Love Heart Soup

Wen-yi Lee

LOVE HEART SOUP

by Wen-yi Lee

Content Warnings: Reference to a massacre, death of loved ones, colonization

It starts like any other soup: garlic, onion, bones, ginger, scallions, salt. On top of that, though, and depending on the day, Sama layers notes of love. Today it is fourteen years since her sons died, and today love tastes like bitter gourd and silken tofu. 

Over the years, love on this day has tasted all kinds of ways: pungent; sour; scalding; salty; painfully, eye-wateringly sweet. Sometimes it tastes like nothing at all. Those days, she has to compensate with other flavours. Today when she tugs open her heart and drops its rough red seed into the broth, the way her mother taught her, the soup turns smooth and bitter all over. Sama grimaces, but draws out the wooden stool that she keeps by the stove and sits there stirring. This is crucial as the seed breaks apart and steeps. The day's flavours must combine.

As she stirs, she looks over at the pictures on the altar. Her parents, her sons, and more recently, her husband. 

All the other women of their djinn-touched family with the little slit in their chests told her she would never be able to cook Love Heart Soup, once she insisted that she didn't fall in love. Until you had children, they insisted right back, the strongest love was for your partner. A girl's first heart-seeds formed in those early days of figuring out love: butterflies in the stomach, the warm, lingering, racing thoughts. Love was their family’s legacy, they said. Passed down with the recipe. They told her it would come, and then the kernels would form on her heart, and then she would learn the recipe. It never came, even after she had let herself be married, but she learned other kinds of love and loved hard enough for it to take seed anyway. 

Unfortunately, the thing about love is that the stronger it is, the more bitter its memory.

There’s a whine from outside. Sama laughs and digs in her icebox for the leftover fish head she kept. She drops it onto the doorstep and a furry claw snakes out to grab it. 

“That better last you until tonight,” she calls. “I won’t be around to give you dinner.”

•••

Aik Eng, though. Aik Eng had been starry-eyed in love since he was eight and the girl at the coffee shop gave him biscuits and a kiss on the cheek. Eng was a good artist; he was always painting pictures to give to the person he was infatuated with that month. He loved so easily and so freely. He had so many friends, and he cared for everyone. Sama liked to think she taught him that. If he had been a woman, his Love Heart Soup would have always tasted rich and clear and a little bit sweet.

His younger brother Aik Fen, meanwhile, was quiet and prickly. Sama worried about him when he was younger. But he was a good, hardworking, filial boy; he got a job harvesting sap at the imbiah plantations, and there he met some coworker’s daughter. Sama never got her name. “It’s too early, Ma,” he said, blushing, when she asked him over dinner. That was Fen, holding all his feelings close. His soup: herbal, complex, soothing once it settled.

Both boys had declared her soup their favourite meal. Especially when they were sick or sad, they drank bowl after bowl from the pot that was always simmering in the kitchen. 

“There’s a little bit of Mama inside it,” Sama teased. “That’s why it tastes so good. It has all my love for you in it.” Her husband loved the boys too, especially Eng, who looked most like him, but even he conceded to her.

“How can I compete with love that tastes like this?” he once laughed.

These days, she loves the cat that sleeps on her doorstep. She calls him Fishball. Fishball makes hacking sounds while devouring the fish head that are almost comforting. Sama doesn’t remember when he started hanging around, but he’s part of her morning routine now, just like deseeding her heart and topping up the broth.

This pot has been cooking for fourteen years. It holds in it the last remains of before, her heart-seed from the morning she told Fen to bring his girlfriend back that night, finally. She would cook a special soup for them, because her love was especially rich that day. Like the rest of them, he had been on edge since the army arrived, but at that moment he blushed and mumbled before finally giving in—Okay, Ma. She had spent the day stirring and balancing the flavours, preparing toppings and side dishes: scallion pancakes, braised tofu, her husband’s favourite chilli vegetables. They had eaten thin dinners since the boats landed, mostly porridge and soy sauce and eggs, but that night Sama wanted to celebrate Fen. And perhaps they all needed some joy, while the foreigners swarmed the fields and went door to door taking census. 

When she tastes the soup now, beneath the bitter and the baby silk, part of it tastes like it used to. Like spooning soft things past toothless gums; of comforting soups for sick days; of the sweet beancurd she made as an after-school treat or for breakfast on weekends with deep fried dough fritters. Aik Eng liked his beancurd cold, and Aik Fen liked his hot. Eng used to play with soft food, though. He squished them into shapes and carved lines out of them with his spoon or his fingers. Even though it made Sama tear her hair out, he had been an artist from the very beginning, so interested in finding beauty even in his beancurd.

