chrysanthemum tea

Note: Numbers that are in ( ) are footnotes. Footnotes can be found at the very bottom of the story.

Ahma died when I was 12. When she was still here, I learned only three things from her:

• Dried apple peels make for a good deodorant when put into cupboards due to their fragrance.

• Apple peels can easily be mistaken for wilted choy sum leaves in the dark.

• We are all supposed to throw them away in the morning. The apple peels, I mean.

Although, I never understood why we had to throw them away. They were already dried, after all. “Your mother,” Ahma would just say and nothing else. As a young child watching her peel them, I developed this belief that the rosy skin of apples with their rich and veiny white fibres hidden beneath were somehow poisonous, and so that was why they always needed to be shaved off before consumption.

“Pesticides,” was another saying my Ahma would often give me whenever she skinned apples. It was then that I really realized the skin must’ve definitely been poisonous because it was to deter pests, like some sort of embalming process that helped to preserve the beauty of an apple. I would often watch as Ahma picked the stem and leaves off the apple with calm and precision, before grabbing a blade with her bony, wilting fingers and filing the skin off over the sink. The rosy skin would gently flutter towards the bottom of the kitchen sink, the pieces falling slowly like rose petals. She was an old-fashioned person like that, my Ahma, preferring a knife over the peeler I had bought for her as a present. Unlike her though, I pitied the peels. I hated the thought of something so pretty going to waste—all those vibrant hues of pink to maroon, and the specks of white and cream locked underneath—they didn’t deserve to go. I would fish them out of the sink after Ahma had discarded them and set them to dry overnight on a paper towel by the windowsill in the kitchen. Ahma would always take note of it. 

“I used to put dried apple peels in the cupboards.” Her voice was always monotone when she said this, her face composed and expressionless.

“Why?” I would ask.

“Smelled nice,” she muttered quietly under her breath as she worked to prepare dinner, not even looking once at me. 

Whenever Mum saw the peels at night, she would quickly suck in her breath and grimace, her eyebrows scrunching together, before asking, “What’s all this good for?” She tried to play it off as a joke, but the contour of her upturned eyebrow always betrayed her.

The deep red colour of the peels would usually pale within a day, and the fibres within would surrender its bright cream color to a dark yellow shade. I would put them into a jar and seal it haphazardly with glue, hoping that my efforts would block any oxygen from taking whatever colour or life the peels had left. I would then put the jar by the window in my room. After a while, I learnt that apples grew on trees, and that they were picked off after a tree had given an apple all the nutrients it needed to flourish and blossom. I suppose that was the cost of becoming something beautiful. Apples needed dependence, but once they became independent and free of their lifeline, they were done for. It was like cutting off the river of life, and to stop the poison was to stop the colour and beauty that the apple had been given. By then, I knew that keeping the peels locked tightly in a jar was pointless. It would receive no visitors, and it was only and just a little more than a simple glass coffin that few would pay their respects to. I threw away all my jars sometime later. There were too many for me to count. 

Chrysanthemums were Ahma’s favourite flower.

There were some chrysanthemum bushes planted in the park of our council estate. Whenever they started blooming in autumn, Ahma would always take me out to the market to buy some. I always disliked it when she would bargain and haggle; it felt disrespectful to those poor vendors in the market. Before returning home, she would take time to sit in the park with me and watch the chrysanthemums sway in the fall breeze. It was easy to see them; those bright yellow bulbs always stuck out against the dull, dark green of the foliage they rested upon. I never understood Ahma’s love for them. To me, chrysanthemums were just flowers, a common sight that came a dime a dozen every day. And besides, they were always a second-rate flower to me. They were not as colourful as sunflowers, not as fragrant as jasmines, not as rare as red camellias. Chrysanthemums were average in so many ways, and yet somehow, it was only while watching the flowers sway in the light November wind that Ahma would reveal a weak, wrinkly smile. She would always comment on the slight, earthy smell of the petals that filled the air whenever we walked home. 

