by Roy Choi
But the alley was pristine. Everything was neatly stacked. No graffiti, no trash. I went around to the front and realized it was a Ralphs supermarket. It was around October, and the entrance overflowed with beautiful pumpkins. The walls were plastered with drawings of witches and goblins, none of which looked scary—the witches looked like the Good Witch, and there were handsome goblins to match. There were people giving each other hugs, moms chatting away with their young kids in tow. Girl Scouts and AYSO tables set up on the sidewalk. Everything was moving in such harmony, so clean, so cheerful.
Something nagged at me. I just couldn’t put my finger on it, though, couldn’t place it. What was different about this place? There was something. Something beyond all the cleanliness, beyond the birds singing, beyond the smiles, beyond the serenity. Then, right as I caught my reflection in the supermarket security mirror, it hit me.
Everybody was white.
White. All white.
It blew my mind.
I didn’t see another Asian, Latino, black, or Indian kid. For days. Literally.
I really wasn’t in Kansas anymore. This was Villa Park, Orange County, a small town of 2.1 square miles that, even though it was surrounded by the lower- and middle-class cities of Orange and Anaheim, was populated with doctors and lawyers and CEOs living in million-dollar homes on streets with names like Covington Circle, Peppertree Drive, and Colony Grove Lane. A town that had fewer than a dozen stop signs, no streetlamps, and no lighted signs. A town cut out from the hillsides of the Santiago Mountains. There was no bus system, and trust, if you walked the streets, you would get stopped by Villa Park’s finest. Almost every kid got a new car at sixteen, and girls actually attended a debutante ball.
I was doomed.
SEVENTH GRADE WAS ALREADY into its first month when we moved to town, so I had to jump on that moving train while also dealing with all the shit that comes with puberty and pimples. By then I was a geeky thirteen-year-old, with braces and a peach-fuzz mustache, tall and growing taller (from five-foot-six to five-ten in three months!). For all the ups and downs of being a latchkey kid, for all the thrills of hiding jewels on my person across Downtown Los Angeles, nothing could have prepared me for Cerro Villa Junior High School.
Everybody dressed in shorts and flip-flops and had peroxide-blond hair. There were some Goth kids and some rockabillys and a couple Mohawks mixed into the scene. The girls were so pretty with their sandy blond hair, and the dudes seemed so cool talking about surfing sets at Newport Beach and the knee-deep powder at Mammoth Mountain. Everybody listened to Oingo Boingo, Depeche Mode, and the Cure.
Me, I tried to catch up, but I felt like I was a lifetime behind. I had never heard of alt-rock, because I was watching Soul Train and listening to oldies. Up until this point I was pretty shy and never had too many friends—we moved too much for me to have anything other than a few school friends at any given moment. And here I was the new kid at school again. I looked for my angle to fit in.
They put me in honors classes with all the smart kids, and I don’t know if that was my mom up to her old tricks or if that’s where all the Asians just automatically went. Because that’s where I saw all the Asian kids in the school. All three of them. They were quiet and smart and kept to themselves in their own little group. But that wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to be another weird Asian kid in an all-white school, a furry new pet orangutan to look at and poke. So I went on the offense first: I became the class clown. I played dumb and cracked jokes in class. And it worked.
The kids in class thought I was hilarious. Oh shit, did you really just say that!? Yeah, shit, I really did just say that. I was sent to the principal’s office a lot as a result of just saying this and that, but I always exited the classroom to a standing ovation. I was laying tracks in this new town, and I sure as hell was going to make sure everyone could hear my beat.
OUTSIDE MY CLASS CLOWNING, I played sports. Offensive lineman on the football team, third baseman on the baseball team, bench warmer on the basketball team. I took up other extracurriculars, too: Home ec. Woodshop. And band. I picked up the trombone because it looked simple compared to the saxophone and trumpet, and it looked real fun, too, with the slide bar and the big mouthpiece. I was curious about how the sound came through an instrument without buttons or signals for the note; I wanted to figure it out. I thought it’d be an easy riddle to crack, but boy was I wrong.
