Free Kitchen Chaos by Deborah A. Levine Page A

both wearing rubber gloves, our arms elbow-deep in greasy suds, and I’m wondering what my mother has in store for me if I leave a few spots on the glasses like our dishwasher.
    â€œHow are those new friends of yours?” she asks while scouring the remains of some noodles that stuck to the bottom of a pot. “Are you going to invite them over again soon?”
    â€œThey were practically just here,” I say. “And I told you, they aren’t exactly friends. We’re just doing a project together.”
    â€œHow is the project going? There’s a great library nearby. You can get there on your bicycle.”
    I put down the platter I’ve been rinsing and decide this is my moment. “Actually,” I begin, turning to my mother, who has moved on to oiling a wok, “we’re going to be doing a different kind of research for our project. We’re taking a class.”
    My mother looks perplexed, but in a sort of angry way, as if confusion is a weakness that shouldn’t be tolerated. “What do you mean taking a class? I thought the project was for one of the classes you’re already taking.”
    â€œIt is,” I explain. “The project is for social studies. But we’re going to do the research for it in a Saturday cooking class taught by a professional chef. It runs for six weeks, and we’ll really learn a lot.”
    â€œA cooking class? You? ” my mother says with the same tone of disbelief she’d use if I told her I was in the running for the Nobel Prize in science.
    â€œI know I’ve never been that interested incooking, Mama, but this is a special kind of class. And it’s for an assignment.”
    â€œWhy do you need to take a special class? If you girls want to learn to cook, you could just ask me. I’ve been trying to show you how to make jiăozi for years! Your friends certainly cleaned their plates, they must have liked my cooking.”
    â€œI know, Mama, they did. They loved the food you made. Everyone does. But this isn’t a Chinese cooking class. We’ll be learning all about American foods, traditional American foods, and how immigrants from all over the world brought them here.”
    â€œI see,” my mother says, squirting out another blob of oil. “And you’re doing this for a social studies class? Because cooking is an important part of American history?”
    â€œYes,” I reply. “No. I mean, I don’t know.” I start spouting a bunch of things I think Mr. McEnroe would want to hear. “We have to come up with some aspect of immigration that would cut across alldifferent groups. Some kind of ‘common thread,’ our teacher said. This is perfect! And all immigrants carried cooking traditions from back home with them to America. We’re going to learn about what foods were brought here by which immigrant groups, about how common things we eat all the time are really from all over the world. We’re going to base our project on that idea and make, you know, posters and a report and stuff to go with it.” Actually, we haven’t gotten as far as figuring out exactly what we’re going to do yet, but she doesn’t need to know that. “Maybe we’ll make a cookbook or something,” I add, a little lamely.
    One thing you should know about my mother is that she doesn’t use cookbooks. She learned to cook mostly by watching her own mother, my lăo lăo , and then just got better and better. It’s like she has some kind of magical ability to know just what combination of ingredients will make something taste exactly the way she wants. There must be a hundred jars of dried herbs and smelly fermented fruits and vegetables inour cabinets, yet my mother can reach her hand in and find the one she needs without even looking. So it’s not exactly surprising that she feels pretty much the same way about cookbooks as she does about ordering