The New York Times - USA (2020-10-25)

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020 SR 5

I

FORCED the last mini cucumber in a

jar and poured brine over it: My

mother’s recipe calls for half a cup of

coarse sea salt and half a cup of vin-

egar for every 12 cups of water, boiled

and then cooled to room temperature. I

have always relied on my cups and

spoons to measure my ingredients. This

time, though, I used the old floating raw

egg trick to test the saltiness of the water,

which I saw my grandmother use as a

child.

When I was growing up in Lebanon,

fall was the season my mother would

transform our kitchen into an operating

room of sorts: cucumber, cauliflower and

carrots for pickling; beans, okra and

leafy greens for freezing; olives, in two

piles, green and black, to be preserved in

olive oil or water; eggplants sliced and

salted, sitting in large strainers, waiting

to be stuffed with walnuts, garlic and red

bell pepper. Fruits like strawberries,

peaches and plums had already been

made into jam. Apples and grapes were

collected in large bottles and kept out-

side in the sun, to slowly turn into vin-

egar.

I loved all the food, but I resented the

time my mother spent preparing the

winter “mouneh,” as we call it in Leba-

non, which translates into “food provi-

sions.” I will not do that when I am older, I

promised myself every year.

A few weeks ago, in my kitchen in

Cambridge, my adopted city, I found my-

self performing the same ritual, albeit on

a much smaller scale (I cook for a family

of two, my mother for a family of five). I

have preserved fruits and vegetables in

the past, but in a more mechanical way,

to avoid last-minute trips to the store to

forage for a missing ingredient.

But this time felt different.

The food I was preparing was connect-

ing me to something I was desperately

trying to hold on to — my Lebanese-ness

— in a trying year, during which I felt

that the idea of my country, what it

means and represents to me, is facing an

existential threat. Over the past several

months, I had watched from thousands

of miles away the disintegration of a soci-

ety I am part of, as it faced a severe eco-

nomic crisis and an inept government,

all of it exacerbated by a pandemic that

brought life to a standstill.

I had suddenly been feeling a weak

sense of belonging but I couldn’t under-

stand why. How does Lebanon’s collapse

affect my identity? Then I remembered a

line I read two decades ago by a French-

Lebanese author, Amin Maalouf, in his

book “In the Name of Identity”: “We all

have the feeling that our own identity, as

we have conceived of it since we were

children, is threatened.” It seems that

such a sentiment is strongest among in-

dividuals whose countries are undergo-

ing upheaval.

The list of my country’s woes is long,

the legacy of successive corrupt and sec-

tarian governments in power since the

1990s when the 15-year-long civil war

ended.

A revolution that started last October

in Beirut and spread across the country

has failed to realize the demands of the

protesters for new, competent leaders.

But then two months ago, a huge ex-

plosion in Beirut’s seaport killed more

than 200 people and injured thousands

more, and destroyed entire neighbor-

hoods. The apartment I have in the city

was one of many that became uninhabit-

able in an instant. The blast, caused by

2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, negli-

gently left by officials for nearly seven

years in a warehouse, became the final

nail in the coffin of what once was a coun-

try. The government clearly had no re-

gard for the lives or safety of its people.

As I rolled small balls of labneh, a thick

strained yogurt, I remembered my

mother sitting in her kitchen, a bowl of

labneh on her lap, a cup of cold water and

a tray placed on the table in front of her.

She would lightly dip her right fingers in

the water, massage her left palm in a cir-

cular motion, then take out a little bit of

labneh and roll it. When done, she would

cover the tray with a cloth and let it sit

out until it hardened enough to be pre-

served in olive oil. During that fall sea-

son, everywhere I looked in the kitchen,

in our breakfast and dining rooms, I saw

trays, jars and bowls filled with ingredi-

ents slowly waiting to dry, to be pickled

or to set before they were packaged, la-

beled, dated and stored. Tasting pickles

for the first time every season was a ritu-

al of sorts. “Who wants to try the pickles

to see if they are ready?” my mother

would call out to my siblings and me, who

were eagerly waiting for that moment.