Lucky for me, I sat next to a guy named Rodney, a pudgy white guy with a crew cut and reddish freckles, always with his backpack real high and tight on his back. He was a saxophone man, and together we’d try to figure out how the hell to play our instruments. Just like a real team. We only really hung out before, during, and after class, but sometimes that’s all you need to forge a bond. He was quiet and strong, and though he never really laughed, he did have a dry sense of humor, and he always cracked a smile at my clownin’ ways.
Rodney was my first real friend in this new Oz, but it wasn’t meant to be. He loved the outdoors, especially dirt bikes and ATVs. One day toward the end of seventh grade, his ATV flipped over backward as he rode it up a sand dune, crushing him. He was the first of three best friends in my life to die too early, and those last few weeks of school after his death were especially awful. A lonely trombone player wailing next to an empty seat.
I MET FRANK in honors English, while I was clowning real hard on Thoreau and Walden. I had the whole class in stitches and my teacher really believing my stupid questions about a deer who had feelings. That caught Frank’s attention. He invited me over to his house to hang, and we just hit it off right away.
Frank was a kid beyond his thirteen years, a mutt mix of Irish, Mexican, Italian, and who knows what else. He was tall with curly brown hair and a wiry muscular frame. He had a younger sister we called Goo-Goo and a younger brother, Max. He wasn’t that rich, and his parents were going through some relationship problems, so he found his release in hard-core heavy metal, the satanic bible, and Monty Python, all of which he introduced me to, his captive audience. I often stuck around his place for dinner; his family cooked a lot—mostly some version of home-style Mexican food like chili verde, tamales, nachos, barbacoa—and I really enjoyed eating there and having dinnertime with my new best friend.
But while Frank and I operated roughly on the same level, the other kids at school were playing a totally different game. If I was culture-shocked by all that peroxide and shit I saw on campus, I was electrified when I saw what went on in those boys’ and girls’ homes. Walking into their houses was like nothing I had ever seen or even knew existed: we’re talking 6,500-square-foot mini-mansions with huge spare rooms lined with arcade games, pinball machines, and pool tables. Closets that resembled the inside of a Ralph Lauren store. Interiors decked out in hand-carved mahogany woodwork and Italian marble. Backyards that looked like public parks with their full-sized tennis and basketball courts and fully landscaped rock formation swimming pools. Six-car garages.
And their kitchens! Refrigerators the size of whole walls, masked in the same woodwork as the banisters. Inside, fruit platters. Who the fuck has fruit platters in their fridge just because? On top of that, four different kinds of juice, every flavor of yogurt, ten different kinds of cold cuts, five different kinds of sodas, ice cream in every color of the rainbow. Pop open the freezer: so many frozen TV dinners that they had to be stacked on their sides like books on a shelf.
Their pantries were filled with more cookies than I could count, and if you wanted chips and dip, you had your choice of seven different types of chips and, for dip, anything from bean to guacamole. Then Pop-Tarts, cereals, cookies, fruit roll-ups, two-liter soda bottles. I dug it big-time and went to town.
Let’s put those Pop-Tarts in the toaster and unwrap all the fruit roll-ups and paste them together to make one large blanket to eat. Okay, I’ll take a chocolate chip cookie, an iced oatmeal cookie, a butter cookie, a Nilla wafer, and a couple logs of Flaky Flix. You got chocolate milk and strawberry milk? Brin
g it.
At first my new friends were a little shocked by my culture shock. But it just took one crazy guy—me—to jump in the pool, and all the racial and cultural barriers were lifted. Then it was like, fuck it. Dive in. All the food they knew as normal became fun again as they watched Tarzan in the City devour it all, fistful by fistful.
