Bitter Melon Sounds
/Music is our witness, and our ally. The “beat” is the confession which recognizes, changes, and conquers time –James Baldwin
James “Lava” Robles lives in Honolulu, and is a practitioner of the Filipino martial arts of Kali and Eskrima. (Photo from Tony Robles)
When he put his own spin on those immortal words though, spitting out, You don’t know your ass from a roll of toilet paper, he was seriously trying to set me straight. There seemed to be an undercurrent of humor; that he was proud of stringing together such a clever thought. He alternated between “a hole in the ground” and “a roll of toilet paper” when I had committed some infractions, too many to recall, the lesson or lessons dawning on me much later. After some decades, I came to believe that I do, in fact, know my ass from a roll of toilet paper or hole in the ground. Thank you, Dad.
At present I am digging a hole in the ground in front of my home in Western North Carolina. It started off as a hole and has grown into rows. I am embarking on a garden, the first in my life. I ordered seeds to grow various vegetables including bitter melon. I remember my father preparing bitter melon when I was a child. He would buy it from Chinatown or from a produce market on Clement Street in San Francisco. It was the most bitter-tasting thing I'd ever had. How could anybody enjoy this, I asked myself, watching my father eat slice after slice of the green vegetable whose skin was gnarled, a maze of nodules, as if the vegetable were afflicted with leprosy. He sauteed it with shrimp, tomatoes, and garlic. I put a slice in my mouth and my lips puckered, my face twisted and contorted and convulsed into cartoon-like spasms as the bitterness took hold of my tongue, refusing to let go. It was the vegetable equivalent of beer (which I was much too young at the time to imbibe). I have never planted seeds or grown anything. I look at the soil and crave the taste of bitter melon.
Sauteed Bittermelon (Source: Yummy.ph | Majoy Siason)
As a child, I remember sitting across from my father at the dinner table. The table was yellow, marred with scratches and stained with blotches, colorations, and discolorations that bled into hues that were unique to our household, or so I thought. It was on this table that the color of soy sauce mingled with the yellow of our table, which provided a palate of flavors including bagoong (fermented shrimp paste), hot mustard, vinegar and, of course, hot sauce. The bottles and jars that contained these flavors stood like chess pieces, partially blocking my view of my father. He sat and chewed. He would sweat and sometimes bits of rice and spittle would fly from his mouth. The sweat and spittle were secretions of the soul that I bore witness to at the yellow kitchen table that had been in the family for generations.
My father chewed his food with his head bobbing to some kind of rhythm. He would bite into a green chili pepper and mix it with a scoop of rice from an ancient tablespoon. One day we had squid adobo for dinner. I didn’t know what it was. It sat in the pot and when it was scooped onto my plate, I saw tentacles. It was from the ocean, that, I knew. I thought that maybe my father had volunteered as a crew member for Jacques Cousteau on one of those undersea adventures and was awarded a healthy number of squid for his effort. At any rate, it didn’t look appetizing. To my young eyes, it was repulsive. I looked at my father, mouth filled with squid tentacles, chewing, swallowing, black squid ink dripping down the sides of his mouth, savoring it like soup. “That’s sickening.” I said, looking away. My father looked back at me, his head bobbing slightly to some beat. You don’t know what’s good, he replied, his mouth twisting in disgust. In my seven-(or 8)-year-old mind, I thought, if that is good, I wonder what bad tastes like? I didn’t eat the squid. I was given something else, a hamburger, perhaps--I don’t remember.
I remember my father retreating to his room. He turned on the stereo amplifier and selected an album from his endless collection of discs. He pulled out a record by John Coltrane called, My Favorite Things. My father laid the needle in the groove, lay back on the bed as if it were a flotation device, arms folded at the back of his neck and set sail in a sea of sound. I heard saxophone blowing but it didn’t keep my attention. I walked out of my father’s room and into my own. I smelled the remnants of squid down the hall. I heard my father’s voice, You don’t know what’s good, as the sky in our San Francisco neighborhood darkened like a pot of squid adobo.
Father and son: James “Lava” Robles and the author (Photo from Tony Robles)
My father was right, I didn’t know what was good; didn’t know how to taste the taste or taste the sound. My grandmother tried to clue me in when I didn’t want to eat a certain good. You don’t know what you’re missing, kid, she would say but I didn’t listen. But one day an uncle came by. He was a merchant seaman who’d been all over the world, a cook on countless vessels. He arrived with a bag of food. One of the bags looked odd. “What’s that?” I asked. Pig ears, he replied. I watched him prepare the pig ears. He soaked them in vinegar and sliced them into strips. Try it, he said. I didn’t protest. I dipped a slice of ear into a bowl of vinegar. From my father’s room the music came. It was the sound of a horn. That’s Miles, my uncle said. The music hit our ears as we dipped the pig ears in vinegar. I heard the crunch of the pig ears but barely the sound of Miles and his horn. The late activist Bill Sorro once told his son, Joaquin, that he hadn’t developed enough taste buds to appreciate jazz, that over time, the taste for it would come. I suppose this was Bill’s way of telling his son, You don’t know what’s good or You don’t know what you’re missing, kid.
Certain things you have to experience. To experience them is to taste it, hear it. In his essay, Uses of the Blues, James Baldwin spoke of the things that gave birth to the blues—the auction block, the pain, the hurt. My late uncle, poet Al Robles said, If you don’t hurt, you don’t know. Fast-forward many decades, I’m beginning to understand what my father was trying to tell me at the dinner table. He used to eat a vegetable called bitter melon or ampalaya, sauteed with shrimps and garlic. It was an extremely bitter vegetable I had rejected.
But now, many decades later, I find myself craving bitter melon. I am trying to grow it in my small garden. As I dig into the soil, the sound of Miles’ horn is in the background coming through on my stereo. My ears dip into the sounds, the sauce as poet Lawson Fusao Inada described it. I am taken back to my uncle slicing pig ears in the kitchen on California Street. I sit and listen to those sounds from my father’s turntable, those sounds that filled whatever emptiness took ahold of him.
My father was right, I didn’t know what was good; didn’t know how to taste the taste or taste the sound.
Giant Steps
Milestones
Seven Steps to heaven
My favorite things
Song for my father
I have developed those taste buds, and now I taste the music that meant so much to my father. I didn’t know what was good, but I am getting there as I listen to those jazz sounds while digging into the soil, planting bitter melon seeds. I listen while eating a big plate of my father’s favorite things:
Squid adobo
Boiled beef
Chinese sausage
Pig ears
While listening to Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, which are now mine as well. Bitter melon.
Tony Robles, "The People's poet" is author of two poetry/ short story collections: Cool Don't Live Here No More-- A letter to San Francisco" and "Fingerprints of a Hunger strike ". Short list nominee for poet laureate of San Francisco in 2017 and 2019 individual artist grant recipient by the San Francisco Art Commission. Currently lives in North Carolina and is working on his first novel.
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