Illustration by Anderson X. Lee
They told me it was
a thousand years old.
I believed them.
I believed in things that lasted —
in black eggs rolled in ash,
in salt and secrets,
in the brittle whisper of my grandmother’s dialect
as she cracked one open on the chopping board,
the shell fracturing like porcelain bone.
The yolk was dark and bruised
green-grey like river stone,
the white — not white but amber
like honey fossilized in time.
It smelled of the earth
and something ancient,
something I wasn’t sure I was supposed to touch.
She laid it like treasure
atop cold tofu, soy sauce, scallions,
and her insistence that this
was ours.
I poked it with my chopsticks.
It trembled.
In school,
someone once asked me
if I ate “those moldy black eggs.”
I lied.
Said no.
Said gross.
Said my mom makes spaghetti
and I like it better that way.
That night,
I said I wasn’t hungry.
But really,
I was starving
for something I couldn’t name.
Years later,
At eighteen,
I found one again in a Chinatown fridge,
wrapped in silence and plastic.
I bought it.
I didn’t know why.
It sat in my fridge
for a week.
Then two.
Then a month.
Until one rainy Sunday
I cracked it open
with a shaky hand.
I chewed the yolk
like an apology.
Swallowed
like a question.
The egg wasn’t rotten.
It had survived the dark,
become more itself
in silence and pressure
and time.
And me — loved in two languages,
softened at the center,
split between what I lost
and what I am still learning to carry.
Yanqiao (Amy) Mo is a Chinese Canadian writer and a graduating senior from Point Grey Secondary School in Vancouver. She will be studying political science, philosophy, and economics at Claremont McKenna College in California, where she plans to further explore the intersections of culture, politics, and creative expression. Raised by a single immigrant mother, she often wrestled with questions of language, identity, and belonging. These tensions now shape her community-driven writing, which seeks to give voice to Asian diasporic experiences—especially in times of uncertainty. Her work reflects a belief in storytelling as a form of resistance, remembrance, and reconnection.