In Amy Tan’s Kitchen God’s Wife, the protagonist’s mother has a penchant for starting conversations by picking up where she left off – even if she left off some two months before. “Pearl, ah...” she begins, and launches straight in with a distinct lack of peremptory dialogue. “Pearl, ah, have to go, no choice,” she says when Pearl picks up the phone one day. The explanations come later.

Amy Tan gave voice to Chinese people, but the voice she bestowed upon them was inevitably an exoticised one for the ears of a Western audience. I guess that’s why I never got into her books the way America seemed to. The Asian American experience, evidently, is vastly different from that of an Asian in America. I can’t say, exactly, that I felt a kinship with Amy Tan’s characters, but insofar as there was a shred of shared experience, much of it was concentrated in Pearl, ah. In Pearl, ah, Amy Tan and I arrived at an understanding.

Pearl, ah, months disappear down rabbit hole, how to blog?



Here is what disappearing down a rabbit hole sounds like.

Days, I settled into a job that required much sitting in a quiet office, with a red pen, a yellow highlighter, and many pages of colourful page layouts. It was a temporary thing, one that was meant to last a week, then two, then six, then another, then. There was a free-flow of sustainably harvested and traded coffee in the kitchenette (the buttons on the machine read “Cappuccino” and “Espresso” but also “Cremichoc” and “Espresschoc”).



Weekends, we ran away, me and Olive, into the wide world. So many bars we ate at, standing up, in Barcelona, with cavas and cervezas ready at the asking, and so often we returned to the Mercat Santa Caterina, with its undulating multicoloured mosaic roof like a wave of joy. Our hotel was between two churches; mornings I lay half-asleep in bed and counted the chimes of the churchbells while the seagulls flew and squawked, awake already. One evening we fell into the kitschy chic of the bar at the Camper hotel, for beers and freshly squeezed orange juices, and guessing at dim sums in the Spanish menu. It is a small space, the bar at Casa Camper, with seating enough for maybe eight? ten? and standing room for another, I don’t know, twelve – and we all cheered when the Spanish guy came on Eurovision. We walked all day, in Barcelona, under the city’s many balconies, before collapsing in bed for siestas come late afternoon. Nights, once the human statues had packed up and washed off their face paint, Pakistani immigrants sold beer by the can on La Rambla.



Another weekend, with Jazon in tow fresh from New York, we packed an mp3 player full of tunes and drove down south to Brighton, and the boardwalk, and the naked cyclists coming down King’s Road with the sea just beyond. We unfolded our legs getting out the car, and I said, because it was true and the smell of the sea was on the breeze, “This is great!” The sun was strong on our shoulders and our arms. The wind flirted with my skirt. We stopped for fish and chips hot and salty at the stand reading “Lovely Jubbly”, and then we took to the pier with its sticks of stripy Brighton Rock reading “Man U” and “Arsenal” and “Lazy Lout”, with its rides spiraling up and around and upside down, its fairground music tinny and insistent through the Tannoy. The rides were called Crazy Mouse and Helter Skelter and Turbo, and the girls screamed when the roller-coaster car rattled and sped round the bend. The carnie at the Dolphin Derby was a young man with hair down to his shoulders. “Welcome to the Brighton Pier,” he said, “where the fish are cheaper than the chips!” The giant stuffed-toy prizes hung huge and googly-eyed from the rafters.



Another weekend yet, in the New Forest, some three hours southwest of London, we breathed deeply at the banks of the Beaulieu River. Ponies and shaggy-haired donkeys and slow, insouciant cows meandered in the village streets, while the horses, undisturbed, breakfasted on the Whitefield Moor. “So,” I said, and the heath was green and flat and vast around us, “this is a moor.” Mr Darby did not come wandering round in the mist. One night, down a long and windy route deep in the forest, we ate – very well, and with glasses of pink champagne – till we were alone in the small dining room, with the footsteps of our French waiter unaccompanied on the wooden floor. It was dark and silent outside, very dark, and very silent, and the trees were dark and silent, too. Our feet crunched on the gravel path to the car. We rolled down the windows, put on Francis Cabrel, and sat on the bonnet. We propped our feet up on the timber fence, above the beam from the headlights. This is the world.



When summer finally came round, I celebrated with berries. A raspberry Victoria sponge, first, at a teatime for girls, then, on a cool Saturday night, a summer berry pavlova on which red berries tumbled onto clouds of whipped cream. Sunday Olive and I spread out the picnic blanket in the rose garden in Clissold Park. The roses were pregnant with summer. We had the weekend paper and a box of strawberries. I fell asleep under my white, wide-brimmed hat, with June in my limbs.