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Breakfast at a Kowloon hotel: waiters in black pants, white shirts, red vests. Platters of fruit and dumplings and smoked fish, bowls of congee, you tiao. It was all so beautiful. Then I saw a cockroach crawling around one of the fruit platters. I touched a waiter’s arm and silently nodded at the roach. His eyes widened and he bore the platter away through a door that swung open onto a different world: fiery woks, steam, cooks and busboys racing around shouting.

Did the waiter flick the cockroach off and bring the fruit platter back out? Maybe. Everyone’s trying to survive. There are other worlds within ours, just behind a swinging door, and if you look for them you see them everywhere.

Picking Blueberries, by Rosanna Young Oh

It was a risk my father had taken in midwinter:
ordering 240 pint boxes of blueberries
in less than desirable condition at a discount
so they could be repicked, repacked, and resold.

We stand together before crates of blueberries—
the color of river pebbles in water, some flecked with mold.
I am twenty-nine years old, and yet my father instructs
me as though I were a child again, hiding
between the aisles of lettuces and squash in the store.

“Daughter, look,” he says. He squeezes a blueberry
between his thumb and finger until the skin tears.
I see now: rotten ones bruise to the touch.

We pick in silence. By the second hour,
our fingers stiffen, their nail beds
purple from juice.

Suddenly, my father’s voice emerges as though from a distance:
“You were not meant to live this kind of life.”

But nor was he—a man with a mind made wide by books,
who as a child rose with the sun to read by its light.

We’re left with fewer boxes than we had thought.
How, how to price them? $3.99 per pint.

Click here for more information about Rosanna Young Oh.

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My podcast: Words by Winter