by Roy Choi
SERVES 4 TO 6
1 cup white rice, rinsed
4 cups water
Juice and grated zest of 2 limes
One 3-inch stick cinnamon
2 tablespoons blanched almonds
2 tablespoons roasted sesame seeds
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup whole milk
¾ cup sugar
Soak the rice in the water, along with the lime juice and zest, cinnamon stick, almonds, and sesame seeds for 1 hour.
In a food processor or blender, blend it all together and let it sit for 3 hours at room temperature.
Strain the rice mixture into a pot, place over low heat, and whisk in the ground cinnamon, milk, and sugar. Bring to a low simmer and keep it there until the sugar dissolves.
Strain again and chill.
SERVE ICE-COLD.
SPLASH
* * *
The Latinos I grew up around always had a lime somewhere, anywhere—just to give that extra little boost to whatever they were eating. I like to have this sauce around to sprinkle a little love on my day—and hopefully yours.
1 cup soy sauce
¼ cup natural rice vinegar (not seasoned)
2 tablespoons minced scallions
1 tablespoon minced jalapeño pepper, seeds and all
2 teaspoons kochukaru
1 teaspoon roasted sesame seeds
1 tablespoon minced garlic
Mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl. Spoon over rice or even use it to amp up a salad. Add it to anything. Everything.
POUR A LITTLE
ON THE GROUND
FOR THE HOMIES, TOO.
CHAPTER 6
CRACK
Cruising through the streets of Norwalk with the Street City Minis could go on for only so long. By the time I graduated high school in ’88, most of the Grove Street guys had moved either on or out. Without my crew, and especially without Ryan, I was alone, aimless. But good Asian son that I am, I still went through the motions of giving a fuck about my future. I applied to college like I was supposed to, ending up at a commuter school, Cal State Fullerton. I trudged through best I could, even joined some clubs. I got my marching shoes on and tried to save pandas and shit, got political with Amnesty International, joined the Greenpeace club on campus. Changed my major from political science to philosophy, learned logic and Emmanuel Kant, got deep into Vonnegut and Nietzsche, connected with Sal Paradise, Holden Caulfield, Fonny and Tish. I dabbled in theater for a while.
But I couldn’t play like I was a good college student. Before too long, I was going to class reeking of weed and staying silent even when called on; I mad-dogged the professors and other students. Ate in the library, stinking up the room while others wanted to study. Bounced around Fullerton Tokers Town houses with cholos, shacked up in a Vietnamese home in Westminster, roamed the streets just looking, hoping to get myself into any type of trouble.
Meanwhile, my parents could only scratch their heads and look for ways to keep their son on track. Finally, in 1990, they sent me to Korea for the summer to attend a program hosted by Korea University in Seoul. It was a wonderful program that focused on connecting twenty-something Korean-Americans to their heritage and identity. My classmates were churchgoing types, the kind who would tell innocent ghost stories while toasting their fucking marshmallows over a perfectly built campfire. They were bright and happy and smart. Pure. And I hated them, because I wished I was just like them. Instead I was me: baseball cap on, pulled low over my eyes, hoodie pulled over the cap, jeans sagging low, sulking during Korean language lessons, refusing to participate while the class learned about Asian history and culture.
Even a field trip couldn’t mellow me out. In the middle of the program, we went on a big bus tour of South Korea. It was only about a week, but South Korea is tiny—combined, North and South Korea aren’t much bigger than California—so it was more than enough time to see the highlights. And that trip should have been the highlight of the summer: from Seoul, we went east, hiking, camping, and foraging for wild herbs and roots in the hills of Seorak Mountain National Park. Old ladies there would make us herb pancakes in the fields, squatting as they cooked them on little burners and put them on bamboo mats to rest. Up along the freezing cold coast, we met fishermen who gave us live octopus and all sorts of sashimi—fluke and abalone and sea bream and sea cucumber—sliced right in front of us and then dipped in a sweet, acidic kochujang, which you funneled into your mouth with your fingers—or theirs—and washed down with a hot cup of fish cake broth.
