cavities

Ever been to a talkative dentist? We see a husband and wife team, both of who are lively, sweet, and highly interested in discussing nutrition as my teeth are being cleaned and sometimes even during a filling. It’s the most awkward thing, because I want to answer thoughtfully but my mouth is dry and my tongue is off to the side and sometimes numb from local anesthesia. I’d really rather not say anything, but she asks me questions and I really do want to answer. They’re vitamin junkies. They take everything: fish oil, vitamin D, probiotics, elderberry. Like everyone, they’re not sure if they’re doing the right thing. Her main concern is that her kids aren’t getting what they need. I tell her, if they’re growing and they eat a good amount of bread and milk and other basics, they’re probably fine. Everything is fortified. One thing I’ve learned through studying toxicology, is that too much of a good thing (vitamins) can be just as poisonous as having too little.    

I have horrible teeth that tell the history of the horrible junk food I ate as a child. My mother made wonderful dinners, but there were a lot of eating opportunities until that late hour. For breakfast it was coco pebbles cereal, the chocolate ones that turned the milk into dark corn syrup soup that I slurped every drop of. My packed school lunches were Michael Pollan’s worst nightmare: bright white wonder bread with limp bologna, the neon orange colored cheese slices that came wrapped in individual plastic, a variety of chips (Fritos, Doritos, Ruffles), a variety of Hostess treats (Twinkies, Susie-Qs, ding-dongs -the worst name of any dessert BTW). My mom wanted to make me feel American, so she bought the most popular, most advertised foods. The folly of following the masses! Afterschool I was always with my friends and we hoarded candy from the ice-cream man. My pockets were heavy with Now N’Laters taffy, Bubbalicious Bubble Gum, Nerds, Gobstoppers, Jolly Ranchers. Death to teeth.

For dinners, mom had a rotating menu, including much American fare: spaghetti and meatballs, meatloaf with a side of english peas, steak with chocolate brown 57 sauce and grilled potatoes, creamy chicken potpie with chunks of carrots, celery and bright yellow corn. My sister and I remember the flavor to her cooking, somehow everything had a little more kick to it. We celebrated Thanksgiving with Turkey and mashed potatoes, but then of course a side of Kim chi. My parents were really modern and willing to assimilate and adapt as needed. My mom especially, was quite open to new experiences and free-spirited. This wasn’t true of many of my other relatives.

We never went to the doctor or dentist for annual checkups growing up. Other than not having insurance, there was a deep-seated belief that you go to the doctor and he will kill you, or make you more sick. It’s like the Chinese of yore who hid their cash under the mattress. Old beliefs die hard.

Luckily my uncle was a dentist, so I saw him a few times for fillings. I had 12 cavities, 4 pulled out, so now left with 8, 4 which are capped with porcelain and the others with fillings that are all cracking at their edges. It’s a lot of upkeep to be aware of them each individually, timing the appointments. It’s like changing the batteries in the fire alarms in the house (they never just all go out at the same time. It’s always just one, and you have to listen to the beep carefully, hunting down the source).

         I love micro and now I know it’s the streptococcus mutans in the mouth that create the cavities by eating the sugar stuck on your teeth. It’s also the acid from foods that foster a favorable environment for those bacteria to thrive. That’s why soda is the worst combo and why I won’t serve it at parties, even the kid ones.

         Today on NPR, I heard a horrible story about how Americans only make up 6% of the world but we use the most energy also b/c we’re obese. The obesity makes us the equivalent of an extra billion people in energy use (gas on the plane, more food and the cost of energy to produce that food). I cringe at kid parties, because everyone serves the same crap I ate growing up. It has changed, but not enough and not in the kid realm. I really have such great ideas for food products, and it’s something I feel strongly about, but I have to remind myself to rest for a while. Everything in time. 

the Italian

We said our final au revoir to Maitre David yesterday. Jakob and Rittika were sobbing and moaning, clutching on to either side of his legs. They wouldn’t let him go, not even for me to give him a final proper hug – I had to side squeeze him, with a weeping child sandwiched between us. Hudson is known at school for being the only one who doesn’t cry. Even when he tripped over a tree root last week and skinned his knees sorely, not a tear or a whimper. "I'm fine, it was no big deal." No, he’s too manly to openly express pain already and this somewhat concerns me. Eric says it’s a good thing, that he’s a boy and that he’s tough and strong. 

The last day of school is always heartbreaking anyway, without having your favorite teacher move back to a remote village in Brittany, never to be seen again. The classroom had been stripped bare and the kids were sent home with cake-crusted lips from the afternoon party (I wasn’t kidding when I said the French like to party), and their arms loaded with different colored square French notebooks. Marion, the English teacher, had them journal for 30 minutes a day and I was impressed with Hudson’s ability to write a succinct paragraph and his overuse of the colon.

