Banana Bread by Chloe Budakian (17, Canada)

“Have you considered law school?” My heartbeat quickens and I experience a pervasive concoction of panic and hope. 

“Don’t listen to Wai Gong,” Mom hisses as if I have any ability to block out his grand proclamation of my future. It is now hour 4 of marinating in the 103-degree heat with Wai Po (my grandmother) and Wai Gong (my grandfather), and I am—quite literally—melting down. 
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“Do you want banana bread?” Wai Po asks rhetorically as she places a fat slice in front of me. Ah yes, the sugary, fibrous antithesis to the dread laying its roots in my gut. In this family, we drown said roots with chocolate and walnuts. “Need ... AC,” I whimper. ​

“Be really careful about going into the house! We cannot, cannot, infect your grandparents.” As Mom begins to recite yet another pandemic statistic, I slap a mask on my face and stomp towards the patio door. No melodramatic teenage meltdowns here, only banana bread. 

Crocs squeaking as she trots behind me, Wai Po unleashes the words that have been clearly pooling inside of her: “Your mom is psychotic. Why would you come all the way down here and not actually come in the house?” 

“Tell me about it,” I gripe. 

But suddenly feeling an ever-growing twinge of guilt, I slip out of the house and back into the blazing hands of the sun. 

Wai Gong has shifted the conversation from my future to my parent’s finances. Now, Mom looks concerningly close to a fiery bout of 51-year-old angst. As Wai Po and I awkwardly thump into our seats, Mom leans in and whispers: “your grandmother is psychotic. Has she no concern for her health?” And so I sit, staring at my mother and grandmother, each face twisted up eerily identically. Their faces crease like tissue paper—years of grand proclamations of their inherent differences have produced two women whose furrows can be traced back to parallel bursts of stubbornness and spunk. I wonder if Mom and I will share the same intentional blindness. For one, we will never appear as similar. Although our noses cling to our faces identically, her monolids are replaced by sharp hooded eyes and in place of her silky hair is an unruly mound of fat curls and bushy eyebrows. I am half-Chinese and half-Armenian. For my sanity, I will refrain from using the “melting pot” analogy at this moment. Actually, I don’t hear “melting pot” as much as I hear “chameleon”— I get that a lot in the figure skating world. Growing up, it was routine to assign skaters of color with music “from their ethnic heritage.” My Chinese friends skated to the Kung Fu Panda Soundtrack, and I skated to Fiddler on the Roof and some vaguely Spanish pieces. 

As I relive my coaches’ many remarks regarding my “chameleon-esque” ability to “blend into whatever I perform,” Mom pulls me out of my trance. Eager to deflect the conversation back to her daughter, she shamelessly whips out the age-old weapon of the parents: “What do you want to do with your life?” Before I can speak, Wai Gong knows right away: “Something with a lot of writing, right?” As I stare at my hands, each coated with the sticky residue from the banana bread I have been anxiously squishing between my fingers, I can’t help but feel a tad conflicted. 

As a child, I had proudly touted my verbose, long-winding stories, made friends laugh when my eyes would flash just above my book and go wide as I realized that I had utterly tuned out of the conversation. But now, my ambitions are not left alone without a “How are you going to save the world with words?” I think of the open computer tabs displaying physics projects and chemistry homework as the English teacher attempts to teach, the proposition to get rid of mandatory English classes to study “like the history of the future or something” and the resounding “yeah mans” from across the room. The world suddenly feels vastly expansive but supremely empty. I can’t help but yearn for some kind of definite answer. I have always seen myself as a sort of societal warrior—unbothered by the skeptics. But now I feel less like a warrior, and more like a sweaty 16-year-old girl wondering why she couldn’t have been born with an unwavering passion for computer science. 

And so, I wrap my banana bread with a napkin (wouldn’t want to offend Wai Po), sneak into the garage, and pull out my journal. My mind wanders back to Wai Po’s relationship with Mom. My chest tightens. Reflexively, I put sticky hand to sweaty pencil, and I write: “The desire to be different will not fence away our similarities. I see my mom when we have passionate discussions about books and authors and life, when I pick up my pen and scrawl out the world I see.” I can’t know if this proclamation is a chimeric dream, or a future reality, but I do know that when reality feels as surreal and hazy as it does in this moment, only words can turn the world crisp. As the sun goes from blazing to peaceful, I set my journal down only once: To take a bite of my banana bread.