when Life imitates Cup Noodles

hear me out!

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of Cup Noodles - or ramen more generally - as a metaphor for art. Or living. Wait no, please don’t go; hear me out!

My first memory of ramen is of my mom making it as a special treat when I was growing up, often in winter, in a steaming pot on the stove. My mom is allergic to MSG (or so she claims) so she would always use just the packet of dehydrated vegetables and discard the one with the soup base. A couple of minutes before the noodles were done she would crack one egg for each person into the pot and then tuck the eggs under the noodles to poach them. She also added frozen vegetables and any stray leftovers she’d found lying around in the fridge - flavored tofu and ground pork with chives, for example, or Chinese cabbage and carrot stir-fried with ginger. Without the soup base the broth was often too bland for my taste, so I would eat my portion with a bottle of Kikkoman at my side and sprinkle soy sauce on my noodles after every few bites, which left the broth inedibly salty by the end of the meal. I’d pour the leftover blackened soup down the InSinkErator and listen to it gurgling away in the pipes beneath my kitchen.

My mom would always emphasize, as she ladled broth into my bowl and then nestled a poached egg on top of the noodle pile, that ramen was not a sufficiently nutritious meal for a growing girl like me, and so while she would allow it as a treat, I shouldn’t get any ideas about eating it more often. But alas, she was only able to gate-keep the flow of ramen into my belly for a limited number of years - everything changed once I finally entered high school.

That was when ramen went from being a special occasion meal to a basic staple of my diet. Lunch service in our cafeteria was divided up between three separate lines: one for hot meals, another for cold or a la carte dishes, and a third for fast food which didn’t require any prep. This is where not only Doritos, Twinkies and Gatorade were sold but also the Cup Noodles, because the only effort required to transform the styrofoam cups into food was to dispense hot water directly into them from an industrial-size tank which sat next to the cash register. All we teenage customers had to do was skewer the paper lid with a fork and keep it pressed down over the cup for 2-3 minutes, et voilà! Lunch is served.

The Cup Noodles line was by far the fastest moving one in the cafeteria, and I spent most of my lunches wolfing down chicken-ish flavored ramen and a chocolate chip cookie for dessert rather than wasting my time on the more substantial, arguably healthier lunches which the other two lines produced. It just made obvious sense: why waste up to half of your forty-five minute lunch break waiting in line for bland rotisserie chicken and green beans when you could speed through the fast lane instead?

Cup Noodles remained my go-to source of nourishment in college, where I spent as much time as I could bent over econ textbooks, writing papers or attending lectures. It took less than five minutes to boil water in an electric kettle and only an additional 2 minutes to steep the noodles, which meant barely ten minutes need elapse between the first sensed pangs of hunger and the last bite of piping hot, salty yellow broth sliding down the walls of my esophagus.

But in the years after graduating from college something about eating brittle, barely-cooked-through noodles out of a styrofoam cup started to feel beneath me. Was life worth living if I couldn’t even make time to boil a pot of water and wait five minutes before sitting down to eat? What did that say about my dignity?

Thus began my slow ascent up the ladder of ramen connoisseurship, but I didn’t jump to boiling water right away. My sister, who I lived with for a few months while my marriage - and life in general - crumbled apart in my late twenties, taught me how to make ramen in a microwave, which was only slightly more classy than eating it out of a styrofoam cup but many times more delicious. Turns out that istead of dirtying a pot and waiting for water to boil, you can put packaged ramen and cold water in a bowl, microwave it for five minutes, et voilà!

Now I’m in my late thirties and not only have I graduated to boiling water and adding both poached egg and frozen vegetables the way my mom used to, I’ve become a loyal adherent to this New York Times recipe for perfect instant ramen (Mom definitely wouldn’t approve). It’s about as fancy as I’m willing to get for homemade fast food: in principle you’re still just boiling water and adding things to a pot, but then you crank up the unhealthiness by layering on a few slices of American cheese and butter at the end, adding extra umami oomph to complement the MSG from the spice packets.

