sunset super 2425 irving st, san francisco, ca 94122 - Yoga Weng '24

today i walked with my mom to the grocery store two blocks from my sister’s chinese school that used to
be mine and took pictures of the water stained tile like i was one of those white girls on social media who
do photoshoots in this supermarket, voyeurs to an identity they’ve constructed through aesthetic inspo
pinterest boards of the snack aisle filtered pink and white, pretty and seeping a kind of ill-fittingly into my
skin like the grease that sits atop hot pot cooling, speaking back your face in fragments rippled through
and then, there i mopped up the corpse of my childhood self, already six weeks dead because i’d been too
busy last week and also the week before and before i knew it six weeks had passed—or maybe six years,
not too sure— and i’d shed the body who hated that filthy water stained tile and the supply closet that
spilled out of the wall in the dairy aisle and the product boxes stacked into the sky in the space above 2.29
ngo om (rice paddy herb) with the words product of the usa circled on the tag, because in the kitchen
appliances section the ceramic soup spoons are kept in cut up shopping baskets red like beginning, still
rough around the edges and some six winters ago i was dragged through these halls in a shopping cart, the
kind that eats a quarter when you steal it and spits it back out when returned, though it does forget
sometimes, and in that time i’d complained in a drum drowned out by the rolling of wheels against the
tiles in heavy vibrations, disjointed and boneless like the beef shabu shabu swelling out of styrofoam for
9.99, and i never want to come back, i’d thought to myself, and yet here i am, six weeks or six years later,
trying to choose between five different brands of tomato-flavored hot pot soup base while my mom
scrutinizes the list of ingredients the way she looks at me sometimes when i’ve done something she
doesn’t like and somehow i know i’ll be here next week, and the week after, to lift the grocery bags into
the car, three on one arm, the remains of my childhood self tidied into a bucket and embalmed in the back
of that supply closet in the dairy aisle, dead.