Hunger

Personal essay

Creative writing nonfiction class

Inland nest issue

2016/2018

Yuling Chen

2025 December 13th

I ate hot pot tasting the sizzling hot potatoes melting at the back of my tongue. Xiaodan wang, my friend, and I who studied at sichuan university went to a restaurant in Chengdu. As we walked down the streets, a guy in a red jacket spoke maliciously, it’s her. I turned to look and saw several of them running after us. I told xiaodan, we have to go; they are going to steal our wallet. We ran towards the hot pot restaurant breathlessly. I sat down in the restaurant and saw she put her red wallet on the table turning towards me. I looked at the windows and saw that they stood around the blocks and stared. We ate lamb, daikon and potatoes. The red oil was bubbling at the bottom of the steel pot. A few days ago, we visited my mother’s sister, my aunt’s, apartment. We sat eat chicken soup. And I felt air stinging my eyelids and it jumped unconsciously. I looked at my aunt’s husband, a military man, who sat on the couch. He smiled awkwardly at me and flirtatiously blinked his eyes. I felt he was saying that I’m flirting and seducing him. I stood up and went to their bedroom pretending to look at their wedding photographs. My aunt later dumped a bunch of old clothes from my cousin in front of me so I could take them back to my dorm in sichuan university. Xiaodan wang sat besides me on the couch nervously twitching and looking like a wild goose or duck. The air flew from the windows of the condo. It was cold and unflinching. I angrily took all the clothes and asked her to leave with me. After we ate the hotpot, the men had all gone. I took the bus to jiang an with Xiaodan wang. On the way back to the campus, a farm woman was sitting opposite of us wearing a large hat and laughing. Xiaodan wang took off her jacket and  vomited into the jacket. As the bus drove, I could smell the pungent smell of the vomit as the stars in the night swirls and spins like Van Gogh’s paintings. Etc.