If I’m honest, I’ve been avoiding Substack for a long time because I thought it was the Cup Noodles of writing on the internet. On the one hand I admired Substack for making it much easier and even profitable for independent writers to reach an audience; on the other hand, something about it felt too simplistic and commercial. Before the Substack App came out, back when subscribing to a newsletter meant only receiving it through e-mail, I didn’t like the idea that writers were at the mercy of their readers’ e-mail clients as the medium to display their words. The way posts are rendered through that e-mail client is most likely how readers will experience the writing (I assume that most readers won’t read the post online unless the word count exceeds the limit). Not to mention if the reader will encounter it at all! I use Gmail, for instance, and every Substack I initially subscribed to - until I eventually gave up on subscribing to Substacks - was categorized as a “Promotions” e-mail, which I would typically only realize one or two days after-the-fact, and then have to comb through the Promotions tab and re-categorize each newsletter as “Primary”. Not only did it seem like Gmail wasn’t actually learning from my re-categorizations, over time I came to subconsciously view all Substack newsletters - even the ones I had chosen to subscribe to myself - as promotional or gimmicky because Gmail had inception’ed it into my brain. The other thing that bother(s)/(ed) me was how every Substack newsletter looks more or less the same. Admittedly I have not spent much time playing around with the format now that I’ve created my own - I will try to do this over the next few days - but my overall impression is that, aside from a few tweaks to the layout, you will always immediately know a Substack when you see one, whether in online, App or e-mail form.

So earlier this year, out of defiance, I created my website (www.yuelianhong.com) on Ghost instead of Substack, even though the latter would have been easier for me to get started with, and even though I’m part of a writing group called the Soaring Twenties Social Club where almost all of the writers use Substack and seem to love it. And despite using a free, predefined template I found Ghost’s aesthetic far more appealing - from the sleek font, to the stylized magazine layout, to the fact that I was easily able to suppress the “Subscribe” button, which to me felt like a highly artistic decision. It was as if I had taken the purer, boil-a-pot-of-water-from-scratch approach to writing. Ghost was barely more effort to use than Substack, and yet somehow, those few extra micro-decisions gave me a sense of curatorial control.

But inevitably, I got stuck. I experienced writer’s block - which is just another term for psychological anguish, if you ask me - which no amount of NaNoWriMo-ing last month was able to overcome. Intimidated by the 1667-word-per-day goal, I began writing a long reflection about a psychotic episode I’d had almost a decade ago and what I learned about synchronicity from it, only to realize that maybe I didn’t learn anything at all. And as I stared, blinking, at a blank screen, the distance between myself and my target word count continued to balloon each day. So when I heard about Jibran’s 100-day challenge on Twitter I quickly signed up, not only because I was drawn to the idea of drawing support from a smaller group of empathic creators, but also because I thought the lower word count target and limited-to-weekdays commitment sounded much more doable.

And then I realized that this faster, more off-the-cuff writing style might not match the carefully pruned prose which I’d been putting on my website. I needed a leaner, easier, faster way to experiment - something that wouldn’t bog me down with details or distract me from consistently doing for 100 days. And the first option that came to mind was to create a new Substack, and it turns out that it was indeed incredibly easy to create one.

Back to the metaphor for a second: there’s a pinnacle of ramen connoisseurship, of course, which I’ve only dabbled in now and again. In my limited experience it involves waiting in line outside of a crowded hole-in-the-wall joint with limited seating, usually in the middle of a very hip neighborhood in cities like New York City or San Francisco or, closer to where I currently live, Düsseldorf, where there’s a large population of Japanese ex-pats (sadly I have not yet been to Japan, so I can’t comment on the ramen culture there). The noodles are typically homemade and chewier than what you’d expect from packaged ramen, and the discerning eater will have many opinions about the various broth flavors or the ideal toppings, including whether the egg is best poached or soft-boiled. When it comes to writing, I am not sure what compares to this tier of ramen enjoyment - publication in a renowned literary magazine, perhaps? - but for now that seems beyond the limits of my current interests and capabilities.

No, for now I shall focus on sharing my boiled-in-a-pot, more manicured writings on Ghost and my off-the-cuff, less polished thoughts on Substack! And maybe, rather than believing that Cup Noodles - or any medium of art or writing, for that matter - will ever be “beneath” me, I will instead continue toying with this idea that there is a proper time and way to savor each and every experience - whether it’s made up of food, art, or life itself.