Cilantro on the Tailgate
In the tumult and tumble of living out of a pick-up truck, cooking on the tailgate has helped me cope with my new chapter in America
By the time we pulled up to the church parking lot, we were not speaking to each other. My boyfriend Adam and I were about halfway through a nine hour drive to Houston, and my wet hair, wrapped in a heavy bun, still hung like a dumbbell. We had camped in a state park outside Memphis the night before, and woke up to the patter of rain drenching our seven foot tent. The wispy white hairs on my arms spiked as we frantically peeled away our home in the cold forest slosh and shoved it into our pick-up truck, which we affectionately nicknamed The Taco. Nothing kills romance faster than mud before caffeine.
As Winston Churchill once said, if you're going through hell, keep going. Our rumbling bellies prompted us to pull in to nowheresville, Louisiana, a town my phone’s metadata clocked as “Sibley.” With about 30 minutes left of September light, we had to move quickly if we wanted dinner. In a neighborhood of stray dogs and a lonely Dollar General, the lot of the Methodist church felt like an exclusive reservation. In an effort to dodge Covid, calories and extraneous costs, we had pledged to avoid restaurants as much as possible on the road. That’s a difficult oath to keep when Golden Arches link the nowheres and somewheres of this country stronger than broadband. But we largely managed to do so with our traveling kitchen, a pop-up kitchenette equipped for whatever empty lot we could find. Sometimes that meant outside an Elvis-themed motel room off Route 66 in the Arizona desert, sometimes the parking lot of a Marriott in bitter cold Appalachia.
I still wasn’t speaking to Adam, so while he unpacked our drenched tent to hang on the chain-link fence around the church’s cemetery, I released the tailgate. While some, in the darkness of Covid, have expanded their kitchens to accommodate jars of sourdough starters and Ina Garten cookbooks, mine has shrunk to the trunk of a car. Two long plastic containers serve as the pantry and utensil cabinets. Tongs double as strainer, rice spatula as serving spoon. A fold-out table, the kind normally used for beer pong, is our kitchen island. About five days of food can last in our coral pink Yeti cooler (the only color remaining amid the run on camping supplies this summer). Oils and condiments clank around in the pasta pot. Vegemite, much to my Australian companion’s dismay, was not allowed on this journey.
The backbone of our kitchen is a Coleman propane gas burner. Which, as the barista of our tailgate oat milk lattes, Adam nicknamed the “Quacké” (one of the kinder jokes my last name has drawn over the years). The Quacké is the stovetop for our tortillas, the grill for our steaks, the toaster for our sandwiches, the oven for our scrambled brownies, the little-kettle-that-could for our bedtime peppermint tea.
Like collapsing into bed, I fell into the evening’s cooking duties with comfort and relief—only my bed these days takes ten minutes to inflate. For a small window of time, I could be alone and decompress. I don’t like being mad at Adam. It’s way more fun belting the soundtrack of A Star Is Born together or throwing lemons at each other at a gas station. But when you’re stuck in a car together for days on end, on the go and in the lurch, collisions happen and often for no good reason. Every night is a constant scramble of where we are going to sleep, shower, and eat, often without any reception. Without a desk, most of my writing has to happen in the passenger seat or a hot tent. I’m spending more money than I make. With no friends around or a job to wake up to, I feel alone and my future as a writer grim. Hitting the road in the middle of a pandemic was probably the most destabilizing thing I could have possibly done. Rather than hunker down and find safety among my quarantine pods, I surrendered to the forces of the pandemic. But with my pop-up kitchen, I can retain, at least the illusion, of control.
With such limited cooler space, meals are planned by the week. I reached for the ingredients for this evening’s Vietnamese salad, a rainbow of shredded carrots, cabbage, cucumbers, and scallions topped with salmon. I chopped an unnecessary amount of carrots into flimsy matchsticks, cucumbers into half-moons, just so I had something to bang. I whipped together a lime dressing, letting the citrus and rice vinegar burn my torn cuticles. As the fish sizzled on the frying pan, I let its wafting glaze of soy sauce, sesame, ginger, and garlic transport me back to the labyrinthine streets of Hong Kong. As I rinsed mixed greens under the tap of our two-gallon jug, cold water splashed over my hands, flowing down the lot to the entrance of the church. But the real salvation came by way of the cilantro, a featherbed of pepper and citrus that carries the dish—as the base, never just the garnish—and takes me somewhere I once knew.