Crunch, crunch, crunch, and suck the

juice. Crunch again. I smiled watching

my 10-year-old son eat a pickled cucum-

ber, and I remembered one summer

morning in Beirut when I found him, a

toddler then, his teeth barely in, standing

at the foot of the open fridge, trying to

climb up to reach a jar of pickles on the

top shelf.

In his book, Mr. Maalouf says that our

identity is shaped by a combination of

our experiences, our skin color, our race,

our ethnicity, our physical appearance,

our religious affiliations or lack of, our

ideological and political views, our socio-

economic status and our families and

countries. I have always taken that to

heart. I cannot be wholly and only Leba-

nese, because throughout the years I have

become much more than what my identity

card says.

Perhaps if I saw a way out of the current

crisis that would return the country to

what it was, to how I remember it, I would

be less anxious about my relationship to

my native country. I would rest knowing

that Lebanon will always be there, a plane

ride away.

Preserving my fruits and vegetables in

tightly sealed jars may be a way for me to

preserve a crumbling identity. Lebanon’s

future is ambiguous, but this produce will

keep.

My husband passed away eight years

ago, and his remains are buried in the gar-

den of his ancestors’ house in a village in

South Lebanon. He lies between two an-

cient olive trees that he imagined his

grandmother had planted before her exo-

dus to the United States in the early 19th

century. They were the last thing she

looked at before she left her home, he

would always tell me.

The olive harvest in Lebanon takes

place in the fall and the branches are usu-

ally beaten until their fruit falls off on tarps

laid on the ground. My husband, though,

picked them one by one. They were the

best he had ever tasted; he said this every

year. But I imagined it was not the taste of

the olives, as good as they were, that he

was craving. It was the connection to an

identity long lost that he was trying to re-

claim. The olives were that tangible bridge

to his roots. Just as my pickles are.

Preserving Food, Preserving Myself

DEREK ABELLA

My kitchen chores keep me

connected to my Lebanese

identity.

OPINION

BY NADA BAKRI
A former reporter
for The Times and
a contributor to
“Our Women on
the Ground: Essays
by Arab Women
Reporting From the
Arab World.”

I

T STARTED with my spice cabinet.

I’d been in a quarantine cooking rut,

and while searching online for differ-

ent things to do with the various jars

and tins at my disposal, I found myself on

the Wikipedia page for Sichuan pepper.

Not a shocker. Wikipedia is frequently

the first or second result of a Google

search. Plenty has been written about

the rise of anti-intellectualism, but the

worldwide popularity of Wikipedia re-

veals that most of us still itch to know

things.

But what could I learn from the

Sichuan pepper entry? It was littered

with the note “citation needed,” and the

entire section on names was flagged as

misleading. I was annoyed, excessively

so. It wasn’t that I neededto know the sci-

entific names and localities for every va-

riety of Sichuan pepper. I had a jar of red

peppercorns already. The error-ridden

entry didn’t inconvenience me, but it

bothered me just the same. It bothered

me to see bad research.

Before the pandemic, waylaying bad

research was my job. I worked as a refer-

ence librarian, which meant that on any

given day I might help someone uncover

what business their ancestor was in, the

story behind the name of a neighborhood

park or the relationship between two his-

torical figures. Researchers arrived with

their own hopes and hypotheses, which

the truth often wiped out. (“I’m sorry, sir,

but it appears that your great-grandfa-

ther was not a cosmopolitan golf pro. He

was a mailman.”)

Many researchers left disappointed —

in their families or their heroes or the na-

ture of the world. But more often than

not, weeks or months later, an email

would chime through: They’d continued

along the path we’d uncovered together

and needed more help. The truth isn’t al-

ways what we want it to be, yet it re-

mains compelling, by nature of being

true.

I loved my job. But in libraries, as in so

many fields, careers have been shaken

up again and again by the pandemic, like

a high-stakes game of Boggle. I was laid

off, then un-laid off thanks to a Paycheck

Protection Program loan. My job de-

scription changed because we couldn’t

retrieve archival material when working

from home. Grant funding didn’t come

through and I lost my job again.

I had a baby, a dog and seven open

browser tabs of mediocre job descrip-

tions, so I had plenty to keep me busy.

But I didn’t feel useful, not in the way I

had been.

