by Andy Raskin
“Matt, I feel like maybe I’m a monster.”
“You’re not a monster, even though you might have done some monstrous things.”
Somehow, because Matt said it, I was open to the possibility that it might be true.
“Will I ever be able to have a normal relationship?”
“Only Ando can answer that.”
“What?”
“What you need to do now,” Matt said, “is turn over your life to Ando.”
“What does that mean?”
“Repeat after me,” Matt instructed, closing his eyes. “O Momofuku.”
In my mind I was already praying—that the couples on the lawn weren’t close enough to hear us. I felt like an idiot, and I wondered if Matt was a religious zealot. In my America Online dating profile, in the space for a personal quote, I once wrote, “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” I had heard the line in business school, attributed by one of my professors to the management guru Jack Welch. It reflected perfectly my belief that everything in one’s life was under one’s control. If you wanted badly enough to stop cheating on women, you simply stopped. If you committed not to date or have sex for a certain amount of time, even if it was difficult, you summoned the will to do that. I certainly didn’t think that praying—let alone to an old man in Japan—was going to help. But Matt had been nice enough to sign on as my mentor, and I didn’t want to upset him. Besides, I didn’t know what else to do.
“O Momofuku,” I repeated.
“Show me how to live so that I may better do your will.”
Matt would later assure me getting kicked out of the sushi bar and getting sick at Ramen Jiro—along with everything that happened next—was all Ando’s doing. I’ve come to believe that he might be right, though it’s certainly open to interpretation. What is not, is that shortly after I began praying to Ando, ramen began showing up more and more in my life.
“Show me how to live so that I may better do your will.”
A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MOMOFUKU ANDO, PART 2 : NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF
Japanese bookstores are full of comic books about business. There’s one about the life of Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, and another about Carlos Ghosn, the French executive from Renault who rescued Nissan Motor Co. There are comic books about Sony’s Akio Morita, and about the origins of 7-Eleven, digital cameras, the bullet train, and the liquid crystal display.
There are several comic book versions of Ando’s life story. My favorite, The Challenges of Nissin Food Products, begins with Ando’s birth. In the opening frames, Ando’s paternal grandfather lifts his newborn grandchild up to the night sky, and just then a white object streaks across the stars. Never mind that Halley’s Comet wasn’t visible to the naked eye until two months later. Edited under the auspices of Nissin, the comic contains other historical distortions. The nameplate on the house in which Ando was born says ANDO, for one, and the house appears to be in Japan.
In fact, Ando makes clear in his first autobiography, Conception of a Fantastic Idea (1983), that he was born in Taiwan while the island was under Japanese rule. (China ceded control of Taiwan in 1895 by signing the Treaty of Shimonoseki, ending the Sino-Japanese War.) Ando’s family name started out as Wu, and the characters of his first name were pronounced “Bai-fu.”
The comic book has not been the only attempt to downplay Ando’s Taiwanese lineage. In 2001, Nihon Keizai Shimbun—Japan’s Wall Street Journal—made Ando the subject of “My Résumé,” a serial column that relates the life stories of historic figures. The following year, the newspaper’s publication arm compiled the columns and released them as a book—Magic Noodles: The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen. In a preface, Ando states that he had been asked for his consent to appear in “My Résumé” numerous times over the years, but that he always refused out of modesty. In the spring of 2001, he was asked again.
Needless to say, I turned down the offer—until I heard the following comment, conveyed to me by a member of my corporate communications staff:
“Considering that instant ramen is widely seen as one of the foremost inventions of the twentieth century, it would seem strange if Mr. Ando did not appear in ‘My Résumé.’ People might think he’s hiding something from the public.” The comment was made, according to my staff, by the journalist in charge of the “My Résumé” column.
I have nothing to hide or be ashamed of in my life. I have done nothing that might make me an object of contempt or scorn. This is a fundamental belief that has sustained and supported me for ninety-two years.
Ando writes in Magic Noodles, “I spent my childhood” in Taiwan, but all references to his Taiwanese parents are gone. No wonder, then, that when The New York Times ran an obituary about Ando, the newspaper initially stated that he had been born to Japanese parents who happened to be living in Taiwan.
The Times later published a correction.
Matt instructed me to keep a small notebook in my pocket at all times, and to write in it when I felt like breaking my commitment. Whenever I wanted to post a personal ad on Craigslist or ask out a woman at a party or in a coffee shop, I was supposed to write a memo to Momofuku Ando describing what else was happening or what I had been thinking about. For the first couple of weeks, I didn’t write in the notebook at all. I went to morning meetings at the church nearly every day, but most of the time I was in a state of shock—there were also moments of euphoria—over confronting this part of my life. I couldn’t believe that people in the meetings were talking openly about what they were talking about. I wondered what my colleagues at the magazine would have thought if they knew what I was doing before work.
Gradually, though, the cravings came back. It was difficult not to act on them, but I followed Matt’s instructions and wrote in the notebook every time. In each entry, I marked the number of days that had passed in my abstinence period.
Momofuku: (17 days) Josh didn’t like my story idea. Said it was “facile.”