People were always asking him to draw things: pictures of their beloveds, posters for their shop or show. He got a job illustrating for the local newspaper, and it made Sama so proud to flip open the paper every week to see the drawings rendered in his skillful hand. Once for her birthday, he had drawn Sama a portrait of herself.

“You look so pretty, Sama!” Choo at the coffee shop had told her when Sama showed it off.

“Ah, a woman my age doesn’t need pictures of herself. Better if he gave me a drawing of the two of them.” But secretly she had been pleased. 

After the Army of the Dawn arrived, Eng became cooped up in his room, working late nights. Sama wasn’t sure what he was working on. Outside, war was raging. The imbiah fields, the island’s main livelihood, were burning as the invaders fought to seize them. People stayed in their homes and watched out for their neighbours. It was a difficult time, and Sama thought perhaps Eng was simply channeling his fears into his art.

It was only after it had all happened—after neither sons nor girlfriend had come home for her soup dinner—after her husband returned with the news of what had happened at the eastern beach—that Sama looked through Eng’s things. In neat stacks in the drawers she found that Eng had been drawing flyers for secret meetings and posters against the invaders, their narrow faces and high foreheads exaggerated to mocking proportions. Later, after she had burned it all, she would learn that his skills and his many friends had rallied an entire army of rebels among the field workers, including his loyal, quiet brother. 

But how did you fight the dawn itself? When they were rounded up, that sunrise was not beautiful. It was a clot of golden bodies in red clouds against a darkening sea. It glinted and sparked in ricochet, burning everything down. Sometimes, selfishly, she wishes they’d loved their island a little less, or their lonely mother a little more.

Today everything is bitter again, and soft, like there is nothing to bite through. 

•••

There's a saying that to be successful one must eat a little bitterness. Sama’s had enough for a lifetime, though. She reaches for the sugar only to realize she’s out.

Well, she needed to go down to the market today anyhow. Slowly, Sama gets to her feet and fetches her trolley. She gives the soup one last stir before heading out—stepping over Fishball, who is basking in the sun—and trudging down the road.

The island has rebuilt since the war. There are no traces of the Dawn in the worn zinc roofs and swaying palms, or the chickens that bob around, or the laughing, half-dressed children. Some birds are quarreling in the distance. A brown dog pants at the other end of the road, underneath a mango tree. 

A lanky boy waves at her, a ball tucked under his arm. “Aunty Sama, can we have your soup today?”

She laughs. “You don’t want it today. It’s bitter.” 

“Tomorrow, then!” he chirps, before dropping the ball and giving it a wide kick. 

Some of the islanders treat her soup like an almanac. Today is a sweet day—good things will happen. Whenever her soup is sweet or savoury or soothing, people always ask for tastes. The mornings that love is warm, she makes extra to share. The days that love leaves a bad taste, like today, she usually just waits for tomorrow. But today the soup is important, so it has to taste good, regardless of what her heart feels.

The market’s hundred stalls spill out of the old building’s iron struts and into the sun. Sama walks appraisingly through rows of fruits and vegetables, fish and crabs spread out on cold sheets, bags of rice and spices. Hawkers in white singlets toss up hot meals on charred woks for customers calling out orders. There’s a loud squawking somewhere—a chicken being butchered.

Small Hock the prawn seller watches her scrutinize each shellfish. “Special dinner tonight?” It’s her last stop; her trolley is already brimming with produce far too much for one person.

“Just soup for my sons.”

“Ah.” He nods soberly. “You should bring some for the others too, I’m sure they would appreciate.”

She picks out the freshest-looking prawns, the ones with meaty tails and tight heads. “I see how much I can carry. Have you heard what the veil will be like tonight?”

“Yah, it’s full moon. Ayu said it should be thin.” He slides over her chosen prawns wrapped in paper and she tucks it into a safe corner of the trolley. “May the sun set on them.”

She nods. “May the sun set on them.”

Other women nod respectfully at her as she weaves past them out of the market. Some older, many younger. Sama can’t help but linger for a second on each woman her sons’ age—women now, not girls, with children of their own—watching them haggle, study vegetables, jostle baskets. She never found out who it was that had Aik Fen giddy for once. She wonders if the woman is still alive, if she would have liked the soup after all.  

When she returns home, the door is ajar. Sama freezes, thinking of soldiers and overturned furniture and soup sloshed over the floor. 

Then, breathing deeply, she continues up the path with a set jaw, trolley clattering behind her.

The day after the massacre, three soldiers tore the house apart. They ripped open seams, threw open cupboards, kicked through boxes, all with cold, razor-sharp efficiency. At some point, however, one of them swore loudly. Terrified, she hurried into the kitchen to find him brushing his pants off with disgust. Soup was boiling over on the stove, overflowing onto the floor. “What’s that?” the soldier snapped.

