by Andy Raskin
Beings are numberless, I vow to save them
Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to end them
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them
Buddha’s way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it
Later the head monk identified what he had chanted as the four great vows of the bodhisattva. I didn’t know what that was about, but number two made me think of the hosts on Go Forth.
I came home thoroughly rested, and before reporting back to work, I wrote something else in my notebook.
Momofuku: I want to quit my job.
YOU SHOULD JUST HUNKER DOWN AND WRITE SOME STORIES ABOUT BIG COMPANIES. YOU SHOULD NEVER QUIT A JOB BEFORE YOU HAVE A NEW JOB.
When I told Josh I was going to leave, he seemed to understand. He threw a good-bye party in the large conference room, where he made a speech about my contributions. Everyone ate Vietnamese sandwiches, which was what Josh always served at resignation parties. I left the office in the afternoon and rode home on the Muni streetcar.
The next morning, I got dressed and walked out to the Muni stop. When I remembered that I no longer had a job to commute to, I just stood at the stop and watched the trains come and go. Matt had asked me to pay attention to my desires, and now I was not only single, but also unemployed. I didn’t know whether to move my right foot or my left foot, so for a long time I didn’t move either one.
Eventually I went home and watched a samurai movie.
Dear Momofuku,
I wake up and my nipples are burning. I tell my mother about it, and she makes an appointment with Dr. D, our pediatrician.
Dr. D examines me, then directs me to wait in the waiting room. This is unusual, because Dr. D always invites kids back to his office to hear the diagnosis with their mothers. In the car on the way home, my mother doesn’t say anything about what Dr. D has told her. I wonder if it’s something serious.
I’m doing homework at night, when there’s a knock at my door.
“Hey, And. It’s Dad. Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
My father enters my room and sits down on the floor, cross-legged, next to the blue-and-red bookcase that he built for me. I have decorated the bookcase with Planet of the Apes stickers.
“So your mother tells me your body is going through certain changes,” he says, “and I thought I would come in and talk to you about that.”
Now it’s all clear. Dr. D saw my pubes, the nipple burning is a symptom of puberty, and my mother has ordered my father into my room to give me a talk about the birds and the bees.
My father’s version is more like a vocabulary lesson.
“There are certain words and phrases you’re probably hearing from your friends,” he begins, “and I just want to make sure you know what they mean.”
THIS IS EMBARRASSING. YOU SHOULD TRY TO GET HIM TO LEAVE.
“I’m really busy, Dad.”
“For instance, bag.” Do you know what bag means?”
“Dad, I have a lot of homework to do!”
“It means ‘scrotum.’ ”
My entire life, I will never hear anyone use the word bag in this manner.
“You also might hear your friends throw around the phrase jerk off. Do you know what that means?”
OH GOD, JUST SAY YOU KNOW.
“Yesssss, Dad.”
I have no idea what jerk off means.
My father gets through necking, intercourse, and balls before he finally leaves. A year later, our family moves from Brooklyn to the suburbs on Long Island because my mother wants better schools for my sister and me. Our new house is not far from Dr. G, so I still see him twice a week. The kid next door, Stuart, asks what my name is, and I tell him it’s Andy, not Andrew. Andy sounds less conceited, friendlier.
My parents join a yacht club in Manhasset Bay, which is not far from our new house. They belonged to a yacht club in Brooklyn, too, but it wasn’t very fancy—just some docks and a locker room. This one has a pool.
I’m swimming in the yacht club pool when a girl named Sharon jumps in next to me. She’s wearing a lime green bikini, and she has long blond hair. She’s treading water. That night, before going to bed, I think about Sharon treading water in her lime green bikini, and after about an hour, a jet of milky liquid shoots into the air and lands on the clock radio behind me.
It’s the kind of clock radio where white digits are printed on black plastic tabs, and the display is illuminated by an orange LED.
Every night I think about Sharon and her bikini before bed, and every night, after about an hour, my clock radio suffers a hit. The reason it takes so long is that I don’t yet know how I can speed the process along.
I’m hanging out at Dan’s house, listening to Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, when I notice a crusty tube sock on the floor near his bed.
“What’s that?”
“My spooge sock,” Dan says, and because he’s cupping his hand and shaking it in the air, I get the idea that you’re supposed to touch yourself.
“What do you use?” Dan asks.
“Spooge sock,” I say, even though I’ve never heard of one. I’ve been using plain old Kleenex to wipe down the clock radio, but from the way Dan talks, it sounds like all our friends have spooge socks.
