by Holly Hughes
*It is no coincidence that Blumenthal is reputed to be a devotee of neurolinguistic programming.
*It’s noticeable that, though many people express strong likes and dislikes for particular foods and drinks, it is those with unique flavours and textures that are associated with instant revulsion. Few who’ve been poleaxed by tequila can ever go back to it. An ‘off’ boiled egg or a carton of unexpectedly sour milk can scar for life.
MAGICAL DINNERS
By Chang-Rae Lee
From The New Yorker
Korean-American novelist Chang-Rae Lee (Native Speaker, A Gesture Life, The Surrendered) immerses his readers in detailed tapestries of immigrant culture in the American suburbs. In this brief memoir, Thanksgiving Day becomes the focus for a tug-of-war between Korean and American foods.
So picture this: Thanksgiving, 1972. The Harbor House apartments on Davenport Avenue, New Rochelle, New York, red brick, low-rise, shot through with blacks and Puerto Ricans and then a smattering of us immigrants, the rest mostly white people of modest means, everyone deciding New York City is going to hell. Or, at least, that’s the excuse. The apartments are cramped, hard-used, but the rent is low. Around the rickety diningroom table, the end of which nearly blocks the front door, sit my father, my baby sister, myself, and my uncle, who with my aunt has come earlier this fall to attend graduate school. They’re sleeping on the pullout in the living room. In the abutting closet-size kitchen, my aunt is helping my mother, who is fretting over the turkey. Look how doughy-faced the grownups still are, so young and slim, like they shouldn’t yet be out in the world. My father and uncle wear the same brow-line–style eyeglasses that have not yet gone out of fashion back in Seoul, the black plastic cap over the metal frames making them look perennially consternated, square. My mother and my aunt, despite aprons stained with grease and kimchi juice, look pretty in their colorful polyester blouses with the sleeves rolled up, and volleying back and forth between the women and the men is much excited chatter about relatives back home (we’re the sole permanent emigrants of either clan), of the economy and politics in the old country and in our new one, none of which I’m paying any mind. My sister and I, ages five and seven, the only ones speaking English, are talking about the bird in the oven—our very first—and already bickering over what parts are best, what parts the other should favor, our conception of it gleaned exclusively from television commercials and illustrations in magazines. We rarely eat poultry, because my mother is nauseated by the odor of raw chicken, but early in the preparations she brightly announces that this larger bird is different—it smells clean, even buttery—and I can already imagine how my father will slice into the grainy white flesh beneath the honeyed skin of the breast, this luscious sphere of meat that is being readied all around the apartment complex.
We like it here, mainly for the grounds outside. There’s a grassy field for tag and ballgames, and a full play set of swings and slides and monkey bars and three concrete barrels laid on their sides, which are big enough to sit in and walk upside down around on your hands (and they offer some privacy, too, if you desperately need to pee). There’s a basketball court and two badly cracked asphalt tennis courts that my parents sometimes use, but have to weed a bit first. So what if teenagers smoke and drink beer on the benches at night, or if there’s broken glass sprinkled about the playground. We’re careful not to lose our footing, and make sure to come in well before dark.
And you can see the water from here. I like to sit by the windows when I can’t go outside. With the right breeze, at low tide the mucky, clammy smell of Echo Bay flutters through the metal blinds. Sometimes, for no reason I can give, I lick the sharp edges of the blinds, the combination of tin and soot and sludgy pier a funky pepper on the tongue. I already know that I have a bad habit. I’ll sample the window screens, too, the paint-cracked radiators, try the parquet wood flooring after my mother dusts, its slick surface faintly lemony and then bitter, like the skins of peanuts. I like the way my tongue buzzes from the copper electroplating on the bottom of her Revere Ware skillet, how it tickles my teeth the way a penny can’t. My mother scolds me whenever she catches me, tells me I’m going to get sick, or worse. Why do you have to taste everything? What’s the matter with you? I don’t yet know to say, It’s your fault.
