this is my grandfather's love of food

*When I think of my grandfather, I think of his square jawline and his tanned skin, the hearty laugh and underbite that earned him the nickname “Bulldog,” his obscenely early bed time and his love for golf, which is the reason he still wakes up at 4 am every day without fail, even at 82 years old. I see him in the white tank top that he wears when he’s at home reading on the couch; most of all, I see him happily feasting at our large family dinners, where most of his energy is spent encouraging everyone else to eat more, as Asian elders tend to do to the ones they love.

*Of course, I really only see my grandfather once every few years, when I visit Taipei, where he lives. His trips to California are less frequent than they once were, though his stamina is still impressive for his age. The last time he was here, my mother complained that he relentlessly tried to polish off everyone else’s meals at The Cheesecake Factory, even as he was clutching his own stomach in pain. Despite being told that Cheesecake Factory portions are inhumanly large and that it was okay not to finish all the food on the table, my grandfather couldn’t help it; he grew up in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule and has since maintained a wartime mentality toward food, despite eating very well, regularly.

*If this wartime mentality of scarcity is the reason why my grandfather feels instinctively compelled to finish every morsel of food, I’m sure that this mentality is also the reason he eats with such gusto and joy. In part, at least. I do believe that my grandfather, like me, has a genetically predisposed fanaticism towards food, which is mere sustenance for everyone else who doesn’t. But then again, whereas I’ve always had the luxury of being picky about what I eat, there was a time in my grandfather’s life—for much of it actuall—when food was merely sustenance because it had to be. There was no choosing what to eat because eating was a matter of survival. My grandfather was the fourteenth of sixteen siblings (eight boys, eight girls, all from the same mother and father!), and in a family with so many mouths to feed, abundance was a pipe dream. Now that food is no longer scarce, he treats every meal as feast, never allowing eating to be solely the breaking of a fast.

*One of my favorite foods is the sweet potato, a food my grandfather refuses to eat. The Japanese sweet potato, yaki-imo, was a wartime staple that he ate as a child; it is a food that reminds him of dearth and poverty, so he doesn’t eat it anymore.

*When I visited Taiwan as a child, he’d take me out—just me and him—and we’d go eat pig’s feet, his favorite dish, which had been stewed for hours in a sweet, dark soy sauce. The pig’s feet were mostly collagen, tender, chewy, and fatty skin, with just a little meat around the bone. It was never in a fancy place, and the pig’s feet would be served on a scratched up platter, with no garnish, just sauce.

He always reminisces about this when he sees me. It’s something to talk about, a good memory we have together, but I also think it reminds him of why he took me to go eat pig’s feet in the first place: because that ten year old girl ate as voraciously and as joyously as he did. Rare are ten year olds who will happily devour porcine trotters as I did.

*In June, I spend a few days at my grandparents’ house in Taipei. I speak Mandarin decently, but not fluently enough to have the kinds of intimate conversations I’ve always wanted to have with my grandparents. So it is as it was twelve years ago, when our most intimate gestures are communicated with food. “What do you want to eat?” is the first question I’m asked when I arrive in Taiwan. The first night we have Japanese food, and I’m barraged with literal boatloads of sashimi.

*On one of my final days in Taiwan, my grandfather takes me out for a special trip to the coast of Taiwan. First we drive to what my mother insists is a phoenix farm. “Mom, a phoenix is a mythical animal. They don’t exist.” We argue about this for the entire car ride, and later I find out that what we’re actually seeing is crested arguses. After the crested arguses, we go to an orchid farm, and I can tell that my grandfather is trying to impress me by showing me the most wondrous things that Taiwan has to offer (exotic birds! exotic plants!). But despite the novelty of crested arguses and orchids, something about this morning feels forced; I feel like a foreign ambassador touring another country.

*After the two farms, we finally arrive at a department store in a small, dusty town, and we ride the elevator to the top, to an empty restaurant owned by my grandfather’s friend. I can sense that he is feeling more comfortable and more at ease. We sit down to eat, and plates of food begin to arrive. Local specialties abound: wild plants I’ve never heard of, fish that are native to the Taiwan coast, shark jowls, marinated pork kidneys, eels, fried buns. Most of the food is stewed, salty, and oily, strongly flavored so that white rice is absolutely necessary. I see my grandfather in his element, carefully monitoring the flow of food to the table and the distribution of it among everyone around it. This is a responsibility he takes seriously, making sure everyone is happily eating and well-fed, if not overly fed, by the end of the meal.

*I sit at the table, simultaneously intrigued by all the delicacies and overwhelmed by both the novelty and variety. I see my grandfather shooting me glances every time my plate is empty, and he spins the lazy susan in my direction repeatedly, urging me to eat more.

