When I left New York City last September to live upstate with a man, I immediately began baking. The first loaf cake I made was terrible: eggy, over-mixed; its one redeeming quality was the layer of apple chunks I’d tossed in. Our rental, a rich family’s vacation cottage that we’d live in for the nine months of the off-season, was furnished, but came without measuring cups. I’d used a rice-cooker cup to measure flour; when I sliced the loaf open, the top had fallen, the ratio of wet to dry ingredients wrong.
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I improved thereafter, buying parchment paper, real measuring cups, and a kitchen scale from Sur La Table. Learned how to cream butter and sugar, how to fold in flour, how to whisk eggs until they grew pale and frothy and became the same pastel color as sugar with orange zest. I made a spiced cinnamon sugar loaf; an ube swirl cake; endless batches of chocolate chip cookies, trying to find the perfect ratio of chew to crisp to spread.
Baking felt like a compulsion, a bodily urge. It soothed my anxieties about moving, about leaving the city and all my friends in it, about leaving my girlhood of roommates and karaoke bars behind. But there was also, almost immediately, a wifely quality to my work in the kitchen. It wasn’t that my partner didn’t cook—he does—but I was the one who baked, and I loved it. I loved who I became when I baked: a calmer, more precise person who turned raw ingredients into gold. Why, then, did baking seem to make me closer to something I didn’t understand and wasn’t sure I wanted to become, which was a wife?
The older I get, the more I feel the confines of heteronormativity closing in upon me—these queasy, cloying expectations, narratives I’m expected to fit neatly inside.
I had decided to leave the city in the spring of 2023, not long after Ryan and I returned from a trip to Vietnam. I had never lived with a partner before, and it felt insane to tear myself from the city I’d lived in for nine years. But it was true that I had come to resent the way New York was changing, all the places where I used to hang out overrun with content creators or shuttered by rising rents, that I desperately wanted to finish a novel but wasn’t getting any writing done, and that I loved Ryan, and I wanted to live my life alongside his.
And it was true, too, that I had only decided to move upstate after my first visit to the temple where Ryan had lived for two years. Set into the side of a mountain upstate, overlooking miles of farmland and marsh, the temple was the heart of a community—a sangha, to use the Buddhist term. The sangha encompassed temple residents as well as locals who lived in the neighboring town.
I came for a long weekend in April, to see the place where he had lived. The schedule began at 5:30 a.m.; as the newest visitor, I was tasked with ringing the wake-up bell. Brush teeth, have tea, be in the zendo by 5:55 a.m., upright on the cushion. On the first day, I felt resistance: I didn’t know anyone here; I was tired; and because of the temple’s configuration, Ryan and I weren’t even able to sleep in the same room. By the second morning, I realized all of that was the point: The temple was a container into which I could fluidly dissolve. It didn’t matter how I looked or what I felt, or for that matter, how anyone else looked or felt. There was no miasma of social niceties I had to worry about navigating, only the simple tasks at hand: to cook, to clean, to feed the community and keep the temple running.
After meditation, work. In the garden, on my knees in the dirt, planting beet seedlings and halved potatoes. Washing dishes after communal meals. A shift in the kitchen punctuated by the rhythmic chopping of daikon radishes into paper-thin slices, by the crackle of a serrated knife slicing into crusty home-baked bread. If this sounds austere, I promise it wasn’t. There was a warmth to every action, a care I felt manifesting around me in the communal body of others, a friendliness that welcomed me in, and which filled me with a solid, bright, peace. I felt myself steeping in the quiet like a dry leaf in tea. Colors and fragrances blossoming. Another life was possible, was in fact already happening. Here, in the mountains, next to the garden and the compost and the undulating fields of goldenrod. A life with others—supported with others—in community.
Driving back down to the city, I said: Let’s do it. Let’s move here.
*
After the move, I began waking up early. I wrote for two hours nearly every morning we weren’t at the temple, which amounted to four or five solid writing days each week. I found myself with more time than I’d ever had in the city, time that had previously been eaten up by that amorphous call to busyness—lunches and drinks, coffees and calls, signs that I was in the world being seen doing something. I stopped doing all that. I kept baking.
No-knead bread, left to rise overnight and shaped on the wooden countertop—the first loaf of bread I’d ever baked, its crust crackled-golden, its crumb plush and airy. Scallion pancakes, lime cheesecake bars showered in zest, oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies, cheddar-chive scones. Each time I retrieved something from the oven a minor miracle, even the failures. Outside of the two half-days we spent at the temple each week, my life came to resemble some kind of tradwife fantasy: baking, cooking, pickling. One week, my friend Mary came to visit from California. She brought a jar of apple butter as a gift. Great, I said, I’ll get a loaf ready to proof tonight and we’ll have it for breakfast in the morning with this whipped local honey. And I did bake bread. And we did eat.
Without fail, the question everyone asked me in those months after I moved was some variation of: How did I like upstate domesticity? I’d left the communal nest, climbed aboard the ship of monogamous cohabitation, and moved to a house in the country. How did I like it, anyway?
