“The Months of Magical Eating,” excerpted from Women on Food (Abrams, 2019)
One night over dinner, when I was six months pregnant, I yawned.
My husband, a Connecticut-born son of an artist and a school secretary, smiled and stroked my hand sweetly in sympathy.
My father, a Guangdong-raised son in a long line of Chinese doctors, furrowed his brow, leaned in to give me a good look, and, dismissing my explanations of long hours at my desk and the obvious gestation, said what he has for nearly every affliction (from allergy to zit) that I’ve ever suffered: “You’re not eating right.”
What would be right, to start, were yàn wō (燕窝). Birds’ nests. Half-moons of hardened saliva spat onto the walls of seaside caves by tiny swiftlets in Southeast Asia.
Dad also prescribed more soups, more ginger, more steaming and less frying, more actual meals and less snacking, and, of course, more rest. But while it seemed clear to me that I just needed to get to the other side by delivering this new person safely into the world, he seemed to think things could be better, now. So I couldn’t refuse when he offered to take over all the cooking while he was in town.