Turnip, an Autobiography

There once lived a little girl named Mei Ling, who was as dumb and stubborn as a turnip.

Her grandmother wanted to help her succeed in life, so she pulled her by her long, green braids and said, “If I pull you out of this wretched, war-torn earth, perhaps you could turn into somebody that people don’t dislike.” Difficult it is for a Chinese grandmother to give a true compliment. (Affection must be doled out sparingly, lest the girlchild become too arrogant, unmanageable, and, worst of all, unmarriageable.) Despite her aching bursitis and rotator cuffs, grandmother pulled and pulled, but the turnip was stubbornly unmoved. So she called her half-sister, Auntie Wu, who was half Mongolian, stood 6 feet tall in her holey stockings, and was an amateur bodybuilder. The giantess appeared wearing an embarrassing psychedelic orange house frock, shouting: “You got to squat low and then lift, that’s the way of Arnie Schwarzenegger and Cao Lei’s Olympic Gold clean and jerk method.” The well-meaning wise women each tugged on a braid. They pulled and pulled, but the turnip refused to budge a centimeter.

The father (whom Mei Ling despised with barfilicious passion; in fact, she dreamed of seeing him buried to his neck in horse poop and villagers pummeling him with rotten apples) stepped on the strong shoulders of Auntie Wu and Granny Wong and said, “Let a real man show you foolish women that a man’s job is to protect his family and drag them from the mire!” Mei Ling hated him because he was an imbecile and had disappeared for months for bouts of gambling and womanizing—impoverishing the family—and made his wife go begging at the Salvation Army pantry for food until she died of exhaustion. He tried, grunting and swearing, but all his manly expressions and masculinist idiocy made the turnip clutch deeper into her roots.

Finally, Grandmother used her fantastical wild card and texted Mei Ling’s sister, Moonie, who was busy agitating for Pride Month, sporting a naked bodkin-painted rainbow and a shocking purple mohawk. She, in turn, dialed up her magical goddess cell phone and summoned the Heavenly Great Matriarch to help.

The Heavenly Great Matriarch manifested from her cosmic grave wearing a vintage outfit, circa 1961: a raspberry pink Chanel/Chez Ninon suit topped with a matching pillbox hat! (Dearest girlchildren, excuse me for this teachable moment: FLOTUS Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy wore this exact outfit during the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson on inauguration day, November 22, 1963. The skirt was still stained by the blood of our beloved President Kennedy’s sacrifice. Sadly, it symbolized the intractable violence of our troubled, divided nation.)

So, the Great Matriarch took off her white gloves, and with a trusty nail file, she chiseled around the recalcitrant earth, sprinkling a palmful of fairy dust, whereupon the turnip wriggled out by her own volition and free will, inculcated with a healthy dose of class struggle. She was further fortified with dried fungus, curcumin, and an extreme list of essential ingredients ... and an awesome bit of poetry.