My favorite was an entry called “The Italian”.

My restaurant is called: the Italian. I want to be the owner. We will serve: pizza, pasta with pesto and cheese. The toppings for the pizza will be: mushrooms, pepironi, chesse, olive and garlic. The drinks are: Shirley temple, lemonade, vanilla shakes, and of course water. The toppings for pasta will be: chesse, butter, pesto and mushroom. Dessert: seven layers of chocolate (tiramiso).

Inspired by the good writing, we took him for a celebratory dinner at Sabatino's Lido Shipyard in Newport Beach. People will bear the Friday traffic on the 55 just for a taste of their house made sausage that is blended with a special Sicilian goat cheese. The long strand arrives on a flat iron skillet, squirming like a trapped snake, sizzling and curling piping hot. It smells sweet from the side of grilled onions and savory from the seasonings in the meat. I’ve never liked sausage, not even on my pizza, but this is the one and only place in the world where it will be my first choice. Hudson ate an entire one, along with an entire man pizza on his own.

We first came here with Eric’s Aunt Rosie years ago, before we had Hudson. She’s married to a well-respected divorce attorney and they live in Newport overlooking the back bay, in a house once owned by President Nixon. On our first married Christmas, Aunt Rosie had 20 shiny wrapped boxes of various goodies from the Home Shopping Network delivered to our door. This included essentials such as a telephone cord protectors, matching scenic Thomas Kincaide embroidered Bible covers, and an industrial size popcorn maker. That night before dinner at Sabatino's, she had given me a bottle of slightly used Bob Mackie perfume. “They don’t sell it anymore anywhere,” she explained as she handed me the glossy black box that was decorated with an art deco peacock tail in gold, pink and mint green. “I still have the box.” And indeed she did, along with the boxes to the hundred other perfumes that she had collected and displayed on her guest bathroom counter. It smelled musky sweet, like a rich woman from the 80s who would have worn furs to dinner parties. As she handed it to me, she said, “Never say I never gave you anything.”

         When Hudson was born, Aunt Rosie kindly sent us a huge box of Charlie Rocket outfits from a baby boutique on Balboa Island. She never had a child of her own and she told me she had so much fun shopping for such small items. And they were so tiny, newborn t-shirts that fit on my hand and of course they never made it over his head, because he was born the size of a watermelon. And now he’s already finished with the first grade, eating Sicilian man sausage, writing business plans about owning an Italian restaurant, using colons in his essays. Last summer when we went to visit my sister before Woo Lae Oak closed, she asked him, “What do you want to drink?” He replied, “What are my options?” All the clichés are too true: they grow up too fast. And if they’re only children, they grow up doubly fast.

name

I’ve never liked my name. A name should say something true about a person, carry a hint of history, and if lucky be unique enough to separate you but not weird enough to destroy you. Monica is Spanish, Mexican, Italian: I am none of these. Although oddly, when I lived in Korea, more locals than not asked me if I was Brazilian. My skin had been darker than usual, just after a hot summer at the beach. My cousin Dave has gotten this too. So we’ve wondered: Could be some latin blood somewhere way back when in the times of seafaring and trading? My grandmother did have ten kids, so we know she was sleeping around a lot. Maybe there was a Brazilian milkman? Then when I visited Japan, people terrified me by invading my personal space with rapid Japanese conversation as if I should know what they were saying. Even when I go to Mitsuwa, our local Japanese market, the cashiers do the same. Perhaps there was a Japanese poolboy, too?

Choi is also a weird sounding name that sounds nothing like what it is in Korean, which sounds more like Che, as in Che Guevara the revolutionary. And maybe whoever the genius translator was had this concern in mind, this potential confusion with the revolutionary, and all of us would be detained every time we tried to bypass airport security. Well, thanks to the phonetically challenged name creator, I was teased horribly all my life: the Choi of cooking, the Choi of sex (thanks Dr. Ruth), Choi boy (when I had a god-awful buzz cut in the second grade), Choi boy-toy (the Madonna era, my best dating era).

There are only a handful of Korean last names, the majors being: Kim, Lee, Park, Han. These are the Smiths and Browns of Korea. So yes, it always annoyed the hell out of me, when someone would recognize my last name and say, “Oh, you say you’re a Choi. I know Mike Choi from grade school in Kansas. Do you know him?” Yes, I know all one hundred Mike Choi’s in the world and we are all related! This may actually be truer than my sarcasm wants to admit. In Korea, you were forbidden to marry anyone with the same last name since they trace back to the same original tribes. Which is maybe why the theme of unrequited love is so prevalent in their drama.

