Last Friday in class, we were talking a lot about food. I am usually pretty focused, but this time my mind kept drifting back to the winter of 2022 in Mexico. The professor had to repeat a question several times, something like “¿A qué hora haces la cena?” before I realized how to respond. I am not sure what triggered the wave of memories. Maybe it was because so many of my experiences and conversations in Mexico were centered around food.
I remember one evening, we were walking along the streets. Sophie mentioned that it could be more dangerous at night. There were protest murals painted on the walls beside the road. Inside a shopping mall, we stopped by a Starbucks and ordered warm coffee. It was made with cinnamon and had a spicy taste. Sophie and her mother laughed and told me that only in Mexico could one find spicy coffee. We had a long conversation. Too long that I actually forgot the entire conversation except the fact that we laughed a lot. Also Sophie has an uncle with a name very long and hard to pronounce.
On another day, I went to a park with Sophie, her cousin, and some friends. There was a large lake and a museum inside the park. Each of us bought a bubble machine and started making bubbles. I took a photo of Sophie blowing a bubble. I zoomed in so much that her face took up the whole screen but the bubbles were reflecting every color of the rainbow. She didn’t like the picture. I loved it.
The day before Christmas, we visited one of Sophie’s relatives. There was an elderly grandmother who was born in Japan. She left Japan at the age of seven and settled in Mexico with her family. Sophie told me she could speak Japanese. When we met her, it turned out she remembered about only a few Japanese words and most of them were about food. She told me she was Mexican. I said that was obvious. Her Spanish was flawless, with no difficulties pronouncing “rr”, at least it’s good to know that she had the potential to become a Japanese yakuza.
The grandmother’s house had two old dogs who lay on the couch most of the time. Sophie’s family also had a tiny cute old dog who loved the sun more than life itself. His name is Arnold. When we rode in the car, Arnold would climb onto my lap just to catch more sunlight. He had very clear goals in life.
Sophie’s dad said he really wanted to teach me how to dance because I confessed that I’m too shy and rarely dance. I never learned. That night I was too sleepy and passed out in the room.
A few days after New Year’s Day, some relatives came to stay at Sophie’s house. There were so many people that some had to sleep on the sofa or on mattresses on the floor. Sophie had to share the lower bunk with her cousin, so I slept on the upper bunk in her bedroom. The bed was small and if I sat up straight I would hit the ceiling. I sometimes wondered what it felt like to grow up sleeping on that bed. At first the ceiling must have felt unreachable. One day it suddenly became touchable, and the next day your legs are too long and your dreams hit the roof. Literally.
Sophie said her relationship with her sister Andy was not very close. They argued often. But I felt that there was still deep love between them. One evening Andy came to dinner with her boyfriend. We prepared some red wine and during dinner we played a traditional Mexican game. A figurine was hidden inside a special cake called Rosca de Reyes. The person who found the figurine had to host a gathering and prepare tamales on Día de la Candelaria.
Sophie’s father said that traditional Mexican food cannot exist without corn. He listed examples like tortillas, tamales, and pozole to show that each of them depended on corn when we were having a meal in a well-known restaurant among sophie’s family. Sophie said that sometimes she felt a sense of connection with people from Southeast Asia or India. First because of their brown skin and second because of their food culture. She said Indian people liked to eat naan and in a way it was not very different from the corn-based flatbreads in Mexico. She joked that maybe people with brown skin all shared a love for corn. I like corn too. But ethnically, I’m Yellow. Though honestly, in real life, I’m just a lighter brown. Black isn’t actually black, it’s a deeper shade of brown. And white isn’t truly white, it’s more of a pale brown. and quote from a not-so-famous standup actor Joe Wong, we’re all different shades of mexican. So maybe what Sophie was really saying is that Homo sapiens in general are pretty crazy about corn. And I agree.
I did not like tequila though. At the time I did not enjoy drinking any alcohol. But I loved the variety of Mexican food. I especially liked the sweet and spicy snacks. My favorite was machetá. I could not understand how something could taste that good. Whenever I expressed how much I liked the food, Sophie would say look at you little Mexican. She said that was the highest compliment she could give.
I once had a small notebook where I wrote down Spanish vocabulary back in Freshman year. Most of the words were about food or swearing, along with a few pleasant expressions, if you are curious. Unfortunately I lost that notebook on the way to the Czech Republic, and I only remembered the pleasant expression such as Feliz Navidad. I hope it found a new home though.
I used to find it strange when books described memories as “surging.” I mean, aren’t memories more like a queue that one thing leads to another? But that day in class, they surged. Like a broken dam. Out of nowhere and unstoppable. I was just sitting there, while everyone else was conjugating verbs, thinking about that spicy coffee I once had in that Starbucks, then boom—300 emotional files downloaded at once.
Memories are encoded in such a way that every time we retrieve one and put it back we change it slightly or clean it up. We don’t just remember. We edit. We polish. We delete. Like emotional Photoshop. In the past few years, my brain has been entering this default mode network more often where it randomly replays memories like a YouTube playlist I didn’t sign up for. And sometimes I wonder if my brain is overloaded. is this just my brain cleaning house? If I reinforce one memory, am I deleting others without realizing it? Human nature resembles the Ship of Theseus. My memory feels like a jar with a leak. It sometimes makes me anxious.
Later that day I figured maybe the question should not be why we forget but rather why we remember. The second law of thermodynamics says that time always moves forward and entropy always increases. People dream of time machines but perhaps we already have one. It’s called memory. In that instant when certain neurons fire together, time seems to pause and we are back to the past. Maybe this is how the brain rebels against chaos. Quietly. Elegantly. Nope. Not today, entropy.
I still have over three hundred photos of Mexico stored in my camera. Street art, murals, museums, volcanoes, pyramids, and crowds at a bicycle race, etc. But when I think of Mexico, I think of the the old movies played in Sophie’s home. I think of one morning when I woke up and heard her mother asking me in cheerful but broken English how was your sleep. I think of the time we took Andy to work and the sunlight reflected off the visor in the car and created a Tyndall effect. I think of the night when we laughed a lot.
I think I never truly visited Mexico. I only visited the Mexico in Sophie’s eyes. Or not even that. We were like two trams passing briefly at the same station. In that moment of brief quantum entanglement I caught a glimpse of the scenery from her world.