One of my favorite things is to chew on the corner of our red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth backed with cotton flocking and watch the slowly fading impression of my bites. It has the flavor of plastic, yes, but with a nutty oiliness, and then bears a sharper tang of the ammonia cleaner my mother obsessively sprays around our two-bedroom apartment. She’ll pull out the jug of bleach, too, if she’s seen a cockroach. There are grand armies of cockroaches here, and they’re huge. She keeps the place dish clean, but it’s still plagued by the pests stealing over, she is certain, from the neighboring units. Twice a year, the super bombs the building and they’ll be scarce for a few weeks, until they show up again in the cupboard, the leaner, faster ones that have survived. You’ll hear a sharp yelp from my mother, and a slammed cabinet door, and then nothing but harrowing silence before the metallic stink of bug spray wafts through the apartment like an old-time song. I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes I’ll breathe it in deeply, nearly making myself choke. For I’m a young splendid bug. I live on toxins and fumes. My mother, on the other hand, is getting more and more frustrated, hotly complaining to my father when he gets home: we’ve lived here for more than a year, and no matter what she does she can’t bar them or kill them, and she’s begun to think the only solution is to move, or else completely clear the kitchen of foodstuffs, not prepare meals here at all.
Of course, that’s ridiculous. First, it’s what she does. She does everything else, too, but her first imperative is to cook for us. It’s how she shapes our days and masters us and shows us her displeasure, her weariness, her love. She’ll hail my sister and me from the narrow kitchen window, calling out our names and adding that dinner’s on—bap muh-guh!—the particular register of her voice instantly sailing to us through the hot murk and chaos of the playground. It’s as if we had special receptors, vestigial ears in our bellies. There’s a quickening, a sudden hop in the wrong direction: I gotta go! My mother is becoming notorious among the kids; they’ll whine, with scorn and a note of envy, Hey, you mom’s always calling you! And one big-framed, older girl named Kathy, who has sparkling jade-colored eyes and a prominent, bulging forehead that makes her look like a dolphin, viciously bullies me about it, taunting me, saying that I eat all the time, that I’m going to be a tub o’ lard, that I love my mother too much. I say it’s not true, though I fear it is. Plus, I’m terrified of Kathy, who on other days will tenderly pat my head and even hug me, telling me I’m cute, before suddenly clamping my ear, pinching harder and harder until my knees buckle; once she even makes me lob curses up at our kitchen window, words so heinous that they might as well be rocks. I remember my mother poking her head out and peering down, her expression tight, confused, most of all fearful of what I might be saying, and immediately I sob. Kathy sweetly tells her that I’m hungry. My mother, who understands little English and is maybe scared of this girl, too, softly orders me to come in, then pulls in the casement window.
Once I’m upstairs, she offers me a snack—cookies, kimbap, a bowl of hot watery rice, which I eat with tiny squares of ham or leftover bulgogi, one spoon at a time. I eat while watching her cook. If she’s not cleaning or laundering, she’s cooking. Every so often, she’ll make a point of telling me she hates it, that she no longer wants to bother but she has to because we must save money. We can’t waste money eating out. My father is a newly minted psychiatrist, but his salary at the Bronx V.A. hospital is barely respectable, and we have no savings, no family in this country, no safety net. We dine out maybe four times a year, three of those for Chinese (there are no Korean restaurants yet), and the rest of the time my mother is at the stove—breakfast, lunch, dinner, as well as making snacks for us midmorning and afternoon, and then late a
t night for my father when he gets home. The other reality is that my parents don’t want to eat non-Korean food; they want to hold on to what they know. What else do they have but the taste of those familiar dishes, which my mother can, for the most part, recreate from ingredients at the nearby A. & P. She’s grateful for the wide, shiny aisles of the chilled supermarket and its brightly lit inventory of canned goods and breakfast cereals and ice cream, but the cabbage is the wrong kind and the meat is oddly butchered and the fish has been set out on the shaved ice pre-filleted, so she can’t tell how fresh it is, and she can’t make a good broth without the head and bones and skin. But she makes do; there’s always garlic, often ginger and scallions, and passable hot peppers. We still have a few cups of the ground red-pepper powder that friends brought over from Seoul, and every once in a while we can get the proper oils and fresh tofu and dried anchovies and sheets of roasted seaweed on a Sunday drive down to Chinatown.