Was I relieved to change my name to Carter? Dear God, no. Because now I am a black woman in Mississippi, a published writer of urban Christian novels with enticing titles called “Sacrifice the One” with the cover a woman in prayer position and “Me, Myself, and HIM” with an even better cover of a man melodramatically caressing a woman wearing a revealing spaghetti strap tank top (both of their eyes are closed tightly). I thought Carter was such a white sounding name, probably because of President Jimmy (the only modern pres to not start a war), but it’s a more common black name from what I’ve found on name searches online.

A friend was trying to search me on Facebook and pointed out another Monica Carter who was also Asian, but younger than me. What are the odds? She even looked Korean - truly stranger than fiction. Why couldn’t I have a unique name like Zosia Mamet or Jemima Kirke? These girls would never have my identity crisis.

So Eric has known about my longing for a better name for years. He took me on a date to see the new Woody Allen movie, To Rome, With Love. He knows how much I love Woody Allen movies and it was a nice gesture to take me, when he prefers shoot ‘em up blood baths to the quirky character story. It wasn’t his best, but the storylines are funny enough to forgive the lack of cohesion. And Italy’s in the poorhouse, so it’s a good pick-me-up to the country that gave us pizza, Pavarotti, and Michelangelo.

In an early scene, Alec Baldwin is talking about Sally’s friend Monica who is visiting and he is warning the boyfriend that he will be tempted by her. He says, “Monica, she even has a hot name!” Eric’s eyes were on me here, because he had watched this scene in the previews and knew he had to take me just to hear that line. We both burst in laughter at the same time. Eric said, “Do you believe me now?”

So my name is a confusing mess, just like my identity, but at least Woody Allen, my husband, and maybe Alec Baldwin all think my first name is sexy. We can’t all be born to Pulitzer prize winning playwrights and end up a Zosia or a Jemima.

If I do write a book, what name would I use? I certainly can’t be Monica Carter, the Christian romance novelist! 

no pain, no gain

It was warm enough in mid-September that the soot from the New York city air clung to my skin, forming a black film on my exposed legs, arms, face and neck. I never felt so filthy at the end of every day, and maybe from the minute I stepped outside. But I still loved the energy of it all, despite the grime: the excitement of so many kinds of bodies and minds colliding spontaneously, the arty storefronts, the walking to everywhere. Someone once told me that New York is the only true city in America. And it may be true, there is an otherworldliness to it that isn’t quite as dramatic in L.A., San Francisco, Chicago or Seattle.

I had imagined living there that year, until I met the reality of  the dirt and weather. The thought of showering so often and the hassle of owning a full winter wardrobe pulled my fantasies back to easy California. I’m not a neat freak, but I can’t go to bed feeling dirty: even my feet have to be clean and anything I’m wearing has to smell like a spring breeze. All I wanted at the close of every night was to take a cool shower and soak my blistered feet. I must have trekked three or four city miles a day in leather ballet slippers, my idea of a good pedestrian shoe then.

Along with my mom, I stayed at my restaurant aunt’s temporary one bedroom loft, which had a living room with a fold-out and was big for Soho. The trouble was there was only one bathroom and my aunt was usually in it nightly for what felt like hours. We wondered what she was doing in there? Reading an entire Russian novel while soaking in the tub? Perhaps tweezing her brows? Practicing different styles of makeup application before the magnification mirror? When my aunt finally opened the door and a gush of steam poured out, I may have hastily said something like, this is good for my clogged pores. She lit up. “You say your pores need cleaning?” She suddenly looked at me differently, saw a new potential to shape me into her image.

The first thing she explained was her mantra: No pain, no gain. This was spoken without any hint of playfulness, but with the command of the military general she must have been in her past life. If you want to make it in the world, you must be presentable. The gain was world acceptance and the pain, well that was where her fun began. She had often told us that she could tell everything she needs to know about a person in one quick glance. When she hired people, she needed not more than five minutes before she knew yes or no. Presentation was 80 percent in her game of life.  

At 50, her skin was impressive: spotless, wrinkleless, even-toned. It may have looked better than mine at 25. But my mother’s skin wasn’t all too bad and she didn’t do much to hers. So I wondered how much our Korean genetics played a helping role and whether the pain that was to follow was really necessary?

