Dad teaches me how to make rice: “Measure the rice with your heart, then fill the water to your knuckle.” The tap fills the black pot as a cloud of starch rises. He swishes the water around, dumps it, repeats until the water runs clear. I never thought to ask which knuckle. Even after watching him a thousand times, he was inconsistent—index one day, thumb the next, sometimes his middle finger. I watched him with the rice cooker painted in yellowed flowers, the small white one too tiny for the whole family so we had to rush for it after Dad got his heaping portion, and later the bigger metal cooker, like an instant pot, that sang when it was done. His measurements were haphazard, careless, the opposite of his slow, methodical movements everywhere outside the kitchen. When I moved away, my rice swung from perfect to congee-soft. His was always right. Never mushy or hard, always firm and fluffy. That’s how it goes: Grandma’s recipe never tastes the same, no matter how closely you follow it.
My mother loves potatoes. A childhood steeped in Pennsylvania Dutch flavors inside an Irish Catholic home. As a flight attendant, she often stopped after a flight at Popeyes just for mashed potatoes and gravy. For lunch when Dad was at work or when he took his biannual trip away, we’d pretend to be potato girls, peeling our fingers through imaginary jackets of butter and salt, drowning pierogies in sour cream and applesauce. At the core, we were my father’s daughters. We clung to the parent who held us farthest from his chest. Sad, but that’s how it goes: the constant craving of love that isn’t freely given.
It’s the same craving I feel for rice. Endless.
By five p.m., when the sun strikes the buildings. When I’m away from home. When I pan-fry dumplings and they sit naked on a plate, waiting for the rice that isn’t there. When I’m stranded without my rice cooker, like the one swallowed when the hurricane tore the walls from my old apartment.
Cooking rice in a pot just isn’t the same, I told my husband in our Airbnb kitchen. It was a lifeless room—blue and grey, with a pathetic landscape print on the wall. No spices in the cabinets besides salt and pepper.
When we moved into our new home, we had almost nothing. Hurricane Helene had wrecked the old one. Just know we lost everything. When we were waiting for the new house to be livable, we set a four-hundred-dollar budget for necessities: two mattresses, bedding, pots and pans, a rice cooker.
I miss my dad. I avoid him, ignore his texts and calls, send out psychic chasms of anger. Then, standing in front of my empty fridge, I set off to fill it. That has been my life for the last year—filling space in empty places. Rebuying what I’d spent years accumulating, then promising myself I’d replace them with better versions someday. Now here I was again buying the cheap pillows and cups and carpets, telling myself I’d upgrade later. Like stacking cards, it all eventually falls inward. The echo chamber of this new void was the pantry, the cabinets, my family. I’ve become a new person, almost—a snake that still drags its old skin.
I close my eyes and see my dad. He made me sad, angry, hungry. In my memories, he was always at the grill, cigar clamped between his teeth, smoke curling into the yard. Sundays meant smoked ribs, steaks, chicken; my mother did the vegetables, and he made the rice. That food was our only conversation, our only connection. After work, before bed, he said little. His moods hung over the house, sharp and heavy—one wrong glance at dinner and silence fell, brittle as dry rice. Nobody wanted to be the target, but everyone knew the rules: one wrong step and the dogpile came, his wrath turned public, merciless. Other nights he laughed, joked, still picking someone to needle, charisma spilling over anyone who wasn’t his daughters or his wife. The air always trembled with what might come, and even the ordinary act of eating carried the weight of fear.
There’s a local Asian grocery store down the street, the one my father used to take me to. I considered it our bonding time. Other kids went bowling or mini golf with their dads; my father’s outings with me were narrower. The flea market. A meal out. The store.
The Asian grocery carried our staples: soy sauce by the gallon, the red-elephant ten-pound rice bag, baby bok choy, shrimp chips, rice-paper candies. I remember the smell of dried squid clinging to my clothes afterward, the only remnants from our time together being the rustling of bags in the silent car ride home. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU waved from the backseat like roadside wildflowers.
I pick up the same items, though I branch out more than he ever did. I like to make my own manapua, stuffing the sweet buns with char siu pork I make at home. The fish I choose is salmon, while he swore by halibut and cod. He can afford Kobe while I buy pork butt and belly. Our shopping lists would look related but not the same—his filled with staples, mine with experiments. Sometimes I wonder if this is how inheritance works, through substitutions.
