The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris

by Jackie Kai Ellis

  Place the eggplant into the sauce, stir to combine, and cook over low heat for 15–25 minutes until the separate elements begin to look like one dish and most of the liquid has evaporated into a thick sauce. This is when you want to be patient and continue cooking it until you are sure it has all come together. It shouldn’t seem like many ingredients in a pot, but rather a smooth, silky curry. Taste as you go; it’s the only way to be sure.

  Fold in the peas, and cook to warm through. Reduce the heat to low, and stir in the cilantro, yogurt, and remaining 1 teaspoon of salt.

  Serve hot, or better yet, just warmed, sprinkled with a pinch of garam masala and alongside a bed of fluffy basmati rice, steamed with a few whole cardamom pods and some chopped onions. Eat, taking time to taste and savor each bite.

  A NOTE ON THE MEASUREMENTS: I have left this recipe in volume measurements, as it is meant to be a recipe for home. However, I suggest tasting it along the way and using your instincts. You’ll know if it tastes great to you. It’s such a nice experience to cook with a recipe for inspiration and not a rule.

  MAKES 4–6 SERVINGS.

  THE TWIN

  {2010}

  WHEN SHALL WE LIVE if not NOW?

  M. F. K. Fisher, Serve It Forth, “Meals for Me”

  THERE ARE MOMENTS IN LIFE THAT WE MAY, AT TIMES, regret. We think of them as mistakes, still feeling their pangs, before we gently remind ourselves that the circumstances, actions, words spoken, and the choices we make are mere stones that pave the road we explore, perfect in its own way. And the more of the road we see, the less we tend to regret.

  I

  “I WANT TO GO TO ART SCHOOL…IN TORONTO,” I declared to my mother, despite my family’s dissatisfaction. They were convinced that I would inevitably starve in exactly the same fashion as many artists had done before me, only to be redeemed in death.

  Going to art school wasn’t a decision I took lightly. For most children of Asian families, university science programs were the only acceptable path: it was the most difficult to achieve and showed the greatest financial promise. Almost all other paths were seen as embarrassing and shameful “plan B”s. Though I knew my decision would disappoint the family, I didn’t really see a choice; I simply didn’t believe I was good at anything else. My parents seemed to hold back their praise and encouragement of my artistic abilities, fearful I would follow that career path, but I received awards and recognition throughout school, so I was just relieved that I was good at something. I was good at art, and I hung onto that as one of the few things that made me special, even though I knew it wasn’t much to my family.

  So I went into the high school guidance counselor’s office at lunchtime one afternoon and stared at a wall of university and college brochures. I picked up an application for an art school in Toronto—somewhere far away and big—and one for a local school as a backup in case I didn’t get in.

  In my parents’ eyes, I was stubborn and tenacious about certain things. I rarely allowed anyone to change my mind after I had decided what I truly wanted, and I think my mother knew this. “Sure. If you get straight A’s and early acceptance into a university science program, I’ll let you go to art school,” she replied simply. I understood it as a fair compromise and began the year of studying, drawing, painting, and planning at all hours of the day and night, focused only on my goal.

  My mind was never one for memorizing dates, names, and disjointed facts. Knowing this, I studied for my exams for twice as long as other students, reading and rereading textbook chapters, burning the image of each page into my mind until I could visualize every word and color. Often I would study until it was time to go to school again in the morning, and on other evenings, I attended portfolio-building classes at a local college to make sure I had the requirements needed to impress the art colleges. My more academic family members and classmates would often tease me, amused at how much of an effort I was making because it came easily to them and they didn’t understand.

  After semesters of math tutors, study groups, and befriending library regulars on my lunch breaks to discuss chemistry problems, I succeeded: I managed to get near perfect grades, early acceptance to a science program at a university in Vancouver, as well as to art school in Toronto.

  My mother was stunned. It was late in the evening, and she was getting ready for bed, but she stopped and looked at me, searching my eyes with a look of confusion on her face. She thought to herself, perhaps not meaning to say it aloud to me, “I only said yes because I didn’t think you could do it.”

  Those words. How sad, angry, insulted I felt, and yet how proud as well. My mother didn’t mean it to be hurtful; in fact, I think she was impressed. That evening I learned that there was a chance my future was not as hopeless as I had believed. I had been taunted and told as a child that all the brains must have gone to other members of the family. Family would tell me that I was not really deserving of our family name because I was obviously not as smart as they were. And my aunts and mom were sure that I would have to marry rich because I wasn’t smart enough to be successful on my own. I was terrified that it was true and also determined to work as hard as I could to prove everyone wrong. I never wanted to be labeled as stupid or useless again.

  II

  AS PLANNED, I MOVED TO TORONTO FOR ART SCHOOL, and it wasn’t long before my partially baked, sensational plans of being a famous photojournalist for National Geographic and publishing a coffee table book, all by the age of twenty-five, were slightly derailed. After I began my photography studies, I became disheartened by what I observed within this new art community.