Ahma kept a jar of dried chrysanthemum petals in the kitchen. Every afternoon, she would take a break from housework and brew herself a cup of tea with the dried chrysanthemum petals while she rested. It was her custom to always sit in “her spot” on the sofa while doing so. For as long as I could recall, she stuck to this routine. On Sundays, Mum would also join her, though she never picked the same drink as Ahma each time, and she would rarely drink chrysanthemum tea. On some occasions, I would have a cup too. I never liked it much. It wasn’t particularly fragrant, or strong in taste, nor was it sweet. It had only a few layers, with not much to offer in terms of anything. It was bland and simple, like drinking a cup of coloured water. Yet Ahma seemed to enjoy it, and so we’d sit quietly in the living room together, sipping on our cups of chrysanthemum tea. During her breaks, Ahma would always gaze out the window of our 23rd-floor apartment and look towards the hazy downtown skyline that peaked just beyond the mountains nearby. With no sound and no speaking, we would spend the afternoon together yet alone.

On holidays, I spent a lot of time helping Ahma with the housework. I’d share details and stories about my life with her, and I would always want to know more about her. As I grew older, it became startling to me how little I knew about my grandmother. I knew that she was born in the Mainland (1), but that was about it. How she eventually became my relative—those years of history were full of experiences and tales yet to be told to me. Sometimes I would ask her about her past, and sometimes she would give a short, simple reply. On other occasions, she would pretend as though I had never said anything, and I took that as a sign not to pry any further.

Once in a blue moon, she would open up a bit more to me. 

One time, I asked her this: 

“So what did you want to do as a kid? You know, if you didn’t have to work in the factories?”

She replied without looking up from the floor that she had been mopping. 

“I want to be my own boss.” 

Due to the Cantonese dialect (2), it made it sound like she still wanted to be her own boss, as if the desire and dream to set up her own business and company had been clinging on to the edge of her lips for the past fifty years. 

“So why didn’t you?” I kept on asking.

“No money. That thing only sent just enough for the kids, and the factory didn’t pay much back then.” She scoffed. “Besides, no one would take a woman seriously back in those days.”

“But you have the money now. What’s stopping you?”

She scoffed again. “Your mother would be angry.” When she said this, she exuded a tone laced with acidity and contempt.

“But it’s your drea–” I started to protest. 

“That’s enough.” She raised her voice when she said this. “Stop talking of impossible things.” She waved at me to go away. “And if you don’t wish to draw the ire of your mother as well, I suggest you don’t speak to her of this.”

One evening, I was helping Ahma prepare dinner when she tossed me a shallot unexpectedly from the shelf. It was an obscene thing: the bulbous vegetable had sprouted, and green tentacles were spewing out of its head uncontrollably. It was soft and mushy, with only the thin film of the skin to hold the dying body in its place. 

Ahma pushed the shallot into my hands, motioning for it to be cut. It didn’t sit right with me, the fact that it had changed colour and shape. The vegetable was practically begging to be thrown away.

“Is it still safe to eat?” I enquired worriedly. 

Ahma just nodded silently as she continued with her work. 

“Are you sure?” I asked again. 

I didn’t want to get sick from the shallot, but she gave no reply. I cautiously got to gutting the thing. With the shallot in such a state, it was nearly impossible to dice. The tough skin refused to bow to my dull knife, and I felt the insides of the vegetable being mushed up more and more as I tried to penetrate the skin. When I forced myself through, I was met with only a squirt of shallot juice into my eyes. On any other day this would’ve had me crying out in pain from the sting, but the poison was ineffective this time. Not even its most vile, atrocious, acidic venom could make a boy like me cry. By the time the operation was finished, the shallot had been reduced to nothing but an inconsistent, jagged-up pile on the chopping board. I showed the result to Ahma shamefully, expecting her to rip into me for doing such a terrible job. However, she made no remark about it.

“Your mother will be home soon. Go heat the pan.”

I did as told. 

In the end, it turns out that shallots in such a degenerative state were perfectly edible, and it made no difference to the overall taste of a stir fry. Even though no one knew what pains the shallot had gone through to become like this, the resilience and determination it had shown to carry on its duty as food despite its ailing health was impressive enough. 