After a ride up north near the border to Kangwon-do, we went down to Busan and Taegu in the southeastern corner of the country, the closest point to Japan. Fresh seafood was everywhere here, with mild water-based kimchi all through the region. In the western province of Cheongju, the roots and tubers and herbs and plants were delicately pickled or preserved to create rainbows of flavor, and we had bowls and bowls of bi bim bap. By the time we made our way back up to Seoul, we had visited every province in the country except for the island of Cheju; had we made it, we would have had mandarins, Berkshire pigs, bony fish, and oysters.
The country was a delicious paradise, a giant wonderland.
But no matter where we went, the dark clouds over my head never parted. And the more fun everyone had, the more I was determined to rain on their parade. As we drove from one province to the other, the kids would pass around a microphone, and everyone would take a turn singing a verse of a Christian song or love ballad. Honestly, a few of them were really good in their own kumbaya way. But they kept passing the mic to me, and I passed it along each time, shaking my head or refusing to even acknowledge it. They weren’t going to let me off the hook. They kept passing it over to me so I could join their happy song, insisting I take my turn. They probably thought I was just shy. I wasn’t shy.
Finally, I had had enough. I took the mic. I wasn’t going to sing no fucking kumbaya. Instead, I kept my hood low and ripped a profanity-laced rap about killing children and fucking your mother upside down and stuffing maggots down your throat.
Silence.
The head counselor said, “Hmmm, okay . . . let’s move on.”
They moved on. I stayed put.
BUT THEN PARADISE LOST turned into paradise found. There was a girl. There’s always a girl.
She was from the East Coast and seemed to be just like me, a fish out of water: no makeup, bohemian clothes instead of shorts and tank tops. Smart, tough, and opinionated, wise beyond her years. I noticed her the first week; a few weeks later, I stepped to her and we clicked. The mean mothafucka became a little puppy in love.
There was nothing sexy about my little dorm room—it was always a mess, always too bright, unless you turned off the pale white light, at which point you’d be shrouded in pitch-black darkness. But we would talk there through the night and into morning, and, as we got more and more intimate, she let her guard down, inviting me to come closer, to be a part of her. We’d clumsily explore each other, trying to figure out how we fit together. We were young and awkward—always bumping our heads against the cinder-block walls. Never quite fitting in the cramped bed, bumping our heads on the bunk bed frame above.
Together we frolicked around Seoul, finding our own souls as we ran, holding hands and exploring the twisted alleys and crowded streets together, finding food everywhere we turned. On the streets, pork belly cooked on steel tables. A drunken crowd folded the pork into lettuce leaves, layering it with soybean paste, kimchi, and radishes. Looks delicious—let’s try it! In the Shindang-dong neighborhood, cauldrons of deep red stew bobbed full of rice cakes, fish cakes, and drooping onions. An intrepid bystander would stuff a pack of instant ramen and Vienna sausages into the pot and swirl swirl swirl until it got all sticky and gooey. There were blood stews and beef bone soups filled with handfuls of chopped scallions and wild sesame seeds. Streetside sweet potatoes roasted in makeshift coal ovens. Dried squid charred over an open flame fired by a retrofitted
butane can, sold by a guy who also repaired shoes.
Everything was so chewy and delicious and lovely.
It was amazing. I was so happy.
Then the summer ended. So did the program.
Her father picked her up.
It was over.
Before I knew it, I was back at Fullerton for the fall semester, her scent still fresh on me. We wrote love letters back and forth, pumped dimes and nickels and quarters into pay phones as operators told us we had only two minutes left on our call.
It wasn’t until months later—January 1991—that I had enough cash to see her. The first chance I got, I jumped on a Greyhound and set sail across the country with one thought in mind: her. I didn’t care about the amber waves of grain, didn’t take photos of purple mountain majesties. I just had to get there. And three days later I did. I showed up on her doorstep at Brown University in the middle of winter, decked out in Chucks, sagging 501s, an L.A. Kings cap, and a bomber jacket. Heeeeeeere’s Johnny!
