My mother’s side of the family had run a small-town bakery for over fifty years, a solid, everyday-staple business which, like retail, ebbed on an extremely thin profit margin that was only a bit higher than putting money in a bank for interests. The bakery was always bustling with activity and the delicious smell of baked goods. There was never a shortage of customers from seven in the morning to nine at night – every ten minutes, someone would arrive for a French baguette stuffed with deli meats, a slice of chocolate cake, or a steaming portion of pork buns. My eldest aunt amassed recipes without discontinuing her products. She went from just two kinds of steamed buns to over one hundred types of desserts, snacks, and miscellaneous trendy items such as matcha crepes and mangosteen iced tea.

The bakery generated a stable cash flow that allowed my eldest aunt to purchase several properties, though with a single income stream, she could never out-earn the richest family in town. There was also a succession crisis because none of my cousins, with their overseas education and a taste for metropolitan luxuries, were inclined to wake up at five in the morning to bake and retire to bed smelling like rice flour. After several costly yet fruitless attempts to revamp operations, they discussed setting up a coffee shop next door to improve the ever-declining margins. Unlike cakes, coffee and tea barely expired and required just a few tablespoons at the base to concoct a variety of drinks. Most drinks, said my eldest cousin, contained chemicals, sugar, and water. They only needed to put down one big initial investment for the storefront and décor.

Fair enough.

He was on the cusp of buying the house next door to set up his coffee shop when, debatably well-calculated rather than accidentally, his girlfriend at the time got pregnant. The news drove my eldest aunt to disown her son and barricade herself in a Buddhist temple for two months because she had vehemently opposed the relationship. Anyhow, after coming back down from the mountain and lodging at our house for the next few months, wailing with Mum, my eldest aunt came to her senses and hosted a flash wedding for three hundred attendees – basically half of town and anyone from whom the family had ever bought a kilogram of flour or a morsel of chocolate. The old woman’s bitter rage outlasted her son’s disobedience because her daughter-in-law’s meek existence in the house constantly reminded her of another crushed dream: a different daughter-in-law who was once promised to her by the wealthiest couple in town.

Then a second disaster struck. My poor aunt, God rest her soul. The baby granddaughter was born with gluten intolerance.

The news flabbergasted even my father, who had developed an intolerance for my eldest aunt’s family drama over the years – she was widowed too young and spoiled her kids too much, he said. “Isn’t your whole family diabetic?” my father uttered, not really looking at Mum but pointing his chopsticks at the stir-fried bitter melon in front of her to demonstrate his distaste and disbelief. Bitter melon had become a dinner feature ever since Mum was diagnosed with type II diabetes, a natural source of insulin that removed glucose from the bloodstream. At one point before her diagnosis, Mum lost fifteen pounds and was on the verge of passing out in her sleep from diabetic hyperosmolarity. Both of my maternal grandparents had type II diabetes, accumulated and worsened by a lifetime of never having enough indulgence, and so did their daughters. For as long as I could remember, eating was the number one cause of death in our family, surpassing wartime violence, traffic accidents, and chronic stress.

“I know, right?” Mum rolled her eyes and laid a piece of stewed fish (also very sweet) onto her rice bowl, the gleaming white grain signified a spike of glucose. “Where did this child even come from!” She began to chew and talked with her mouth closed. “How is she gonna survive in that sugar house of theirs? Isn’t there an allergic reaction for just inhaling freshly baked cakes?”

And so, the gluten-intolerant child grew up in a four-story gingerbread mansion, with a bakery and production floors right beneath the Hello Kitty room where the unwanted bribe had set up a crib, under prying eyes and flapping ears on the lookout for more gossip. The baby girl was slightly malnourished, constantly suffering from a bloated tummy and diarrhea until after the third or fourth pediatrician, when her parents finally figured out a suitable diet. I held her in my arms once, as a baby, and babysat her a couple of times in the month of September, when the entire household was occupied with mooncake orders and feeding the crowd attending my grandfather’s death anniversary. Slowly but surely, my cousin and aunt became fixated on the idea that this gluten-intolerant child would one day inherit their bakery. 

The heiress was an anomaly.

I listened intently to the duo’s optimistic endeavors in reforming our family’s sweet addiction and endorsing their gluten-intolerant child. It was an alternative universe that, in hindsight, brought out health benefits for us all. At a time when S franchise was the first to introduce industrially produced soy and oat milk at swanky locations in Saigon and charged its chic clientele exorbitant prices, my aunt had somehow managed to source plant-based milk through her longtime vendor for whipped cream and made such options available and affordable to the populace in our sleepy, coastal hometown. The production lines were refurbished with new machines to process nuts, corn, and sweet potatoes. There was even a new smoothie menu.

Every September, I visited the bakery for another drawn-out, one-hundred-attendee feast on my grandfather’s death anniversary and watched the gluten-intolerant little girl running around the bakery, collecting bills from customers – she was old enough to participate in activities on the floor now, sitting on my eldest aunt’s lap to count the day’s earnings. The curious world of the glutted, filled to the brim with love, adaptation, accommodation, and tolerance. How wonderful karma was when it forced us to build and sustain an alternative we once resisted and cast aside, to unlearn the lessons we had dutifully absorbed and mastered for half a life. In such a world, for our own gains and future, we must resist the natural reflex of resistance, thinking before responding to an urge as innate as children reaching out for a sweet treat.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that had been the story, that a change of heart had transformed the entire town’s dietary habits and sparked inspiration for intrusive relatives with high diabetic risks to mind their own businesses?

In truth, when his little girl was four years old, my cousin sold the bakery to a national chain. They kept nothing, down to the last whisk and sieve. Everything that could be bought was sold.