Last week my book club discussed I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. Most of the group landed on 5 out of 7. I gave it a 2, and I will admit I rounded up so I would not sound extreme.
The 2 says more about me than about the book. Here is why.
First, full disclosure: I own two copies. This is my second set of two copies of the same book. The first was Eat Pray Love.
It caught my eye at Gramedia earlier this year, and after the last few years I could not think of a more relatable title on the shelf. I loved the cover too. A lot.
I picked it up expecting an invitation into someone else’s inner life, plus a window into Korean culture, even if that window turned out to be one dish wide.
The Bahasa Indonesia edition was hard going, and I put that down to translation, so it stayed at my parents’ place in Jakarta almost unread. Then the book club picked it for September, which felt like a good excuse to buy it again in English. I packed it for a 23-hour flight to London and very nearly finished it.
It was still a difficult read for me, and the reason is simple. I could not find myself in it.
The author is writing her own experience with a lot of honesty, and honesty is not the same thing as familiarity. The way she sits with her thoughts is not the way I sit with mine, and that gap stayed open for me the whole way through. That is a mismatch, not a fault. Plenty of readers clearly close that gap easily. I could not.
The book is sold as part memoir, part self-help, so I kept checking whether it was offering me any comfort. It was not. Reading it in a good state of mind did not lift me, and I know that in a low state of mind I would reach for something else entirely.
I once read a line on Instagram about the comfort of being sad. Parts of this book live in that comfort, and some readers need exactly that. I am not one of them. I read for the way out rather than the way further in.
I also wonder how much of this is cultural distance. My book club circled the same question: how much of a therapy room survives the trip across a language and a country, and how much of it stays behind. Something in those pages kept slipping past me. Empathy has never been my strongest muscle, so I am willing to accept that the distance was mine to close.
Speaking of Tteokbokki
Which brings me to my one real complaint, and it is with the book rather than with anyone in it. Where was the tteokbokki?
I can only remember it turning up twice, both times on the cover. The front calls it a spicy rice cake, three words. The back tells us it is the author’s favourite food. Given that it is in the title, I wanted a paragraph. I would have taken a page. Food is one of the quickest ways into a person, and this felt like a doorway left unopened.
Caveat: I skipped a few pages, so tell me if I missed it.
If you came here looking for Tteokbokki
Tteokbokki is one of the best-loved street foods in Korea. It is made with chewy cylinders of rice cake (imagine penne without the hole), fish cakes, a broth usually made with anchovies and kelp, and a sauce led by gochujang, which is where the heat comes from. Boiled eggs and spring onions are common additions.
It arrives extremely hot and is best eaten standing right where you bought it, with chopsticks and no dignity.
As it has grown in popularity, so have the variations. The last one I had was a cheese tteokbokki at a Korean restaurant in Melbourne. Excellent winter food, and a much easier recommendation than the book.
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