BACK HOME, I wasn’t disappointed so much as I was reality-checked. Our refrigerator wasn’t carved out of teak harvested from an Indonesian forest, and it sure as hell didn’t have shingled fruit platters and Brie cheese. Instead, it was filled with bubbling cauldrons of spicy fermentation. Our house smelled like kimchi and sour soybean paste, not potpourri and potatoes. And that was okay by me: sometimes no matter how exciting a new trip can be, all you want to do is get back home, curl up with your own pillow, and sink into its comforting, familiar reality. Even if that reality consists of salted aged fish eggs and grilled pig intestines.
But even as the food in our fridge gave me something to hold on to in my brand-new world, watching my parents navigate theirs set me afloat all over again. They were doing exactly what they thought they had to do for business, for networking, for the family: working every day at the store and in the trenches of Downtown L.A., of course, but also drinking and partying more and more. Staying out late at karaoke bars. Kissing the ass of important politicians and doctors within the Korean community. Just to sell a damn rock.
I watched all this go down and knew they could run circles around half those jokers. I wanted them to run those laps—but, no, they were content to be the ones playing the court jesters just so they could make the sale. I wished they didn’t. I wished they could see that they were the kings, not the clowns.
But even though I wished it was different, I knew they thought they were laying the foundation and setting the perfect path for their kids to earn countless achievement awards, score high on the SATs, graduate at the tops of their classes, and attend Ivy League schools. Boom boom boom. Our new life was supposed to be the perfect incubator for my sister and me.
But.
But they were so busy paving that golden road they forgot to check to see if I was ready to go. If they had, they would have found their golden boy slowly heading in the opposite direction, following Frank into the comfort of his world, moving on from K-EARTH 101 (“The Greatest Hits on Earth”) to KNAC 105.5 (“PURE ROCK”), swapping Barry White for Black Sabbath, Frankie Valli for Led Zeppelin. And taking that crucial first puff of weed. When seventh grade came to an end, so did my innocence.
Not even the Cure could save me.
MAGIC FISH DIP
* * *
The refrigerators of my classmates at Villa Park were stuffed full of all sorts of dip: onion dip, cheese dip, you name it. As for me, our house always had something pink in my refrigerator, but it wasn’t fruit punch. No, there were fish eggs. Having fish eggs on hand in your fridge is like having a special pouch of magic dust in your hip sack for whenever and whatevas.
This is a little paste I came up with that’s perfect for using up those sacks of frozen pollack roe you may or may not have in your freezer.
MAKES 1 CUP OF MAGIC
½ cup pollack fish roe, crumbled (you can use salmon roe, flying fish roe, even caviar or jarred salted baby shrimp)
½ cup thinly sliced scallions
½ cup minced jalapeño peppers, seeds and all
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon kochukaru
1 teaspoon roasted sesame seeds
2 tablespoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon Asian sesame oil
¾ cup soy sauce
¼ cup water
Mix everything together and store in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
Spread on toast or mix with rice.
FRUIT ROLL UPS AND DOWNS
* * *
My mom had a food dehydrator back in the day, and I’d come home from school and find octopus or squid or fish or oysters in that muthafucka. Now, how do you bring non-Asian high school friends home to that? It was a social scar for sure in my teenage years, but I ate that shit. I loved that shit. And sometimes she’d put persimmons and other fruits in there, and they’d end up tasting like fish, too. Ha! This one plays off the supermarket roll-ups you may have grown up with, then gets remixed in the Choi family dehydrator. Trip out.
MAKES ENOUGH FOR 4 TO PEEL AND SNACK
3 cups water
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 star anise
2 kaffir lime leaves
½ teaspoon pink peppercorns
One 3-inch cinnamon stick
2 apples, cored and sliced into thin rounds (hold in water with a splash of lemon juice until ready)
1 pineapple, peeled and thinly sliced lengthwise into wide strips
Preheat the oven to 175°F or prepare a food dehydrator.
Combine the water, sugar, lemon juice, and spices in a medium saucepan and bring the mixture to a boil. Whisk the mixture, lower the heat, and let it simmer for 5 minutes.
