The Ramen King and I (12 page)

“O Momofuku,” I repeated.

“Show me how to live so that I may better do your will.”

Matt would later assure me getting kicked out of the sushi bar and getting sick at Ramen Jiro—along with everything that happened next—was all Ando’s doing. I’ve come to believe that he might be right, though it’s certainly open to interpretation. What is not, is that shortly after I began praying to Ando, ramen began showing up more and more in my life.

“Show me how to live so that I may better do your will.”

J
apanese bookstores are full of comic books about business. There’s one about the life of Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, and another about Carlos Ghosn, the French executive from Renault who rescued Nissan Motor Co. There are comic books about Sony’s Akio Morita, and about the origins of 7-Eleven, digital cameras, the bullet train, and the liquid crystal display.

There are several comic book versions of Ando’s life story. My favorite,
The Challenges of Nissin Food Products,
begins with Ando’s birth. In the opening frames, Ando’s paternal grandfather lifts his newborn grandchild up to the night sky, and just then a white object streaks across the stars. Never mind that Halley’s Comet wasn’t visible to the naked eye until two months later. Edited under the auspices of Nissin, the comic contains other historical distortions. The nameplate on the house in which Ando was born says ANDO, for one, and the house appears to be in Japan.

In fact, Ando makes clear in his first autobiography,
Conception of a Fantastic Idea
(1983), that he was born in Taiwan while the island was under Japanese rule. (China ceded control of Taiwan in 1895 by signing the Treaty of Shimonoseki, ending the Sino-Japanese War.) Ando’s family name started out as Wu, and the characters of his first name were pronounced “Bai-fu.”

The comic book has not been the only attempt to downplay Ando’s Taiwanese lineage. In 2001,
Nihon Keizai Shimbun
—Japan’s
Wall Street Journal
—made Ando the subject of “My Résumé,” a serial column that relates the life stories of historic figures. The following year, the newspaper’s publication arm compiled the columns and released them as a book—
Magic Noodles: The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen.
In a preface, Ando states that he had been asked for his consent to appear in “My Résumé” numerous times over the years, but that he always refused out of modesty. In the spring of 2001, he was asked again.

Ando writes in
Magic Noodles
, “I spent my childhood” in Taiwan, but all references to his Taiwanese parents are gone. No wonder, then, that when
The New York Times
ran an obituary about Ando, the newspaper initially stated that he had been born to Japanese parents who happened to be living in Taiwan.

The
Times
later published a correction.

M
att instructed me to keep a small notebook in my pocket at all times, and to write in it when I felt like breaking my commitment. Whenever I wanted to post a personal ad on Craigslist or ask out a woman at a party or in a coffee shop, I was supposed to write a memo to Momofuku Ando describing what else was happening or what I had been thinking about. For the first couple of weeks, I didn’t write in the notebook at all. I went to morning meetings at the church nearly every day, but most of the time I was in a state of shock—there were also moments of euphoria—over confronting this part of my life. I couldn’t believe that people in the meetings were talking openly about what they were talking about. I wondered what my colleagues at the magazine would have thought if they knew what I was doing before work.

Gradually, though, the cravings came back. It was difficult not to act on them, but I followed Matt’s instructions and wrote in the notebook every time. In each entry, I marked the number of days that had passed in my abstinence period.

I noticed that, at least in these first few entries, almost every time I wanted to break my commitment, there had been some conflict. It did not escape me that the conflict usually involved men.

 

 

 

T
he next appearance of ramen in my life came several weeks later. I’ll describe what led up to it, beginning with some entries in my notebook.

In the morning, when I awoke, Grandpa Walter was standing in front of me. He had been sleeping in my sister’s old room.

“Hey, buddy. How’s it going?”

I rubbed my eyes. “Grandpa, I’m really sorry.”

He seemed not to hear me, and I remembered that he had begun using a hearing aid. His once-broad physique—the product of years of working in machine shops and being on sailboats—had begun to slump.

“Listen, Andrew. Will you drive me to the cemetery?”

In her will, Grandma Sylvia had asked to be cremated and to have her ashes tossed over the Atlantic Ocean. That was because she and Grandpa Walter had spent nearly every summer of their lives sailing, usually off the coast of Brooklyn. When he was in his twenties, my grandfather found a small whaling boat beached in Sheepshead Bay. He took it to his father’s metal shop, where he patched a hole in the hull, soldered on a mast, and made a sail out of canvas. He taught himself how to sail, then sold the whaling boat and bought another sailboat. My grandparents would sail north to New England, and as far south as the Caribbean. My father and his brothers grew up sailing, and so did I, though I never really took to it. Even though Grandma Sylvia had asked to be cremated, she had also requested a headstone bearing her name in the family’s cemetery plot in Staten Island.

“Sure, Grandpa. I can drive you there.”

My parents caught a ride with my uncle and left me the Denali. I backed the “car” out of the garage and onto the driveway, giving Grandpa Walter a hand getting in. As I drove toward the Long Island Expressway, we passed several split-level homes being torn down to make room for new construction. Grandpa Walter muttered a remark about surging real estate prices, and at the mention of money I made a note to write later in my notebook.

Driving along the expressway, I asked my grandfather a question I had never asked him before.

“How are you feeling?”

“Whassat?”

The hearing aid. I repeated the question.

My grandfather tilted his head and opened his hand, which is what he always did when he was sharing important information.

“You know, I went with a lot of girls before I met your grandmother.”

This was unexpected and, needless to say, new territory for our relationship.

“I thought you and Grandma got married when you were nineteen.”

They met on a beach, near Coney Island.

“Well, yeah, that’s true. But there were some things before that.”

Things?

“In any case,” he continued, “when I met Sylvia, I knew that she was special because it was going to be about more than just sex.”

I tried, unsuccessfully, not to imagine my grandparents having intercourse.

“I knew that I could build something with her.”

I didn’t know what to say. “That’s great” was the best I could muster. Ugh.

“It’s very important to find that,” he advised. “Very important.”

We crossed the Verrazano Bridge. The sun was out, but fallen leaves were swirling in the wind. When we got to the cemetery, around twenty people were standing near Grandma Sylvia’s headstone—mostly relatives and friends from my grandparents’ sailing days. I helped Grandpa Walter out of the car and he joined the other mourners. He gave an unscripted eulogy, repeating the stuff about how he always knew he could build something with my grandmother, but this time he didn’t explicitly mention sex. Later, we all had lunch at a nearby diner. I don’t remember why, but instead of riding home with me, Grandpa Walter left with someone else, and my parents drove me back to their house in the Denali. On the way, my mother announced that she wanted to be cremated, too, but she didn’t care to have her ashes spread anywhere. Rather, she hoped to be split into two urns that my sister and I would keep in our living rooms. I listened to my parents’ conversation from the backseat.