by Monique Daviau
Plates and bowls are meant to be simple conveyances for food, but now eating at home would possess the burden of memory: each grown-up, lonely dinner of spaghetti with jarred sauce and salad from a bag would be served on plates that screamed in my face COLLEGE! YOUTH! 1998! NORTHAMPTON! NEVER EATING ALONE! Over time, would these thirty-six pieces of cracked, used china simply become my regular old dishes, no longer returning to my mind an amalgam of dusty, distant college memories? Did I want my Madeleine or didn’t I?
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by Preeta Samarasan
My daughter has her father’s white skin, her grandfather’s dark curls, but nobody is sure how she got her blue eyes. Her father’s eyes are hazel; mine are brown. On her father’s side, the origins of her blue eyes are easy to trace: Grandpa has bright blue Irish eyes. It’s now known that the genetics of eye colour are complex, and that any combination of parent-child eye colours is possible. Still, the question of whether there have previously been blue eyes in my family — simple enough on the surface — dredges up all sorts of complicated family dynamics, long-buried resentments.
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by Preeta Samarasan
For the past two weeks, I’ve been immersed in the commemorative supplements of a Malaysian newspaper celebrating its fortieth anniversary this month. I’ve read every single one of the articles available online, even the sports coverage, even the sex advice straight out of trashy magazines and unthinkable in a Malaysian newspaper today. I’ve lingered over the fonts, the text-heavy advertisements, the hairstyles and sunglasses of the 1970s.
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by Richard Tillinghast
Perhaps to be human is to forget. Perhaps every culture survives by forgetting. In America we have forgotten so many things that we are sometimes called a people without a memory. Modern Turkey sometimes strikes me as a culture based on forgetting as many things as possible about the country’s past. Since the late eighties, the place to eat in Istanbul for serious foodies has been Ciya, in Kadikoy, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Ciya is the creation of master chef Musa Dagdeviren, whose mission is to restore to Turkish diners a cuisine that they have forgotten.
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