“Are those shallots?” My mum asked as she picked and poked around her plate during dinner. 

“Mm hai ah (3).” Ahma dragged out every syllable flatly without much emotion as she said this. “Why would I add shallots? To hear you complain again? To listen to your whining, when you’re not the one cooking? 

“Mum, you know I don’t eat shallots,” rebuked Mum with visible anger in her voice as she held up a piece with her chopsticks, sighing with disappointment.

“You shouldn’t be so picky on what to eat!” Ahma slammed her spoon down on the table and glared at Mum across the dinner table. Her eyes were wide open with dismay and her lips were quivering with anger, as if she still had so much more to say but didn’t want to pour any more fuel onto the fire. 

“We had no onions, so we settled for the next best thing,” I added, hoping to de-escalate the tension as I usually did whenever Mum and Ahma fought.

“Ma gwai fan (4)!” Ahma added, including the Cantonese suffix “ghost” for tone. With her tone of finality, a period of awkward silence ensued where no one wished to speak.

“I’m not looking for a fight, Ma. We’ve been through this. Shallots make me sick.” Mum explained quietly after some time. “It’s just that work has been so tough recently, the clients are always nagging. Is it wrong to be mad when you don’t like what’s for dinner?”

“Then why’d you become an accountant? You never liked numbers growing up,” continued Ahma. 

“What did you want to be growing up, Mum?” I asked.

Mum looked reluctant to answer, but eventually replied, “A model.”

I was surprised. “A model? Why didn’t you become one, then? You’re not ugly, and you would have gotten to travel the world, wear the best clothing, have your portraits posted on the covers of magazines…” There must’ve been stars in my eyes as I delved into the fantasies of becoming the child of a famous model. 

“It’s not that easy. Besides, I’d be away from home for days, weeks, months even. You’d barely get to see me. Wouldn’t you feel lonely?” She smiled weakly and spoke in a softer voice than usual as she looked up. 

I was about to object when Ahma interrupted. She pointed at Mum with her chopsticks.

“Do not use your son as an excuse.” 

“What are you trying to say?” said Mum as she shot Ahma an accusatory squint, a harsh tone returning to her voice.

“You know that if you had become a model, he wouldn’t even be here.” Ahma turned and pointed at me.

That final statement seemed so innocuous, so harmless to me, but it somehow spurred a frustration within Ahma. She picked up her bowl and utensils and placed them in the kitchen sink before retiring to her room, alone. Before she did though, she called out to Mum, who was sitting motionless at the table, still exasperated.

“No need to peel me an apple for dessert tonight. I’ll do it myself.”

***

In Chinese tradition, seven days after someone dies, we anticipate the deceased to return home for a final farewell. It is customary to cook their favourite meal as an offering. Mum decided to take charge after Ahma left us. She even went to the market herself.

“No more takeaways for dinner from now on,” said Mum one night. “And I don't need your help, either. Go do your homework. Ask your father if he will come home for dinner.”

With her always at work, there was no one else to cook dinner at home, so I always resorted to takeaways. 

I called Dad. Half of me wanted him not to come home, and to stay at work as he always did. When he confirmed my wishes with that slightly guilty tone of his, I sighed with relief. “No, it’s okay,” I told him. I didn’t want to hear any more arguments that night, especially not on a night like this. I suppose Mum had felt the same. She gave no reaction when I told her of Dad’s absence. I observed her image silently as I leaned on the kitchen doorframe. Her rolled sleeves, her pained hands, her tightly-tied bun as if ready for heavy labour. It was the first “real” death I had ever experienced, in the sense that it was the first time I had lost someone very close to me. It was weird. It wasn’t how I felt it would be though. There were no tears. No crazed wailing or exaggerated emotion. It wasn’t how the movies always portrayed it. I didn’t know if I was too cold and detached, or if this was normal. 