Momofuku: (19 days) I sucked today playing Ultimate Frisbee. Matt said I should try some new activities, especially new activities where women were not the central focus. So I showed up at an Ultimate Frisbee pickup game in Golden Gate Park. I dropped three passes, and one of the guys on my team said, “Maybe we should screen new guys before we let them play.” Later I made a great pass that resulted in a score, but no one gave me any credit.
Momofuku: (22 days) I finally got Josh to let me run with my story idea and now I’m sitting here at my desk in my tiny office staring at the computer screen and I don’t know what to write. I have no idea. Maybe it was facile.
Momofuku: (22 days) I am sitting around my apartment doing nothing. I have no friends. I’m bored.
Momofuku: (23 days) I just got bawled out by the managing editor. We were in the big story meeting and I was so afraid of being criticized that I said, “Would it be possible if I just said my idea and we moved on to the next person?” The managing editor called me into his office later and told me I was the most conceited person he had ever met and that he had worked with writers who had reason to be conceited but even they weren’t as conceited as I was. I really, really want to go on a date tonight.
I noticed that, at least in these first few entries, almost every time I wanted to break my commitment, there had been some conflict. It did not escape me that the conflict usually involved men.
The next appearance of ramen in my life came several weeks later. I’ll describe what led up to it, beginning with some entries in my notebook.
Momofuku: (31 days) I am in a coffee shop, and there is a woman at the next table I want to talk to. Just before coming here, my father called. Actually, he left a message on my answering machine. It started with, “Hi, And. It’s Dad.” He always calls me And, but I knew something was wrong because whenever my parents leave a message, it’s always my mother who leaves it. My father spoke in his usual flat, unemotional tone, even though he was telling me that his mother was dead. “It’s Grandma Sylv
ia,” he said. “She succumbed to the cancer.” I feel guilty because when I heard that Grandma Sylvia was dead, the first thing I thought about was her clam chowder. It was white, but loose, not starchy. The “secret” ingredient was dill, but she used so much of it that it was hardly a secret.
Momofuku: (33 days) Back in Long Island for Grandma Sylvia’s funeral. It’s two a.m. I am resisting the urge to go down to the den and log on to my mother’s computer. Momofuku, if she only knew what I have been writing to you about. She picked me up at Kennedy Airport a couple of hours ago. She was waiting at the baggage claim even though my flight didn’t get in until after midnight. The first thing she said was, “Are you hungry?” It was right out of a Woody Allen movie, so I said, “Ma, you sound like you’re out of a Woody Allen movie.” She said, “Just because I don’t want you to starve, that makes me Woody Allen?” I didn’t mean that she was Woody Allen, but that she reminded me of the mothers in Woody Allen movies. Whatever. I can’t believe she’s almost sixty-five. She’s in great shape for her age. On the way to the short-term parking lot, she said she had eliminated processed sugars from her diet and that I should do the same. Basically, I think she was telling me to lose weight. When we got to the parking lot, she led me to her new car. It’s an SUV called a GMC Denali. I remarked that the car was huge, and she started rubbing her forehead, which she does when she feels guilty. She said the car was the president’s fault, because he had pushed a law through Congress granting a tax break to anyone who purchased small trucks, and the Denali qualified. “It’s going to be like $10,000 to buy this car when all is said and done taxwise,” my mother told me. “We would have paid $30,000 for any other car we were looking at. So the president gave us no choice. I feel terrible. I want to put a bumper sticker on the back that says, ‘The President Made Me Buy It.’ ” I’m staying in my old room. My parents have painted it blue and put frilly throw pillows on the bed so it looks like a guest room.
In the morning, when I awoke, Grandpa Walter was standing in front of me. He had been sleeping in my sister’s old room.
“Hey, buddy. How’s it going?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Grandpa, I’m really sorry.”
He seemed not to hear me, and I remembered that he had begun using a hearing aid. His once-broad physique—the product of years of working in machine shops and being on sailboats—had begun to slump.
“Listen, Andrew. Will you drive me to the cemetery?”
In her will, Grandma Sylvia had asked to be cremated and to have her ashes tossed over the Atlantic Ocean. That was because she and Grandpa Walter had spent nearly every summer of their lives sailing, usually off the coast of Brooklyn. When he was in his twenties, my grandfather found a small whaling boat beached in Sheepshead Bay. He took it to his father’s metal shop, where he patched a hole in the hull, soldered on a mast, and made a sail out of canvas. He taught himself how to sail, then sold the whaling boat and bought another sailboat. My grandparents would sail north to New England, and as far south as the Caribbean. My father and his brothers grew up sailing, and so did I, though I never really took to it. Even though Grandma Sylvia had asked to be cremated, she had also requested a headstone bearing her name in the family’s cemetery plot in Staten Island.
“Sure, Grandpa. I can drive you there.”
My parents caught a ride with my uncle and left me the Denali. I backed the “car” out of the garage and onto the driveway, giving Grandpa Walter a hand getting in. As I drove toward the Long Island Expressway, we passed several split-level homes being torn down to make room for new construction. Grandpa Walter muttered a remark about surging real estate prices, and at the mention of money I made a note to write later in my notebook.
