Of Meat, Memory, and Mandarin: Alienation, Texture, and Identity

When I was still a kindergarten kid, there was an unpleasant story that happened to me. Young Ricardo was a kid who hated the texture of food. It was always a struggle for him to explain the concept and the authentic feeling and meaning of texture to adults. His kindergarten teacher was grumpy, so most of the kids in his class were afraid of her supervision. He spilled the large meat slices from the lunchbox because it was hard to chew and they made him feel disgusted. He was afraid that his behaviour would be discovered by the teacher, I guess. So he hid the spilled slice under the bottom of the lunchbox. Unfortunately, the nightmare was that the teacher noticed the whole process. She forced him to swallow the wasted meat slice. After that, I was not that ‘picky’ and ‘fussy’ boy anymore.

Time flies; I am a gym rat who has gotten used to a carnivorous diet for proteins. The boy barely remembers what texture drove him to mad in childhood. That was until Ellen and Jazz introduced their reasons for choosing plant-based and low-texture food.

Humans are oblivious to the alienation of themselves until something silently and gently collapses in their hearts. Five years ago, when Kaley asked me whether I had doubted the fact that we use plural third-person pronouns with a patriarchal overtone in Mandarin, some memories were awakened.

Still a kid, still me, still Ricardo—who learned how to express them in Chinese characters and wondered why there are male radicals there.

Sense of alienation always there.