Still, I walk through the aisles and see no one like him. No towering figure juggling seven items in his arms because he refused to grab a cart. Instead, the aisles are crowded with other fathers, children hanging off carts, neighbors running into neighbors. My father’s ghost doesn’t haunt the store so much as it leaves a space—a gap on the shelf, a figure missing from the fluorescent aisles. I am filling the fridge again, but it will never be filled the way he filled it. I’d bring him jars of homemade kimchi and I wonder if they still sit in the back of the fridge.
When I called my parents after the hurricane, I thought it was a formality. Of course they’d say yes, of course we could stay. I imagined us crowding into my old room, my son trailing his surviving toys down the same hallway I grew up in. I even thought my mother might cook for us, that I’d sit at her table again eating mashed potatoes with a crater of butter in the middle, pretending I was a child and not someone who had just lost everything. Instead, their voices came flat. My father never even cleared his throat to say we weren’t welcome. Made me read between the lines and feel the cold glower of his eyes. Whenever I asked, “Well can we stay?” He’d pause and laugh, “I guess we can’t leave you homeless.” My mother told me what her therapist had told her to say: you’re adults and you’ll figure it out.
Four out of five bedrooms stood empty in that house, four beds stripped clean and waiting, but not for us. I hung up the phone and felt like I’d swallowed a stone.
For a year I haven’t driven past their street. I imagined the smell of dinner sieving from the windows, the steady yellow glow of the kitchen light. My father spooning out rice from the cooker, the grains steaming and perfect, my mother pulling a tray of sweet chili chicken out from the warmer. All of it untouched by wind or water, while I crammed our things into the back of my car, while I balanced my son’s happiness with my own melancholy. I tried to believe we weren’t beggars. To make sure we’d never ask for anything ever again. Their rejection clung to me like wet clothes.
Call me Helene. Call me the flood. In their eyes, I was my own upending.
The craving that had always followed me—his rice, her potatoes, their rationed love—swelled into something bigger.
Not just hunger, but famine.
At night, in the different beds we rented—mattresses with stiff sheets, hotel blankets that smelled of bleach—I lay awake and thought about rice. I thought about how my father never measured it the same way twice, yet it always turned out right. I tried to mimic him in strange kitchens, using strange pots, but mine came out too wet, too dry. The waterline slipped from my knuckle as if I had lost the map. I wanted to ask him which knuckle it really was, but I couldn’t bring myself to call. The silence between us felt more solid than the walls we no longer had.
My body, since the flood, has felt half submerged. The fear of houselessness has dimmed since we’ve moved into our new home but has never completely drained. We had to tent the house and vacate for three days. The idea of leaving made me break out in red raised hives down my back. Vacations—or even the idea of them—send me into paralysis. I move our belongings to higher shelves before we leave, emptying cabinets and taking stock of what little we deem special.
These days, when I pass my father and I’s pho restaurant, I look for my dad’s truck out of habit. I know the order by heart—large pho with extra tripe, sprouts piled on the side, the squeeze of sriracha and oyster sauce. I can picture him sitting there, chopsticks in one hand, the other curled into a fist against the bowl, as if guarding it. I used to sit across from him in silence, apologizing to the waiter with my eyes if the sprouts weren’t enough. When he said it was nice to catch up, I agreed, though we had barely spoken. I want his questions, his curiosity, the small ways a father might notice who I am. But he offers none. And still, even knowing that, I want him. I want him to see me, to ask me, to care. I carry that wanting like a stone in my pocket, heavy and impossible to ignore.
It was the same silence that filled our dinners at home, our car rides back from the grocery store, our years of living together. The silence was the rice—present, filling, but never enough.
I wonder sometimes if he looks for my car too. If he scans the parking lot, half-hoping, half-dreading to see me walk through the door. He wouldn’t know where to look. He doesn’t even know my new address, doesn’t know the jars I’ve already filled in the pantry, the shelves stacked with bags of rice I buy in bulk now. I measure the water to my own knuckle, landing on using my thumb only. The rice comes out close enough. I feed it to my son, who has no memory of his grandfather’s hands scooping steaming grains, only mine.
I let the uncooked rice fall through my fingers, smooth but sharp, and it reminds me of my father—polished on the surface, but cutting in ways I never knew how to handle. Cooked, the same rice swells and softens in my hands, warm and yielding, as if it has learned to forgive, or at least to let itself be held. Maybe this is how inheritance works—not in the exactness of recipes, but in the gaps, the substitutions, the quiet hunger passed down.
I give him rice, bowl after bowl, until he knows it as home.
Rae Zalopany is a writer, visual artist, and teacher from St. Petersburg, Florida. She holds an MFA from the University of South Florida. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Southeast Review, The Boiler, and elsewhere.