Starting with the apples, dip each slice into the simmering sugar liquid, then place gently on a silicone-mat-lined sheet pan or on dehydrator racks, making sure to shingle each slice a quarter over the next one to create a quilt of sorts.
Repeat with the strips of pineapple until the whole sheet pan or dehydrator rack is filled in one single layer. If you run out of room, layer the remaining fruit on a second sheet pan.
Place the fruit in the oven or dehydrator until dry, about 2 hours. Pull out and let cool.
Peel the fruit off the pans or racks and eat like Tarzan.
CHIPS AND DIP
* * *
In high school, I loved that onion dip you’d find in the refrigerated aisle at American supermarkets. Man, that was so other world for me. Sometimes my parents would come back from a trip to the supermarket with onion dip and other weird-ass things they pulled off the shelves as they walked down the bright aisles—canned ham, flavored onion packets, pork and beans. And we’d store them all away alongside the fish paste in the pantry and the kimchi in the fridge. Any Asian kid, from Pinoy to Viet to Korean, had parents who did the same thing. For my version of chips and dip, I just wanted to pay homage to how we integrated into American life.
MAKES ENOUGH CHIPS AND DIP FOR 6 TO 8
DIP
2 cups sour cream
½ cup fresh lime juice
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons prepared horseradish
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons kosher salt
¼ cup grated fresh horseradish
Splash of Tabasco sauce
½ cup chopped fresh herbs, any herbs you want
CHIPS
1 pound taro root
1 pound Idaho potatoes
Fine sea salt
2 cups vegetable oil
Whisk together all the ingredients for the dip and set aside.
In a deep fryer or other deep pot, heat the oil to 300°F.
Wash and peel the taro and slice it thinly on a slicer like a Japanese benriner or a mandoline. Soak the slices in water to preserve their color.
Wash and thinly slice the potato lengthwise and store in water.
Layer a sheet pan with paper towels. When you’re ready to fry, drain and pat dry with paper towels the taro root and potatoes and start flipping the chips into the fryer, being sure not to overcrowd the basket. Then swirl everything around with a spider spatula.
Swish them around from time to time until the chips are a light brown color all around, about 1 minute; then immediately transfer them to the paper-towel-lined pan and season with salt while hot.
Repeat with all the chips until done.
Make about 30 percent more than you anticipate eating because you will eat that extra 30 percent as you cook them. Leftover dip will keep, covered and stored in the fridge, for 3 days.
Enjoy my sour cream and onion bag of chips.
THAT’S SO SWEET
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I’ve always loved the sauces in life more than the food—maybe that’s why I cook the way I do. So it’s no surprise that I’m a sauce packet fiend. If I go to a fast-food joint or the mall food court, my tray is like twenty-five deep in the packets. And it’s not that I’m hoarding all this shit; no, I have a ritual. I’m real anal about my packet game. I open ’em all before I eat anything, and make my sauces. I blend and mix and create. Then people say, “Oh, he drowns his tacos and rice bowls in too much sauce.” Guilty as charged. Drown your chicken or shrimp in this sauce.
MAKES ABOUT 4 CUPS
One 25-ounce bottle Mae Ploy Sweet Chilli Sauce or other Thai sweet chili sauce
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons roasted sesame seeds
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 serrano chiles, chopped, seeds and all
5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon Sriracha
¾ white or yellow onion, chopped
½ cup fresh lime juice
⅓ cup fresh orange juice
⅔ cup fresh Thai basil leaves
⅔ cup chopped fresh cilantro
6 garlic cloves, peeled
⅔ dried Anaheim chile, chopped
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons chopped peeled fresh ginger
⅔ cup chopped scallions
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons kochukaru
⅔ cup natural rice vinegar (not seasoned)
1 teaspoon chopped peeled galangal
Combine all the ingredients in a blender or food processor. Blend everything until it’s all real smooth.