Maddie Ballard
Plentiful
We make quite a pair, the two of us. After all, we’re not obviously related. She is a full head shorter than me and her face rests permanently in a smile. Her jacket is zipped all the way up. Her shoes are comfortable. There is careful foundation on her cheeks to veil a tickling of sunspots. In comparison, I am much dishevelled: hair in a half-knot, pimple on my chin. Her eyes, a little milky now, are monolidded and gentle. My face places me as foreign almost everywhere, including anywhere in Asia.
When I go to pick her up, I ring the doorbell and wait for her to come down. It seems like a long time as she navigates her shoes and her bag; locking the door; the walk to the lift; the ride down. Then she comes out and sees me waiting by the car and cries Lai Lai!, a diminutive of my Chinese name, with pure delight, and the wait seems in hindsight like suspense rather than tedium. We move very slowly, out of necessity. She holds my arm and I try not to rush her across the carpark, even when two cars are waiting for us. What is amazing is that they wait: everybody waits for an old lady to cross the road. She takes her time, which seems like a lesson of some sort.
I have always loved the supermarket, with its promise of abundance. So artfully is it populated: the slippers of opalescent snapper in the cabinet, the dew-freckled broccoli, a bay of discounted mini Easter eggs. Sometimes, if you get there early enough, the tiny misters above the produce bins are puffing out fine silver sprays, like a parody of freshness. I know she notices it all too. Once, apropos of nothing, she says, In New Zealand, everything is plentiful. (She’s not wrong.)
Each week, we choose avocados, a bunch of green bananas and a single ripe one for tomorrow, a loaf of Oatlicious toast. Fish is a given, both fresh and frozen, as is a single lean pork chop to make into the tonic she feeds me on Saturdays. Toothpaste, teabags. I come to know all the brands she prefers, accumulated over a long and frugal life. Still, some things are worth a little strain. We do not spend money on luxury potatoes, but we will not buy any prawns less than the best: those from Australian waters, their heads and tails still attached. We always get a Lotto ticket.
Although we are shopping for her, somehow I always come away with something. One week, she buys me a comically large watermelon, so large the car sinks visibly when I put it in the boot. Another week, I track down the Pams peanut cookies she serves her friends for afternoon tea and am plied with two packets of my own. No matter how much I resist, I am shouted down. Last year, my grandma sold her house and became a bemused millionaire at the age of 87. She has not forgotten what it is to lack, which means it is important to spoil.
Often we need to visit a second supermarket because the Pak’n’Save baak choi isn’t fresh enough or they don’t have the glutinous rice flour with two elephants on the bag. At Dahua or Tai Ping, we buy rudely bright gai lan and a bitter melon the size of a baby. An enormous bottle of sesame oil. Tiny mooncakes, out of season, that catch the eye by the till. We will inevitably know somebody here, somebody elderly, who will stop by the salted plums, greet her raucously, eye me with unconcealed curiosity. This is my granddaughter, she tells them in Cantonese, as I try, in ironic inversion to the rest of my life, to look less white. Aah! comes the response, a syllable enthusiastic and amorphous and distinctly Chinese. Much nodding and smiling. More words I cannot grasp. Then we are moving on slowly, down between the flavoured crisps (century egg; lap cheong) and the dried rice noodles, whispering in their packets like ghosts.
After shopping, we go to lunch. There is a hole-in-the-wall lunch bar we frequent, the type with chipped formica tables and a fan cycling tea-scented air above two waving cats. We get the combination noodles, saucy and delicious, the cha siu a bright lucky red. Hou sic ma? she asks. Does it taste good? Hou sic, I say. It tastes good. It is my most-used Cantonese phrase, one I have known all my life. When my brother and I were small, she steamed plain cheung fun for our lunch and doused it in sweet soy. Max ate his quickly, still rolled up, each bite revealing a cross-section like the rings of a tree trunk. But I liked to unravel the delicate rice paper rolls until they lay flat in sheets, then wait until every inch was soaked in sauce. Hou sic ma? she asked each time. Hou sic, I promised.
Afterwards we drive home with the boot full of rustling jute bags. I ask her what she’ll do with the afternoon: Mahjongg! she says. Nei ne? I tell her I’ll be working from home. I can see her thinking of me, fiddling with words on a bright screen in my bedroom. She closes one eye and shakes her head. Young people and their computers! When she was young, work was work and home was home. We went to the market garden in Mangere very early in the morning to choose the shop’s produce. Cauliflower and eggplant and very beautiful apples. The carrots were still covered in dirt: we washed them in a concrete mixer, there’s a photo of Gung Gung. At the end of the day, we balanced the accounts.
We unpack the bags of shopping upstairs, where everything has a place: avocados along the windowsill, bananas above the fridge. She nestles the bag of prawns tenderly in the glittering deep freeze. She asks me to show her how to open WeChat, a manoeuvre she masters each time I teach her, then forgets during the week. There are six new messages from her friend across the road, two from her sister. So popular! she exclaims. I agree. You want tea? But I need to go. Next week! she says brightly, and slips me a tiny mooncake. She thanks me, touches my cheek in goodbye.
Maddie Ballard is a writer and editor from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work has been published in Milly Magazine, Pantograph Punch, Signals, and The Oxford Review of Books, but she probably does her best writing here.