*“I used to take her to eat pig’s feet,” he says proudly to his friend, as he eats another slice of pork kidney. It’s a simple, anecdotal statement, really—but what he means to say is that we’re close; he means that we understand each other.Most of all, he’s telling his friend that by eating and sharing food together, those pig’s feet especially, we’re also inextricably bound, through famine and feast, through scarcity and abundance.

 

this is fika in the fabric of our lives

*In Swedish, fika means “coffee break.” Fika is a coming together of friends for coffee and something sweet. It isn’t an occasional occurrence; it is a daily habit that is woven into the fabric of people’s everyday lives. Fika is taken before work and after work, sometimes in the late morning or afternoon, other times in the evening. It bookends and breaks up the day. There’s no one mandated time for fika, only that it is taken regularly, gladly, and deliberately, with friends.

*In every society and culture, people come together to share food and drink. Fika ritualizes this idea, making coffee and pastry into a social institution that is distinctive in its casual, frequent, but still intentional nature. Its ordinariness means that it can be seamlessly woven into daily life, a sort of mini-communion taken over and over again throughout the day. It is the breaking of bread and the drinking of wine, secularized, but still symbolic: of friendship, of solidarity, of community, of pause from work, of the value of people and camaraderie, of the small but meaningful moments that sweeten and deepen relationships.

*In Helene Anderson’s book The Swedish Table, she writes that fika establishes friendships and social circles; it is never romantic, but it is a marker of whom you care about and who are the pulses in the rhythm of your life.

*What is the physical substance of fika? At its most basic, coffee and a Swedish pastry, like a kanelbullar (the Swedish version of a cinnamon bun) or a cardamom bun, both of which are yeasty and doughy, less buttery than a croissant, and not too sweet. This is a classic pairing of a bitter drink with a sweet food, which strikes the kind of balance that neither can achieve alone: merely caffeine-fueled, on one hand, or purely indulgent, on the other.

*It seems that every culture has its version of a social non-meal that consists of complementary food and drink. In Italy, men stand around espresso bars with un caffe e un cornetto or biscotto in hand, chatting about the business of the day. In South Africa, the pastry-drink combo of choice is a rusk (similar to a biscotti but larger and more cake-like) and rooibos tea. Taiwanese breakfasts feature youtiao (a Chinese cruller, literally meaning “oil strip”) dunked in hot homemade soymilk. And of course, dim sum, a style of Cantonese tapas, is the food component to a much larger Hong Kong institution, yum cha, which literally means to “drink tea.” Going to yum cha means that you’re eating and drinking tea (usually of the Jasmine or Chrysanthemum variety) with friends and family, carrying the same social implications as fika. And of course, the ceremonial British tea time, which can be casual or breathtakingly lavish, is another social ritual with complex codes and etiquettes that bears social, political, and economic weight.

*In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” Though the passing hours of our day may seem insignificant, I’ve come to find that the quality of my life is often determined by the interstitial moments, the small transactions that may seem mundane but become the threads that connect all the different parts, people, and places in my life. How we break up our days, for instance, might end up being the anchors around which we float. 

*If we take a cue from the Swedes and transform our coffee breaks from a time of zoning out to a time of honing in on the relationships in our lives, maybe the quality of our lives will be that much better—for it’s often not the major life events that determine whether we pass our days well. It’s the daily sustenance that we take in with our minds and our senses, our hearts and our souls; the bread we break and the coffee we drink with our friends; the kinship in which we partake when we sit down, for just an hour, to shoot the breeze with a friend.

this is a plea to keep libraries alive

*As a child I was irascible—easily bored, prone to tantrums, and always on edge. Luckily for my parents, they discovered a cure early on: books. We’d make weekly trips to the library, where I’d fill up a tote bag with as many books as it could hold. The bag was always so heavy that I’d have to schlep it over my shoulder like a bindle, which was only cute because I was at an age and size when carrying really heavy things was endearing rather than pitiful.

*I’d check out more than thirty books at a time and finish them all within a week. I’d often lock myself in my room, finishing seven novels in a day. I was the kid who read under the table at family dinners and was told my eyes would melt away for reading in the dark on in the car. I discovered early on that books had a palliative effect on my otherwise choleric temperament. Books became for me the tokens of comfort that stuffed animals were for many kids. Libraries and bookstores were both places of discovery and havens of refuge.

*There’s a part of me that refuses to believe in the possibility of obsolescence. Will books and libraries soon be, respectively, the LPs and the record stores that we visit with a nostalgic glance? Are they already mere emblems of authenticity, marks of a certain “type” of person whose usage of books and libraries avows a certain devotion to higher principles? Are libraries soon to be museums of objects rather than places where we go to borrow books?

