Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant (19 page)

T
he Ethiopians were dying. They were on television all the time—their dirty faces, their sunken cheeks, their bloated stomachs, their abstracted, fly-orbited eyes. Help was needed; something had to be done. So various governments sent food, medicine, supplies, doctors, nurses, etc. So pop stars gathered to raise money by singing rock ballads.
We are the world,
the pop stars crooned, swaying in unison.
We are the children. Let them know it’s Christmas.

Meanwhile, in the schoolyards of Bangkok, “Ethiopian” became an epithet for skinny children with large, outsized heads like me.
Hey Ethiopian,
the other seven-year-olds would catcall, sniggering.
Yeah, you. With the glasses and the gangly arms. With the big head. With the dark, shitty skin. That’s right. We’re talking to you. You mouth breather. You fucking Ethiopian.

I didn’t mind. At least they didn’t call me Chinese or Cambodian or Muslim or—worst of all—Laotian. “Laotian” implied that you were ugly, poor, unfashionable, stupid. No one would talk to you. You’d sit silently by the garbage bins during lunch with the other Laotians, wallowing in the shame of your communal Laotianness. The roaches and mice would scuttle around your shoes, and everything you ate would smell like wet trash.

And so I sat alone each day eating instant noodles, which I bought for two baht and fifty satang from a vendor who was probably an actual Laotian immigrant. She didn’t speak much Thai, and when she did she spoke with a lilting accent. She always prepared my lunch in less than ten seconds—a bowl, a brick of dried noodles, a ladle of boiling broth—and I would go to my corner of the canteen to mark time with each spoonful.

It is a stock scenario, the abject child eating alone at school, lifeblood of so many sitcoms and young-adult novels. The image’s ubiquity must have something to do with the school canteen’s special status as a primal site of unchecked peer sociality. And so the maligned child fulfills, with each bitter mouthful, her circular, uninvited destiny: she eats alone because she is abject and she is abject because she eats alone. But the tragedy is not eating alone as such—it’s the transformation of the very meaning of eating itself, from a nourishing, comforting, and familial activity to one that is cold, pathological, and solipsistic.

But there are, of course, worse things than eating alone at a public elementary school in Bangkok. For one, I could’ve been an actual Ethiopian.

The Thai government—not to be outdone by its colleagues, let alone its colleagues’ pop stars—decided to make a contribution to the relief effort in Ethiopia. They solicited nonperishable food items from citizens and businesses alike, and soon received a sizable donation from an instant noodle company. Several planeloads of instant noodles were sent to Addis Ababa as a gesture of the Thai people’s goodwill. Upon arrival, however, the planes were sent back with their cargo—aid agencies had found the noodles to be wholly lacking in nutritional value.

Get this stuff out of here,
the aid agencies are reported to have said.
They’ll only exacerbate the crisis. Instant noodles are bad for you.

At least that’s the cautionary tale told to many Thai children when instant noodles flooded the markets in the early eighties. Alarmingly cheap, colorfully packaged, and offered in an impossibly wide variety of flavors and noodle sizes, the offending foodstuff was also rumored, at one point, to contain powdered marijuana in its seasoning packages. This was said to account for its strangely addictive quality, and I remember sneaking several Mama-brand chicken-flavored seasoning packages into my bedroom as a seven-year-old, believing I was embarking on an inaugural experiment with illicit drugs. I nearly sucked at the foil to get at every grain, and then I lay back on my bed and waited for magic to happen.

No magic happened. I didn’t get high, just really thirsty.

Around the time of this failed experiment, a friend showed me a trick. This consisted of crushing a sealed bag of instant noodles, opening it, fishing out the seasoning pack, and pouring the seasoning back onto the noodles. He shook the bag for a few seconds before offering me the mixture.

Potato chips,
he declared, smiling proudly.

