I still remember the day when Mother was crying like a lamb facing slaughter; Sister was preparing for a debate competition. Or was it a design contest or in-class presentation? She said Mother’s tears were not a big deal. “She must have had too much bread,” she remarked. She glanced at Mother for a moment and concluded, “Mother never learned to control herself.” Then she took her backpack, grabbed a pile of notes, and left the house. Her school skirt has not been laundered for several days; it was dirty but did not affect her overall appearance.

 

Apart from Mother who had collapsed on the sofa, I was the only one in the house. If not for the ambiguous wailing that sounded like a torturing yet endless soprano, then this voice must have embraced a construction worker’s power to drill a wall. All these drove me to unlock the door and go out. I walked past the long corridor, climbed down the stairs to the ground floor, opened the fire door, and entered into a place showered with golden sunshine. The leaves quivered on the breeze. The aroma of the baking bread filled the air. At first it was subtle, but gradually built up to the never-dispersing scent. It persisted in my respiratory organs, and eventually became my smell. I have come to realize that I could never step out of this zone, if it was not for the Mother’s influence, it must be some other similar experiences.

 

Almost at the same time, I could more or less comprehend how Mother felt when she was kneading the dough, with the strong determination to make loafs of bread on her own.

 

Back then, we did not decide on our meals. “Others envy you as no choice means no troubles,” Mother exclaimed. So, when she brought out a plate of hard whole-wheat bread, we had nothing to say but lowered our heads and ate in silence. The sound of chewing filled the air in the room.

 

If Sister did not cry out, we would have definitely continued with our meal till someone said something like ‘It is delicious!’ or ‘This bread is the best one I’ve ever tasted!’. Sister’s squeaky scream broke through the air, broke the unbreakable silence. She pulled out a brown curly hair from her mouth, from the bread that she ate. The hair was soaked with saliva, mixed with grey bread debris. She held it between her two fingers and showed it to everyone.

 

I forgot whether there was any embarrassment on Mother’s face. I only remembered her voice, as sharp as a cold knife, which will be deeply inscribed in our hearts and always replayed in the future. ‘No matter how exquisite the food is, if it is made by effort, there must be a trace of the cook. It can be sweat. It can be a small crust. It can be saliva, eyelashes, hair, nails… or even blood. But you never notice, or maybe you get used to it.’ Mother’s voice raised, from low to high pitch, raspy to sharp, like the anger growing in her heart. Rather than explanation or convincing, it was more likely to become a condemnation.

 

‘The bread that sells in the shops is terribly dirty.’ Mother looked into our eyes one by one and continued, ‘If you visited the kitchen of any restaurant, you would lose all your appetite afterwards.’

 

From that day on, bread was the main protagonist of at least one meal out of the three. We were not sure whether Mother was addicted to the process of baking bread or her stomach couldn’t get rid of the dough she kneaded, with all that yeast. She just led us to the kitchen and pointed at the white lazy fat guy who slept deeply on the table - the yeast. ‘Not providing any flour and water to them, it will die within two days.’ Maybe, it was just because of the guilt which I couldn’t bear, as it seemed to be a part of Mother’s flesh and blood. Or maybe, it was just because we were in the same boat. I volunteered myself to take the responsibility of caring for the yeast. I promised Mother that I would ensure it got enough water and nutrition every day, just like taking care of a fragile baby, with no conscious.

To be honest, we didn’t hate eating bread that much — there was always a thought inside me: though our bodies resist baked food physically, eating it is only for sustenance.

 

Mother was so gentle and delighted when making bread as if another person had taken over her body, which gave us a dreamy thought that maybe we didn’t have to pretend to be the “usual” us. Everyone could leave the house at any time anyway. She took out the yeast from the fridge after dinner every night and let it get used to the room temperature. Fondling its slightly stiff torso, Mother whispered to it softly, like encouraging it, but even more like pouring her heart out. Only when the night got darker did she water the yeast and add new flour to it, like feeding a weirdly tempered plant. As though she was massaging the aching muscle of a person, she kneaded a new dough out of it. Same as Adam, who was created by God in his own image, the bread innocently carried the shadows of Mother.

It was inevitable. Sometimes she screamed, cursed and sobbed while slapping the dough; other times she hardly stretched the dough, tearing it down into pieces and throwing them into different corners of the kitchen. Most of the time, of course, she simply kept shaping the sticky thing in her hands and talked to it endlessly about all kinds of secrets.

We pretended to be asleep but there were so many things in life that were out of our control, for example, a pair of ears which could never be closed, reminding us that no one could stay out of it.

At a dinner later, Mother announced that she was planning to produce bigger quantities of bread and sell it on the street. “Every kind of bread has a different emotion, just like an intense hormone that attracts the same kind of people from all around and it’s irresistible for the passers-by,” she said with a beam of delight in her eyes. But can this get their appetite on? I was not quite sure.

