It was late at night, after her coworkers had left and I’d even told her about the pheasant I’d encountered when I was twenty years old, a story I’d never told anyone. I turned out the light in the kitchen, came back to the table, and extinguished the light hanging over the table, dangling from the ceiling above Munju’s head. Amid the honks and the intermittent flashes of headlights racing by on the eight-lane road outside the restaurant in the deep of the night, we were floating in a space of zero gravity where we couldn’t feel or taste or smell.
My father wanted to raise us very strictly, Mun-ju continued. Maybe it was because he felt unsettled that he didn’t have a son. He had rules about when we slept, woke up, studied, and didn’t allow us to wear skirts or blouses. My sisters and I had to grow up like little soldiers. But raising girls like that doesn’t turn them into boys, you know? Our relationship got worse after Mom died. My father set strict curfews and even forbade me from hanging out with friends. I think he was the worst with me because I’m the oldest. Once, after a group tutoring session, a boy walked me home, and my father caught us. For a whole month after that, he didn’t touch the food I made, like it was dirty. Food was the hardest thing for him to control. Once a week, he’d force me onto the scale and weigh me, saying a fat girl was of no use to anyone. You can’t understand how hard that was for me. I wasn’t stick skinny, but I wasn’t fat either. So I ended up stuffing myself when my father wasn’t looking. There was no other way to rebel. I used to keep a whole bag of brown sugar in my purse. When I was sad about something, I ran straight to the fridge. But the odd thing is that I gained weight every day, a lot of weight, but my father didn’t say anything about it. And I couldn’t stand that either, because it felt like he was ignoring me.
My father would appear in my dreams and say, I’m going to eat you up because that’s how much I love you. I got fatter and fatter. At one point I was so fat that I even dreamt that my girth blew the house to pieces. My life’s purpose boiled down to this—leave home as soon as possible, which I did when I was seventeen. I think bingeing and starving are really the same. They both have the same purpose—they give you a twisted sense of accomplishment, allowing you to say, I’m the best at bingeing or starving myself. But that really was all I had. I met you at a time in my life when I was thinking that. And your cooking taught me, for the first time, that food wasn’t just for stuffing your face, but was supposed to make you feel something. That first day, the roasted duck breast you made, topped with roots of baby spinach, really got me hungry, just by looking at it. That’s why I wanted to leave as soon as possible. But then you came after me in the parking lot, asking why I didn’t eat it, how could I write an article about it if I’d never even tried it. You really cracked me up. You were so serious! That day, I thought there must be something special about your food. It’d been a long time since I’d eaten something that made me feel as if a weight had been lifted off me. I feel like I spent all of my twenties struggling with something stupid, with eating, with food. I’m really pissed about it, I really am.
I pushed napkins toward Mun-ju, who was crying.
A sated person is different from a hungry one. A hungry one can’t be persuaded to do anything, but a full person can be given boundaries and convinced. So after that, I continued to cook for Mun-ju whenever she popped into the restaurant. I just made the portions a little smaller and helped her to eat slowly, and continued to tell her what she shouldn’t eat, what she should avoid, what she must eat. Like most intelligent and creative people, she knew what she wanted and how to focus her whole being on what she wanted. She wasn’t avoiding food, she was using food to get over her fear of eating. It was unspoken, but that was what we both wanted for her.
A person’s appetite is as precious as salt was in the seventeenth century. Trying to go around the salt officials who confiscated and regulated it, women would hide chunks of it in their cleavage and corsets, between their thighs and buttocks. When the officials squeezed those parts of their bodies, the women would burst out crying in pain. The more you try to take it away, the more people try to hide it. What I could do for Mun-ju was not to hurry, but to wait and watch over her patiently as if I were waiting for the last course of the meal to arrive at the table—this was something anyone could do for a friend. If Mun-ju thought this was special, it was special for me, too. I cooked, she ate. I cooked a little, she gradually ate less.
It took about two years for Mun-ju to transform her physique into a pleasantly plump one. Now, even if there’s food in front of her, Mun-ju doesn’t attack it quickly like a starving person, but has become a woman who knows how to eat a meal leisurely—but with gusto. When she goes on dates, she doesn’t go out again with the men who rush into their food as soon as the first course is placed in front of them, and she even makes me laugh, mimicking them. She was able to get rid of a lot, but Mun-ju hasn’t been able to rid herself of the fear that she might become fat again—not just yet.
I don’t shrink from the fear of gaining weight. For me, the pleasure I get from eating trumps that fear. The taste bud is like a diamond, getting shinier and sparklier the more you polish it. The person with a good appetite is one who wants to live; in the same way, the sense of taste is the first to go when a person loses the will to live. Some people feel alive when they play music, and others feel invigorated when they write or when they shop. These days I’m energized when I eat. I’m ready to eat anywhere, at any time. And there’s something in particular I want to eat—an all-consuming desire. When you can’t have something, the desire for it becomes more powerful and intense.
I’m staring at the biggest and deepest hole in his face. His tongue moves around, supple, like the tongue of a fish, like a bird’s tongue wrapped in soft cartilage, moving carefully, with concentration, like it does when it’s eating the tastiest thing—The. Person. I. Love. Now. Is. Se-yeon, the dark hole says. Like the bumpy, scaly tongue of a four-legged animal, it’s stiff, rough, reddish black. I stare at his red tongue, I want to suck on it one last time. Like a truffle, a tongue renders a woman and a man in a gentler state and is easy to chew on, light and soft. I take a step toward it. You told me with that mouth that you loved me. I’m close enough to swallow it whole. Hold me just one last time, I beg. Don’t, he says, and pushes me away forcefully. I’m hot, like boiling oil. Like a starving person, I crave his tongue. My throat is already lengthening and opening wide, like that of an always-accommodating goose. He pushes my puckered lips away with his hand and backs up. I’m going to wait for you, I warn him gently. He licks his lips with his dry tongue, his tongue that looks parched as if all the juices have drained out of it, and says, That’s never going to happen. At one point it was a familiar and beautiful tongue, filled with admiration and praise for my body as it understood and explored me. I grab and swallow the whole thing down. His tongue resists in my mouth, like a flopping fresh fish. I grip my mouth closed to stop it from escaping. My teeth grab it swiftly and mash it. My muscular tongue wets it with flowing saliva, works it, flips it, moves it deep into my throat. My tongue bends back to push it in deeper, to shove it down completely. Nothing, not one piece, not one drop, escapes from my mouth. It slides perfectly into my stomach. All the nerves in my body vibrate faintly like the end of a needle, and finally I heave a breath out. My tongue, remembering the dish I’ve just tasted, licks my lips.