On a Sunday morning I am sucking on soft bean curd, thick blankets of white soaked in sugar water, and I am reminded of the way my mother naps; glasses slipping off her nose, jaw lax, hands lolling on her lap, head drooping to the lullaby of the TV's dry hum. But my mother does not sink into the couch prettily, as how the bean curd gathers its skirts and swims in sweetness. She sags into her own pencil-thin weight, arms loose around her brittle hips, curled like the baked husk of a bean pod. The faint buds blooming on her paper skin scatter like clouds, the way you break a slab of bean curd with a spoon.

            I used to study old pictures of my mother, in London, Shanghai, and Los Angeles, thick shades propped on her pubescent face, sun-shimmered hair over her shoulders, thin by choice, and I would try to reconcile this young sprig of my mother, an orchid frozen in time, to the softening flower I saw at home. For me, my oncoming adulthood is a trick in a mirror maze; at times I catch glimpses of myself, and at others the strange and beautiful orchid, captured through a spyglass. Again and again the illusion startles me. And now, as I stir the dense folds of my bean curd, I imagine how my mother is within me as I am in her, and how we are layered upon each other until we taste the same.