“Can We Have Pizza Tonight?”

Daughter: “Dad, can we have pizza tonight?”

Father: “Pizza? What pizza? We’re having steamed buns with pickled veggies.”

Mother: “We’re out of pickles, though.”

Father: “We still have a little at the bottom of the plastic bottle. Buns dipped in that leftover oil and brine will do. And there’s still that jar of preserved tofu. The one that’s been in the fridge for a year, or maybe two. You can eat the buns with that.”

Daughter: “Please, Mom! Just a Saizeriya pizza, maybe? That’s the cheapest.”

Mother: “No, why – didn’t you just have that last week?”

Daughter: “Then… how about fried rice? You can cook fried rice at home.”

Mother: “There’s no leftover rice from lunch, no”

Daughter: “Can’t we just make egg fried rice tonight?”

Mother: “If there was any leftover, sure, I’ll fry the leftover rice. But there isn’t. I cooked so much rice and we ate it all with pickled radish. You finished the radish in the dish too”

In the middle of a brief chat with a stranger on a crowded subway train, his daughter – 6 years old, dressed in cute white – interrupted, asking what they’ll have for dinner. His father later complained:

“She always wants pizza, spaghetti, burgers – the expensive Western stuff. Kids, you know. Somehow they’re drawn to it by an invisible force. You just can’t understand – what’s there in them that makes them so alluring, when the cheapest among them is too expensive for us? It’s not much meat, not much seafood; if it were any of that I could understand, though we still couldn’t afford it. But you know, we still give her a treat now and then. She’s lovely.”