  Professors seemed to skip over the fundamentals of art, glossing over skills and techniques to push modern conceptual art, and students were graded on how provocative their work was. Students who procrastinated on six-month projects learned a popular trick to coming up with something to hand in: all they needed was nudity and a little bullshit. It was quite simple: cast your penis in bronze and talk about our culture’s antiquated ideologies of male stereotypes. Create a childlike painting with your pubic hair—must still be attached to the labia for true effect—and talk about the discordant messages on youth and sexuality from media and pop culture. (And we all knew the artist painted in a juvenile style, not for conceptual commentary on society but because neither she nor her labia were very deft at painting to begin with.) I watched this happen over and over again, and then began to question whether I was learning anything of true value in art school. But I couldn’t admit to my family that they might have been right about my career path, that it was a waste of time and I would end up jobless and starving. So I kept going, but I abandoned any clear path toward being a photographer. Instead, I took random courses in topics that I was interested in, such as jewelry-making and electronic installation art, where we spent an entire semester soldering electronic components for motion-activated lights while talking about the Clinton administration and books by Gabriel García Márquez. I took paper-making, Chinese painting, figure drawing, and film classes, just aimless and wandering in the world of art.

  By the time I was in my early twenties, I found myself with a lot of random skills, none of which were employable in itself. I could draw, bind books, make rings, make artisan paper from strands of sisal, use medium- and large-format cameras, talk at length about the history of Japanese film, have intellectual art critiques, and communicate with someone with nothing but a canvas and paint. So I painted, selling canvases when I could, and worked odd jobs: an illustrator for a men’s fashion designer, a salesperson at a gallery on the east side of Toronto that sold African masks. I was surviving as many artists had done before and around me, confused about what I should do next.

  “Should I go back to school to get an official degree? Should I learn something else? Should I just be an artist forever? Should I…” I asked my good friend S for the hundredth time over a bowl of cheap noodles in Koreatown.

  She listened patiently to the same conversation we’d been having for months, and
finally, as if the moment was ripe (or perhaps her impatience was), she said, “Jackie, it is hard to know what is down the road if you’ve never been there. I think perhaps you should just take a step and start to walk.” S was naïve about everything except the wisest topics. She was from a wealthy family in India, and while I often got the sense that she could barely tie her own shoes, she’d sometimes surprise me with her insights on life.

  So after a year of trying to make it work in Toronto, I reluctantly went back to Vancouver, with no credentials to my name. I immediately missed my independent life out East, but I took my friend’s advice and started walking in any direction: working as a nanny disguised as an art teacher and applying to interior and graphic design programs that seemed to have good earning potential; waiting for life to reveal itself to me. I wasn’t particularly passionate or even sure of any one career direction, but I wanted to get my life started as soon as possible. I eventually settled on going back to school for graphic design and illustration, because I was allowed to skip the first year of the program based on my past education.

  When I walked into a classroom on the first day, everyone looked up at me: thirty students in front of their computers, their desks decorated with photos, past projects, and inside jokes. I was scared, worried that I wouldn’t be able to catch up. I sat at the empty desk in the middle of the room, and after I settled in, a girl with a platinum blonde bob leaned over. “Hey, I’m T. Are you nervous?”

  I sat up taller and looked at her over my shoulder. “Why should I be?” I reasoned to myself that acting confident was better than showing how unsure I was.

  “I don’t know. All these new people?”

  “Well, they’re either going to like me or not. There’s not much I can do about it.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said hesitantly, startled by my brusque response. In all honesty, I did care if they liked me, but I had also decided that I was there to succeed and make something of myself. Even if it meant being disliked, I needed to focus on being the best.

  After a few weeks of classes, I was delighted to discover I had a passion and talent for the topics we were learning—typography, illustration, visual communication and storytelling, conceptual development. I discovered that I innately knew how to tinker with aesthetics, to combine shapes, colors, textures, words, and volumes of visual cues to communicate complex concepts. I understood the subtleties of the visual language and of communication. I was good at it, and I remembered again what it was like to be good at something.

  “It’s like the teachers love everything you do!” a classmate said to me one afternoon on our lunch break.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everything you did to my project, the professors loved. How do you know?” she exclaimed, mystified. I had just helped her with a project that was failing miserably.

  I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought about it before. It all just felt quite natural. I thought of my family, how I spent years as a quiet child, afraid of being a burden to my family. I watched intently and learned a language that was never spoken. So much was communicated with a furrowed brow, a sarcastic tone of voice, or the way we dressed for an occasion. When my mom wore makeup, I knew I would have to be extra well-behaved that evening. If she wore red, it was probably a traditional event, and if she wore an expensive dress with a brand name, it was because she wanted to impress someone. My mom would unconsciously mumble to herself the things she felt while driving or cooking by herself, thinking that no one was listening. But I would listen carefully, and I developed a kind of Rosetta Stone for deciphering her language. As I learned to read the layers beneath my mother’s communication, I gained an intuitive sense of what people wanted but never said. But I didn’t know how to explain this to my friend in words, so I just shrugged and replied, smiling, “I don’t know!”

  III

  I HAD THE HIGH-PAYING JOB, THE CONDO, I WAS MAKING my yearly retirement plan contributions, I was married: all the boxes for “success” seemed to be checked. But now that I was surrounded with everything I had been told I was supposed to want, the veneer began to crack.

