Food in TWBU

A large part of That Which Binds Us revolves around the social experience of good food. This was largely influenced by my wife! She’s an amazing cook and has introduced me to so much in the world of flavor. Before I met her, I didn’t know what cilantro was… Now I know and it is my enemy! But I digress – below are several of the food scenes in the book and their inspiration.

Opening scene

The book begins with Mei eating noodles for lunch at her high school. While the scene quickly goes sour, the inspiration for it remains bright. My wife grew up with her mom cooking all sorts of great food. Since schools never have microwaves (at least not available for students to use), her mom would heat up the food at home until it was lava-hot and then put it in a thermos. It would still be warm by the time my wife opened it up for lunch! This is such a clear image to me because of how touching it is.

Cooking at home

For many people who grow up with regular cooking, the kitchen is a safe space, a haven where the feeling of a knife chopping through vegetable stalks pares stress away. Not so for me – I didn’t really grow up around much cooking, so to me, the kitchen is where the microwave is and the room next to the far more important pantry.

To Mei, of course, the kitchen is a comforting room. In Asian families, it’s not uncommon for food to be the language of love. Here, in the scene where she comes home from the awful day, she can bask in the broth of her mother’s unspoken love and take out her stress on some bok choi!

The food park

I thought of Harry Potter and how wonderous the banquet hall is at Hogwarts. I wanted the ‘banquet hall’ at Myer’s to be just as wonderous. Fortunately, this was incredibly easy for me. My wife and I had our honeymoon in Hawaii. For the first 2-3 days, we ate at restaurants around the hotel we were at. But then we discovered the food truck park – a total game-changer. It’s basically exactly what you read in the book. A variety of food trucks serving fresh, local food of all sorts of different cuisines. It was heaven.

Cooking for Devi

So if you’re not used to Chinese cuisine, this scene probably seemed pretty normal, hopefully romantic. If you are familiar with Chinese cooking, you probably wondered why she made hot oil noodles as a romantic dish. Full disclosure, I used them as a placeholder with the full intention of looking up a more romantic dish. Yes, I am half-Chinese, but again, I didn’t grow up with a lot of cooking, so I was going to have to do some research. To be clear, the research would have taken me 10 minutes. Clearly, I didn’t do it.

Devi’d eggs

You’ve heard a lot of mention of my wife and her influence on the good cooking scenes. It probably comes as no surprise that the inspiration for Devi’s abysmal cooking is me. Womp womp. Yes, when I first met my wife, I knew basically nothing about cooking. I, for sure, would have set the house on fire trying to scramble some eggs. After some rigorous education though, I am a breakfast master! Scrambled eggs are actually my specialty – if that sounds like nonsense to you, then you have a lot to learn about eggs.

Recovery soup

Soup is a universal comfort food. Maybe comfort food is the wrong label, but a recovery food. And Mei, with her penchant for injuring herself, needs lots of soup! What could be more comforting than a bowl of soup, cooked by a mother? Not even your mother necessarily. Just a mother is probably sufficient. Whenever my wife is sick, she wants a bowl of egg drop soup from the Chinese restaurant down the street. I would legitimately pay extra for some sort of mother-made guarantee.