Chapter 42
Ramen Remembrances
When you live on a rural island in the Pacific Northwest, winter teaches you how to be still. More than half the restaurants shutter for the season, the ferries run late or not at all, and the dark comes early, slinking in by four o’clock. There are no malls, no chain stores, and nothing stays open very late.
I’ve had to cancel three Hungry Love dinners due to ferry crew shortages. The weather’s been brutal, and sourcing ingredients on the island this time of year is like playing Iron Chef with one arm tied behind your back and a three-item mystery basket you didn’t choose.
Kiki is off island for a week, which means the apartment is quieter than usual. Without her soundtrack of movement and color, I do everything I can to distract myself from the silence. From the space he left behind.
I joined the local Romance Book Club because I want to believe in love again.
I joined the Somber Sisters Book Club because I suspect it might be hopeless.
And when I finish our club picks, I cross the street to the bookstore, craving espresso and something less tangible. Maybe distraction. Maybe company. Maybe a room where my chest doesn’t echo back everything I’m trying not to think about.
Outside, the world is fog and rain; in here, it’s paper and warmth. Darvill’s is the only shop open seven days a week, even in the off-season, because as Sara says, “Everyone deserves somewhere warm to duck into when the rain won’t stop.”
The staff has become like family over the last few months.
Ashley, tall and wry with a resting-bookworm face, lights up when I talk romance books with her. She figured out my weak spot for Mhairi McFarlane. Becky’s my go-to when I’m chasing literary fiction that bruises. Kelly, with her legendary cackle, knows which cookbook to hand me when I’m spiraling.
And Gray—gentle, soft-spoken, razor-sharp—always finds the most surprising titles. She’s mixed Asian-Latino-Scottish like me, and though we haven’t talked much about that, there’s something grounding in just seeing her. She’s studying publishing at Emerson and comes back to the island during breaks to work at the bookstore. Her taste is precise and expansive—Ocean Vuong, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney—and she never recommends something that won’t make me feel deeply.
Elaine’s got me covered for soul-nourishing nonfiction—the kind that makes you believe people can change, even when you can’t.
Ocean, her four-year-old daughter—quiet, wide-eyed, always in mismatched socks—lives in the kids’ section. She curls up in the window nook like a little forest nymph, reading under a string of paper lanterns as seals and seabirds and the occasional orca drift by in the Salish Sea just beyond the shoreline.
Today, Sara seems to read something in my expression, like an aura she knows how to translate. She hands me Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong. I devour it in a night. I laugh into my sleeve, cry into my pillow, and wince at the chapter where a white boyfriend infantilizes and fetishizes her.
The next morning, I return to Darvill’s Bookstore, wrecked, mascara-smudged, and starving for more.
Elaine slides Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner across the counter, like she’s setting down a bell I’ve been avoiding ringing, but maybe that’s the point.
Gray recommends Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls, about Chinese mothers, inherited silence, and the things families pass down without meaning to. It just won a Pulitzer, and the editor, Daphne, lives on Orcas, which everyone treats like proof that the island holds literary magic.
I leave with my arms full and something knotted tight in my chest.
Back at the apartment, I light the fireplace and curl up with a blanket and start to read. But my brain won’t stay still.
I bought the books for distraction. What I got was a reckoning and the realization that no one ever let me mourn.
When Mom and Dad died, there was no memorial. Instead, there were social services, foster interviews, and bouncing from one school to another. We had been new to town, and Mom and Dad hadn’t made friends yet. We were a self-contained universe, just the three of us who didn’t need much more. And when that universe broke apart, there was no one left to remember them with me.
Now, the grief is loud. It has edges. It’s not just the persistent ache of absence I’ve known all these years, but the sudden need for a mother I can’t call. A mother who could hold me through this kind of loss—two heartbreaks in less than a year.
Not the loss of men who mistreated me or ignored me. No, they were the kind of men who treated me like a queen. Who gave everything they had. Until they didn’t.
It’s not lost on me that all the books I’ve clung to lately are by Asian authors, with food and their mothers prominently featured. I didn’t have a fraught relationship with my mom like Michelle Zauner, but the question she asks—“Am I even Korean if my mother doesn’t exist?”—lands like a sucker punch.
I’m half Japanese. But now that Mom’s gone, what does that make me?
I don’t have an answer. Grief and identity are braided so tightly that I can’t untangle one from the other. So, I head to the kitchen.
I cook like I’m trying to conjure her.
Not the easy weeknight ramen I’ve made on autopilot for years.
The real ramen.
The kind of ramen my mom used to make, every winter, with religious dedication. The two-day, bone-boiling, noodle-making, soul-excavating kind.
I start by buying pork bones from Lum Farm. Boil them down into a cloudy, rich broth over twelve hours, skimming and stirring until the whole apartment smells like salt and marrow. I make noodles from scratch, adding baking soda to give them bounce, running the dough through the pasta machine in rhythmic turns until my shoulders ache and my mind finally shuts up.
At hour six, I Google “is it normal to feel emotionally manipulated by a stockpot” and the internet is unhelpful, because the internet has never met me or my mother.
I soak wakame. Stir in miso. I make jammy eggs, medium-boiled and marinated in sake, mirin, and soy.
I braise pork belly that I marinated overnight in garlic, sugar, and sake to make chashu, and add it to the broth in strips. Three hours later, the meat melts in my mouth.
The ramen is salty and rich and gloriously umami-deep. A portal and an offering.
And it’s mine.
And it’s the perfect dish to cry over—because you can blame the steam.
Later, sleep folds around me like silk, and for once, I wake the next day like something has been lifted.
I make garlic somen noodles with homemade chili crisp. Then curry over rice. Tatsuta-age. Soboro-don. Anything that keeps my hands busy.
I don’t stop until I collapse.
I don’t make any of it to feed anyone else’s hunger or heartbreak. Just my own.
And maybe that’s what this week was for.
The dinners I had to cancel. The books I wasn’t ready for. The food I didn’t need to serve. The silence I kept trying to outrun.
It wasn’t distraction. It was remembering.
And the remembering—whether I wanted it or not—was a kind of letting go.