Adobo is Love (except for when it wasn’t)
By: Agnes; Bronx, New York, USA
It’s 1980-something and my kitchen is decorated with pink flower-patterned wallpaper, yellowed with grease and age, and peeling from the walls. It’s cold, and not from frost forming in the corners of the windows. It’s cold with emptiness, and loneliness, save for the lone brushed silver pot on the right back burner on the stove, browned edges starting to creep up the sides of its belly. The pot that signals cold adobo for dinner. Most days, I beg my older sister to eat my share and make me scrambled eggs in the microwave instead. And she does it. If she doesn’t want to eat my share, she makes me the eggs anyway, and I hide my share of adobo in the trash, which my mother will inevitably find, and chastise me for my ungratefulness.
We’re home alone and we’re not allowed to cook, which is why dinner on most days is cold adobo or sinigang or giniling or corned beef omelettes. Years later I’ll discover that most of my childhood diet consisted of food that lingered too long in the food temperature danger zone. At the time, though, this was nothing compared to the dangers that could result from family services discovering that my sister and I were home alone every day after school until midnight, sometimes until the next day, depending on when my single mom had a double shift. To prevent discovery, there was no TV allowed, no peeking out the windows through the blinds, and secret codes for knowing when to pick up a ringing telephone.
And no cooking. No reheating food—even the microwave was too risky. I hated adobo for years. Lifting up the lid of that pot and staring at the cold dark meat at the bottom, in our quiet, empty house, where we sneaked Mets games and MTV and The Box, living room blinds shut tight to avoid any detection of flickering lights from the forbidden TV, turning it off early enough to cool down, so that when my mom came home at 11:30 that night and checked the cable box, there would be no residual heat rising from its surface to betray us. There was never any warmth in our house. Cold food, cold rice, cold TVs.
…
It’s 2020-something and my kitchen is now part of a larger multi use space, borders between living areas defined by intentionally placed furniture. We try to keep it tidy, and most of the time we do, but our lives intertwine, mingle, and hold each other in this space. Basketballs roll past shelves crammed with books. My daughter’s homemade paper dolls leave behind them a trail of paper scraps, tape, scissors, and various pens.
Our apartment is never going to be on Apartment Therapy, but more importantly, it will never be the cold, silent rooms I inhabited growing up, either. It’s warm, and I’m standing in my kitchen in 2020-something with the smell of soy sauce and vinegar wafting through the air from the silver pot on the stove. I lift the lid, steam billowing from the depths of the pot, obscuring for a moment the brown velvety sauce bubbling below. It’s adobo, and I can’t wait to ladle huge spoonfuls of the tender chicken and warm sauce into a bowl full of steaming rice. After decades of having visceral reactions to it, I had learned not only how to make adobo, but to love it. That shift coincided with me learning how to love myself. Leaving those empty rooms and those plates of cold adobo and rice behind, leaving behind the controlling relationships I grew up with as a child and that followed me into adulthood, and letting myself know that I deserve to feel warmth and joy. My babies and I laugh loudly at our dinner table now, and get up to dance while nourishing our bodies with warm, satisfying food. We talk about how our days went and write down the best thing that happened to us on slips of paper to drop into our memory box. We hug each other afterwards, and oftentimes, my son thanks me for the food we just shared together. We are full of the warmth and richness of chicken adobo, and the warmth and richness of simply being together.
Agnes is the youngest daughter of Filipino immigrants. Originally from Jersey City, NJ, she currently lives in the Bronx, New York, and has been a teacher for over twenty years. Writing is a way for Agnes to heal from past traumas, process the present, and share joy and hopes for a liberated future.
Artist Links:
Instagram: @agnesjlopez
Bluesky: @agjean.bsky.social
Wordpress: https://agnesjlopez.wordpress.com/
The Lupa Newsletter features stories and poetry from Filipinos around the world.
Visit the About page to share your own story.
Visit the Archive to read previous submissions.