This essay is in response to Elliot Harvey’s March essay, “Instrumentality and Power.”
The kids’ chicken katsu curry meal at Curry House came with corn chowder, steak fries, some kind of sausage, an orange wedged with a tiny American flag, and a toy. The toys were never normal: a rubber piece of cheese, a plastic mustache the size of a thumbtack, and two pieces of metal wire linked together with no discernible purpose. Once, a sticker from a Japanese children’s show I did not recognize and would never see again. You could order spaghetti or a hamburger patty with your curry if you wanted. It felt like it was designed by a Japanese person trying to recreate an American restaurant without ever having experienced one firsthand. I did not understand the restaurant, and I loved it completely.
Our family drove 45 minutes through Los Angeles traffic to get there, from our house to Sawtelle, nearly every other weekend. My dad almost never chose where we ate, but when he did, Curry House was his pick. My brother and I liked it enough that we never argued. My mom, I think, could take it or leave it. She came to make the rest of us happy, which was a habit of hers.
After we ate, we went downstairs to the Japanese Daiso store. My dad would buy a box of Botan Rice Candy, eat the wrapper in front of us and and wait for our shock. Then he’d explain it was edible because it was made of rice. He did this every time. I knew how the wrapper worked by the second visit, maybe the third. I played along every time. I loved it every time.
Curry House was a chain then, sprawling across Southern California. There was a location on the way to Anaheim, near where all of my dad’s friends from his days in Berkeley had settled. Some weekends, we’d make the hourlong drive, the families would take over a few tables, the kids would eat, and the adults would talk, and afterward, my brother and I would fall asleep in the back seat on the drive home. I remember the freeway lights sliding across the car ceiling. I remember arriving home without remembering the drive.
At some point, that location closed. We still saw my dad’s friends for a while, then less, then rarely. That’s just how it goes.
The Sawtelle location remained. The menu grew stranger over the years, which I liked. One afternoon, we drove out and found the doors locked. We checked the hours posted on the glass. It should have been open. Then we noticed flowers on the ground.
There was a place across the street called Hurry Curry that my mom used to go to in college. That closed too. It reopened years later, but it was not the same, the way things that reopen never are.
On the two nights a week she cooked for us — two nights carved out of a full-time job and a two-hour commute — my mom sometimes made her own version. It was not Japanese curry. It was Korean curry. Adjusted by instinct, never identical twice, attempting to replicate a dish she probably did not care for personally just so that the rest of us might have something close to what we’d lost. At some point, she stopped making it. The instant curry bricks stayed in the pantry. Occasionally she’d buy a new box — “I heard this one tastes like Curry House,” she’d say — and place it beside the others. We never opened them. We never threw them away.
My dad drove a Prius for most of my childhood. He bought it the year I was born, a practical car for a practical man: 26 years at a firm in Santa Monica, turning down every offer to move to the Austin headquarters because his children were in Los Angeles and that was that. He is an avid car lover. He once told me that without a family, he’d have worked on cars for a career.
Much later, he sold the Prius and bought an older, used Porsche Boxster — the last manual transmission they ever made. Two seats. It didn’t fit the whole family, which was part of why he eventually sold it. But before he did, he taught my brother and me to drive stick. He brought the top down, and I moved the gearstick for him while he worked the clutch, and the wind came in, and for a few drives, it was just the mechanical fact of changing gears together, purposeless and complete.
My parents spent their lives in the service of means, and so did I. Hagwon (Korean cram school) from when school ended until 6 every evening. Taekwondo, robotics, swimming, tennis and study after that — all of it in elementary school. When I asked why, they said: so you can go to a good college. