Illustration by Anderson X. Lee
She is small and dark, a brown egg among a dozen white ones.
At home she eats fried eggs with rice, while the white chicks eat theirs with toast and potatoes for breakfast.
She eats rice day and night, piles and piles of it covering her plate, like white sands whose infinite specks can’t be counted. Sometimes she tries to count the hard little grains that her family keeps in the bucket beneath the kitchen counter, runs her hands through the uncooked granules, forming rivers and valleys and breathing in the fragrance of their fields. Once, she asked for a handful which she tied up in a spare piece of cloth, creating her own footbag for kicking high up in the air.
Other families eat bread and pasta and potatoes, the ‘regular’ foods. She knows nothing but rice, and she knows this makes her different from other kids. She knows she is different. She knows she is different.
The teacher stares and points at the board, at her students sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“Cradle. Baby Jesus. Star. Christmas. Tell me what these mean.”
One by one, small wings raise tentatively. They are learning to fly.
“Magi. Tell me what this means.”
The girl, the dark one of the bunch, is slow to take off. The other little birds are silent, unwittingly creating a void into which the dark one can step. She does, raising her little wing, poised and ready. She knows.
“What is the answer?”
“A sauce. It is a sauce we put on rice.”
The teacher is puzzled. Her students are buzzing, looking around at one another. The teacher smiles. “Please explain.”
“Maggi is a sauce. It is a type of sauce we put on rice. It makes it taste good.”
The teacher and the students laugh. That is not the correct answer. “The correct answer is this: the magi were wise men, three of whom came to visit the baby Jesus on Christmas Day.”
The dark one feels ashamed. She hides her head behind her wing and vows she will never make a fool of herself again.
The dark one is not the dark one in her house; there she is like the others. But she knows whenever she leaves the nest she is conspicuous as a sparrow among snow geese. Small and alone, she doesn’t try keeping up with the flock because she knows she will never fit in. Instead she keeps very still, a quiet dark spot in an ocean of soaring and singing white birds.
She pecks at the rice that is sprinkled with Maggi sauce, dark splotches in a sea of white like her. Strangers at school, she and her rice are different. She hides behind her wings but cannot blend in with the snow as she believes she should.
She doesn’t yet know the value of her wings, her claws or her plumage. She is waiting for the right crosscurrent to hit her wings, to take her to where she needs to go: up high above the rivers and valleys, to see how the rice fields grow.
Jeanette Vo lives in Richmond, B.C. She has Filipino and Vietnamese heritage. She holds a B.A. in English literature and psychology, and her work has appeared in magazines including Archetype, Blank Spaces, Existere, filling Station and previously in Ricepaper Magazine.