I have never seen him comb or brush his hair, all my life. I don't remember the time when he had a full set of hair. Now, in the kitchen, he had enough to show what little pride he carried in life. Most of it was gray and white. Almost like a tumbleweed, through which you could see the color of his scalp. He has accumulated vast amount of wrinkles recently, but I suppose by "recently" I meant the little I've seen him. And after each time I saw him there seemed more.
Food was ready. He cooked most of it. But he wasn't with us. He was in the kitchen, busy washing utensils used for the cooking. He had a rag, not a sponge, and I am not sure where he got that rag from, but I suppose it was clean. He squeezed a bead of dish washing liquid in it and started foaming the spatula he used for stir frying the bok choy. He rinsed off the foam and proceeded to the next item, two bowls where he put the raw meat and some scallions earlier. He never washed with gloves; to suggest it would have caused some confusion on his face. He, in fact, never wore gloves, not for cleaning, and not against the harsh wintry winds. If you haven't worn gloves most of your life, it would feel strange to start now. His fingers, however, were all cracked; no amount of any type and of any cost of cream could heal them. They were the constant victims of the winter, not only its harsh winds but also the cruel dry air. I have never opened his palm and looked at it, but I imagine they are full of cracks and lines that told the stories of his life. I have asked him about his hands, and he responded in an as-matter-of-fact manner that they were what they were. And in a way, they've always gotten the job done, whatever the toil was.
Now it was an easy job. Just the routine washing of the dishes before eating dinner, my parents' only daily meal together. They wouldn't sit at the dinner table, normally, but rather eat in front of the TV, watching satellite broadcast Chinese shows. They would dump all their food into a big bowl of rice and eat from there. Very practical. The formalities of eating had eroded and eventually disappeared with their simple and lonesome lives. When there were no guests, no relatives, and, of course, no children to be around on a regular basis, there was no need for tradition, and the value of food had shed off its complicated rituals and boiled down, to to speak, to a process of obtaining it, cooking it, and ingesting it, each in its own place, if that's a ritual. It is a ritual, it seemed, however, to wash whatever dirty dishes and utensils lying around. To forgo this and do it afterwards was to break a habit, not so much a tradition, that was just as strong as any ritual. So when I asked him to come and join us, since their son was here, at the dining table, he had refused many times. He couldn't just stop. He had to now attend to the big wok where most of the food was made. He grabbed each side with a hand and lifted the wok, which already had water in it, soaking up all the residue for easier cleaning, and turning to the right where the sink was, he poured the water out gently, careful not to let it spill out onto the little counter space there was between the sink and the stove top. And using a harsh scrub without any soap or detergents he scrubbed off all the pieces of food and films of oil off, and then, having put the scrub back in its proper place next to the faucet, he grabbed that rag and rinsed off the soap before superficially washing off any remaining item on the wok. It was important, he had told me when I was a kid, to not wash the wok with soap, as it was of steel and so could rust.
Shaking off the last beads of water from the wok, he wiped it with a dry rag hanging just behind the faucet, and placed the wok back where it was sitting on the stove top. I am sure he heard me beseeching him to join us, but his tired eyes under those thick, unkempt, gray eyebrows saw the wok lid. He grabbed it with those same strong but wrinkly and overused hands, and just with the wok, he washed it without soap but with a scrub followed by a rag.
Perhaps at that point I walked in the kitchen and invited him out in person. He was short, lately seemed shorter than I could remember. He, as always, didn't look at me, his head bowed, even though he was smiling, with a tinge of embarrassment that I had to come get him in person. He shook the water off his sixty-something year old hands, then dried them with a rag, not sure which one. He asked, without looking at me, if I needed anything. And when I said that just that he joined us, he said all right, and he grabbed his bowl, not just any bowl, but his bowl, even though for me they all looked the same, and he filled it up with rice. With his own stuff he was fast; there was not much attention paid to the things he did for himself. Perhaps it was because he was just usually dedicated to others, or perhaps he knew himself so well that everything he did could be done in the dark. I bet he had opened that rice cooker, or any that had sat in that same position for decades, scooped up the same amount of rice out of it, dumped into the bowl, repeated the same rice action the same number of times everytime, closed the lid, turned to open the draw to get a pair of chopsticks, and walked out of that tiny kitchen, all this done thousands of times.
The only variation might be that most of the time he would have a soup first. But I think this time he forgot, or that his habit was a little shaken up, by my intrusion into the kitchen. He managed to remind me to have soup first, but this time he forgot it himself. He had a smile on, still a bit embarrassed, but he had a smile on. With people he usually had a smile on, and with me, since I didn't come to visit them that often, the smile was even grander. And when he smiled, his age lines, scarred permanently on his face for eternity, became even more pronounced. His eyes become even smaller as the lines at their corners and on their eyelids, became deeper and more concentrated. And when he came out and entered the dining room, where there was a warmer light, as opposed to the fluorescent blue light of the kitchen, he was talkative and his age lines were all sentences of joy. A huge contrast to his pensiveness in that little room where food was made and the utensils used for this process were rigorously and meticulously cleaned.
We finally sat down and started eating. He paused for a moment and murmured, before continuing dipping his chopsticks in the shared food, that he forgot to have soup first.
