Instant
Katie Chan
Sept 2021
It starts beneath the mart’s lights, in a tucked-away aisle bathed under a washed-out, sterile glow. While rifling amidst an ocean of reds, oranges, and yellows, there’s the unmistakable crinkle of plastic-on-plastic, unceasing until a package is procured from the rows of rumpled packaged squares.
Chunky. Brittle. Behind its glinting, squeaking exterior, instant ramen carries a pallor pale to the eyes and stiff to the touch. It’s a tangled mess, mimicking the frantic confusion woven among snarling, intercrossed wires. But when tossed in a pot of hot water, the taut coils mellow out into soft, relaxed lines, aimlessly drifting among its watery depths.
That original stiffness often creeps up during late nights, the type spent at the kitchen counter in mid-suburban San Diego, a familiar tension in the air clinging to both the muscle and the mind while hunched over heaping mountains of calculus. It’s on those same kinds of nights that a bowl of instant ramen would work its way toward me, my dad’s hands gently sliding a pair of chopsticks between the slots of fraying notebooks and crumpled scratch paper. The bowl itself is hot to the touch, steam still rolling out in waves, a hard-boiled egg rocking side-to-side amidst the sea of yellowed noodles and crackling seaweed. If I peer closer, I can discern some tofu and kale mixed in — staples of my home diet — bobbing amidst the soupy concoction’s disposition.
It’s nothing like the restaurants, all drenched in oils, fats melting on the tongue and tastebuds saturated with spices in one cosmopolitan broth. A leaden heaviness weighing in the stomach — full, but dragging, a sleepiness that tugs and pulls at the soul. But it’s also not the run-of-the-mill high school snack, teetering between half crisp and half soggy, all slurped up in seconds while racing from tutoring to swim practice.
Specifically, my dad’s ramen tastes sweet — not a sugary sweet, but sweet like the sun, a beam of light chasing out the threatening storm of homework and sleep deprivation. My dad would often ask, “Good?” — a hesitant whisper that still manages to break past the deafening darkness — before I furiously nod back, blinking away bleariness to offer two punchy thumbs ups. Where spoken words are few and far between, the lingering, unspoken ones are nothing but absent, traces swirled into the soup mixture, carrying hallmarked memories and stages of growing up: my dad, gripping the handlebars once the training wheels came off my first bike, teaching me to write my first computer code, videoing my first harp recital. The stretched-out ramen noodle tethers each memory to the next, a series of loosely connected memories cushioned by warm bowls and fond smiles.
The noodles stave off the hunger, sure, but they stave off the silence even more, introducing a debatable amount of nutrition into my digestive system and setting my heart to a steady warmth, reminiscent of hugs and high fives before my dad takes a left in his beige sedan to his office and I’m turning right for my quick drive to school.
Instant ramen may be the hallmark for inferior goods, an unwanted item that is forgotten in the face of bigger and better, but despite the initial temptations of restaurant-sourced linguine or uber-ed pad Thai, the ramen noodle never fully lets me sever the connection. When it comes from my dad, one packet adds enough volume — enough depth — to fill both the gloomy nightscape and my midnight cravings, a stoked flame glowing amidst reoccurring yawns and an impending dawn.
Katie Chan is from San Diego, California and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.