The night Ahma passed away, I must’ve stood by her bedside for fifteen or twenty minutes, unsure of what to do when I woke up early and found out, but I didn’t panic. I was more scared of how Mum would react when I told her. In the end, she didn’t react much at all. At least, not what I would call an appropriate amount when one of your own parents had just died. After I woke Mum up from sleeping, we stood together silently by Ahma’s body, a pale apparition with her eyes closed and her mouth slightly ajar. The faint glimmers of early morning sunlight were beginning to pierce through the veils of the curtain. It was so peaceful, so quiet, I could hear the city around me starting to come alive. The hammering of a traffic light. A car horn. The click-clack of the train tracks near Ahma’s bedroom window and the whisper of a slight wind coming through it. I supposed what shocked me the most was how normal everything seemed that day, as if I was only playing a game of “Spot the Difference” with the world, and I struggled to put my finger on the answer. 

I felt dirty, ashamed. It was impossible to justify this lack of feeling. 

Here we were, the two of us, and the first thing we felt was relief that Dad wouldn’t be coming for dinner tonight. 

“You know, your grandmother grew up far away from this place,” Mum began as I continued to stand by the kitchen frame. She took out a chopping board and placed it near the sink. “She lived in the countryside up north, where the lands were controlled by gangs and bad men. She saw her friend die when the communists invaded her home. He was running away and trying to hide when they shot him. He was only ten.” I stayed quiet.

“That night, your grandmother decided to leave the country. By the time she arrived here in America, her shoes were soaked in blood. How messed up is that? And to think I was only a little girl when she first told me.” Mum stopped for a moment, her eyes in thought. “But I never grew tired of the tales, unlike your uncles. It got to a point where she would only tell me these stories, and I felt special because of that. I didn’t care if the stories were fake or not. I found solace in her experiences. I would stand by the kitchen frame, just as you are now, waiting for her to feed me. Not with food, but with words.”

My grandfather was a sailor. He was also a drunkard, gambler, and wife-beater, among other things. Mum only told me he returned home once a month to Ahma and them, and it was a day the whole house would fear. Mum recalled how she and her siblings would hide when they heard the jangle of his keys, leaving only Ahma to face him alone, and how the only thing you could smell in the house the next morning was the stench of alcohol and the hazy scent of cigarette smoke. 

Ahma had worked at a factory that made plastic flowers when she was raising her kids. She spent whatever time she could working, always hoping to make an extra bit of money every day. On weekends, she would even bring home bags of plastic in every shade of colour imaginable, and make Mum and her siblings do the work for some extra overtime pay. 

“We wouldn’t be served dinner that night if we didn’t do the work. On occasions when we all worked together, Ahma would even tell stories from her own life to entertain us. It was never on purpose though. She never wanted to tell us something, she just needed someone to vent to.”

Mum’s voice was like a wave of comfort as I listened intently. Then I noticed that she had been snapping off wilted choy sum leaves at the sink.

“Aren’t those leaves still edible?” I pointed out.

“They are, but they look ugly.” Mum told me.

“Ahma told me to never snap off the leaves unless they turned really yellow,” I replied tentatively. 

She turned to me and said, “She isn’t here anymore.” 

There was no sense of anger in her voice, just a quiet, straightforward, matter-of-fact tone. Maybe it was to veil her sadness, but I knew better than to press the issue any further.

“So, are we going to leave some of the food out for her later?” I asked.

“Yes, that is the tradition.”

“It would upset her if she knew you broke the leaves off the choy sum.”

“She would find another thing to pick at. Plus, it’s only a ritual. No one believes in these things anymore. Besides, it’s all going in the trash tomorrow morning.” Mum continued to argue with me as she kept on chipping the leaves off into the sink where they softly floated around and around, slowly descending. 

