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Eat
My mother is holding my infant son so I can eat the mustard cabbage she has sweetened with brown sugar. For the starving children in China, I have learned to eat whatever I am given. Even mustard cabbage, which I hate. She nods approvingly. Now I must eat to feed not only all the world's starving children but my own flesh and blood, my infant son who fattens daily on my milk, my milk that trickles a thin blue stream into his wet pink mouth. I grow thinner. He is sucking the living daylights out of you, says my mother, and with a bamboo rice stick paddle, she slaps another helping onto my plate.