Momofuku: (34 days) I was thinking today, while driving Grandpa Walter to the funeral, that after the memorial service I wanted to call Jennifer, in Connecticut. What was I thinking about just before that moment? Grandpa mentioned real estate prices, and then I thought about how I don’t own a home and how I’m the first entrepreneurial failure in four Raskin generations.
Max Raskin, Grandpa’s father, emigrated from Russia, and with two of his brothers built a business converting horse-drawn carriages into motorized trucks. (To perform a conversion, Max bought a Model T Ford and scrapped everything but the chassis, which he soldered underneath the carriage.) According to the family history, the company, Standard Body Corporation, produced three-quarters of the trucks in metropolitan New York by 1931. When trucks from Ford and General Motors flooded the market, Max secured a niche, converting regular trucks into ice-cream trucks and other specialized vehicles. As a teenager, Grandpa Walter worked in Max’s factory, helping solder miles of copper tubing onto the insides of truck walls; the interiors were cooled by pumping refrigerants such as Freon gas through the pipes. Then Walter had a better idea. He stamped a flow pattern in a metal plate the size of the truck wall, soldered that to a flat metal sheet, and installed the assembly in the side of a truck. He got a patent, and with capital from his father, he founded a company called Dean Products (named for its address on Brooklyn’s Dean Street), which sold heating and cooling surfaces to everyone from Budweiser to NASA. My father worked for Dean until he was forty years old, but he didn’t always enjoy working with his relatives, so he quit. His friend offered to teach my father the home-building business in exchange for sailing lessons. Later, my father formed his own, very successful, real estate development company.
Driving along the expressway, I asked my grandfather a question I had never asked him before.
“How are you feeling?”
“Whassat?”
The hearing aid. I repeated the question.
My grandfather tilted his head and opened his hand, which is what he always did when he was sharing important information.
“You know, I went with a lot of girls before I met your grandmother.”
This was unexpected and, needless to say, new territory for our relationship.
“I thought you and Grandma got married when you were nineteen.”
They met on a beach, near Coney Island.
“Well, yeah, that’s true. But there were some things before that.”
Things?
“In any case,” he continued, “when I met Sylvia, I knew that she was special because it was going to be about more than just sex.”
I tried, unsuccessfully, not to imagine my grandparents having intercourse.
“I knew that I could build something with her.”
I didn’t know what to say. “That’s great” was the best I could muster. Ugh.
“It’s very important to find that,” he advised. “Very important.”
We crossed the Verrazano Bridge. The sun was out, but fallen leaves were swirling in the wind. When we got to the cemetery, around twenty people were standing near Grandma Sylvia’s headstone—mostly relatives and friends from my grandparents’ sailing days. I helped Grandpa Walter out of the car and he joined the other mourners. He gave an unscripted eulogy, repeating the stuff about how he always knew he could build something with my grandmother, but this time he didn’t explicitly mention sex. Later, we all had lunch at a nearby diner. I don’t remember why, but instead of riding home with me, Grandpa Walter left with someone else, and my parents drove me back to their house in the Denali. On the way, my mother announced that she wanted to be cremated, too, but she didn’t care to have her ashes spread anywhere. Rather, she hoped to be split into two urns that my sister and I would keep in our living rooms. I listened to my parents’ conversation from the backseat.
“That’s a little weird, Jude.”
“What’s weird?”
“It would be a little weird for them to have you in their living rooms.”
“What’s weird about that?”
“Where would they put you, on the mantel?”
“OK, they can bury the urns in their backyards.”
“What if they move? You’ll be buried in some stranger’s backyard.”
“They can dig me up and take me with them.”
Shortly after the funeral, my grandfather moved to an assisted-living facility. To prepare his house for sale, my parents, along with my aunt and uncle, flew to Florida. They sent Polaroids to all our relatives of items my grandfather didn’t want, and asked everyone to put in requests. I didn’t have a big apartment, so I inquired about my grandmother’s KitchenAid mixer. Everyone, it turned out, wanted the KitchenAid mixer. I settled instead for a framed photograph of my grandparents on their sailboat, a dictionary on a display stand, and Grandma Sylvia’s recipe box. UPS delivered the package a few weeks later. I hung the sailing photograph in my living room, and set up the dictionary on its stand near my desk.
The recipe box was made of pressboard, its cover attached with a rusted hinge. Opening the box, I saw that it was stuffed with index cards. I wondered if Grandma Sylvia’s clam chowder recipe was among them, so I reached in and pulled out a random card.
The title was “Cousin Jody’s Asian Coleslaw,” and the list of ingredients included “instant ramen, one-half cup (crushed).”
A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MOMOFUKU ANDO, PART 3 : SOMETHING CUTTING INTO HIS HEART
The various accounts I have read of Ando’s life agree on many points. For instance, they all state that his parents died in Taiwan when he was very young (although none explains how), and that, along with two older brothers and a younger sister, he was raised by his paternal grandfather, a textile distributor.