This feeling of uselessness was exac-

erbated by the fact that we were coming

up on an election. People were scram-

bling for some truth to cling onto in a sea

of hasty, sloppy, sometimes deliberately

misleading research. The crazier the

world gets, the more it needs librarians

— I really believe that — but I seemed to

have lost my powers when I lost my job.

What good would it do to pedantically of-

fer sources as the 300th commentator on

some dumb article about QAnon? I tried

anyway, cringing in anticipation of blow-

back, but nobody even noticed.

Then, while reading lazy half-truths

about Sichuan pepper at my kitchen

counter, it was as if I received some li-

brarian version of the bat signal, a single

round peppercorn outlined against the

night sky. Here, I was needed. Here, I

could do something.

It was easy to begin. The barrier to en-

try for editing Wikipedia is low, and I al-

ready had a Wikipedia account. I hadn’t

done much with it beyond creating a

short entry for the South Oxford Tennis

Club, which was at one time the only

Black-owned tennis club in New York

City. “Why doesn’t anyone know about

this?” a library patron had asked me af-

ter we stumbled across an article about

it. I’ve heard this question so many

times! Yet clearly people doknow about

these things — they write the articles

and books in which we make our discov-

eries. I think what people really mean

when they say, “Why doesn’t anyone

know about this?” is “Why isn’t this in-

formation super easy to find?” or more

succinctly, “Why isn’t this on

Wikipedia?”

So that’s where I put the South Oxford

Tennis Club. And it was so much work,

even beyond the research and format-

ting: Is my phrasing too opinionated? Do

I trust a scholar’s word over a source that

claims to have been there? To that point,

what is my role as a non-Black person

starting a record of a Black institution?

I was reminded of all this as I shook the

dust off my account to edit Sichuan pep-

per. The effort of Wikipedia had been a

headache when I had a full-time job, but

now I could better appreciate how ex-

traordinary it is that such detailed con-

cerns should be standard on a volunteer

production. Every single entry — from

“99 Bottles of Beer” to “Human” — has

an accompanying “Talk” page, where ed-

itors and readers dissect it.

In the past I’ve had to remind student

patrons that you can’t cite Wikipedia on

research papers, and if they asked why, I

never had a great answer, just something

along the lines of, “Um, it’s kind of lazy,

don’t you think?” But now I’d advise

them to visit a Talk page or two to under-

stand what research is. It’s not just look-

ing online for stuff; it’s a process of as-

sessment, of re-searching through what

you’ve found to determine what’s super-

fluous, what’s missing and what requires

thought. The nakedness of this process

on Talk pages makes it accessible. Pro-

fessional researchers can be precious

about our work, but research is a skill we

can and should all acquire, given the

abundance of information and misinfor-

mation mixed up at our fingertips.

Plus, it feels great. Few things are as

satisfying as uncovering a hard gem of

truth in the shifting sands of opinion,

politics and legend. I worked my way

slowly through the Sichuan pepper en-

try, unraveling the truth of an assertion

while waiting to hear back on job applica-

tions, adding a citation while my baby

slept.

As someone who’s never lived in China

and doesn’t speak Mandarin, I was espe-

cially concerned with finding sources

from regional experts. Sichuan pepper,

like the South Oxford Tennis Club, be-

longs to a culture different from the one I

grew up in, and quality research requires

primary sources — people who know

what they’re talking about because

they’ve lived it. In almost every instance,

uncovering truth means hearing the

words of people who aren’t you.

I finished the Sichuan pepper revi-

sions, I mean as much as research is ever

finished, which is to say that people are

still out there improving on my improve-

ments. But I couldn’t stop. I haven’t

stopped. Even as more profitable work

has come my way, I still find time for an

edit on the béchamel sauce entry, a cita-

tion on the La Llorona entry, a sleepless

hour dedicated to one of the many, many

other entries tagged as “Wikipedia arti-

cles with sourcing issues.” It’s something

of an addiction and something of a bene-

diction, an act of love for a world that, as

messy and misleading as it can be, still

contains the most beautiful truths.

Fact-Checking the Sichuan Pepper

MARIA CHIMISHKYAN

Trust a librarian: The

truth is out there, and it

is beautiful.

OPINION

BY MARY MANN

The author of

“Yawn: Adventures

in Boredom.”

.