She had no idea I was coming. What a great surprise this will be, I thought. All I had to do was show up at her door like a bottle of milk, and she would drink it. Brilliant. But Korea was Korea. This was Providence. The second I saw her, and the look on her face when she saw me, I knew it was over. Yet she was so kind to entertain me for even a day.
I held my head high and concealed my embarrassment until I could leave the next day. I had put all my eggs in one basket, and the bottom had fallen out. I had nothing. No best friend. No girl. No purpose. Nothing left for me at home. I looked at where I was, where I could go, and remembered the New York of Salinger, Baldwin, and Kerouac. Holden Caulfield, Fonny and Tish, and Sal Paradise called me out of Providence to work out my troubles with them and the other lost fish in Times Square.
BY THE TIME I crash-landed in New York, I was hurting bad. The heartache of the last few days broke the levee on the heartache I’d been carrying over the last few months. As I walked out of Port Authority and found my way to the YMCA, I went from macho to tender. Let my guard down a bit. Mistakes happen.
The YMCA at Times Square was housed in an old camel-colored brick building. For seven bucks a night, I bought myself a ride up a tiny elevator, a walk down a barren hallway, and a room even smaller than the elevator, with a bed fitted with prison-blue sheets. After I settled in, I headed back downstairs to grab a smoke out front.
“Hey, do you have a cigarette, young man?”
The guy asking for the cigarette was bearded and wearing a Guardian Angels beret and an army jacket. He had a backpack slung over his shoulder and books in his hand. He looked like an educated guy, a little bohemian even. I’m not sure what he saw in me. You’d think some Asian kid smoking a cig in front of a dumpy YMCA wouldn’t make for much of a mark. But I guess I was wearing my vulnerability on my sleeve.
I gave him a cigarette, and right there in front of the building we talked. And talked. And talked. He said he was an adjunct professor at Columbia. We talked about Nietzsche; we talked about life and all the things that were important to me. Four or five hours went by. He was earning his keep. He said there was going to be a lecture at Columbia the next night, that he had just happened to be passing through Times Square, on his way to get his ticket, when he ran into me.
“I’m heading up there now to get my tickets. I can get one for you, too. Just stay here and I’ll be right back, and then we can get some late dinner. The tickets are $120. Just give it to me and I’ll secure our seats.”
An Ivy League lecture! I was going to be smart again. Wow.
He took my bounty, darted across the street, and slipped into the darkness.
I waited. And waited. He said he’d be right back, right? Another cigarette, another hour. Twiddling thumbs. Man, he was good. Real good. Got me for everything I had.
Whatever little of that macho shit I had left before that moment was completely gone. I was completely gone. Though not angry at the guy—to this day, the sting still amazes me. I tip my hat to him for sniffing me out and humbling me to the quick.
It was almost midnight by then. Numbed by what had just happened, I stared into the night and, just as you find stars in the sky if you look long enough, I started to see figures moving in the shadows. People in trench coats; hookers; dudes with shifty eyes.
Then, as if someone was watching me from the loge seats, I heard, “That dude got you, huh?” The voice belonged to a lanky white guy, maybe twenty-two years old, holding on to a fifth of bourbon and munching casually on a bag of chips. Now that the show was over, he had decided to come out of the shadows.
“You hungry? I got some chips upstairs,” he said.
Fresh off the con, I was on red alert. At first I thought maybe he wanted to have sex with me. But there was something about that guy that caught my attention. He was a tiger without fangs. A kindred spirit, in a way. And I had just lost the last thing I had to lose. So, what the fuck. Let’s go. Back up the tiny elevator, back down the barren halls, into his room. Lights on. He handed me a pipe.
Crack looks like crack: small clusters of white, chalky nuggets the size of Nerds in a vial the size of a perfume sample. There always seems to be so little of it, rattling around in its tube like a quarter in a pay phone coin slot, but there’s always just enough to get you good and high.
