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(Picture from the movie A Touch of Spice)
I didn’t know what I was doing. I stared at the salad bowl, inside was a mixture of the remaining materials I got in my fridge—minced beef, basil, chopped onion, potato, flower and egg. Then I tipped off the lid of a small jar and the dark brown content poured into the salad bowl. An exotic intriguing smell instantly struck my nostril.
Warning: this is not a movie review and copy right of the picture is reserved to whoever owns it
Then I knew. It’s a scene from the movie A Touch of Spice in which a five-year-old little boy was making Turkish rissoles to the memory of his grandfather. But if Fanis spiced his memory of his grandfather and the life in Istanbul with cumin, then to whom and what was I indulging my nostalgia?
I arrived at Melbourne in a cold rainy winter. During the first three weeks, I went to parties with my new friends. To me, party is a place where you drained yourself with questions for strangers, strived to memorize and distinguish different Johns without their surname, and forced yourself to swallow up whatever bizarre drinks (red wine with coke, come on!) you were offered. And when the guy you just met whose face couldn’t quite fit into your name catalogue walked towards you, it’s time to go.
Few times after I put myself in a panic state of social phobia, I decided I am fed up with those party-going activities. Instead I started to go to the Asian grocery store at the corner of Little Burke Street and Russell Street. There was a huge, long wall of oriental instant noodles that sailed from Thailand, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and China all the way down under just to feed the yearning hearts of foreign travellers. But how could it be? I anxiously glanced up and down, to-and-forth between Japanese and Korean packages for the pictorial, intricate characters I am so proud of, but in vain. The closet thing I got is the deformed, simplified ones written on the package staring at me with hostility. Yes those instant noodles were mocking me, mocking a silly girl who tried to retrieve the lost sense of home through instant noodles. I fought back the brimming tears with difficulty.
Several months passed and spring came with its golden sunshine. I no longer went to the Asian grocery shop for the memory of home. It’s half due to the Aussie boy I secretly fell in love with and the Mauritian and Sri Lankan girls who lived next door. The two girls taught me how to use spices in cooking. On the little island I came from, cuisines were usually flavoured with ginger, garlic, basil, and Chinese herbs. Spice like rosemary or thyme is coated with exotic or European cultural imagination. After they re-emerge from the poetic ocean of translation, each of them is rendered a tint of mystical presence. Rosemary becomes the beguiling scent, cumin the lingering scent, thyme the scent that fills the air within a thousand miles. And paprika, garam sala, and tumeric directly overwhelm me with erotic sensations since the obscure Chinese translation match nowhere in people’s epistemology.
Those spices completely bewitched me. Following a completely opposite route of Fanis, who traced back his dreamland and childhood with ritual-like cooking, I embarked on a new sensory journey of fresh new experiences in a culturally diversified city. With gleeful excitement, I walked down Lygon street to do my routine window shopping for food, greedily taking in the tempting colours and smell of food on people’s table, imagining the texture and taste, guessing the spice they used, and reading the foreign languages on the menu. Italy, India, Chile, Sri Lanka, Thailand etc, it’s a condensed world map of food and cultures. Homesickness only frequented me in dreams.
In this way, I took advantages from immigrants’ ritual-like reproduction of their memory toward homeland, not realizing one day fresh experiences became one’s past and one’s past makes who you are. Spice has its cynical charm. It pinned down your taste buds with memories and never let you break its spell. I went home for the long summer vacation, and found things were no longer the same. People drove in the opposite direction and there were no big patches of blue sky. My tongue and my heart longed for something missing. I searched and searched, but there was no way I can find the familiar cumin smell. I felt lonely and not quite at home.
In autumn I came back to Melbourne, to greet my second winter in one year. The boy has got himself a girl friend and the Mauritian and Sri Lanka girls moved out. The sense of loneliness struck again and that’s when I found myself repeating the movie scene, savouring the smell of cumin. The same night I went to the two girls’ new apartment. With the flickering candle light, I found my fingers tapping to the rhythm of an Indian song which used to make me feel dizzy. Then I realized it was me who have changed to a foreign traveller who can only search for the unchanged in his memory map. I became Fanis. Ahh, the damned spice!
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袁泉。台北 (Short Stay No. 1) (1)