*Already, the function of libraries is changing—but then again, perhaps they, like any institution, have always been dynamic. Many people have written about the library as a “third place,” a term coined by RayOldenburg in his 1990 book, The Great Good Place. Simply put, a “third place” is “a neutral social surrounding separate from home and work/school.” Specifically, Kevin Harris, who writes about libraries as being third places, writes, “all societies need places that allow informal interaction without requiring it, places that are rich in the possibility of the safe, mundane encounter…” Libraries can serve this function, but they should also be distinct from other places of informal interaction, like cafes and parks, in their focus and intent.

*If libraries are to survive, then they must be able to adapt to their own changing functions, or people’s perception of their function—and capitalize on their distinctiveness from other “third places.” Besides being a meeting place, the library environment should foster, if not an appreciation for books as objects of both beauty and experience, an appreciation of reading, learning, and the pursuit of knowledge. They should expand both the breadth and depth of intellectual exploration.

*One of my college professors, John Stilgoe—an eccentric man whose curmudgeonly facade could never truly obscure his absolute brilliance and kindness—said that the reason why he never sent research assistants to the library and did all book-fetching himself is because of the serendipity that that happens when scanning bookshelves. In the process of seeking one book, you find another, whether tangential or relevant, that might be even better than the one you were seeking in the first place. The same is true of a librarian’s expertise: human knowledge, memory, and association create strands of interpersonal discovery and sharing that we’ve tried to replicate in our digital libraries, without complete success. Serendipity is diminished, if not lost in algorithmic recommendations, and even the most personal of reviews online are less human than in a conversation, in a physical space. 

*Can the design of a library, then, facilitate serendipity and discovery while attracting the masses in an age where digital convenience is highly prized and sought after? Last week I visited both the Stockholm Public Library and The Royal Library in Copenhagen, both of which are grand pillars of design. To the credit of Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund, the Stockholm Public Library’s most notable feature is its rotunda, which though remarkable from the outside, is even more remarkable for the experience it creates for the visitor upon entering the library: the feeling of being enveloped in books, as in a forest, or a in a crowd. The modern design, which is both functional and aesthetically pleasing, creates a sense of monumental grandeur which does not preclude accessibility, which can often be the case in spaces that feel larger-than-life. In fact, Asplund intentionally implemented open shelving so that visitors could access books without the help of librarians; this democratization and access is at the very heart of the communal book-borrowing system.

*But in a day and age when borrowing books seems antiquated, if not superfluous, the best libraries serve other functions. One of the reasons I visited Lamont Library, when I was at Harvard, was to spend time in the Woodberry Poetry Room, which housed rare archives and recordings. The room also played host to readings and lectures, which were ends in and of themselves, but also means for people to become acquainted with library’s stock. The Seattle Central Library offers a list of the top ten things to do on its “Plan a Visit” page, which include “Enjoy exciting public art,” “tap into technology,” and “pick up a gift in the friendshop,” all of which are extensions, not origins, of a library’s function. The word “library,” after all, comes from the Old French word “librairie,” which means “collection of books.” But even if these functions are necessary for libraries to survive, they must also not eclipse the foundation of libraries: the books themselves.

*I say this because I love and romanticize books as objects. (My one flash of kleptomania was during the summer before third grade, when I stole Sweet Valley High books from the summer camp library; never has anything else even tempted me like books have.) But despite that love, I admit that I am also obsessed with my Kindle and visit libraries now for their architecture, aesthetics, sometimes their food, and very often their bathroom, which is true of my visits to the Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Berlin libraries.

*The Royal Library in Copenhagen seems at first glance to be a library only in name. Situated on the waterfront, the black marble and glass facade is a sleek backdrop for tanning in the sun, which is the preferred activity of many who visit the library. Besides the sun-kissed visitors, the library also houses a fancy, modern restaurant, a bustling cafe, and a concert hall, all of which could stand alone, as if the library were a mall or arcade. None seems to need the word “library” as a descriptor, as in a library cafe, or a library restaurant, or a library concert hall (in fact, those couplings all sound rather awkward), yet all incentivize visits to the library—at the very least, a reason to go inside the library after tanning outside. The structure, an eight-story atrium with wave-shaped walls and transversal corridors impresses more easily than its contents. Its modernity is a far cry from the beautiful University libraries I am acquainted with (Widener, most familiarly; Yale's libraries through Gilmore Girls episodes), but its structure's ability to captivate, the same.

