The rain came down in sheets, turning the hawker center’s neon signs into smudges of green and gold. Jia Wei wiped the counter with a rag that smelled of decades-old grease, his father’s voice slicing through the clatter of dishes.
“Too much garlic,” Mr. Lim said, nudging the bowl of bak kut teh toward a customer. “Next time, I’ll charge you extra for scaring the ghosts away.”
The old man chuckled, slurping the broth louder than necessary. Jia Wei watched appa’s hands—the left one steady as it flicked a chili seed into the trash, the right one trembling faintly as it scrubbed the pork ribs. The bones gleamed moon-white under the fluorescent light; their edges jagged as broken pottery. They hadn’t talked about the diagnosis. They talked about the rain, about the price of pork belly, about the Malaysian couple who’d bought the adjacent stall and oversalted their hokkien mee.
In the night, he woke to the sound of retching.
He found his father hunched over the toilet, one hand braced against the wall, the other clawing at his chest as if to tear out the tumor himself. The bathroom reeked of bile and the cloying sweetness of the osmanthus air fresheners.
“Pa—”
“Out.”
“Let me help—”
“Out!”
He retreated to the hallway. Through the door, he heard the wet, animal sounds of his father’s pain, the creak of his joints as he curled tighter into himself. When the vomiting subsided, there was silence, then a hoarse whisper:
“…forgot the ginger.” He froze.
“In the broth,” Mr. Lim rasped. “You forgot the ginger today.”
A laugh punched out of his throat, sharp as a sob. His father was dying, and all he could fret about was a goddamn soup ingredient.
“I’ll add it tomorrow,” he said, leaning his forehead against the door. “No. You’ll add it now.”
3 A.M. They stood in the hawker stall’s kitchen, the stainless-steel counters glowing blue in the pre-dawn dark. Mr. Lim leaned against the sink, his breath shallow, directing his son with a jerk of his chin.
“Smaller slices. The ginger—it’s not a zombie, ah. No need to hack.”
He bit his tongue, the knife slipping in his grip. He’d written a dozen stories about fathers and sons, but none had prepared him for this: the intimacy of appa’s hands as he wiped the counter in slow, deliberate arcs. They were a pendulum between stove and ledger, tallying debts in one column and years in the other. When the doctor said cancer, his hands kept moving. Scraping scales from pomfret. Scrubbing the wok’s charred belly.
The rain thickened, drumming the zinc roof until the stall became a dim, throbbing cocoon. Mr. Lim peeled garlic at the counter, his movements precise and lethal. Jia Wei studied the hollows beneath his eyes—craters where the chemo had mined what little softness remained.
“I’m not going to New York,” he said. Scritch-scritch.
“Pa. Listen. An MFA degree is useless anyways. I’ll take over the stall. I’ll—”
A spoon clattered into the sink. Mr. Lim stood, wiping his hands on a towel already stiff with old blood.
“The Teochew muay vendor asked about you,” Mr. Lim said. “Wanted to know if you’re still scribbling fairy tales.”
Jia Wei tensed. “What’d you say?”
“I’m going to tell him that you only write menus from now on. Very poetic. ‘Fish head curry: $6.50.’”
The sarcasm landed like a fish tossed onto ice—a flop, then stillness.
“I sold the stall.”
For a heartbeat, the only sound was the drip of the faulty tap and the distant wail of a child in the playground. Then, louder: Scritch-scritch-scritch.
Jia Wei’s breath caught. “To who?”
“To Lee. The Hokkien idiot who thinks MSG is a spice.”
“Why?”
Mr. Lim shrugged, but his jaw twitched, a tell Jia Wei had inherited.
“Pa,” Jia Wei said, the word a bridge between them. His father turned out the lights, plunging the stall into a darkness that smelled of old oil. They stepped into the alley, shoulders nearly touching. The weight of the envelope in Mr. Lim’s pocket—thick with Lee’s cash, thinner than the cost of a lifetime—pressed against his thigh.
He wanted to tell appa that he would get the dishes today. He wanted to teach him how to use the dishwasher. He wanted to ask why he’d found a crumpled NYU pamphlet in the trash last month, its edges singed as if appa had tried to burn it, then changed his mind. He wanted to unspool the decades from his spine like silk unraveling from a cocoon.
“You should’ve at least told me,” he whispered, clutching a towel like a white flag.
Mr. Lim spat into the drain. “Told you what? That life tastes like bile after 60? That I sold the stall because a man can’t eat his own bones?”
That night, he dreamt of childhood summers: humid nights with the swirling ceiling fan, turmeric buzzing on his tongue, elbows at the table, orchid gardens, nectar-colored dusks.
When he woke up, he remembered asking his mother about the upcoming elections, the new transit system that was supposed to be eco-friendly, the economy, none of which his mother could give him an answer to. He asked her if time was an illusion, if old age visits one day like a friend, if loneliness was colored silver.
“Careful, ah boy,” she’d say, not looking up from the broth that bloomed with orphaned garlic cloves, their paper skins littering the floor like shed chrysalises. He thought of the stories he’d scribbled in his notebook—tales of boys who rode midnight trains to nowhere, of cities that glittered like broken glass. None of them tasted like this: of star anise and loss.
When his father’s body lay in bed, a parenthesis collapsing, he’d rasp: write. And so, Jia Wei wrote. He wrote about the way appa peeled oranges—thumb splitting the rind in a single spiral, the fruit naked and glistening. He wrote how he’d learned to measure grief by the weight of a soup pot, how appa counted coins into a tin box. The ritual never changed: Clink-clink-clink, like a metronome set to the tempo of their past life.
In the end, all he received from his father was a jar of broth. “Boil it with ginger. And when you run out, don’t come back.” he had written on the label, his characters slanting like a man leaning into the wind. Jia Wei carried it to New York. He let it ferment in his cupboard, too afraid to open it, too afraid not to. Some nights, he presses his ear to the glass and swear he hears him—not his voice, but the silent violence of time and understanding, that vast and aching country between them.
He writes about the broth now. How it outlived appa. How he drinks it cold, straight from the jar, when the Manhattan snow falls like ash and his bones forget their own names. He writes about the way appa held a fish, how gently, as if it weren’t already dead but merely waiting for better music. He writes until his hands shake. Until they, too, become a language. Some nights, he imagines appa reading his words, the old man’s calloused finger tracing the lines about ginger and ghosts. “See?” The finger hovers. “This is how you leave.”