Assistant Editor Haley Crigger: In “Tea and Seeds,” the narrator’s elders chew sunflower seeds and exchange wisdom in a language she simultaneously lost and never had. Her attentiveness to their every move is a portrait of yearning, the desire to regain a cultural inheritance lost to something that defies the prose of her “puckered, modern mouth.” I love this story for its physicality, its insistence that seeds can be portals, that the past can be unfurled. Amazingly, this is Yu’s first publication.
To hear Yasmine read her story, click below:
Tea and Seeds
Over tea, the elders talk, spitting sunflower seeds between their teeth. Their tongues are effortless in shelling salty pods and oversized egos. At the center of the table, cracked hulls fill a carton made from newspaper. Time gets woven around the table. As they talk, they pull in strands of stories, memories, absences, debts, migrations, disasters, from which signs of a future are teased out. Not again. No good. This won’t end well, they say.
The elders pour tea for each other. There are no leaves to read here, for they don’t divine, they only discern. There’s nothing to change but change itself. The elders talk in a language that’s never been written down. It flows, it diverges, it picks up where it left off, returning to the same vast, endless conversation from which this one runs.
If I disagree, if I say anything at all, the elders laugh, black-and-white seeds spilling from their gums. Their talk has none of the reductive analysis or meta-intellectualism that comes out of my puckered, modern mouth. I lost their language long ago (can you lose what you never had?), but my ears still strain to understand. You can’t avoid loss, only go through it. At school, they taught me another language, the one with which I thought I’d rewrite the world, but oh, the world eludes the word.
So I gather the carton of cracked hulls. I stick my hands into the mound, fingering the roasted, spit-covered seedless shells. If I could, I’d sow their language into the loam of my mouth. Rightly spaced, rightly spread, so something, when tended, might one day grow. The elders sip their tea. As they talk, their mouths are cracking black-and-white sunflower seeds. Each word carries potential, each seed stores a world: around this table, maybe something unseen is sprouting, a leaf about to unfurl.
Yasmine Yu lives and writes in Los Angeles. She is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants. This is her first fiction publication.
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