Personal Essay
Salted Red Ginger and the Latchkey Walk Home
The salty, pungent burn and the brick-red stains on my right thumb and forefinger faded long before I heard a key in the door.
This was Honolulu in the early 1990s, and I was in middle school. After a childhood of watching my schoolmates disappear one by one for hours, alone on the aluminum benches until my parents finally got off work, I had seized upon the new-to-me option of taking the city bus home. Another point in its favor was the Mini-Mart, which was indeed mini, perched a few houses down the hill and above my otherwise residential neighborhood.
The mini-mart, with its stacks of six-packs and dingy yellowish light, was one of the few places where my parents couldn’t dictate my food purchases. In their pursuit of a healthy diet we kept little sugar at home—Frosted Flakes counted as a dessert—and certainly no chemical stews of industrially generated additives. I was not only a sugar fiend but also enamored with Hawaii’s cross-cultural, no-holds-barred flavor and texture bombs: funky and chewy dried cuttlefish, broken chunks of dry instant ramen with the flavor packet shaken in, dayglo “rainbow” shave ice.
At the mini-mart, my affordable drug of choice was red ginger. The dried, salted, often artificially sweetened, and vividly dyed ginger shreds were just one form of the “crack seed” dried snacks Hawaii had adapted from China, wizened and piquant jewels in seemingly endless permutations. Their clear plastic packets dangled from stapled-on labels of folded paper, hanging in rows on long display hooks, making it easy to select my then-favorite: Dry, powdery, deep red, promising a flavor as intense as the color my mom would wrinkle her nose at. A black-bordered box on the back of the paper cautioned “warning: contains phenylalanine.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it added to the danger and intrigue.
I paid in cash at the little counter next to the door, pulled off the label, and tore open the plastic to inhale the bag’s radioactive miasma, all at once sweet, salty, sour, and almost savory. A pinch in my mouth was even stronger, the ginger burning and my salivary glands activating painfully. It even tasted red, like something you weren’t supposed to eat, or eat only in small doses on top of something else.
Of course I ate the whole thing, on the long walk down the hill, around to the left, to the right and up the next hill, on the bridge over the stream, and down the long, uneven, dead-end road where I lived a few houses from the end. I often lost my key, and with no one to let me in, I became accustomed to taking out the jalousie window screen and a few of the sharp-cornered glass slats and climbing into our family room from partway up the wall. I can’t remember what I did afterward—probably homework and TV—and perhaps my inability to pin that time down illustrates the point: In those hours my house granted loneliness and tranquility, aimlessness and freedom.
My kids are now the same age I was then. They can text me from school for every real or perceived emergency. It’s so foreign to me. Back at the bus stop, and the mini-mart, heading home to an empty house, it was just me and a backpack full of textbooks under the sun. I had the late afternoon ahead of me, brick-red fingers and a mouthful of aspartame and burning.
