I wrote “Sukiyaki” for an anthology published by the Knoxville Writers’ Guild whose focus was diversity, A Tapestry of Voices (2010). I wanted to continue exploring the food issues in my childhood regarding my mother and stepmother, with an added layer of ‘foreignness.’ I’d begun this exploration in my second book, Mother Land, with the poem “Mother Wars,” about my mother’s homemade macaroni and cheese and my preference (at that time) for Kraft mac ‘n cheese, used by my stepmom. Oh, how things have changed! I was drawn to the modernness and comfort of my stepmother, who was twenty when she married my father and is only thirteen years older than I. She loved to play and offered me the peace and refuge of a ‘normal’ homelife when I visited on the weekends. My mother suffers from bipolar disorder, an illness no one understood in those days (1950s-60s), least of all a child torn between two worlds.
"Sukiyaki" is a poem that evokes a vivid memory. How many years passed between the experience of trying sukiyaki for the first time and writing the poem?
Close to fifty years! I left my mother at the age of eleven to live with my dad and stepmother. I remember my stepmom making the dish after I was with them full-time. Her brother served in the Navy right after the war and married a Japanese woman, but the sukiyaki is the only Japanese dish I recall her making.
The poem depicts moving from one existence to another—mother to mother, culture to culture (Japan to Tennessee), familiar to exotic, uncertainty and fear to security, taste to taste, etc. The strangeness of sukiyaki, the dish and the name itself, illustrates my stepping into a new life, still feeling the guilt and angst of leaving my mother behind—that “slippery shore” I navigated, “part paradise, part unknowable.”
For someone raised on Chef Boyardee and La Choy, Japanese flavors must have been a shock to the palate. Did you take to the cuisine right away?
As I said, the sukiyaki symbolized the ‘newness’ I entered when I moved in with my dad and stepmom. How would I embrace this change? How would I begin again (especially during the rocky years of adolescence)? As for the dish itself, I most remember the saltiness of soy and the wonderful scallions and rice, but the soy sauce wasn’t that different from the Worchester we poured on our steaks! Salt, salt, salt. My dad was a traveling salesman and, when he returned home on the weekends, he wanted his beef—roasts, T-bones. Even so, all of my parents (and I) were raised on—and still love—traditional southern dishes like chicken and dumplings, fried fruit pies, cornbread, homegrown tomatoes, pintos, green beans cooked to death with fatback (but oh, so good), etc.
