[color=f7976a][b]JAMES XIAO[/b][/color] - Room 804, Marble Heights Dorm Building
	Saturday, 8/24/2019 - 7:54am[hr]
[color=f7976a]“Listen.”[/color] James sighed. It sounded more like a tired growl. [color=f7976a]“I don’t like muscling my way to an agreement. Ain’t my style anymore, those days are behind me.”[/color]

His addressee remained condemningly silent.

[color=f7976a]“But I’m doing this for the family, yeah? Don’t matter how I feel about it. Whatever it takes.”[/color]

He rolled up his sleeves, revealing wiry, muscled forearms. Further down, the skin on his knuckles was rough and worn. Colorful band-aids adorned the fingers of his left hand. Seemed he was no stranger to ‘muscling’, as he put it.

[color=f7976a]“Nothin’ personal.”[/color]

Before him, the mound of frozen dumplings gave no plea, no call for mercy. So be it. James placed both hands on the lid and [i]shoved[/i].

It was a situation, see. Baba had surprised him before he left for the year, hefting a large, large container to the car. Grinned and instructed him to put it in the freezer as soon as he got to school.

“<<Half a day’s stock,>>” Mama had rolled her eyes, giving her son a tight hug, “<<I swear, he always goes too far.>>”

The stockpile would probably last him a week. Not that he doubted the cooking expertise of Marble Heights’ kitchen staff, but there was nothing like the taste of home. He’d eat every single piece, not a crumb wasted! Each morsel would be received gratefully and deliciously. Otherwise, the specter of his father’s disappointment would loom over him until his dying days.

The going away gift suited him just fine until he actually got to his dorm. It turns out that restaurant-grade bulk containers often didn’t lend themselves well to standard home freezers. Condensation dripped onto the benchtop as the August sun continued to rise. Realization twisted his expression. Instead of filling his new lodgings with a frozen but comfy slice of home, it was now a race against time.

It was damn lucky that he was a sculptor because he doubted anyone else would be walking around school with a bunch of plastic tofu boxes on hand. Sourced from the market down the street, their family had kept a pile of them in the pantry for as long as he could remember. A young James had learnt that they were good for storing his clay figures, little works in progress. And sometimes, like right now, you could even store food in them! But he wasn’t a gazillionaire prodigy ([i]prology? progery?[/i]) like his classmates, he wasn’t [i]made[/i] of reusable tofu boxes! He’d divvied up the pile as best he could between what containers he had available, but the mounds all peeked prominently over their respective rims. This called for step two: compress.

And so, on this fine August Saturday, at 7:57 in the goddamn morning, in his new home for the next eleven months, James Kaishen Xiao was muttering to balls of stiff dough and meat, all the while trying to compact them into containers that [i]clearly[/i] were not humoring his efforts in the slightest.

[color=f7976a]"C’moooooooOOONNN!!!”[/color]

It was going to be an interesting year.