My aunt was the most disciplined one in our family. My mother thinks it was because she was born exactly the time the Korean War started and she was tossed around a lot instead of being cuddled as a baby. She may have heard gunfire and bombs and absorbed that the world was a dangerous place. Whatever the reason, she followed her routines like clockwork, as if all human life on the planet depended on it. She woke up at the crack of dawn to spin at the gym, returning with every article of clothing drenched in sweat; if you didn’t sweat, you didn’t accomplish anything. The day was filled with rotations at the restaurants, meetings and planning, keeping everyone and thing on task. At night, she had a beauty ritual that was a compilation of tips she had read in magazines and gleaned from the finest dermatologists along with some old school habits of my grandmother (like rubbing the insides of orange peel and apple peel to the tops of her hands).

I sheepishly held my drugstore Neutrogena cleanser in my hands. She refused to look at it. For amateurs. If you want to make it in the world, to be truly presentable, you needed a 12-step. I wondered if she had a secret life that none in the family knew, that maybe she had been attending Alcoholics Anonymous every morning all while telling everyone she had been going to spinning class. No, her hamstrings were much too toned. The 12-step was a mere coincidence. She wanted me to get a notepad and write every step, every ingredient, the timing, the progression, so I would never forget, because she would never take the time to tell me again. I explained that I had a decent memory and that the notepad would only get soggy and the ink would smudge. I followed my aunt from the kitchen, who had a cutting board, vegetables, a pot of oatmeal and an ice-pick in her hands. I carried a jar of mayonnaise. Close the door, she ordered. 

Step 1: Steam. This meant transforming the entire bathroom into the inside of a thick white cloud, only achieved by running the shower on its hottest setting for a solid half hour with door and window closed When the room is so foggy you can’t see your face in the mirror, it’s ready. Let pores open.

Step 2: While pores are opening, chop food products: Cucumber slices, avocado, orange rinds. Stir and blend mixtures into three separate bowls for cleansers and masks.

Step 3: Rub oatmeal mixture over face in circular motion and if it starts curdling from the heat, don’t eat it. 

Step 4: Rinse.

Step 5: Glop on forkfuls of mayo for your hair, like a conditioner to add shine (and a sour tuna sandwich smell) to your mane. Use the fork as a comb to blend it through.

Step 6: Mask. Use avocado and yogurt mixture. Ignore the smell.
Step 7: Rest the cucumber slices over your eyes. Try to relax even though your face smells like spoiled guacamole.

Step 8: Rinse

Step 9: Get icepick. Yes, Icepick. (The hefty industrial kind used in the backs of kitchens at big fancy restaurants that only sociopathic owners had access to.)

Step 10: Retrieve Evian ice block from freezer and use the pick to chip away large shards.

            Step 11: Fill sink with this fresh Evian ice and Evian water.

            Step 12: Dunk face 100 times to seal the pores and tighten. Quickly in and out, in and out. Repeat in reps of 10. (It was brain-freeze, like I had bitten into the coldest scoop of ice-cream, but this had no pleasure to it, no tangible reward.)

And all these years I had thought food was for eating. Maybe this was what happens when you live and breathe in a restaurant. You start becoming extra resourceful with what you know and have before you, see the many uses of a thing.

No pain, no gain. Got it. But an ice-pick? Just the thought of an icepick was painful without the odd act of hammering away at an ice block on a steamy bathroom floor. And all that Evian water. I had a passing thought about all the plastic bottles the size of Texas floating in the Great Atlantic. I had another about all the women in other worlds climbing uphill in the hot sun to fetch clean water from a well. And here she was, pouring Evian into the sink like it was nothing, a clean cocktail for her face. We were shallow. We were vain: all this consumption in the name of clean skin. We had been in there for almost an hour. Were our pores that much noticeably cleaner and tighter? I was only 25 and my skin felt just the same as before we initiated this string of pains. What did we gain? My face smelled like guacamole all night and I didn’t like it.

The next night, she told me she left extra avocado mask and ice in the bowl next to the sink, that I was on my own to follow the regimen. She had trained me and now I must follow. I told her I would try the 100 dunk, but only made it to 10. I picked up my Neutrogena cleanser and used it to wash my face in one step in the shower like I always did. When I came out of the bathroom, my pores were too large, my face didn’t share her same sheen. She thought me weak and ineffectual.  

Back home in L.A., when I asked my sister if she knew about the 12-steps, she told me that I got away easy. At the L.A. ghostly mansion my aunt had built something of a home spa. My sister told me she once ventured in and had the entire regimen not just for the face, but the body too. This included a carton of raw eggs for some kind of special tightening mask. Some of it had trickled into her scalp and the heat from the steam cooked it, so she spent hours afterwards painstakingly combing scrambled egg out of her hair.