  I was exhausted from the long hours and stress of trying to get ahead in my work. I was at the office past midnight and every weekend. I took on so many projects that I did the work of three people. The office simply didn’t know how to deal with the number of overtime hours I accumulated. When the pressure to be creative, successful, and worthy mixed with looming deadlines and self-doubt, I would take five-minute breaks to cry in the bathroom until I felt ready to tackle the next task. And even though I was achieving my goals, being promoted from entry-level designer to account manager, senior designer, essentially acting as the art director in three and a half years, I began to feel despondent and disconnected without really knowing why. And as more time passed, the veneer buckled further.

  Desperate for a change, G and I left the firm and started our own. It was lucrative, and the work was steady and secure, but a few years into it, things inevitably began feeling routine again. I needed a challenge, a distraction.

  “G, maybe we could do more. We could take on more projects, different ones and hire freelancers. What do you think?” I asked him one day in our home office.

  “I like the way things are. If we expand, then our lives will change; it’ll get more complicated. I don’t know if I want that,” G said. So we stayed exactly the same, day after day, while a yearning for something I hadn’t seen yet bubbled on the back burner, getting more concentrated year after year.

  IV

  ONCE, WHEN I WAS A CHILD, WE FOUND LITTLE WHITISH worms in our big bag of rice. There they were, barely noticeable except for the dark ridges across their bellies that we could see if we looked closely enough. Being a young family, and having so many mouths to feed, it was more of a loss than anyone in the family said out loud. I watched my mother begin to separate the bugs out, grain by grain, until my dad, standing beside her, said, “It’s not worth your effort. Just throw it out.” It was true. It didn’t matter how the bugs got to be there; it wasn’t something we could have avoided. It just was, and regardless of how hard she might try to fix it, the rice couldn’t be eaten anymore.

  V

  “G, I THINK I’M READY TO HAVE KIDS. I’D LIKE TO TALK about it with you but want to give you time to prepare and think. Shall we set a time to talk in a month?”

  This was the way we interacted. I spoke to G very prudently, even formally, a reflection of the many rules and boundaries that had been created between us over time. As I spoke today, I made sure to be even more careful. This was important. I needed him to be receptive, so I chose my words precisely and practiced them in my mind a few times before I said them aloud.

  On our second date, I had said to G, “I have always wanted to be a mother, to have two or three children. It’s what I feel like I’m meant to do, and I can’t imagine a life without being a mother. So if you don’t want the same thing, there’s no point in dating me.” He smiled and nervously admitted that he wanted the same. After we decided to marry, we planned to wait for a few years to give ourselves time to settle into married life.

  In our first year of marriage I had found a box of vintage wooden blocks with the alphabet carved into the faces alongside pictograms for each letter—an apple for A, a bumble bee for B. I wrapped this box of blocks in green holiday paper with a gold bow before our first Christmas together and placed it under the tree every Christmas, for our future baby.

  Four years passed. When one of my best friends had her first child, I flew to Toronto to help. I did laundry, cooked, burped, and bounced the newborn baby so my friend could recover. One day when I was changing the baby’s diaper, his clear eyes connected to mine. He smiled wide and laughed gently, and I was sure he knew me. I knew I loved him very much. That was the moment I was sure I was ready to be a mom. So I chose the right moment to bring up the subject again with G.

  “I’m not sure I want to have kids anymore,” he replied.

 
; “Why?” I asked, stoically. I knew the reason was unimportant. I knew his mind was made up, and I was not going to change it. But because he wanted six months to think about it, I waited.

  For those six months, I imagined life without children, something I had never done before. What would I do with my time? What was the purpose of my life? I questioned why I had let becoming a mother define so much of my future self. Would I be happy without children? Would I be sad? Lonely? Would the regret become so overwhelming that I would come to resent G later? My mind paced back and forth. The wait felt like the hours I spent in the hospital, waiting for the doctor’s diagnosis on my grandmother’s impending death. All this time I was full of dread, patiently, fearing for the life of a child that didn’t yet exist. And in the end, G’s decision didn’t change.

  I agonized over what to do next for months. I sat with my friend B for hours, wondering aloud about everything worrying me. Could I have children with someone else? Could I leave G? If I was going to resent him anyway, perhaps it would be best to leave now. But was it fair to compare my future husband to G? It was true that things were not perfect with G, I wasn’t always happy, but we had perfect moments, too…And he was my husband and I depended on him. I would feel lost without him. He was the only thing I knew when I didn’t know myself. But although he was my whole world, children were the only future I had imagined for us.

  I weighed my options, back and forth, based on how heavy the regret might feel on my shoulders. I couldn’t blame G for changing his mind. I understood that people did.

  One night, I asked him to sit with me on the couch. I explained that if I left him, there was a chance I would regret it. And knowing that children absorb subtle emotions, I foresaw the possibility that my child would feel my sacrifice and become sad or resentful toward me in return. I didn’t want that under any circumstance. So I chose G, and I promised myself never to resent him for the decision I made to stay, without children.