Thai
potato chips,
he continued, when I just blinked at him.
Half as cheap and twice as tasty as the
farang
variety.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my friend had taught me how to prepare my first meal, and he had also taught me something about thriftiness and ingenuity and cross-cultural mimesis. But more important—as I said to him at the time, sprinkling a handful into my mouth—it was fucking delicious. Those Ethiopians didn’t know what they were missing.

My mother taught me how to prepare a bowl of instant noodles on the stove. It was the first thing I ever learned to cook and remains, to this day, one of the few things I cook when I’m alone.

Bamee
idiot,
she said as we waited in the kitchen for the water to boil. Idiot noodles. Meaning: even an idiot could prepare a decent bowl, though she couldn’t resist adding that it also meant if I ate too many, too often, I might run the risk of retardation.

This stuff is bad for you,
she proclaimed.

But you can make it good,
she continued.
It’s what you add to it that counts.

We added Chinese cabbage, green beans, spring onions, and sliced hot dogs into the pot that afternoon. Near the end, as the noodles softened, she showed me how to separate an egg’s white from its yolk, dribbling the translucent substance into the pot by transferring the yolk back and forth between its broken shells. Strings of egg white puffed and brightened upon contact with the boiling broth. Then she placed the yolk into the bottom of our serving bowl—the heat from the broth, she said, would be sufficient to cook it.

The dish hardly resembled the meal I’d been consuming at school. While my lunches had consisted of nothing but noodles and broth, my bowl now teemed with other ingredients; while the vendor at school had taken less than ten seconds, my mother had taken nearly ten minutes; and while I ate my noodles at school alone, disconsolately spooning each mouthful, I now sat with my mother and my sister on either side, chatting between bites about nothing in particular.

I moved to Ithaca, New York, in 1996 to attend Cornell University. It was the first time I had ever lived alone.

One afternoon, I came across a Chinese grocery on Route 13 that stocked a decent selection of Mama, Yumyum, and Waiwai instant noodles. I nearly wept at the sight of them in their bright and shiny packages, lined up neatly beside their Korean, Chinese, and Japanese counterparts. I had tried several American brands of instant noodles since arriving from Bangkok but found them all inadequate—the broth flavoring had always seemed rather
too
artificial, the noodles texturally suspicious. Here, then, were my madeleines—material links to a former life—and I remember gathering several packages into my arms as if they were children that I had lost.

But instant noodles were not simply an item of homesick nostalgia. They were also—at two dollars a dozen—economically viable. Shortly after I arrived in Ithaca, the baht was devalued, the Thai economy subsequently crashed, and my mother informed me that the length of my American adventure depended upon my ability to pay my own way. I watched as scholarships ran dry, middle-class fortunes crumbled, and several Thai students headed home without the degrees they’d hoped for. Very little was left of the already negligible Thai community in Ithaca. It was the loneliest time of my life.
1

All new immigrants yearn periodically for familiar foods. The fulfillment of that yearning can be a difficult, if not impossible, proposition. Ingredients are often scarce. Resources are often limited. And restaurants offering one’s native cuisine tend to serve inadequate approximations of beloved dishes (at unheard-of prices, to boot). The gap between the memory of a good meal and the attempt to re-create it in a foreign country—to make oneself feel, in a sense, more at home—can reinforce rather than eradicate feelings of dislocation and homesickness. This would be the case, I suspect, even if one managed to re-create a dish in all its subtle, “authentic” aspects, for there are things that one can never re-create on a stove. Because of this ambivalence, immigrants know—perhaps more than most—that though eating can make you full, it can also often feel like fasting.

The instant noodles that I ate alone in Ithaca might have been identical to the instant noodles of my childhood, but the taste, so to speak, was entirely different. The reasons for this, of course, were obvious. My mother was not there. My sister was not there. The students who called me Ethiopian were not there. The Laotian vendor was not there. My friend who taught me how to make Thai potato chips was not there. I was alone, in a half-basement studio in a small New York town, thousands of miles from the people I loved, people I would not see again for many years. I was cold and I was exhausted: frat boys woke me with their whooping at night, emptied their beer-filled bladders against my window, and occasionally, when I walked down the street, American children taunted me with what I can only describe as fake Chinese. No matter how fastidiously I followed my mother’s recipe for instant noodles, these were entirely different noodles, and I knew that I would need to learn, with time, to find comfort in their flavors, lest I resign myself to bitterness.