Sometime later, dinner was ready. After our meal, we began preparing our offering. I made it a point to sort out Ahma’s portions into neat piles, and even used her favourite bowl and chopsticks. The bowl was fragile and fading, and the blue markings of a dragon etched into the surface resembled a Ming Dynasty collectible. Mum said Ahma had been using it since before I was born, and it felt like it would break in my hands if I clutched it too tightly. It would only be fitting that Ahma used it for her final meal as well. Mum looked on as I spooned the rice into a neat pile. We laid everything out how Ahma would have done herself. It was a pathetic ritual, to be honest, and I think that deep down both Mum and I knew that. After that, we went on with our usual routines for the evening.

That night, I ran into a deep bout of insomnia. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ahma. Would she really come back and see us? Did she miss us that much in the afterlife? Had we treated her well enough? Been good enough as a grandson and a daughter for her to feel proud and content with the life that she had lived? I kept on looking for a sign, anything to suggest an arrival. I fixed my eyes on the gap in my bedroom door, and the darkness that seeped through it. 

Whilst waiting, I remembered about the spirit that always walked into our living room at midnight. It was a common occurrence, yet not unusual for me and in our culture. Ever since I was a child, I always heard creaking in the floorboards outside around that time, and eventually concluded that it must’ve been a ghost; someone from the past who came to visit our world every day. Sometimes I would catch a shadow floating silently across the floor or ceiling. In my mind, it was the spirit of a young child looking for his family. The family had moved away after the child died, but the spirit didn’t know that. He spent his nights scouring the building for his parents, but every night he would leave the building alone, not knowing his family had long been gone. I could only imagine the eternal unrest in my heart if I had to spend the whole time in my afterlife trying to find out where my family was. And even if the spirit found his family, would they recognize him? Or worse yet, would the spirit himself even recognize his family still?

I must’ve spent hours waiting before I finally heard something from outside. I crept out of bed and opened the door, hoping to see Ahma there as usual, doing housework or sitting quietly on the sofa. I didn’t see that. Everything was dark outside, but my lack of sight enhanced my other senses. I immediately noticed the faint scent of chrysanthemum tea floating in the chilly air. From the kitchen, I heard a quiet scraping sound. I tiptoed my way past the dinner table, noticing some freshly brewed tea sitting on top of the darkened wood, and observed the dark silhouette of a womanly figure peeling an apple, the skin rhythmically falling into the sink where it made one plopping sound after another. The silhouette looked too young and healthy to be Ahma. Do people return to their prime figure in the afterlife? 

I quickly slipped back into my room as the figure began to turn from the sink. I kept the door opened just slightly to look through; my eyes still fixated on the figure. She gently put the peeled apple where Ahma’s dinner lay.

“Your dessert,” The figure said in the softest whisper possible. Then, for a long time nobody moved. Not me nor the figure. I kept my gaze fixed on the figure while they quietly sipped down their chrysanthemum tea and stared blankly at the untouched food. She didn’t seem to notice me looking at her. The two of us waited in the dark together yet alone.

After a while, the woman finally got up from the dinner table.

“Zau la (5).” It was impossible to tell if she meant to say, “Go now,” or “I’m going now.” She left her empty mug on the dinner table and retreated into Ahma’s room, locking the door softly behind her.

The next morning, I woke up and saw Mum throwing away the food from last night. The cold dead choy sum was still missing its leaves. The peeled apple had long withered and shriveled up, the brown flesh looking like compost. 

I never told Mum what I saw that night.

Or asked why there was suddenly an apple on the table that seemed to have appeared overnight, or if she knew I had been watching her the whole time when she had placed the apple there on the table.

1.  The “Mainland” is what people from Hong Kong call China.
2.  There is no distinction between past and present in Cantonese.
3.  Translated: “No.”
4.  Cantonese slang meaning “annoying” or “bothersome.”
5.  Direct translation: “Go.” Conversational Cantonese often forgoes pronouns such as “I” or “You,” instead relying on inferred context to determine the subject of a conversation.

J.A Lau (he/him) is a college student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was born and raised in the seaside metropolis, where his connection to the city and the dense nature surrounding it has deeply influenced his writing. He primarily writes short-form poetry, particularly haiku. His works have appeared in various publications, such as Frogpond Journal, seashores haiku, House of Poetry, and Humana Obscura.