My family takes a vacation at the Nevele, a resort hotel in the Catskill Mountains. We go ice-skating and enjoy all-you-can-eat buffets. Every evening, there’s a celebrity guest speaker, and on the night before we leave, the celebrity guest is Tommy Lasorda, the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The New York Yankees, my favorite baseball team, have just defeated Lasorda’s Dodgers in the World Series, and he’s recapping the games. The TV announcers made a big deal about how Lasorda dedicated the World Series to the memory of his friend, a baseball player who recently passed away. I am such a huge Yankee fan that I want to rub it in.
“Yes, the girl in the back,” Lasorda says during the question-and-answer session. My hair is puffed out in what will become known as a “Jewfro.” I think it looks great, but Lasorda thinks I’m a girl.
“You dedicated the World Series to the memory of that friend of yours. Now that you lost, how do you feel?”
The Nevele audience buzzes. I’ve said something I shouldn’t have.
ARE YOU SO INSENSITIVE, SO UNCARING, THAT YOU COULD EQUATE WINNING A BASEBALL GAME WITH THE DEATH OF A MAN?
“You know, young lady,” Lasorda says, “that’s just baseball. And you’re talking about a good man’s life. Shame on you.”
My mother is sitting next to me, and she’s clearly embarrassed.
“I wish you had told me you were going to ask that question.”
My family checks out of the Nevele the next morning, and I am silent in the car.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
When we get home, I go to my room and think about Sharon in her green bikini. For a little while, at least, nothing is wrong with me.
Sincerely,
Andy
Between watching samurai movies and writing the letters, I searched the Internet for books written by Ando. I found the two autobiographies, Conception of a Fantastic Idea and Magic Noodles, and I learned that he had penned several essay collections, including Peace Follows from a Full Stomach, Noodle Road, and Food Changes with the Times: Field Notes of Momofuku Ando. I ordered them all.
In his essay collections, Ando documents a series of culinary research excursions—in Japan and abroad—during which he studied noodles and other foods. Some of these have oddly beautiful titles, such as “Noodles Are Ambassadors of Peace” and “The Sadness of Tea.” More interesting, however, is the way in which the autobiographies seem to hide details of his life. There’s his murky decision to reside permanently in Japan, the paucity of details around his marriage to Masako, and of course, the mysterious disappearance of his eldest son, Hirotoshi. I knew from Nissin annual reports that Hirotoshi served as Nissin’s CEO in the early 1980s, shortly before his younger brother Koki took over, but in the books publishe
d after that, there was no mention of him.
One night, just as I was about to go to bed, an instant message popped up on my computer screen.
“Did you hear about the summit?”
The message was from Zen.
“The what?” I instant-messaged back.
Zen e-mailed me the URL of a Japanese newspaper article describing the fifth biennial World Ramen Summit, a conference sponsored by an organization called the World Instant Noodles Association. Under the official slogan “Happy World with Ramen,” the summit had brought together representatives of the world’s largest instant noodle manufacturers. Previous summits had taken place in Tokyo, Bali, Bangkok, and Shanghai; Seoul had hosted this fifth one. On the summit’s official Web site, I found a photograph of Ando presiding over a dais, and another in which he was enjoying a performance by South Korean schoolchildren. The summit had ended with participants signing the Seoul Declaration, in which they pledged to uphold common manufacturing standards and to donate more instant ramen to disaster relief efforts around the world.
“When did this happen?” I typed to Zen.
“Last week.”
I probably could have gotten a press pass, even though I had quit my job. I could have met Ando.
I typed back an expletive.
“Andy, do you still want to meet him?”
Momofuku: I (still) want to meet you.
ENOUGH ALREADY. YOU SHOULD WANT SOMETHING ELSE.
“OK,” Zen typed. “In the next five seconds, tell me how you’re going to do it.”
“Five seconds?”
Zen sent another link. This one led to the page on Amazon Japan for Zen’s newest book, Wow Meetings. A line of marketing copy under the title said, “Based on the management coaching philosophy of Jew Howard Goldman!” Howard was the management coach we had hired at our start-up, and Zen considered him a mentor.
“You make it sound like Jew is his title,” I typed.
“Andy, it’s a term of respect.”
Zen explained that quickly coming up with ideas was a tenet of Wow Meetings, though a similar concept also appears in Wow Method under the heading “Answer Your Big Question in Five Seconds.” Adopting speed chess as a metaphor, Zen asserts that 86 percent of all moves are just as good as moves the same players would make without time limits. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to know what a player would do in the exact same situation without a time limit, so Zen had obviously made up the figure. I decided to go along anyway.
