A sweet and fragrant spring
They eat the peeled and cut mango faster than I can prepare it, and without pause, so I stand over them while they polish off a plate and then wipe their mouths and hands
There are fruiting trees on the grounds of our apartment complex. Last year, we returned to Canada on May 20th, and although these trees were already in fruit at that time, the fruit was not yet ripe. Occasional pale orange ovules got tossed to the ground on windier days, and they would be crushed under feet or car tires or by a passing scooter by the end of every day, spitting their seeds out through their pressed flesh. I’d watched the tree blossom and then watched the blossoms fade. I assumed it was some probably inedible variety of fig based on my shallow plant knowledge, and I didn’t look into it any further.
This year, we’re staying here a little bit longer before visiting home again, and we’ve watched the fruits on the tree ripen to a rich orange over the last week or so. Some of them fall and are crushed, just like last year. A week ago, though, I watched a pair of women, presumably fellow residents of the apartment complex, use an extendable pole with a forked attachment and a small net to pick fruit from the top of the tallest of the three trees. They brought the net down after each successful pick attempt and finally walked off with cupped handfuls of the small fruits. D suspected that they were loquats, which were a feature of his Argentinian childhood, and he was correct. We don’t have the kind of fruit picking equipment that our neighbours do, but the kids have told me that they’ve eaten fruit from the tree when they’re with their ayi during the weekdays. She, of course, speaks Chinese, and I picture them pausing under the tree while someone with a picker pulls fruit down and hands it to them as our ayi chats with them and shows the kids the right way to eat the fruit.
Loquats are one of the many tropical and subtropical fruits that have come into season recently. There are fruit stands on almost every block here, spilling their gorgeous produce out over the sidewalk. The stands are intensely fragrant, in which way they feel similar to the fish stands, although their fragrance is more pleasant overall. Last night I walked past a fruit stand that stands directly next to a fish stand. The brine and guts of the fish stand hit me first, floating up from the Styrofoam trays full of salt water and twining live eels; then, a few doors further down, I was overtaken by the smell of durian, which seems to have a strange property of moving through space unattached to its origin point. The smell of durian is everywhere, not just now, but off and on throughout the year. I understand why people find the smell offensive. It’s not because the smell itself is bad, it’s because it is so powerful and pervasive that it clings and stays and won’t budge once it’s on something. I’ve never ordered durian fruit, or purchased it at the market, but I’ve often come home with bags or received a grocery delivery and found that they perfume our whole apartment with the lingering smell of durian fruit sold by whichever vendor I’ve bought our groceries from.
The loquat tree that I pass by each day smells to me like passionfruit. Passionfruit is another strong-smelling fruit, although the smell doesn’t cling quite as intensely as that of durian. Eating fresh passionfruit has been one of the surprising delights of living here. I never thought to wonder much about what passionfruit actually looks like. They have thin tough skins with white pith beneath them. I wash them before cutting them in half. The fruit’s flesh is a soft, liquid yellow-orange pulp that you have to spoon up after loosening it from the pith. It is intensely flavourful, sweet and also sour, and the small hard seeds crack perfectly between your teeth. The smell of passionfruit is sweet and tart and almost skunky. I was confused the first time I came across the smell, because cannabis is illegal here and there are pretty severe penalties for breaking China’s drug laws. That skunky note in the smell is probably what makes it so strong. When we buy passionfruit, the smell fills the kitchen, and it lifts up from the fruit basket every time I reach into it for another fruit.
The kids like passionfruit, and we feed it to them sometimes, spooning it into their mouths out of halved fruits. Lately we’ve been buying boxes of small mangoes, which are super sweet and flavourful and densely fleshed. We get almost a kilo of mangoes for about three Canadian dollars, which is pretty much the same price we pay for apples. When I unpack a bag of groceries, the kids watch me from the kitchen doorway and start begging for mangoes as soon as they see them come out of the bag. I used to feed them cut mango from a fork to mitigate the sticky mess, but I’ve given up on that lately. They eat the peeled and cut mango faster than I can prepare it, and without pause, so I stand over them while they polish off a plate and then wipe their mouths and hands before they go back to playing.
One thing that I find a little uncanny is farmed Chinese blueberries. They’re grown in Yunnan province, which straddles the Tropic of Cancer, although it, like much of China, has a diversity of climate types within its boundaries because of its mountainous terrain. I think of blueberries as an exclusively northern fruit, and I find it difficult to imagine their dark dusty globes growing without a backdrop of jack pine and juniper and the possibility of black bears around every corner. It’s foolish for me to keep this close association when the blueberries we buy at Canadian grocery stores are just as artificially farmed as the ones we now get from Yunnan province. Still, I feel like no blueberry is real unless it’s sun-ripe and I have to brush away spiderwebs to get at the thickest patches, my hands staining purple the more I pick. The Yunnan-grown blueberries that we buy from Aldi are sold according to size: 14 mm or 18 mm, which I imagine is a product of a particular kind of efficient picking system, though I haven’t confirmed that imagining. The 18 mm berries seem huge. The kids love them.
We’ll be back in Canada on June 11, and we’ll stay for about six weeks. The weather here has been mild, but we’ve already had weeks of high humidity and many days of temperatures in the mid-thirties Celsius. It’ll be a relief to spend some time in the relative dry of Winnipeg’s summer, although I know that lack of humidity is contributing to the wildfires up north. Of course, much more than the weather, I’m looking forward to all the people we’ll get to spend time with while we’re back home. I might miss the passionfruit, though.
I look forward to seeing you this summer. Bob and I are on our way back to Winnipeg right now. The province is on fire but I am still anxious to see everyone.