Authors: Kyung-Ran Jo
“What was the dream?” I ask.
“I was lying in bed and the door opens and a man with a tray walks in, holding the onion dish I hate the most. He rubs it all over my face and tries to shove it into my mouth. I tried so hard not to open my mouth that when I woke up my jaws were sore.”
Mun-ju looks calm. Last time, she’d dreamt she was so thirsty that she hacked at a hard palm and cracked it open, getting drenched when all the juices dribbled out. A more visceral dream was the one in which dirt-caked carrots pushed through her body, one by one. Mun-ju’s dreams are filled with grinding teeth and swallowing and being eaten up and bitten and chewed, violent and aggressive like an imaginary world created by a child. I wonder what Uncle would say if I were to tell him about Munju’s dreams.
People you need aren’t there for you
. Maybe Mun-ju wouldn’t want to relate those stories even if Uncle were here. If only the dreamer could accurately translate the dream. It’s a positive sign that Mun-ju no longer rinses out her mouth after eating or dreaming.
Mun-ju now enjoys food, but she still has a hard time with sex even though the fundamental sexual instinct is oral. I find it interesting when sexual, but not oral, repression exists. Is it because we become aware that we have a tongue before understanding we have a penis, a mouth before a vulva? The organs located in the lower regions, the penis and the anus, feel pleasure
by contracting and retaining, which relates to control and obsession, but the mouth is associated with immediate pleasure: sucking, licking, biting. You can try to control your mouth through eating. And although everything involved with eating—swallowing, chewing, digesting, and going to the bathroom—can be orgasmic, achieving an orgasm requires a will. So the urge to maintain control over yourself compels you to control your food intake, then represses your sexual urges. We neither know how to cure it nor do we have the courage to do so. Liking or disliking something is a conceptual problem, not a real one. It’s the same even for dogs.
“Grandmother once had a dream about onions,” I remember.
“What was it about?”
“She found a trunk, and she opened it to find shiny gold onions. It wasn’t money or gold, but Grandmother thought it was a good omen. Onions shimmering like gold—a whole trunk’s worth at that! Grandmother thought she saw something that doesn’t exist in this world, like the ancient Egyptians used to.”
“Egyptians?”
“If you look at an onion sliced in half, you see concentric circles. Egyptians thought this mirrored the concentric circles of the heavens and believed that onions and garlic had powerful healing properties. So they packed onions inside mummies, and when a loved one died, they placed them in their eye sockets.”
“That’s kind of disgusting.”
“Well, I know you don’t like onions, but try to look beyond that.”
“Was your grandmother a happy person?”
“I think so. At least before her son and daughter-in-law died in the accident.”
“I think I would be different if I had a grandmother.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, maybe I wouldn’t have grown up hating the kitchen.” Mun-ju smiles.
That might be true. Mun-ju’s mother died before Mun-ju was old enough to learn how to cook by her side. You don’t enjoy cooking if you think of it as a duty. Mun-ju couldn’t understand that the kitchen is a warm, cozy place—Grandmother used to say that being in the kitchen is like sitting close to someone in front of the fireplace on a winter night. Even if I’m preparing food for a death anniversary, I’m not making the dishes for a dead person: It’s as if Grandmother is scheduled to come in five minutes, holding dried lavender in one hand and a basket of steamed potatoes in the other. Filled with excitement and expectation, I season fernbrake and boil chicken and fry beef and onion pancakes. The first time I cooked a full-course meal was on the date of Grandmother’s death, the year after she died.
“If I picked up that trunk, I wonder what would have been inside?” wonders Mun-ju, still thinking about onions.
“I don’t know. What would you want to be inside?”
“Hm, I’m not sure.”
“Something you like, I’ll bet.”
“So something like water?”
What am I supposed to say to that? You can’t go back after a potato has cooked through or an egg has been broken.
Just forgive your father, Mun-ju
. Otherwise Mun-ju might continue torturing herself with these dreams. Dreams where nobody can help her.
“What would be in it if it were you?” Mun-ju asks.