“I could write him a letter.”
“You’ve never written him a letter?”
“I e-mailed his PR people a bunch of times, but I guess I’ve never written directly to him.”
“I find that when I write a letter directly to the person I’m trying to meet, my success rate in hearing back from that person jumps thirty-six percent.”
Another made-up number, to be sure, but I was grateful for Zen’s support.
“By when will you write the letter?” Zen asked.
Wow Meetings, I learned later, was all about making clear commitments with firm deadlines.
“How about in the next hour?”
“Wow,” Zen typed back.
I could have written it faster in English, but I felt that I would make more of an impact by sending the letter in Japanese.
I typed out a draft.
Dear Mr. Ando,
Japan must be in the rainy season now. Are the hydrangeas in bloom?
I’m an American writer, currently living in San Francisco, on the west coast of the United States. I can write in Japanese because of a study-abroad program I did almost twenty years ago in Tokyo. In those days, the automated teller machines were only open on weekdays from nine to five, and I often forgot to withdraw cash before the weekends. I survived many weekends with only a few hundred yen in my pocket thanks to your instant ramen.
I have been moved by many of your famous sayings, such as “Mankind is noodlekind” and “Peace follows from a full stomach.” Recently I have been reading your books, and I find myself wanting to hear your thoughts directly. In particular, I’m still unsure why you set out to invent instant ramen after losing all of your money.
I would very much like to meet you, and I’m wondering if it would be possible to arrange an interview. I can visit Japan this summer, and would be grateful for any time you can spare.
Sincerely,
Andy Raskin
I e-mailed the letter to Zen so he could check my Japanese, and he made several edits. He struck the part about the ATMs because he felt it would be better if I sounded like a man who always walked around with only a few hundred yen in my pocket. He also changed the closing salutation from “Sincerely” to “Praying that these sentiments have reached your heart, I am . . .”
“Do you have his mailing address?” Zen typed.
I didn’t, but then I remembered a Brady Bunch episode where Bobby takes a photograph of Greg’s football game and blows it up to find out if one of the players stepped out of bounds. It might have been a real Brady Bunch episode, or it might have been a dream. (As a child, I often dreamed that I was a friend of the Brady kids, and that they would invite me over for lunch.) I connected my digital camera to my computer and downloaded the photos of Ando’s front gate. I zoomed in on the ANDO nameplate.
The address was right under the kanji characters for Ando’s name!
I sent the letter by Federal Express, and after two days, checked the tracking number. The letter had been delivered and signed for by “M. Ando.”
I e-mailed Zen: “That’s either Momofuku or Masako!”
Three days later, I received another express mail envelope. It came so quickly that I never imagined it could be a response. Unfortunately, Ando hadn’t written it.
Mr. Raskin:
Greetings. I apologize for taking so much time to write back.
Unlike America, Japan is now in the middle of the rainy season. It’s one rainy day after the next.
It is wonderful that you read Mr. Ando’s books, that you identified with his thoughts, and that you desire a meeting with him.
Unfortunately, Mr. Ando is very busy with his daily duties. In addition, he is ninety-six years old. So I am going to have to deny your request to set up an appointment with him. I wish that I could have been more helpful in realizing your desire, but I hope you will understand that it is very difficult.
However, if you like, you are welcome to visit Ikeda City’s Instant Ramen Invention Museum, where you can learn more about Ando’s philosophy and the history of instant ramen. I am sure that one of our Public Relations staff members would be happy to be your guide.
I hope you will consider it.
Praying for your continued success,
Kazuhiro Fujioka
Manager, Secretary Division
Nissin Food Products Co., Ltd.
There was obviously poor interdepartmental communication at Nissin, because this Fujioka seemed unaware of my previous attempt to meet Ando and my visit to the museum. I was about to throw out the envelope, when I felt something inside. I reached in and pulled it out. It was a small green book.
The book was titled Praise the Appetite and it was a newly published collection of Ando’s short, food-themed essays. Most were about his invention of instant ramen, but not all. In “I Am a Salad Bar Man,” he proclaimed a preference for simple foods (like salad) over lavish meals when traveling abroad. An essay about fish began with the line, “Striped bass brings up certain memories.” In “Instant Ramen Finally Reaches Outer Space,” he summarized Nissin’s successful effort to develop a version of instant ramen that could be prepared and consumed in zero gravity. First enjoyed by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard Space Shuttle Discovery (on July 26, 2005), Space Ram came in a basic soy sauce flavor and—in response to Noguchi’s requests—also in curry, miso, and tonkotsu varieties.