Model My Voice

Peanut Butter Jelly Sandwiches

All I ever wanted was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

For all the other children, lunchtime in the school cafeteria was always an occasion for ostentation, transactions, and sheer excitement. For me, it was a demonstration of how different I was from everyone else.

The other children had beautiful peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cut into perfect triangles and placed delicately in square boxes stamped with the “Wonder Bread” logo. I, on the other hand, had a bizarre and intricate contraption that separated my rice from my meal of sweet pork with black fungi.

My classmates would trade pudding cups for cookies, apple slices for chips, and chocolate milk for juice, but no one ever wanted my bright durian and taro jello cups, prickly lychee with hazardous dark pits in the center, sticky slices of dragon fruit speckled with tiny black seeds, or my suspicious can of grass jelly juice with foreign script blazoned across the top.

Everyone at the lunch table was both mystified and disgusted by my lunch; and everyday my mother would pack equally strange and alien-esque meals. I had become increasingly self-conscious of my abnormal lunches and became reluctant to even pull out my favorite shrimp flavored crackers for fear of appearing too different.

One day, as I sat at the kitchen table finishing the last of my multiplication problems, my mother opened the fridge and began rummaging through its contents.

“What should I pack you for lunch? I could pack the leftover steamed fish, it’s your favorite,” she called in Chinese.

“CAN I HAVE A NORMAL LUNCH FOR ONCE?!” The words had escaped my mouth before I had time to connect harshness of my voice to my ungrateful little brain.

My mother, taken aback, closed the fridge door and looked at me. She picked up her bag and keys, and said in broken English, “Then we go to store.”

Rather than driving to the Asian market where my mother usually bought her groceries, we drove to a typical American grocery store with typical American food. At the store, I led my mother to the bread section where I carefully selected a loaf of cream white Wonder Bread. I then took her to the canned foods aisle where I picked out a jar of Skippy’s chunky peanut butter and sugary grape jelly.

When we returned home, my mother helped me slather peanut butter on one slice of bread and purple grape jelly on another. She then took out a knife and delicately sliced the sandwich into two perfect triangles and carefully placed them in a square sandwich-sized container. Before placing the sandwich in the fridge, she gave me 25 cents to purchase a carton of chocolate milk.

The next day as my fellow classmates and I lined up for lunch, I could barely contain my excitement. I proudly followed my classmates to purchase a carton of chocolate milk and pulled out a perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich. For once in my young seven-year-old life, I was just like my all-American classmates.

It was a disappointingly bland and one-dimensional taste… My sandwich lacked the rich diversity of flavors of my mother’s cooking, there were no rice crackers to cut the sweetness of the grape jelly, and there was no gelatinous grass jelly juice to wash away the stickiness of the peanut butter. My mind was flooded with guilt and regret, but I quietly sat at my table and continued to nibble on my peanut butter jelly sandwich.

***

Eighteen years later, I am standing in front of my refrigerator, trying to decide what to eat for lunch. After staring at a jar of peanut butter, I shut the fridge door, and dialed a familiar seven-digit number on my phone.

“Hi Mom.”

“Hi Annie, you eat yet?” she replies in her heavy Chinese accent.

“No, not yet, but I was wondering if I could come over for dinner next weekend.”

“Of course! What you want eat?”

“Umm… is there any steamed fish?”