I stand in the kitchen of my off-campus apartment, staring at the lumpy sack of Japanese sweet potatoes on the counter. The shape is wrong. They are smaller than the ones Mom buys from the Asian Food Markets back home, their skin covered in little scabs as if they’ve made a hard journey to get here.
If I were home, Mom would be wearing my brother's old zip-up, the reindeer apron I made in third grade tied around her slender frame. She would peel the potatoes in long, curling ribbons, cut them into thick rounds, nestle them gently into the rice cooker among fine grains of jasmine rice. I would always reach for the driest, crumbliest pieces first. They tasted like candied chestnuts, oozing with sweetness.
I do not own a rice cooker. Our scratched-up, grey counters are home to a mishmash of tupperware, spices, jars of peanut butter, and a lone microwave from the tenants before us. I do not know why I bought these potatoes in the first place—maybe out of some stubborn longing, a need to prove that I could recreate something familiar in a place that never quite feels like home.
A quick Google search for how to make sweet potatoes brings up instructions from a website aptly named Healthy Recipes Blog: wrap the potato in a damp paper towel, microwave for five minutes. It feels wrong, the hurriedness of it, the way the recipe calls for American sweet potatoes and butter—butter, of all things. But maybe that is what happens when things travel too far from where they started—they change, adapting to what is available, reshaped by new kitchens and new hands.
The urge to dial up Mom and ask her what to do rises within me, but I resist. I have to do this on my own. Rip off a sheet of paper towel, run it under the sink until it is dripping, then wring it out until it is just damp enough. Swaddle the potato, tuck it carefully into the microwave. I skip the butter. Five minutes pass, and then a beep cuts through the silence.
I should be used to it by now—the constant cycle of leaving and returning, of carrying pieces of home only to find they do not quite fit the way I want them to. I should know better—that things shift, stretch, shrink when carried across distances. That the past never slots neatly into the present, no matter how tightly I hold onto it. But still, the ache curls in my ribs. I think of my parents' kitchen, where the mail piles up in quiet chaos, where mugs from every continent crowd the counter, waiting to be used.
I reach in too fast and burn my fingers, dropping the potato onto a plate with a dull thud. I peel back the paper towel. The skin is intact but lifeless, the inside mushy in some places, but strangely dry in others, as if the potato gave up halfway through cooking. I take a bite. The flavor is a ghost of what I remember. I cling to it anyway, pretending, just for a second, that I am home.
It almost works.
Maybe that is the nature of sweet potatoes. They are carried across continents, planted in unfamiliar soil, made to grow and adapt where they were never intended to. Most sweet potatoes are never consumed where they first took root. Maybe that is why I bought them —why I keep trying.
