The doctors warned me about the taste changes. It is a known side effect of certain chemotherapy protocols — a phenomenon called dysgeusia, a distortion or complete loss of taste. They said it matter-of-factly, the way you discuss side effects when you are trying to prepare someone for what is coming. What they could not tell me, because it cannot be adequately described, is what it means to lose the ability to taste food when you have loved food your entire life. When eating becomes an act without pleasure or meaning. When you eat only because the body requires fuel, the way you would put petrol in a car.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer at thirty-eight. My daughter was three. My son was five. I was in the middle of a career I had worked for a long time to build, and I was living in Toronto, far from my family in Manila, and then I was very suddenly in the middle of something else entirely. My mother flew to Canada in the second month. She arrived with two enormous bags — one with her clothes and one, which she had spent days assembling, with ingredients she could not guarantee she would find here. Cane vinegar. Patis. Dried bay leaves from the tree in the garden.
She cooked for us every day while she was there. Rice, always. Fish when she could find the right kind. Sinigang once, using the tamarind paste she had packed in a sealed jar. I ate because I was supposed to eat, mechanically, without tasting any of it. Everything arrived in my mouth with the same metallic flatness. I would watch my children eat and feel something close to grief — not for my health, which I was fighting for, but for the simple pleasure I had lost and could not be sure I would recover.
Six weeks after my mother arrived, on a Sunday afternoon, she made adobo. I smelled it from the next room before I could place what it was — the vinegar sharpness, the garlic, the faintest sweetness of the soy reducing in the pan. I walked into the kitchen and sat at the table without meaning to, the way a smell can move you before your mind has caught up. She put a bowl in front of me. I took one spoonful of the sauce, just the sauce, and then I tasted it.
I cannot fully explain what happened in that moment except to say that the taste was there — fully, unmistakably, for the first time in weeks. The vinegar’s tartness. The dark saltiness of the soy. The garlic. The bay. My mother’s version, which was her mother’s version, which I had eaten every week of my childhood and had never once thought about as anything other than ordinary. I started to cry, and then I started to laugh at myself for crying, and my mother stood at the stove and looked at me with an expression I did not have a word for then but have since identified as relief.
I finished my treatment nine months later. I have been in remission for four years. I make adobo every Sunday, without fail — not because I am afraid of losing the taste again, but because I am no longer willing to eat it without noticing. I notice everything now: the sizzle when the chicken goes into the hot oil, the moment the vinegar hits the pan and fills the kitchen, the colour of the sauce as it reduces and darkens. I was not taught to be grateful for ordinary things. I learned.
