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.
The thousands of taste buds on my tongue wake up one after the other. Taste is the most pleasurable of all human senses. The happiness you get from eating can fill the absence of other pleasures. There’s a time when all you can do is eat. When eating is the only way you can prove that you’re still alive. Large raindrops splatter onto the table, signaling the imminent arrival of a squall.
To eat or not to eat. To love or not to love. That is the question for the five senses.
CHAPTER 18
MEMORIES ARE LIKE A WINDMILL with sharp points, spinning in your heart, stabbing it. The more you dwell on them the more they spin, quicker and quicker. Will the edges eventually dull? Will such a day come? Am I actually longing for that day to come, or are the sharp points keeping me alive? My past stays with me no matter how much time flows by. It’ll be good not to think about it, if only for three days. I bite my lip. Is there something I wouldn’t be able to do unless I did it right now? I feel that something will change for me when I go home. I feel more trepidation than excitement. Here, all I do is eat at three different restaurants a day. My nervousness might be a sign that my subconscious is vibrantly alive. With that faint hope, I eat breakfast at Killiney Kopitiam near the Somerset MRT station—French toast with jam of kaya, made of coconut milk, eggs, and sugar. I sense saltiness before sweetness.
In the afternoon I’m supposed to attend the wine workshop at the Conrad. I buy two jars of homemade kaya jam and hop into a cab to Chinatown. It’s hot and humid and it might rain again. From a fruit stand I buy a green-tinged mango and a bright yellow Hawaiian papaya. I bypass exotic fruit like mangosteen, juicy and tart enough to be called the queen of fruit, little orange-colored bananas, and champedak, which is too smelly to bring into the hotel. I can make a sweet and light dessert by slicing the orange mango into thin slivers and shaving Gouda over it. Or these fruits would be perfect garnishes to honey-baked pumpkin. Mangosteen or champedak would be delicious with green-tea ice cream. Fruit is good on its own, but you can absorb more of its nutrients if you pair it with something else. Something is missing. I go into a Chinese bakery and buy a box of tarts. I don’t know if he still likes these cookielike pies, made with plenty of pineapple sauce thickened for a long time on the stove. We’ve seen each other a few times since he left but we haven’t eaten or drunk together. I don’t want to believe his tastes have changed. One’s sense of taste and smell do not change easily. I want to bake myself like a cake for him, or bake flour-salt dough into hard, salty, bracelet-shaped pretzels and cuff them to his wrists.
Chef was to join me at the wine workshop conducted by the wine expert Michel Rolland in the Conrad Hotel garden, but I don’t see him. Kim and Choi would be on the sought-after gourmet safari, which takes you to three restaurants along the river. Rolland talks about Château Lebon Pasteur, which has notes of overripe plum and dried fig; it’s made in Pomerol, his hometown. This wine might be ordinary for others but is special to him. According to Rolland, you eat from the lightest to the most intensely flavored dishes, but for wine you should drink from the heaviest to the lightest, the most flavorful to the most subtle. But that’s not always true. Individual likes and dislikes are important in choosing wine, and the same is true for food. Rolland pours about half an inch of wine into glasses lined in a row on the table. Now it’s time to taste. He raises his glass and says, This is the purest liquid in the world!
Ruby-red liquid dances in the glass, the color of condensed sunlight and wind, sophisticated and transparent. A question pops into my head. Pure water doesn’t contain any molecules that draw out taste. So you can’t taste something that is completely pure unless another element is added, whether it’s a grain of salt or a few droplets of vinegar. Is the wine in my hand pure liquid or not?
On our last night in Singapore, our group decides to have dinner together at Seafood Center on the eastern shore. I stay back at the hotel alone. Just as a meal ends with coffee or ice cream, trips to Singapore always finish with seafood. This time I didn’t feel like it, partly because of the wine I’d been drinking since the afternoon and the humidity sticking to my body like a wet cloth. My head hurts. It’s not even eight o’clock when I return to my room after having a bowl of wonton soup at the third-floor Chinese restaurant. I sit in the tub with the water running, then emerge and lie down in the middle of the floor, water dripping off my body. Whatever energy I have drains out, as if someone were sprinkling kosher salt over my naked body. Three days is too long. To think of only one person, or to try as hard as I could not to think of him. If you’re sad just let yourself be sad. I can’t tell whether it’s sadness or wistfulness or resignation pressing down on me. I want to sleep now. I want to enter into a deep and lengthy sleep, one I wouldn’t wake from in the morning. Choi will be back soon. I don’t have the energy to get in bed. I’m wilted, like hand-torn spinach. I manage to stretch my arm out and pull down the camel-colored blanket from my bed to cover myself. I feel warmth from my armpits, from the insides of my elbows, between my knees. Did I overindulge in eating and drinking? Seok-ju, I’m freezing all of a sudden.
I rub my eyes. A huge white horse stands in the middle of the room. I close my eyes, open them. A man wearing a white bathrobe stares down at me… Who is it? Like I’m looking through heavy fog dispersing slowly, I realize it’s Chef. I’m about to raise myself up, but remember that I’m not wearing anything and that I’m not in a kitchen but a hotel room. I tug the blanket up to my chin. What time is it? Are they back from the seafood restaurant? Where’s Choi and why is Chef here? Even though I’m lying down and Chef is just standing there, it’s not awkward—it’s as if we’ve done this before. All we’ve done was stand next to each other in a narrow kitchen, bumping into each other. I raise my neck with effort, to get up.