The older I get, the more I feel the confines of heteronormativity closing in upon me—these queasy, cloying expectations, narratives I’m expected to fit neatly inside. To be a partner, sure. I am learning. But what about those other roles: mother, maybe, or wife? I can’t tell what’s applying the pressure, either; if it comes from within or without. It seems as though every step I take in adult life provides another opportunity to fall in line. (In a group chat, trying to make plans to hang out, my friends cite weddings, move-ins. “Congrats everyone on becoming straight this year,” one of us writes.) It’s not the attraction to a gender other than our own that makes us feel these limitations of “straight.” It’s the way our lives have started to become shaped by heteronormativity, by how what once felt like a choice—to love, to be with—now feels like an external structure, ordering our lives.
*
At a vegetarian restaurant in the city—I haven’t truly left; I commute in every week to teach—my friend Anna shows me the Instagram account of an influencer they’re recently obsessed with. She makes everything from scratch, they say; it can’t possibly be real, but she actually does it. We watch a video together: hand-pulled mozzarella, churned butter, freshly baked sandwich bread, all for two toddlers’ lunches. In each TikTok the influencer—I don’t know why I’m being coy; you already know it’s Nara Smith—stands straight-backed in a pristine kitchen, decked out in couture.
The tradwife has become a social media archetype. In an essay for Dissent, Zoe Hu deftly outlines her various guises: back-to-nature homesteaders, Christians cornfed and converted, right-wingers, and perhaps most devastatingly, “women living in big cities with advanced degrees, leftists themselves, who traffic in half-ironies and conscious displays of heterosexual longing.”
The model of the tradwife has its origins in fundamentalist Christianity, which privileges the nuclear family (and its concomitant monogamy and child-rearing) above all other social forms. In Smith’s case, her tradwifery is tongue-in-cheek—but also, given that her husband is Mormon, is it really? Over time, the tradwife has come to symbolize a kind of lifestyle—slow, soft, simultaneously caring and beloved—that belies a deep conservatism, one that happens to neatly align with America’s religious roots. The tradwife suggests—isn’t feminism a little, I don’t know, exhausting? Wouldn’t you like to be cared for? Wouldn’t you like to be kept?
I understand why we’re transfixed by the tradwife, even the lonely leftists among us. The tradwife knowingly provides an alternative to the hustle and grind. (Whether she stands before her KitchenAid as a beneficiary of that capitalist system goes without saying.) She never has to worry about paying bills. She has the time and energy to care for the ones she loves. She lives, probably, close to nature. She can, without visible effort, afford a lifestyle that most of us can’t.
American society rewards the couples, the nuclear families, these structures of living that fall neatly into prescribed shapes. Dinner parties, couples’ trips, property ownership, and health insurance—everything becomes lubricated by the dyad. Sending Ryan off to work meetings with home-baked cookies, I felt a quiver of the tradwife arise in me. I’ve worked from home for the last six years, nevermind my weekly commute into NYC to teach, and yet there was something so gendered about the whole situation. My life looked one way and felt another. Was this what I’d become—what I’d longed, in some way, to be?
As much as I wrestled with the dyad’s heteronormativity, I wanted it in some form—the sweet, simple household of two.
Another thing the life of the tradwife can resemble, in its emphasis on domestic labor, living with intentionality, and cultivating a relationship to the land. Squint, add a dozen more people and their two-dozen hands, and it starts to look like a Buddhist temple.
*
When I got to the temple, I started reading about the lives of Buddhist women. I felt something, not quite a schism, but a rift between what I thought I wanted and what devoted religious practice meant. Raised Buddhist, I was drawn to the intensity and purity of Zen. I wanted to be neat, clean, true. At the same time, I liked—like—being a laywoman. I like sex and sweets and staying up late.
The rigor of the temple schedule, the stripped-down silent retreats, the early mornings waking up in pitch dark: it all felt counter to what I also badly wanted, which was to live in a cute house and bake things for a man that I loved. As much as I wrestled with the dyad’s heteronormativity, I wanted it in some form—the sweet, simple household of two. The stark contrast of temple life—and trying to hold both modes at once—challenged that.
The Buddhist women I read about faced similar challenges—torn between the lay and monastic paths. How to be a householder, to keep a home and care for other people, while making room for the solitude and silence that deep practice demands? Buddhism isn’t immune to the patriarchy: The life of the lone ascetic, more easily available to men for the usual reasons, is often privileged over the life of the laywoman, who juggles her domestic responsibilities with that same desire for enlightenment. Sometimes I hated the temple. Less often I loved it. For the first few months, I felt terribly, ambiguously lonely.
Then, as it does: Time passed. I tried my best to be open to everything and everyone. Brought into familiarity through practice together, I met a new friend for tea. Then another. The temple wasn’t so different from a house, anyway; we all worked in the kitchen. I brought treats with me to every outing: a cardamom-orange cake, a slice of lemon loaf, apple-cinnamon bread with cream cheese filling. I’d started bringing them because my house was full of baked goods, but the sweets were something to share, easing the friction of new friendships and connections. People liked my baking; I was surprised to find that they also liked me.
In a story from Song dynasty China, a woman is given a mantra: “Let it be.” What’s interesting to me about this story, though, is a detail at the end: while preparing fried cakes for dinner, she heats the oil and adds a spoonful of batter. When she hears the sizzling sound of the batter frying, she immediately becomes enlightened.
Alone in my kitchen, I realized I was only as lonely as I’d let myself be. The fantasy of the tradwife wavered in the air, then disappeared.
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“The Temple and the Tradwife” by Larissa Pham will appear in the Winter 2025 issue of Cake Zine. Cake Zine is a literary print magazine exploring art, history, and pop culture through food.
