The Art of Slicing a Mango
Growing up I don’t remember eating mangoes. In fact I doubt if I ate a mango before I was 20 years old. I’d go so far as to venture that I did not eat a mango until after graduating from Indiana University. This amazing fruit just wasn’t commonly available in the town of Lexington, Virginia where I grew up. It’s not that we lacked fruit in our home. We always had apples, bananas, oranges, grapes, blueberries, raspberries, etc. Kiwis were as exotic as it got. I remember one of my favorite t-shirts as a kid had a gigantic sliced kiwi on the front that accentuated my chubby belly. Living in Taiwan during mango season, it’s so easy to get fresh mangoes at our local fruit store and order mango smoothies with freshly cut mangoes at the nearby drink stand. It blows my mind knowing that mangoes alone have hundreds of different types of cultivars and there’s not only one kind of mango out there.
Our favorite type of mango happens to be the 愛文芒果 Irwin Mango, which was surprisingly first cultivated in Florida by F.D. Irwin in the early 1940s. A cross between the Lippens and Haden cultivars, the Irwin, in my opinion is the perfect mango. It has that lovely mango shape (there’s no other way to describe it), and the color of the skin changes between bright orange, darkened red, and sometimes a spot of yellow. When we pick them at the fruit stand, we always make sure to choose one that happens to be leaking a bit of syrup from its end. This sign indicates that it is ready to be sliced and eaten. The taste is not overly sweet with a slight bitterness. Irwins grow quite well in Taiwan, especially in the South around Tainan.
Regardless of the type of mango that one chooses, the true joy in eating mangoes comes when you place a freshly sliced piece on the tip of your tongue, right? I would say “yes;” however, there’s something that needs to happen prior to eating a mango. You need to take a knife to peel and flesh and cut and peel the mango. Taking this step into account, I would go so far as to say that cutting and peeling the mango now gives me as much joy as actually eating the mango itself.
My wife, Mayumi, loves mangoes as well. When we moved to Taiwan, we were both pleasantly surprised at how delicious and readily available mangoes were during certain seasons. In Japan, mangoes (and other fruits) are notoriously expensive. When we first bought mangoes here for our kitchen, it was a relatively new experience for both of us. We were both novices in the area of subtropical fruit care in the kitchen. This has changed since moving to Taipei.
When you get married, no one tells you how the two of you will share your responsibilities in the house. There’s no single correct guide or manual for all of the things that need to happen to make a household cooperation, or “married couples’ cooperation” (as my wife puts it) successful. We learn from doing. We learn from being together. We learn from communication and correcting the mistakes that happen along the way. We learn to express our needs. We make whatever works in our household work for us.
Mayumi is a much better cook than I am. She prepares dishes in a way that is much more aesthetically pleasing, and she tries her best to utilize different colors in each meal so that we have a rainbow of representation that we can ingest. I’m the one who normally washes and puts the dishes away. I take the trash down when the trash truck arrives at 6:45 pm on the weekdays (except for Wednesdays when they are off). She cleans the shower. I clean the toilet. She folds the laundry. I discard of the nasty netting in the sink that catches bits of food so that it doesn’t clog up the drain. We have our own roles and responsibilities in the house, and we have learned to love these roles and responsibilities. And yet…they are not set in stone. There’s always room for flexibility and communication amongst these roles. More recently I have been helping to prepare tea, traditionally her area. She has vacuumed the “study,” traditionally my area.
And then there’s slicing mangoes….
When we first bought mangoes, I think she naturally gravitated towards being the one responsible for slicing them. We didn’t discuss this role as belonging to her, and yet she settled into it as easily as a knife in hot butter. Again, she didn’t have that much experience slicing mangoes because it just wasn’t a readily-available fruit to her in Japan. One thing we have learned through our almost three years of marriage is to stay somewhat clear of one another while in the kitchen. We both operate quite differently when we are moving about the kitchen. I am quite haphazard with my cooking and measurements, whereas she tends to use measuring devices and is more exact with how much she adds to a recipe. (This probably explains why her cooking is consistently better and mine is hit and miss).
As she has been cutting mangoes for quite some time in our household, it never occurred to me that the cutting of a mango actually takes some skill and patience. Recently after purchasing a mango together, I decided that we should cut the mango together. I wanted to take a chance in the kitchen to do something together, and I thought that the simple act of slicing a mango could be that something.
As we took the cutting board out, she told me that mangoes were tricky to cut due to their oddly-shaped and rather large seeds. The seed takes up the entire middle section of a mango, and it’s rather flat. She gave me the knife and told me to cut the mango into thirds, but to leave the middle section long and flat, so as not to cut through the hard seed. After making two end sections, and one middle cross-section, I would then slice the two end sections so that it would be easier to peel them. She demonstrated that in order to peel each of these smaller pieces I shouldn’t use my entire hand to hold the handle of the knife.
“If you hold the handle of the knife, it makes it more unstable and less easy to control. Move your hand up the handle, and then put your finger on the top of the blade, and your thumb on the blade itself so you can control what you are doing and it’s safer.”
As she gave me the knife to try cutting the next piece for myself, she told me about her own evolution and discovery of the most convenient way to cut and peel mangoes.
“When we first arrived here, I didn’t know how to cut mangoes. Maybe it’s not the ‘right’ way, but this way is safe, and it works for me.” I held the knife in my hands, not exactly sure what to do next, but trusting that she was there with me to help me along the way.
I took the next piece in my hands, and I could feel from her gaze that she was worried about me cutting myself. I could feel her love and patience as she stood back and watched me as a baby taking its first steps. She observed carefully, but didn’t intervene or interrupt as I sliced the piece, my right hand holding the blade of the knife directly, and my thumb gently pulling on the skin as the knife sliced through the flesh.
There’s something that happens to my mind when I’m totally engrossed in a task at hand. It could be playing an instrument, brewing a cup of tea, practicing the nunchucks, playing the diabolo, reading a book. It doesn’t matter what this action or task is…when my mind is completely lost and focused on that action, there’s a complete calm that takes over. This was the first time that I was slicing a mango, and as I held that piece and blade in my hand, my mind went completely slack. It was almost as if nothing else existed at that very moment. I had to focus with relaxed certainty that I was not going to injure myself. There was almost something addictively soothing and calming about how easily the knife went into the flesh of the mango as my thumb pulled on its skin only a millimeter away from the blade. I forgot about everything else in the world and time stood still. The mango made no sound as its juices wept into my thumb. It was just me, the blade, the mango, my hands, and Mayumi. We were all there in that moment, and I was learning something new in a moment with her. It may have been a small thing, but it was something, and we were together.
To me, this moment was just a reminder of one of the reasons I am alive and married. While learning to slice a mango is such a simple joy, I have to ask, isn’t that what we all need, what we all strive for? We’re faced with so much fragility and harsh truths of imbalance each and every day. Life is so delicate, as delicate as that millimeter that separates the blade, the peel, and the potential of pain and loss. In order to get to the beauty of life, sometimes we need to engage in the simple processes of everyday actions with those whom we love. In order to enjoy the fruits of our labor, we need to enjoy the steps that take us to these fruits together. Life is full of processes, some great and some small. Sometimes rather than focusing on the sweet nectar that awaits us at the end of the process, we can embrace the moments that connect us to one another along the way. Because we don’t really know how anything will end. All we know is what is happening in the moment when we’re in the moment. If we can treat each moment like a delicate mango in our hands with someone we love by our side, perhaps we don’t even need to taste the mango in order to enjoy its flavor. The flavor is already there, each slice of the way.
