A Writing Contest HOSTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH Sweet July

Guide to Defrosting

By Chelsea Zhu

FINALIST

Sunrise and I wake up to watch 
the world through color: black
birds, blue exhaustion, red January. 
I walk downstairs to hear frost
sliding off the roof and beside
the kitchen wall lies a shovel
waiting to drag its mouth against 
the thawing snow. When my
hands touch the ground, they 
dehydrate into wrinkles, white 
burns cracking open my skin. 
My thumbs share Ma’s plain 
whorl, the one she uses to press 
her forehead when she runs
out of bok choy—empty cutting
board filled by a knife. In this 
house, Sundays are for groceries, 
for carrying 40 counts of water
bottles and caring to scour 
through bottles of vegetable oil 
at 99 Ranch for the best expiration 
date. When Ma comes home with 
three bags of rice flour, I refill the 
jars of brown sugar, hoping for 
a blizzard—spending winters 
to the quiet stir of batter until 
our wooden spoon breaks. You never 
follow the recipe book, I say, 
when Ma doubles the recommended 
serving size and reduces the cups 
of sugar by half. I am too tired 
for dinner. Every year, I hunger
for something new: strawberry 
bingsu, building igloos, burying
a family time capsule in our 
backyard that couldn’t grow 
vegetables. Yet Ma calls for warmth 
instead and tells me to eat: Before
the food gets cold, she says, pacing 
across the room in worry. Upstairs,
I respond with silence, baking myself 
into ambition. As my palms redden,
fatigued from learning, Ma watches
the plate of nian gao harden into 
memory, holding frost between her fingers.