I Eat Rolls Like Air

Written By: Joy Wang

Graphic By: Temi Idowu

A common Asian-American childhood cliché is shirking our heritage food in favor of bland, processed meals. Choosing off-the-shelf Lunchables over homemade rice dishes from our loving parents was our American Dream. But for my younger self (who had begun preferring American food as a means to escape my family’s chronic inability to cook), pizza rolls meant more than just lunchtime discrimination.

I was at HEB with my mother when I first saw them. High up on the refrigerated food section, in between miniature breakfast hamburgers and fried cheese balls, lay a world I had yet to explore. Totino’s was everywhere, the rich purple of its logo blending jaggedly into its uniformly neon yellow packaging. I had never seen anything so exotic.

My mouth watered. I thought of stealing pizza rolls out of my classmates’ Tupperware, of Vanessa Bayer playing a housewife destined to keep feeding men pizza rolls on SNL, of picture-perfect suburban families sharing a commercial laugh over mundane board games and pizza rolls plated elaborately on china. I grabbed a box of fifteen.

A miracle happened: my mother (as ‘almond’ as a Chinese mother can be) relented. We were still under lockdown, and I spent my waking hours Zooming in bed; perhaps she felt sympathetic toward my wasted teenagehood. “Only this one, yeah?” she chided softly in the checkout line. I nodded.

In the next few years, I will have spent hundreds of dollars worth of pizza rolls. A lifetime supply can be read in the crevices of my body. But in the moments right after my initial purchase, I am a fifteen-year-old girl, and I have discovered pizza rolls for the first time again. The world has just begun.

2.) Arrange 10 on the plating of your choice: In the summer after my first hospitalization, I was in a catatonic state of purgatory. I had barely finished junior year, my grades irreparable.  Meanwhile, I stared empty-eyed at my bedroom ceiling. My only consolation was the three plates of pizza rolls I’d pop in at lunchtime (4pm) and the three at dinner (11pm): my only formal sense of structure — of recovery.

By now, I had developed my own preferred recipes and routines, as known and dear to me as my mother’s traditional ones. I could wake up and expect only the same humdrum of living; everything felt meaningless until I felt the first sizzle of an overcooked pizza roll burning the roof of my mouth.

My mother was nervous. She was terrified of prodding me further, but it was painful to see me teeter into a cavernous apathy she could not understand. “Please try going on a walk,” she’d beg at my door frame, and I could hardly look at her. Everything felt suspended, as if I was trudging through an intoxicating fog. I would clutch the fine tendrils of my head and screech in agony over still being alive, but at least I had this: pizza rolls and the occasional TV episode.

On one particular morning, in the middle of an Arrested Development run, I woke up unnaturally early (or, as early as a vampiric teenager could manage: 10am). The Texas sun streamed ribbons of warmth through my window, and I watched its tickling lights pirouette neatly into my palm. I could smell the rot of my past week at once: cups piled messily onto my desk, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had showered. I stared at the evidence of my disastrous night: three half-bitten rolls, each curiously green from their week in refrigeration.

I licked the unrelenting dryness of my lips, and I took a deep breath. I threw the leftovers of my depression into the trash, and I put on clothes that weren’t suspiciously stained sleepwear. The fridge was now free of Totino’s for the first time in months. My mother shouted from her work desk as the front door slammed behind me: “Where are you going?”

“Outside!” I called back, my hair swept up by the rising wind. My first step turned into a run. A new day was starting, and I knew I had to embrace it.

3.) Pop them in for around 3 minutes: The end of December creeps up one me, and I think I’m dying. I had been sucking out the remnants of melted string cheese from my seventh pizza roll when the whole piece suddenly fell straight onto my chest. I had a nasty habit of burning rolls just well enough so that they were crunchy but still edible and juicy; I’m unsure of how many carcinogens I’ve accumulated resultantly over the years. So this fatal fall actually meant a considerable amount of heat dumped onto my fragile human skin.

Now I watch as the marinara sauce gives way to raw flesh, displaying an eerie pomegranate pink to the world. I would be mesmerized by its slow beauty if the horror didn’t immediately stop me from editing my last application essay. I howl once, twice, and I rush to the bathroom. Soggy paper towels can’t get rid of it fast enough, and soon I’m blinking back tears as a permanent blemish confirms its position right at my heart. I don’t have time — I’ve still got a couple colleges to go in the next hour, and here I am suffering a self-inflicted first-degree burn.

But it hurts, it hurts. I sink onto my knees, cradling my aching chest, and drag back my favorite foolproof thought: I hate myself. The absurdity of this situation is not lost on me; none of this would be happening if I hadn’t been this ridiculously reluctant to leave home. If adulthood didn’t seem like a neverending nightmare ready to kidnap me from all that I have known, and if I hadn’t been so intent on procrastinating college and all the newfangled responsibilities that followed, I could be celebrating the new year. Going out to the new Italian restaurant with my friends, carving a candle-packed cake, open-eyed gazing at the possibilities I had in front of me.

Instead, I sit my laptop right on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor, and I dab my eyes and my new scar. Future inquirers will be getting a glimpse of heroic triumph, of stepping over hot coals, of braving an escaped zoo lion. If I’m bold enough, the eternally battled Joy of my stories will have won over even the plague. But the Joy I know, here and now and real, is sobbing over her life speeding uncontrollably by. How overwhelming and terrifying and wondrous it is to grow up.

My now-coated heart flickers within me again. I wipe away another wayward tear, my stress-eaten pizza rolls at last forgotten, and I hit Submit.

4.) Now you’ve got yourself the perfect comfort meal — enjoy: O-Mart looks dreary as ever at 3am. The clerk makes a noncommittal greeting grunt, and I head straight toward the frozen food aisle. There it is again: the box of fifteen is waiting for me, its vibrantly contrasting yellows and purples now bleeding into the night dust around me.

Every time a semester has reached a breaking point for me, I can be found wasting away in my windowless bedroom, my hand down a volley of pizza rolls—my body’s tell-tale warning sign. It is comparable to one developing a bone-crushing stomach bug or a life-changing fever right on the eve of exam season. Freshman year was commonly spent learning how to microwave without waking up my roommates.

Now, as I grip my greasy hair and pat my sweaty palms, I’m debating again. To roll or not to roll. I read the ingredient label that I’ve memorized by now, and I think back to the years of stretched memories. Bathroom cries and scorching summer walks crawl by me in a flash. Totino’s will never know how much they have meant to me.

I lick the cracked dryness of my lips. The world has changed so much since I was fifteen — why not change with it? I place the box back on its shelf, and it falls back into line once more with the prepared sandwiches and canned coffee. My century of anguish has at last concluded.

“You’re not getting the pizza rolls?” the clerk asks when I hand him my items.

“Nah,” I flash a smile. “Not anymore.”

He rings me up, and I wave him a quick goodbye. I slink back into the dawning day, my heart and the scar that guards it beating in pride, and I take the first bite of my new Hot Pocket.

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And so, straight out of the burnt carcasses of my pizza roll plates: I rise.