I
have never been a conventional eater and, considering my lineage, it’s no wonder. My mother, the writer Laurie Colwin, was a foodie with a salt tooth. She was pan-national in her tastes—she never met a culture whose cooking she flat-out disliked. She brought home Chinese herbs, Ethiopian bread, Jamaican desserts, and Mexican salsa. She mixed condiments based on Indian recipes and tried her hand at traditional English puddings, the failed latter of which got her into comical culinary trouble at a dinner party once. In short, she was not just a consumer but a fierce emulator, often employing extraordinary measures to obtain her recipes. She was known for traipsing downtown and up, unafraid to pick up a bun, a bread, a cheese and ask “What’s in this?” I remember her in the kitchen, worrying over a stove full of boiling pots, the counter littered with various utensils, stirring vigorously with the sleeves of her sweater rolled up past her elbows. Several hours and cross-continental phone calls later, she would more often than not emerge victorious, hot bowl or plate or tureen in hand.

My father, the publisher Juris Jurjevics, is not a cook except by necessity, yet he has his own set of food-related habits. Both a European and a Vietnam War veteran, he is content to consume his meals directly from cans, bags, and packets. Growing up, I would sit beside him on his bed and listen to daytime talk radio while we shared Goya chickpeas and pickled cabbage, lentils and black beans, packages of M&Ms and toasted almonds. Veterans Day meant Spam and Vienna sausages, served as is save for frilly toothpicks stabbed into their centers. Our Saturday breakfasts were crêpelike pancakes native to Latvia, his homeland, and sick food was a stockpot of slow-boiled cabbage soup. His love for root vegetables—the food of his people, as he’s known to say—and my mother’s affinity for kitchen adventures filled our plates with parsnips, beets, carrots, and potatoes. My grandmother’s baking provided us with saffron cakes and peppery ginger cookies throughout the holiday season.

These days, as a grown-up responsible for feeding myself, I realize more than ever just how much I have inherited my parents’ eating habits. There are times I have opened my fridge and grinned to see, next to my roommates’ tubs of peanut butter and mayonnaise, my little jar of capers, a staple in my fridge at home but an anomaly here, or a packet of rice bean cakes in the freezer beside the Chubby Hubby ice cream. Like my mother, I often crave sour, turning to cornichons strong enough to hurt the taste buds, or freshly peeled organic lemons. Sometimes it’s salt I want, and I go on ravenous sprees, buying long slices of lox and tins of black olives, sautéing zucchini and chicken in oil and garlic salt. And I am just as much my father. When I return home for holidays and observe him, hunkered over his manuscripts as he eats from a jar of nuts, I realize I have copied him movement for movement as I nosh and study. Film theory books in front of me, I pluck hearts of palm spears from their cans, spoon up cold beans, or dip my fingers absently into a tub of shredded red cabbage—his favorite. I have, as every child fears, turned into my parents. And I love it.

My friends, however, have not always shared my enthusiasm. At one former apartment, a four-flight Boston walk-up, I tried to tempt them with Latvian pancakes, goat-milk yogurt, and my favorite Chinese candy, a dried sugar-and-salt preserved plum known as
wamoi.
They either politely declined or recoiled in horror, depending. This was nothing new for me; in grade school, I was known as the girl with the weirdest lunch, coming in with homemade multigrain bread and all-natural treats bearing disarmingly accurate names like “fruit leather.” I tried and tried to trade; nobody bit. In Boston, I am left to enjoy my Japanese seaweed snacks and tomato-paste sandwiches solo. Oh, well. More for me.