“In the trunk?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know …”
I don’t think it’s appropriate to say tomatoes, but I can’t
think of anything else. Once when we were young, Uncle said, Want to see something interesting? and pulled down his pajama bottoms. There’s a flesh-colored pinky dangling between Uncle’s legs, I thought, and immediately fainted. I also fainted after I first slept with Seok-ju, as if I were a woman living in the nineteenth century who’d bitten into a tomato for the first time. The tomato was an emblem of fear and terror for me: With its thick, sticky innards and densely embedded black seeds, it was as if I were touching something forbidden. My hidden sexual orality slowly drifted downward, like rain trickling down a tree branch. Seok-ju licked it and smelled it and touched it and wet it like it was a small fruit that would burst and lose its juices if he didn’t take care of it, and he waited for it to ripen and open up like a fig. That’s how I was able to get over the tomato, although it took almost a year.
I remember making a tomato dressing to go with a seafood salad at one of my cooking classes. I told my students that it’s best to find a just-picked, fresh, juicy tomato, although it’s hard to find one in the city. One student joked, Isn’t that what men want in a woman? Now my face turns red for no reason, like it did then.
“Who said that?” asks Mun-ju.
“I don’t remember.”
“Se-yeon?”
I don’t say anything.
“God, that’s so her.”
“Yeah, Se-yeon is red and pretty like a tomato.”
“You’re ridiculous. Just watch, you’re going to dream about a tomato tonight.” Mun-ju throws a mushroom at me.
“Can you look after Paulie for three days?”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“Yeah, Singapore.”
“Oh, it’s already April.”
“I don’t think I can put him in a kennel this time. He’s really on edge.”
“Ask Seok-ju. Then Paulie will get better quickly, too.”
“You know she doesn’t like him.”
“It’s three days! She can’t watch him for three days, the dog of the man she can’t live without?”
“You’ll do it, right?”
Mun-ju is quiet.
The most potent of canine abilities is detecting and isolating a preferred scent from a whole tangle of smells. In the beginning of spring, Paulie stopped smelling like Seok-ju. Even when Paulie’s next to me, his ears are pressed back against his head and his tail lists limply to the side. It’s the position he assumes when he’s about to defend himself. It must be hard for Paulie that the person he needs is no longer around. It’s gotten harder and harder to leave Paulie at home by himself. And now I’ll be gone for three whole days. After Seok-ju, I cherish Uncle and Mun-ju the most, and so does Paulie.
“It’s hard. It feels like it’s getting harder and harder,” sighs Mun-ju.
“What is?”
“Just … everything. Life.”
I’m sure it’s not everything. There were moments when it wasn’t hard. I had many moments when I was happy.
“It’s okay, Mun-ju.”
“What is?”
“Just … everything.”
“That’s lame.”
I want to tell her that onions aren’t always bad. That it’s better to dream about onions than not to dream at all. Because dreaming must be proof that you’re thinking nonstop about the thing you desire. But why does desire come hand in hand with repression?
At one side of the table I put a salad of lettuce, three kinds of herbs, thinly sliced onions and cucumber, and lightly fried tofu with an Asian-inspired dressing. In April, and when you feel tired and lethargic, salad is the perfect choice. Not too stimulating, yet it will put a bounce in your step.
Mun-ju falls asleep. I close the front door and windows, which I’d left open a crack, and turn off the lights. There might be a sign that Grandmother came for a visit. I take a blanket and cover Mun-ju with it. I gently take Mun-ju’s hand, poking out from under the blanket, for a little bit. When you’re falling asleep, your senses slowly drift to sleep, too. The first one to go is taste, then sight, then smell, then your sense of hearing gradually falls asleep, too. Touch is the last sense to be lulled to sleep. Always alert until the very end, to warn us of any impending danger. In sleep, Mun-ju’s cheeks glow like rubies in the dark. Everyone shines like that, sensually, as they fall asleep. The sex you have before sleeping is the most profound and intimate. But when you’re finally asleep, all senses become isolated. What would be in my trunk other than onions or tomatoes or water?
IN APRIL SINGAPORE, also known as “The Earth’s Kitchen” or “The World Capital of Food,” hosts the World Gourmet Summit. This year seventy events will be held for three weeks at fourteen restaurants and seven first-class hotels downtown, including the Conrad Hotel near City Hall. The summit is famous for its renowned chefs, who come from all over the world to cook and satisfy appetites and teach master classes. You can taste the works of Michelin-starred chefs and converse with them without flying all the way to Europe. Anyone who works at Nove for at least six months can attend for educational purposes.
