I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

by Baek Sehee

I think I’m going to quit my job. Life is all about getting better and getting worse and getting better again, so getting worse is a natural part of life and I just have to learn to deal with it.”

What a jagged shard of introspection. So obvious, but it is really quite astounding. The ebb and flow of comfort. The bare amount of affective control we actually have in our lives. The world simply dragging us along. The future is so murky that it is simply impossible to know how close you are to crashing into the bottom at any given moment, or even in what direction things are trending, until you’ve enough distance to look back, to see from a different perspective. Even then, your position is simply relative, with no controlled baseline from which to draw comparisons.

I recall some of my own crushing despair in fits and starts; when I touch something in a particular way, or after a book or a song slams into me just right. Humid spring nights and Tove Lo’s Stay High Hippie Sabotage Remix combine and I am thrust back to the dark sidewalks of Manhattan’s Lower East Side at 10pm on a Wednesday, headphones in, passing people unloading food for a charity house. I was out wandering to give my friend and his new-ish girlfriend some much-needed alone time—they were kind enough to let me stay on their couch after I got dumped—and as these charity workers unloaded their van full of foods, their purpose amplified how absolutely adrift I felt. NYC is an okay place to wander late at night when you have nowhere else to go—when your years-long home is gone and your years-longer bad relationship has finally ended (when even the inability to afford solo apartment payments can’t keep you together)—but those moments of impossible loneliness stay etched in one’s mind.

“Worse” is comparative, then, but so common throughout a lifetime that only intentional juxtaposition draws it out. There’s a beauty there, in that moment of representational sadness, but at the time it is a prison that I thought might never end. Things only got better from there, but what if everything hadn’t collapsed when it did? If I hadn’t hit that wall, things likely only would have continued to decline. Things get worse, things get better.

That tiny apartment in Manhattan was one my at-the-time girlfriend and I could barely afford, after I stopped working in a career I detested structurally, and philosophically, and practically. I was free in one sense while increasingly trapped in most others. What if I had kept working at a law firm? What if I was a less terrible partner, so that there was actually some amount of “good enough” inertia to overcome the friction of increasing unhappiness? If my past lacked that Tove-Lo nadir, would those years of quiet desperation now seem like a lost luxury? Extrapolating that level unhappiness with my career and my relationship into the present, how bad might things be right now? Stability, even if unhappy stability, can be tempting. Could I have remained an attorney, married to another attorney, doing legal work while quietly hating everything my life had become? 42,000 newly licensed attorneys in the USA each year–surely that cannot be too uncommon.

I wonder about others like me, who seem totally fine on the outside but are rotting on the inside, where the rot is this vague state of being not-fine and not-devastated at the same time.

I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, with its formatted dialogue and breezy length, can easily slip into any reading list. It is heavy while feeling weightless, somehow. Universal while being incredibly specific. Clichéd—much like this list of antipodean adjectives—yet refreshingly new. “Raw” is a word that follows this book around, but it is so sleek and smooth that “raw” feels anathema. It is cartoon ham—the Platonic ideal of representational “meat”, perfectly processed—for the mild dissociation that undergirds much of modern unhappiness.

It fits in any reading list and I think it belongs there, because many people are, I think, quietly unhappy. Unhappy with with the weight of expectations:

Me: …I’m not into book clubs, for example, because I have a creative writing degree and work at a publishing house, which makes people have all sorts of expectations about me….

How hard is it is admit that? I hated being a lawyer, and I was never very skilled at it, but that thought of someone saying to me, “I thought you were supposed to be a lawyer” in response to legal questions I answered partially or not at all truly terrified me. It is why I always tried to position myself as an outsider: A person who wanted to be in graduate school for creative writing during law school; a person who was only running long distances to get better at rowing; someone writing book reviews just to help me remember what I’ve read. No, I was just too scared to admit that I was running to run, or writing to be read. That fear, knowing it exists in other people? That is uplifting. Tteokbokki joins you as you wander the city streets at night.

Perhaps the sadness is more prevalent in our generational cohort, as itinerant precariat-class type things increase. Maybe its the “education is freedom // student loans are prison” dichotomy, though I don’t know if scholastic debt really figures into non-U.S. countries. Whatever the push, anxiety is globally relatable, but there are also some bits that—thankfully for my own sanity—I find personally baffling.

Me: I am very aware of it. I’m so sensitive to that sort of thing that every little word sounds like thunder. For example, at my writing group, I once went there in glasses instead of contact lenses, and the reaction was very positive. ‘Hey, you’re cuter in glasses. You should wear them all the time.’ But that means if I don’t wear glasses, I look ugly.

I really appreciate seeing that differences in mental processes as well, a reminder that we all have our own baggage to handle. This is yet another really simple thought—”everyone is different”—that is expressed exquisitely on the pages. It doesn’t feel like a cliché when you’re reading it, because it’s not telling you anything, it’s simply showing what is going on inside of the author’s head. Everything in Tteokbokki matters so much while not actually mattering. It is a book with a perfect title: it tells you exactly what to expect within the pages and how to approach the material. It is literal and figurative and jokey and serious. How else can you think about life, where some years you eat almost nothing but ramen with egg in it and other years you spend nights and weekends with coworkers and friends at internationally famous restaurants? 

What else is life but 300+ book reviews and yet constant self-flagellation from the half-dozen skips over the past decade, books you read and liked but about which you simply didn’t have anything to say? Jobs that pay well but leave you stressed, jobs that you love but command fourteen-hour days, job you dread but you have to do because rent and food exist. What else is life but long runs that leave you awake to the possibilities of the day, short trips to the grocery store that feel impossible, constant contradiction and daily uncertainty swirled up together into an unknowable mess that is only comprehensible with hindsight?

What else is there but wanting to die, but also wanting to eat tteokbokki? This is not a perfect book, but it is what it says it is, perfectly.