“Soup,” she murmured, bowing low and avoiding his eyes. Her heart pounded against her ribs, against the long thin seam she unfolded every morning. She wondered if he had been on the beach, if that rifle had shot one of her sons. She hoped he hadn’t heard rumours of their family—djinn-touched, magic-hearted. Not that her magic would have been any kind of threat. But they were already interrogating the shamans and the shrinekeepers. “Just soup.”

The soldier made a contemptuous noise, but then he gestured to his compatriots and they were marched out. She was left staring at the bubbling pot, door hinges creaking in the background. Her soup had never boiled over before, but that morning, love had been anguish, explosive and scalding and drowning, and it frothed over and over the top, no matter what she tried.

Today, however, there is only Fishball, standing huffily on her kitchen table. “Ay, stupid cat.”

It purrs. It doesn’t leave, even as she begins unloading her shopping bags. Sama holds onto the prawns. “Not for you.”

Fishball watches her as she adds her ingredients: sugar, a little extra salt, tomatoes, the prawns, a splash of coconut milk, kaffir leaves, lemongrass for an extra touch of sweetness. She’s learned how to mix a kinder taste of love, even if her heart insists on producing otherwise today. When she tastes the soup again an hour later, the warmth makes her think of shared dinners, Eng and Fen quarreling over the last chicken drumstick, the whole family breaking new year buns that they had baked together earlier that day. It tastes only like the good things. 

“Much better,” Sama says to Fishball, who has resorted to curling up on the window ledge and hoping for scraps.

•••

As a child she never understood why Love Heart Soup wouldn’t always taste good. If soup was love and love was forehead kisses and warm hugs and looking out for one another, how come some days her mother threw the soup out with the washing water before anyone could taste it?

As she got older and the people she loved grew more complex, she understood. When life conspired with the Dawn to give her unconditional love and then insurmountable grief, she knew. She can pick out the dozen notes of love in her soups now, her tastebuds honed by age and heartbreak. 

They were all surprised when she made her first pot of soup without ever having fallen into their kind of love, but it seemed completely natural to her. The way she protected her friends and her neighbours fiercely—wasn’t that love? The way she fed the animals, cradled seedlings, found solace in the sea lapping against the earth—wasn’t that love? And though she didn’t feel for her husband the same way the other girls did, and had married him only for necessity—didn’t she love him, still, as her partner, her confidant, the father of her children? Perhaps her heart had never fluttered for him, but it had shattered when the illness had taken him, three years ago. That was love all the same. It tasted the same way.

She had thought that this, at least, was fundamental, even if most people couldn’t seem to muster up enough for it to take seed: the love for common humanity, the wonder at the thing that was being alive together. But the occupation had taught her that just as she had no heart-fluttering, body-warming kind of love, there were those who lacked this fundamental thing. 

War did not love. Conquerors did not love. The Dawn did not love.

They were not interested in bringing things together, in giving things time to warm and combine. They did not care for balanced things, things that built upon each other, enhanced each other as a whole. Everything they touched rotted.

But like soup, the land renews, given time. It simmers the spoil away. 

•••

The sun is going down. Sama turns down the fire and spoons soup into four tingkat bowls. The broth sloshes against the steel. She stacks the bowls, does up the clasps, and sets off.

She arrives at the beach as sunset pools across the sea, washing the shore and the ghosts in gold. They lie languidly in the sand, no longer as restless as they were in the years right after the event. Some drift gently, forming and reforming in the light. She can’t see her sons yet.

She does see other people, however, sitting on the beach with their own meals. The other islanders noticed her tradition and started joining her every year, bringing their own liquid offerings of wine or coffee.  

She spreads her own mat at her usual spot by the coconut trees and unpacks the food. The first three bowls she pours slowly into the sand: one spot on her right, one spot on her left, and one spot opposite, further away, for the rest of the wartime spirits. Small Hock will be happy. The fourth bowl she sits down with herself, along with a pat of rice.

As she eats quietly under the darkening sky, faint shapes settle themselves into the spaces beside her. In the wet, malleable earth, they almost form an impression. “Eng,” she says. “Fen. Eat.”

The sand is still steaming where she drenched it. As the ghosts recline, the wisps seem to waver, as though someone is blowing across its surface, waiting for their dinner to cool.

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WEN-YI LEE is from Singapore and likes writing about girls with bite, feral nature, and ghosts. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming with Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Pseudopod and Anathema Magazine, among others. She can be found on Twitter at @wenyilee_, and otherwise at wenyileewrites.com.

Love Heart Soup can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 5.1.