This was not the direction of my life I had projected. Up until that point, I was a young journalist in Asia, drunk with excitement and possibility. While America flailed in the nightmare of Trump, he was never more than an overnight notification for me, liberating me to discover the wonders of the region. Covid, like everything else, tarnished that. In the wake of the outbreak and visa purgatory, I had to leave behind a life I wasn’t ready to let go of, along with some of the closest friends and mentors I’ve ever had. I left some of my most precious belongings—saris from Delhi, trail maps of Hong Kong—and never said goodbye, thinking I'd be back in a couple of months. My last memory of Hong Kong is with my Australian friend Veronica who also had to leave during the frenzy of March for home. In a barren airport, our plastic ponchos crinkled as we hugged goodbye outside of her gate, sobbing through our masks.
All things considered, I am fine. In fact, I am extremely lucky. My family is healthy. I have no debt and no pre-existing conditions. But “relatively” doesn’t mend my heartbreak, displacement, and loneliness. I’ve struggled in my relocation back home. I haven’t written much about my life in Hong Kong yet because I haven’t been able to move on. The last three years have been so rich with happiness, love, and tumult, especially and even in 2019. From the moment the highways swelled with protesters last June, Hongkongers looked out for me every step of the way. The group that helped me over the fence when the cops came charging. The man who helped me out of clouds of tear gas, the woman who threw me a bottle of saline. I have so much to thank Hongkongers for, and I feel immense guilt and sadness I couldn’t stay through the dark.
In my scramble to make sense of the now, the Wise Ones say that amid pivotal moments of history like this, move forward with only the essentials. Given the confines of the Tacoma, that makes a lot of literal sense. I’ll never be able to recreate Sunday brunch dim sum or egg waffles on the street. The pot we use is way too thin to make even a decent rice. Propane burns quickly so we don’t have the means to simmer a good broth. I was never a good cook to begin with, so really no level of fancy equipment will salvage my meals. The other day, I made the horrific decision to Frankenstein a Thai coconut curry and Indian tikka masala curry recipe, in which my torrent of cumin and lemon turned a coconut milk from velvet into rust. I tried to conceal my mess with fistfuls of cilantro, to no avail.
I’ll never be able to return to what I've lost. Hong Kong is a love lost too soon, and I’m still grappling with what could have been. But what I can do is hold on to the flavors and ingredients of the past, and infuse them into the now, even in the most difficult circumstances (and limited skillsets). Sometimes it’s as simple as elevating scrambled eggs with scallions and soy sauce. Sometimes it’s as elaborate as a curry lentil soup or rice paper rolls. Without condensed milk on hand, I can’t make a ca phe sua da. But I know that ricotta makes for a pretty damn good alternative.
On the only two plastic plates we carry, covered in criss-crossed scratches from their nights as a cutting board, dinner is served. I sat on the cooler while Adam drooped in a fold out beach chair around the tailgate. I glanced at the cemetery, wondering if the dead minded. Dinner was largely eaten in silence. On our way there, I battled nausea as I scrambled to finish writing a post in the passenger seat, so he took my driving shift. He later made a slight about my carelessness and lack of responsibility over the car, which sent me into a teeth-clenching lockdown. With the amount of shit we deal with on a daily basis, it doesn’t take much for him to get mad or me to get upset.
It also doesn’t take much for us to reconcile. Usually the dishes do it. But no matter how much we fight, no matter how many times I get sunscreen on the car or he criticizes my cooking, on the road, we are all the other has. He rinsed the plates under our portable tap while I dried them, watching suds and cilantro leaves flow off the cutting board and down the lot toward the church. We finished packing up and hugged as the sky went dark. I may not have Hong Kong, but I do have Adam. And right now, it’s all about the essentials.