By Haley Kim
I’m being so serious, if I don’t marry by the ripe ol’ age of 38, I’m packing my stuff and finding a house in China with a fat mandarin tree in my front yard. Because genuinely, what type of drug did they inject into those things? If you put me in that one marshmallow test they used to do with elementary school kids, but replaced it with a mandarin, oh boy, it’s gone.
Every fall, my relatives from Sacramento bring me two fat boxes of mandarins from a secret, confidential source they won’t reveal to me (probably because they knew that if I got the location, I would drop everything and move to Sacramento). And I’d sit for an hour on the front step just devouring mandarin after mandarin. My addiction got so bad that my hands started turning orange. Several people became quite concerned for my well-being—namely, Lucky Felder and a certain Samhita Holla, who seemed exceptionally freaked out that I did my own research. Turns out, I had a condition called “Carotenemia,” a skin condition that appears when you have too many orangey foods.
So there you have it, physical evidence of my obsession with mandarins. I don’t know, there’s just something about the satisfaction you get when you peel open that delicious ripe fruit and the juices bursting into your mouth as you eat them one by one. I tried to defend myself against my “orange hands,” but my friends simply could not understand my undying love for this fruit, saying, “It can’t be that good.” There is only one friend who was truly by my side on this one and who shares the same love for mandarins: Madeline Tanaka (if you’ve ever wondered why there are no mandarins left in the lunch line, you know who to blame).
List all the possible fruits in the world: strawberries, raspberries, bananas, blueberries. After eating any of those for three or four business days, you’d get sick and tired of it. Mandarins are unlike any other fruit and can get you stuck in an endless peeling loop, which has become a form of therapy for me. Some people dream about expensive cars or big houses or a new watch—I dream about becoming financially stable so I can buy a lifetime’s worth of mandarins just within arm’s reach. And honestly, if my future partner can’t compete with that, you know what I’m choosing.