 

“The bread sold at the market is all fermented by scientific methods. When you take a bite, all you get is either getting all the bread stuck between your teeth or emptiness as if you have lost everything,” said Mother, ripping another bit of the brown rice bread in her hand with her protruding canines teeth. “Only the naturally fermented bread can fill in those chilly holes and make the hunger disappear, just like karma.”

 

We were out of words, with mouths full of bread crushed and chewed. I wonder if the reasons for our silence were identical, but from that day onwards, the chances of dining at home with Sister became fewer and fewer. Becoming an undergraduate, she had thrown her uniforms away and replaced it with her own clothes. If there was no group project, she must have been attending society meeting, or being a part-time tutor, or dating, or celebrating the birthday of her friends, only to escape Mother’s bread leftovers. I could not stop thinking, why wasn’t I going to university? Why could not I find an excuse to eat out? Maybe I spent too much time finding those chilly holes, like searching in the dark or a grey wall without margin, ending with nothing found still. Maybe because of the unfulfilled soul, I could not get over the anonymous invisible boundary. Every time I was faced with the idea to sneak out for a meal, the dirty fingertips and oily hair of the unknown cook came into my mind, just as it would be full of meaningless faces when I imagine heading to the city centre, without someone I loved.

 

That night, Sister was back after mum fell asleep. She stared at the messy, depressing unsold bread, becoming molded and hard. Then she came to me and complaint in a low voice, “Everyone knows that only some tastes would be popular, like red bean, sesame, cheese, corn, taro, tomato, vanilla, matcha or pumpkin.

 

I did not go along with her though we shared the same idea, but I clearly know that I would still pick up one of those bread in the next morning.

 

Like the insects storing their food quietly and industriously for the winter, Sister moved her belongings from home to another place. It was as silent as the closure of Mother’s bakery.

​

Mother no longer had to get up in the chill of the morning to ensure the bread was still warm when it was delivered to the customers. She spent more effort on kneading the dough and shaping the bread, with a seriously concentrated face of a melancholic sculptor. Once in a while, she would tell me which flour men are the ones that had just been completed. Just like long ago, how the unrepairable cracks and holes inside someone’s personality had brought wounds which ache forever. She cared for them so much, those are the dearest and closest after all. The oven, however, made me sense the difference from the past. She had rolled them vigorously into balls, soon the dough would slowly rise and become all puffed up. When baking and cooling was done, we could eat them all up and quickly digest them entirely. Many a night, we were waiting for the aroma of baked bread to wake us up from sleep. Therefore, I affirmed that in so many afternoons, she actually enjoyed herself very much when she was tucking into her strangely shaped and messy-looking bread with green tea.

 

Sister certainly saw it differently. She regarded the bread which contained too much salt and butter as the reason for Mother’s deteriorating hypertension and malnutrition.

 

I think Mother didn’t hate it when Sister limited her daily consumption of bread. But she did feel stung because Sister attributed all the problems to the bread, which she saw as her own child. She grounded out that this was a revenge, for many years ago, Sister had bit into a long-necrotic tooth which she dropped accidentally while kneading the dough.

 

On the day my Sister decided not to come home for dinner any more, we met in a coffee shop. She ordered a dainty chestnut cake but lost the appetite to eat it. She just spouted about Mother as if something pent-up for ages suddenly poured out. “That’s exactly why she was abandoned. If I were her husband, I could not put up with her either.”  Sister said, tilting her head at the same time. She looked out through the window blankly like the passing crowds.

 

Probably at that time, the genes of making bread in my body were ready to grow. It was not an impulse, without any expectation or excitement, more a kind of responsibility, or obligation. After all, the bacteria in the yeast were constantly derived. As the water increased and the temperature raised, it would eventually thicken into a cloud that was enough to cover us completely even clogging our nose, mouth, eyes and pores. If it was too late to make them into bread, it would be more terrible than a car that was out of control.

 

Therefore, I was not surprised that Mother had left suddenly, but I was surprised that she had carried the bulky, old oven with her. When Sister first came back home over the years, she was unable to recognize the house, which was strange to her. Standing in front of Mother’s messy bed, it seemed that the one who had left was not Mother, but herself long time ago.

"Where did she go?" She suddenly turned to ask me.

 

I shook my head and said, "Anywhere she could take her bread."

 

And then we had nothing to say. The aroma of bread spread from the new oven, permeating the whole house. Surrounded by the warm and moist atmosphere, I took out a tray of golden bread from the hot oven.

 

Just like the time when we were children, we stood in front of the same window watching the streets, tearing bread into small pieces before putting it into our mouths. However, we were no longer young. The rough and boring bread tasted like Mother's face, or our skin that was no longer elastic.

 

The wind blew through the leaves and branches. It blew through the clothes, the hair and the sagging muscles of passers-by and rolled up a mass of garbage on the street. The whole world seemed to have been tilted a little bit after that.