*More than ever, we must recognize libraries as places of modernity, not antiquity, that we can utilize in non-traditional ways. It is only in doing so that we can perhaps keep their original purpose, as houses of books, intact. We rarely use the word "patron" anymore, but one of its root meanings, "protector," is an apt word for any book-lover's relationship to libraries, both public and private. In attendance and in finances, I want to patronize libraries. This is my love letter to libraries and the serendipitous discoveries we make inside: the books we find, the knowledge we devour, and the occasional human encounters. This is for all the times that books made me feel better, for all the times I escaped into libraries as a world unto themselves, for all that I've stolen and loved and read and learned. This is my plea to keep libraries alive.

this is dinner in stockholm: Nytorget

*We first met as naive, peppy freshmen at Harvard. More accurately, we were each other’s first college friends, thrust into the New Hampshire woods as strangers, later emerging from the Appalachian trail smelly and mosquito-bitten but inevitably as friends. We bonded while eating peanut butter and Nutella tortillas, a curious tube of summer sausage, and bags of GORP. Reduced to our bare essentials (the best and worst of ourselves), we didn’t—or couldn’t—care to impress one another. During that week, the most physically grueling of my life, we had nothing but each other. At the end of each day, when the purest exhaustion swept over us, we swaddled ourselves in our sleeping bags, lying like matchsticks under the stars.

*Having not only endured but enjoyed the wildest of trips with Noah and Jonathan, when they asked me to go to Europe with them, I said Yes. Well, I said Yes and then didn’t really act on it for a couple of weeks. But in a moment of desperation, sad and confused and in want of a physical escape, I bought a plane ticket to Stockholm, less than two weeks before the departure date. Lapses in logic can indeed be blessings.

*That’s how I ended up in Stockholm, Sweden, on a Monday night, with two friends whom I hadn’t seen in a year. That we would reunite, in a middle-aged Swedish women’s apartment was uncanny—yet that randomness—the way we improvised so casually and even carelessly—was the perfect counterpoint to my typical overwrought, over-devised plans.

*We read somewhere that Stockholm was the staid older sibling (“lovely, quieter,” with a “sly sense of humor,” if I remember correctly) to the more popular, fun-loving Copenhagen. A quirky yet accurate description that we found to be true. At night (a merely temporal term; the sun did not set till 10 pm), the streets were quiet and empty. But on the first night we went south to the Södermalm district, the neighborhood that tour books are currently calling “hip” and “trendy” (there’s always one of those), and sat our tired selves down at Nytorget, a restaurant-cum-bar attached to a fancy little grocery store called Urban Deli.

*Nytorget is a trendy, buzzing restaurant—the busiest in the area—filled inside and out with locals and young professionals. With wooden interiors, a moodily-lit bar, and seating areas at multiple levels, Nytorget is a choose-your-own-adventure place. Dine slowly and luxuriously al fresco or get a quick drink at the bar.

*Start with fresh oysters (all from Normandy, France), as we did, served with the usual lemon but also with delightful accents: pickled onions (which I mistook for horseradish, because when you expect a certain food, even when it tastes totally different, your mind belies your taste buds) and a tincture of homemade Tabasco sauce, to be applied with an eye-dropper. Trendiness is all about the kitschy details, but in a place like Stockholm, where beautiful typography and impeccable design are the norm, it’s not as easy to distinguish the hip from the merely functional in these aesthetic details.

*Continue the meal with a plate of charcuterie, graduating from most raw to the least raw. Intense concentrations of salt whet the palate well. Among the hams and prosciuttos are little gems of sugared, brandied olives, more sweet than savory, with a hint of horseradish.

*There's a variety of meats on the menu (including burgers, sourced mainly from the US), but for Swedish fare, order the gleaming Nytorget sausage, which is served like a bedded baby atop a nest of agreeably oily vegetables and new potatoes. (Though the potatoes may seem trifling and ordinary, trust me, the young potatoes are better here, and they're a Swedish staple. The flesh is buttery and smooth, with less grain and starch than your ordinary russet potato. They're also bite-sized!)



*Fresh seafood is a must-eat in Stockholm. The seafood stew at Nytorget is more delicate than the typical chunky affair, with a salty and mildly acidic tomato broth that is as equally tasty as the morsels it bathes: chunks of salmon, cod, mussels and little shrimp. Light, with diced carrots and potatoes you'll surely leave til the end.



*If there's any pairing instrumental to everyday Scandinavian food, it's the marriage of savory and sweet (much to my pleasure). The ubiquitous honey-mustard, an accompaniment to many a dish, is the perfect example of this. But an even shinier and perhaps more enjoyable example was this caramelized, brûléed goat cheese, nutty and mild, but with a tang that seemed to diverge from the typical goat-iness of goat cheese. This parchment-wrapped dish, a bundle of oily vegetables with hazelnuts and a dollop of creme fraiche, typified the vegetarian dishes I saw on menus: a handful of vegetables with a large cross-section of cheese. Smear this sugar-encrusted goat cheese on bread (you'll need a lot of this; this is a generous round), throw back a pale ale to wash it all down, and call it a good first night in Stockholm.