He taught me how to take that first hit: back straight, flame to rock, quick puff, chest expanded. It tasted like all the things in the closet of my life, if the skeletons in there had been made of saltwater taffy.
A few hours and hits passed. We needed more. It was 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. when we left his room, went a block or two this way and that way, down empty streets and dim alleys. Then we turned a corner and . . . people. Crowds and crowds of people, hustling—but it was quiet. Dark blankets, tank tops even though it was winter, beards, all moving about in silence. He showed me around like I was his new roommate; through him, I learned how to walk. Always walk forward. Never stop walking, never give up your position, not even a shoulder. If bodies crash, keep walking. One small move gives up the line, and you’ve lost the game of chicken. And the vultures will start to circle.
I was to have his back and keep cool. There were all types of shit being thrown out there to buy, a bazaar for the bizarre. Blow job? No, thanks. Weed? Next time. Pizza? Not hungry. Meanwhile, he was scanning, looking for that elusive right deal. It was like Asian ladies picking fruit: a little bit of superstition, intuition, feeling for the primo spots to find the one that feels just right. Eventually we found him. A few crumpled bucks later, we had the vial. Grabbed some nachos and meat pie and went back up the chute to our penthouse, to lose ourselves in the taste of the taffy all over again. In between hits in the dark, we ate like squirrels: quick nibbles, just a little bit at a time. A handful of chips here, Corn Nuts there, swig of Gatorade, slice of pizza. Hit.
Days passed, but it felt like one long night. The YMCA was full of people, but it was always so quiet, just a bunch of lonely guys minding their own business, talking to themselves, getting high in their rooms, then wandering out for more. We were fish swimming around each other in the same bowl, respecting each other’s space. When the sun went down, the stars I could barely make out that first night became clear as day, and I flew with the bats of the night: trench coat flashers; XXX horndogs; other crack addicts; transvestite hookers; hobos; drifters; pimps; hos; invisible joes. People with no homes, no destiny, no hope.
It’s not so much that I liked any of this—I didn’t like crack all that much, actually. But if it wasn’t this drug, it would have been another one: drinking, girls, binge eating. Anything to fill that void in my heart, anything to rub salt in my wounds, anything to make me forget.
I WAS LUCKY. Maybe it was because the drug was just a filler until time could heal my broken spirit. Maybe it was because all that good son/Asian heritage stuff I had in my blood was powerful enough to pull my mind back before it could be pushed too far away. Whatever it was, on the seventh night of this long week, I woke up
and remembered my family and heard my mom’s voice calling out through the haze in my head. I got up, looked at the mirror, and, for the first time in a long time, recognized the boy looking back at me. I didn’t need to be drugged anymore. I could walk on my own now.
Back to Port Authority. Back to the home I had left behind. When I arrived, my mom pulled out all the stops. Everything out of the pantry, everything onto the stove, then onto a plate to feed her son. It wasn’t the first time my parents pulled me back from the brink. And it wouldn’t be the last.
But I never touched the pipe again.
PERFECT INSTANT RAMEN
* * *
You can have almost no money and still have enough to live off this stuff for weeks, months, years. Eat enough and you’ll start to look for ways to make it different: add a little more sauce, a little less sauce, cook the noodles less, cook them more, add more water, less water, add an egg, scramble the egg, etc. Me, I’ve become a freak when it comes to my instant ramen. Don’t fuck wit it, don’t fuck wit me, let me do my thing. This is how I do my own thing.
MAKES 1 PERFECT BOWL
2½ cups water
1 pack Shin Ramyun or whatever pack of instant ramen you have
1 egg
½ teaspoon butter
2 slices American cheese
¼ teaspoon roasted sesame seeds
GARNISH (OPTIONAL)
½ scallion, green part only, thinly sliced on a bias
Bring the water to a boil in a small pot. Open the ramen package and add the noodles to the water. Cook the noodles for 2 minutes, then add the flavor pack.