We adore those Chinatown days. I love them especially because it means we skip church and the skeptical regard of the pastor and his wife and the bellowing Hananims and Amens from the congregation that for me are calls to slumber—a break that I see now my parents welcome, too. Somewhere on Bayard or Mott Street, we’ll have a lunch of soup noodles or dim sum and do the shopping with an eye on the time, because the parking lot is expensive and by the hour, and, despite the parade-level litter and the grimy bins of dying eels and carp and the lacquer of black crud on the sidewalks, which she would never otherwise tolerate, my mother seems calmed by the Asian faces and the hawker carts of fried pot stickers and gooey rice cakes and the cans of stewed mackerel and chilies filling the shelves. She’ll go unexpectedly slowly through the crammed aisles of the dry-goods store, lingering over selections that aren’t exactly what she’s looking for but which nonetheless speak to her in a voice I imagine sounds very much like her own: Take your time, silly girl. Enjoy yourself. You’re not going anywhere. Soon enough, the bags of groceries are teetering like drowsy siblings between my sister and me in the back seat of our navy-blue Beetle as we swerve up the F.D.R. Drive. The seats are covered in a light-gray leatherette stippled like the back of a lizard, which I’m constantly picking at with my fingernail, inevitably running over with my tongue. It tastes of erasers and throw-up. My father is one of those people who drive by toggling on and off the gas pedal, lurching us forward for brief stretches and then coasting, the rattling of the fifty-three-horsepower engine establishing the dread prophetic beat, my sister and I know, of our roadside retching—one of us, and sometimes both, barely stumbling out of the car in time to splash the parkway asphalt, stucco the nettles. Now, with the odor of dried squid and spring onions and raw pork enveloping us, we’d be doomed, but luckily we don’t have too far to go to get back to New Rochelle; my father will let us out before searching for a parking spot, my sister and I sprinting for the playground while my mother goes upstairs to empty the bags.
On those post-Chinatown evenings, she’ll set out a plate of fluke or snapper sashimi to start (if she finds any fresh enough), which she serves with gochujang sauce, then broiled spare ribs and scallion fritters and a spicy cold-head stew along with the banchan of vegetables and kimchi, and it’s all so perfect-looking, so gorgeous, that we let out that whimpering, joyous, half-grieving sigh of people long marooned. Yet often enough, apparently, the dishes don’t taste exactly the way they should. My father, the least imperious of men, might murmur the smallest something about the spicing of a dish, its somewhat unusual flavorings, and my mother will bitterly concur, lamenting the type of fermented bean paste she has to use, the stringy quality of the meat, how these Chinatown radishes have no flavor, no crunch, instantly grinding down her lovely efforts to a wan, forgetting dust. We protest in earnest, but it’s no use; she’s not seeking compliments or succor. She can get frantic; she’s a natural perfectionist and worrier made over, by this life in a strange country, into someone too easily distraught. In Korea, she’s a forthright, talented, beautiful woman, but here, at least outside this apartment, she is a woman who appears even slighter than she already is, a woman who smiles quickly but never widely, a foreigner whose English comes out self-throttled, barely voiced, who is listening to herself to the point of a whisper.
Never quite up to her own exalted standards, she is often frustrated, dark-thinking, on edge. Periodically, I’ll catch her gripped in fury at herself for not quite comprehending, say, the instructions on a box of Rice-A-Roni or Hamburger Helper (seemingly magical dinners that my sister and I whine for, despite not actually liking the stuff), revealed in her wringing the packet like a towel until it’s about to burst, then remorsefully opening it and smoothing it out and trying to decipher the back of the box again. I do something similar with toys that I can’t get to work properly, or am tiring of, or sometimes—and with an unequalled, almost electric pleasure—the ones I value most. I’ll take the claw end of a hammer and pry open the roof of a Hot Wheels car, the enamel paint flaking off from the twisting force and gilding my fingertips. I’ll squeeze the clear plastic canopy of the model P-51 Mustang I’ve carefully assembled until it collapses, the head of the tiny half pilot inside shearing off. We are mother and son in this way—we share a compulsion we don’t admire in the other but never call out, either, and, right up to the unsparingly frigid night she dies, nineteen years later, and even now, another nineteen on, I’ll prickle with that heat in my foolish, foolish hands.
