I am not going to tell you about dead fish: the red snapper, mackerel, and eels. There will be no eyes fixed on rubber hands—and there will be no metaphor, either. No chromatic clip of the last fish on display and its winking, steel scales. No, the truth is, the inside of an Asian supermarket is more than fish and guts, haggling over the best cut of meat, or beer-drunk men slinging ten pounds of rice over a shoulder.
*
The first time I go to Hmart in months, I see a woman who looks like my mind’s image of Nainai. She is leaning against her shopping cart, one hand brushing out the tangles in her short bob. Fingers catch in the strands, and her nails gleam like hidden gems. I imagine she wore her hair in every shade of dark and only quit dyeing it once she reached a respectable enough age. Again and again, her fingers dip back into the gray.
*
Hmart is young. Since its founding in 1982, it’s emerged as America’s largest Asian supermarket chain with 97 stores across the country. When you account for the fact that this country is more planar than linear, this means every store represents a vertex on a chain-link fence, the faint lines intersecting to form a net.
*
If America were a six-foot tall man with a mullet, the suburb of my childhood would be the drop of mustard staining his white collared shirt. Spend half an hour driving straight through this county, and you’d see nothing but strip malls named after greenery and the sky glittering over the Chattahoochee.
*
Which is all to say, we are a divot of yellow that knows how to hide.
*
The second law of thermodynamics: an isolated system will evolve towards a state of maximum entropy. So everything multiplies. Dirty toothpicks. Yogurt drinks. Empty seats in a food court. The fluorescent lights flicker so quickly, the air trembles like it does on the inside of a convulsing throat.
*
Nainai brags that she makes the best dumplings in the city perimeter. After dinner one night, she tells me a secret. That none of the ingredients—vegan, organic, premium—matter, and the trick is to crimp the edges with water and two fingers. To let everything steam together in a pocket of dough sealed tight.
*
The basic principle behind Southern suburbia is that convenience convinces you there is no reason to leave. So we hung out in supermarkets after school. Learned how to squeeze into the space under shelves and how to knock down a pyramid of lemons. How to turn the switch of our invisibility on and off.
*
After every two years, my parents buy the newest make of instant rice cooker on the market. I can never taste a difference, but I notice all the new buttons sing a song, silvery and robotic. I let that convince me it was worth the money.
*
I keep all my grocery bags in the cabinet under the sink. For the environment, maybe, but more to study their structure. At a glance, I can tell you whether they are inside out or not—without even searching for the thank yous and singular, yellow smiley face.
*
In another story, Nainai crosses the street each morning with a cane, the electric scooters and taxis honking at her slow progress. She walks a mile to the freshest market in Shanghai, and she makes it home before I even notice she’s gone. Whether I mean this in the transitive or the intransitive sense, I can’t tell, but I know my Nainai would call this a silly question, mixing my congee with century eggs as dark as the sunspots by her eyes.
*
All my memories die at 10 pm. The checkout line shrinks to a point before blackout, and the windows dim to their second skin, the night sky moving like a river within it, and outside, my friends and I sit on the curb waiting for our parents’ Toyotas to wheel into the parking lot. We stare up at a sliver of a moon, and for a moment, we are silent and holding our breath, each of us wondering how long it’ll take before we make it home.
Sarah Lao is a senior at the Westminster Schools and the editor-in-chief of EX/POST. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the Penn Review, Liminality, and Counterclock Journal among others. She is a 2019 Best of the Net Finalist and 2020 YoungArts Finalist in Poetry, and her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Hollins University, Penn State Behrend, and the Adroit Prizes.