The .Plan

Kimchi is good, but is it that good?

Last month, scientists at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute unveiled a kimchi especially developed for astronauts to prevent them from getting constipated in space. A researcher at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul reported that kimchi lowered the stress levels of caged mice by 30%… The library of a kimchi museum in Seoul holds more than 2,000 books about kimchi and thousands more dissertations. (”A Kinetic Model for Lactic Acid Production in Kimchi” was among the recent titles.) New theses are being added at the rate of 300 per year.
–Barbara Demick, “Koreans’ Kimchi Adulation, With a Side of Skepticism”, Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2006

The longing for home is so universal a form of longing that there is even a special word for it, which is, of course homesickness… I also know the sense of sadness and lostness that comes with feeling that you are a stranger and exile on the earth and that you would travel to the ends of that earth and beyond if you thought you could ever find the homeland that up till now you have only glimpsed from afar.
–Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home

Six years ago, Thom Mannarino published in the The Mars Hill Review an essay entitled, “On Finding Home”. That winter was my second darkest winter in Cleveland — a small prelude to the darkest winter that would arrive two years later — and, for that reason, I think, I appreciated Mannarino’s essay all the more. The occasion for the essay is his leaving a comfortable but aimless life as a doctoral student in Florida for a six month lectureship in London (that cold, dark city where I fortunately avoided getting stuck for a year after college), and he writes compellingly about feeling lost and anonymous in the sea of Londoners.

One winter afternoon, he ducks into St. Martins-in-the-Fields to dodge a downpour and finds himself reading notes pinned to the “Prayer Requests” bulletin board. After reading through them all, Mannarino ponders:

There were more than two dozen notes pinned to that board, a compendium of the fears, the confessions, the vulnerabilities of strangers like myself. I read them all. Maybe I shouldn’t have. They were, after all, folded up, pinned to the board, addressed to someone else, namely God. But just reading those words, hearing those voices, so raw and unguarded, brought me to a safer place. It was like being stranded on a desert island and discovering a bottle on the shore, and inside a note from soneone on the very next island: ‘Hey, it’s lonely on this sandbar. What’s it like over there?’
–Thom Mannarino, “On Finding Home,” The Mars Hill Review, Winter 2000

That essay really has nothing to do with anything related to the present, but for some reason I always find myself drawn to it when I arrive at a new destination homesick and despondent, with new uncertainties and a heightened (usually exaggerated) sense of my vulnerabilities. That’s probably it. The geographical exile is confounded by the passing away of the old securities and comforts. As Augustine of Hippo wisely prayed, God you have made our hearts restless until they rest in you.

In the meantime, what is a guy to do? He cooks. The apartment smells new and cleaned, but it smells nothing like home. Out comes the bottle opener, and off come the bottle caps. A Bostonian twist on the Black-and-Tan: Guinness topped by Sam Adams. Chicken thighs, skin and fat and all. There is no other activity in the world that sings more loudly the praises of slowness than picking fat off of chicken thighs; if you rush it, you waste good, dark chicken meat. Soy sauce, slivers of ginger, slices of scallion, dry sherry, a dash of cinnamon, star anise, and a bit of coriander all tumble into the glass bowl after the chicken. The mixture gives a satisfying squish, squish in my hands and then goes into the refrigerator for half an hour while I have a seat on the balcony and enjoy my patriotic Black-and-Tan. One pint later, and the chicken is ready for the wok. And as the chicken sizzles from pink to pale to brown, now, and only now, the apartment smells as it should.

The road trip is over; this is not really Day 6. But the days will be numbered until I can get over myself and bring you back your regularly scheduled daily dose of impersonal research citations and political commentary…