Styrofoam Containers
Photo by Tim Samuel from Pexels.
White takeout styrofoam containers were the bowls of my childhood.
They came when the sky smeared with charcoal and the playground rumble of daycare softened to faint whispers. On those weekday evenings, I would tilt my 10-year old head to listen: for the trill of keys and clink of pen in pockets, the thump of pointed work shoes and the ratting, dry coughs of my father; sounds and sights that told me - that even in this strange, lonely place full of faceless kids - I was home.
In the hours of waiting after school with my younger brother at daycare, watching the blur of parents and children returning home melt with the blues and pinks and oranges of the daytime sky, the sight of the containers was comforting. Usually at this time, the daycare was packed up like a suitcase, chairs placed on top of tables, most lights turned off, my brother and I the remaining leftovers. But with the sight of the styrofoam, the furrowed brow of my father, the aroma of take out food—charred scallions and peppered beef and ketchup fried rice drizzled with dripping egg yolk—the quiet room felt less empty. We were being picked up from school, after my father’s long day at work.
The meals depended on my father. Sometimes, in those takeout boxes, it would be trays of vermicelli, sliced cold cucumbers and carrots in one portion, rice noodles and hot grilled lemongrass beef in the next, and a sauce container of nuoc mam, Vietnamese fish sauce, in the corner. Other times, it would be fried salt and pepper squid, paired with tofu that was deep fried in vegetable oil and drizzled with Chinese chili and soy sauce. And when my mom, a nurse, didn’t have a graveyard shift at the hospital, they would be Nasi Bungkus, a dish wrapped in banana leaves, revealing flavoured beef, chicken gizzard chunks, diced potatoes, and egg marinated in a coconut flavoured curry. It was my mother’s favourite, her food from back home in Indonesia.
During those weekday nights, it was so strange to see dinner time not wrapped in a white plastic bag that read THANK YOU and HAVE A NICE DAY in red blocks of text. To my family, eating before 9 p.m., sitting at the dinner table with a home cooked meal, was a luxury. Both my parents had full time jobs, making a lengthy commute to Los Angeles every day of the week, leaving at dawn and not coming back until the sun swallowed the sky. Immigrants and refugees, they worked until their bones ached and their hair grayed, to bring their own deferred dreams of what America could be like into fruition for their children. Oftentimes, we ate with plastic forks and cut takeout boxes into makeshift bowls because we were too hungry and my parents got back too late. In between my parents’ work commute, their lengthy shifts, and the long drive across freeways home, it took too much time to wash the dishes. But even then, when the Banh Mi got soggy or when the satay skewers were lukewarm because traffic turned an hour and a half commute into three hours, I appreciated every bite.
To me, the meals were more than just dinner. It was my parents’ shared language, love parcelled through styrofoam containers and takeout meals. It was their sacrifice, their daily climb in trudging forward in a land that treated them like an outsider, in hopes that their children can face something different. It was running through humid, forbidding jungles and escaping on crowded, rat-filled boats; it was mopping linoleum floors at Taco Bell and shining strangers’ shoes at the swap meet. It was learning English for the first time, forming the vowels in their mouth until it ceased to be a fishbone that lodged in their throat. It was picking their new American name out of faded telephone books and wearing it, awkwardly and shyly, like a shirt that didn’t fit right. It was waitressing, it was car selling, it was apartment hopping, it was making ends meet. It was swallowing their dreams for a roof on their head and transforming their deferred hopes into their native-born children. It was their strength and courage in coming here, and it was their fatigue and frustrations in having to live a haggard life this way.
Each Styrofoam container meal tasted of comfort and love and warmth: a fierce pride in everything my parents could do for their children and a wistful longing for what they couldn’t provide.
I didn’t need anything else.
