The 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.