A few years earlier, when we briefly lived in Manhattan—this before I can articulate my feelings for her, before I understand how completely and perfectly I can hurt her—I make her cry because of a fried egg. She cooks an egg for me each morning without fail. I might also have with it fried Spam or cereal or a slice of American cheese, which I’ll unwrap myself and fold over into sixteen rough-edged pieces, but always there is a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime, laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It’ll corrupt you for all time. But one morning I’m finally sick of it, I’ve had enough. She never makes an exception, because it’s for my health—everything is for my health, for the good of my bones, my brain, for my daunting, uncertain future—but, rather than eat yet another, I steal into her bedroom with my plate while she’s talking on the telephone with Mrs. Suh (at that time her only friend in the country) and drop it onto her best shoes, black patent-leather pumps. And here’s the rub: there is no sound a fried egg makes. It lands with exquisite silence. This is the dish I’ve been longing to prepare.
Do I confess what I’ve done? Does my face betray the crime? All I remember is how my mother, still holding the phone, and my baby sister, usually squirming in her high chair, both pause and stare at me as I return to the kitchen table. My mother bids Mrs. Suh good-bye and stands over me, eying my plate swiped clean save for the glistening oil. Without a word from either of us, I’m dragged forth, her hand gripping my elbow, and we’re inexplicably moving. It’s as if a homing beacon only she can hear were madly pinging from her bedroom, where I’ve left the sliding closet door open for all to see my work: the yolk broken and oozing inside the well of one shoe, the rubbery white flopped over the shiny ebony toe. It’s a jarring, bizarrely artful mess; boxed in Lucite, it could be titled “Stepping Out, 4.,” or “Mother’s Day Fugue,” but of course she can’t see it that way because she’s hollering, her morning robe falling open because she’s shaking so violently, stamping her foot. The end of the robe’s belt is bunched in her tensed fist, and I think, She may kill me, actually kill me. Or my father will do the job when he gets home. But I’m hugging her leg now, my face pressed against her hip, and, as much as I’m afraid for myself, I’m confused, too, and frightened for her, for tears are distorting her eyes, and she’s saying, in a voice that I will hear always for its quaver of defiance and forfeit, how difficult everything is, how wrong and difficult.
Sh
e’s too indulgent of us, especially of me. I love to eat, so it’s easy for her, though also at times a burden for us both. Each morning at breakfast, after the egg, she asks me what I want for dinner, and except when my father requests Japanese-style curry rice, which I despise (though I enjoy it now) and show my disgust for by dragging my chair into the kitchen and closing the louvered doors to “get away” from the smell, my choice is what we’ll have. As with an emperor, my whims become real. Dinners-from-a-box aside, I have wide-ranging tastes, but increasingly it’s American food I want, dishes I encounter while eating at friends’ apartments, at summer camp, even in the cafeteria at school: meat loaf (with a boiled egg in the middle), Southern fried chicken and mashed potatoes, beef Stroganoff over egg noodles, lasagna. These dishes are much heavier and plainer than ours, but more thrilling to me and my sister and perhaps even to my parents, for it is food without association, unlinked to any past; it’s food that fixes us to this moment only, to this place we hardly know.
My mother, having no idea how the dishes should taste, at first struggles to prepare them, going solely by recipes that she copies into a small notebook from a new friend in the building, Mrs. Churchill, an always smiling, blond-haired, broad-shouldered woman who hails from Vermont and has a shelf of classic cookbooks. It’s excruciatingly slow going at the A. & P. as my mother runs down her shopping list—it’s as if she were at the library searching for a book in the stacks, trying to find the particular spices and herbs, the right kind of macaroni, the right kind of cheese or cream (heavy or sour or cream or cottage cheese and a perhaps related cheese called ricotta and the deeply puzzling cheese that is Parmesan, which comes in a shaker, and is unrefrigerated), the right canned tomatoes (chopped or crushed or puréed—what, exactly, is “puréed”?), each decision another chance to mar the dish beyond my ignorant recognition. I can be tyrannical, if I wish. I can squash her whole day’s work with a grimace, or some blithe utterance: It’s fatty. It’s too peppery. It doesn’t taste the same. You can watch her face ice over. Shatter. Naturally, she can’t counter me, and this makes her furious, but soon enough she’s simply miserable, her pretty eyes gone lightless and faraway, which is when I relent and tell her it’s still good, because of course it is, which I demonstrate by shoving the food in as fast as I can, stuffing my awful mouth.