If my mother was a food pioneer and my father is a food appreciator, I am a food nomad. My favorite thing to do on a gray, rainy day is to go deep into Boston’s Chinatown—imagine the population of New York’s condensed into less than half the square footage—and seek out my favorite pan-Asian treats. It is during the pre-midterm, calm-before-the-storm week that I venture out into the drizzle, sans umbrella, on a search for something more than the compulsory pizza and pasta that comprise the American college diet. Chinatown is still busy, tired faces under the coming rain. I pass an adult movie house and a smoke shop and finally duck into a narrow side street bordered by dark, postindustrial buildings. And there it is, sandwiched between a seedy video store and a greasy-windowed restaurant—my favorite sublevel market, nameless, fluorescent-lit, and beckoning.

The market is a wonder, an Asian Balducci’s of sorts. It is usually busy, filled with families and solitary older women who stoop over their carts and chatter impatiently at the annoyed stock clerks. The front of the market is dominated by freezer bins containing frozen buns, entire dim sum meals (in the style of Lean Cuisine), and packets of poultry parts I dare not guess the names for. Fruit abounds: oversized apples, bulging grapefruits, longan in a bucket, and, of course, the spiky, craggy, and foul-smelling durian. Vegetables have their own wall toward the back. Bok choy bottoms gleam in the white light, leeks and celery are stacked stalk by stalk, tofu floats in water. Adjacent to the produce is the seafood counter, next to which sits a bank of Plexiglas fish tanks containing discontented-looking creatures that, next to all the bright packaging, seem vaguely prehistoric. They swim in their holding cells while their felled brethren lie belly up on beds of ice beside them.

I am the only white face in the market and, feeling vaguely like a tourist, I cruise the isles with my basket, passing cans and boxes and vacuum-sealed packets of things I have never seen, the names of which I cannot read. The labels of soups and mixes feature photos and shoddy English. Candy labels boast rosy-cheeked children with eyes closed in delighted laughter. Here I make my selections: lychee nuts in syrup, pearl mushrooms, udon noodles, the dreaded
wamoi.
I wander past the housewares section, turning over soup spoons and Buddha statues, sniffing incense, poking snow globes.

As a kid, I used to take these trips with my parents. My mother and I would set out for Chinatown to get dim sum or venture off to the Little India section of New York for fiery-red tandoori chicken and yogurt lassi drinks. We’d hit the Union Square farmers’ market in the crisp fall air and select apples from wooden boxes and sample twice-baked dark pretzels. With Dad, it was a different kind of exotic: we ate the forbidden foods my mother loathed and banned from the house. At his office, we drank deliciously foul strawberry-milk beverages and ate from little white bags of marshmallow twists, giggling, at his desk. On the Roosevelt Island tram, we ate glazed doughnuts and Mc-Donald’s fries high above the East River, landing for a stop at the candy store for sour straws and Cokes.

Heaping my basket at the market, as much a delighted stranger here as I was in the adventure spots of my childhood, I think of them both. Roti and cabbage. Lemons and lentils. Goat cheese and pancakes. Mom and Dad.

The lady at the checkout counter gives me the once-over, takes my money without a word, and hands over my bright pink bags. I stuff them in my backpack and make my way home, up the four flights to my apartment. My roommates, watching television, studying, and lounging, look up.

“Whatcha got?” they ask me, pointing to the bags.

I look down at the tops of the cans, at the package of
wamoi
peeking up at me. My roommates crane their necks to see into the bags, hoping for cookies, cheese, packaged bread, the staples of our hodgepodge household. For a moment my choices seem strange, even to me, a blend of foods no normal person would put together. I consider what to say and toy with the plastic edge of the
wamoi
’s shrinkwrap, still half heavy with memories. I look back at my roommates; my bags are full but to them they are empty, the contents inedible. My treats and childhood favorites hold no context for them, no afternoon sojourns with Mom, no watching Dad twist the can opener in his trademark pajamas. So I shrug and head for the kitchen.

“Nothing,” I reply. “Just food.”