This year Chef is leaving Manager Park in charge of the restaurant and going to the summit with the most junior cooks, Choi and Kim. It’s rare for Chef to accompany them, and it’s even more surprising that he suggests that I attend a wine workshop. There is always more to learn, Chef says. I know this, but hearing it pains my heart. His voice reveals that he knows I’m wavering in the kitchen between chicken and duck, eggplant and onion. Or you can just take some time to rest, Chef
says. I don’t recognize this version of Chef—I’m looking at someone who’s usually curt but who has suddenly turned very sweet. A man who is stern and standoffish should continue to be like that until the day he dies. It wouldn’t be as sad.
I’m not saying you should go to the summit and just rest. You have to eat something different for every meal
. I nod. Chef might be more worried about my eroding sense of taste than about my well-being. When a cook starts to lose his sense of taste, the best way to cure it is to leave the kitchen and eat food prepared by other cooks. Just as the best way to treat someone with an eating disorder is to bring him into the kitchen and have him make something. Three days. It’s also a chance to test myself, to see if I can go without thinking about Seok-ju. As we board the plane I mumble, At least it’s not an entire week.
We’re staying at the Metropol, which is a seven-minute walk across the bridge from City Hall, where the five-star hotels are clustered and where most of the events will be taking place. Chef and Kim are sharing one room and Choi and I will share the other. As soon as we get to the hotel we disperse according to each person’s schedule of events. Singapore in April is busy and humid and congested. I change into a cotton skirt, a white T-shirt with sleeves I can roll up, and light sneakers. If Seok-ju were here he would tease, All white again? Even when I wear sky blue it has white polka dots on it; if I wear a striped T-shirt, the stripes are white. You always have to wear white, like a birthmark! he’d say, smiling as if he’d discovered something amazing. I wear white in the kitchen, to feel at home. I smooth the front of my clothes and decide to go eat laksa.
Singapore bursts at the seams with gourmets from all around the world. To determine who is a gourmet and who is not is as uncertain a dilemma as figuring out where a duck’s head starts and its body ends. It’s not important whether someone is a gourmet. Everyone wants to eat and knows that food is crucial
to live. But everyone has his own special reaction toward food. One person can become so excited about a certain dish that his eyes sparkle and his muscles harden, while someone else shovels in the same dish without paying any thought to what he’s eating. A gourmet appreciates beauty. Gourmets eat slowly and thoughtfully experience taste—they don’t rush through a meal and leave the table as soon as they’re done. People who are not gourmets don’t see cooking as art. Gourmandism is an interest in everything that can be eaten, and this deep affection for food birthed the art of cooking. Other animals have limited tastes, some eating only plants and others subsisting solely on meat, but humans are omnivores. They can eat everything. Love for delicious food is the first emotion gourmets feel. Sometimes that love can’t be thwarted, not by anything.
Foie gras is the most popular gourmet food, but it isn’t always easy to come by. In the 1970s, America banned the import of foie gras because of certain illness-causing bacteria. But even this international barrier couldn’t stop Jean-Louis Paladin, the world-class chef who was at the helm of the famed Napa restaurant in Las Vegas. He flew to France and shoved a goose liver into the gullet of an enormous angler fish and brought it back. He knew that customs agents would never want to feel around in the gullet of a fish. With his precious foie gras he made a dish that wasn’t on the menu, and food lovers swarmed the restaurant and greedily ate slightly seared foie gras in a wine reduction.
The love for delicious food. This love is analogous to that between men and women. Cooks and gourmets make ideal partners. The cook’s purpose in life is to use food to make people happy, and the gourmet never stops thinking about good food. After I peeked through the crack in the pocket door last fall and saw Seok-ju and Se-yeon together, I started to think that people immersed in sex must be gourmets, too.
I sit at an old outdoor table at Marine Parade Laksa in the streets of Katong and focus on eating. The laksa, made with coconut milk and rice noodles and a handful of herbs, is rich and hot enough to burn the roof of my mouth. In this food paradise, the first thing I eat is the all-too-common two-dollar laksa. I think I might laugh. I wrap the noodles around my chopsticks and put them in my mouth. The thick rice noodles have a nice texture to them. I like rich, murky soup like this. This coconut smell. The scent of spices, the aroma of herbs. It’s the smell of Singapore, where I first came with him, the old street we searched for, famished after walking in the East Coast Park near our hotel, the pastel houses and flowery tiles in Katong. If I turn the corner at that 7-Eleven I will see him standing awkwardly, tall and bent forward, like back then. If I walk three blocks I’ll be at Katong Antique House—we will be preserved there like wax figures, him choosing a blouse for me, and me looking at china. First I’ll finish this bowl. Then I’ll go there, one more time. I slurp the soup.