She heats up a bowl of rice drizzled with pork fat. She adds a splash of soy sauce to the steaming
heap and squats down on a foot stool in the kitchen to steal eat. Hidden from her first daughter,
who tells her pork fat is bad for her high cholesterol and high blood pressure, and her second
daughter, who tells her the only people who still eat pork fat in Taiwan are the poor people, she
devours the fat, soy sauce, and rice with a pair of wooden chopsticks dulling at the tip. She
recalls how, after the occupation ended and the Japanese had gone home and she got married, she
saved drops of pork fat after her in-laws had finished the pork she cooked. She recalls how,
while everyone else napped in the afternoon and she had finished washing and cleaning the pigs
in the pigsty, she stole ate a bowl of rice drizzled with pork fat and stole read a book in Japanese.
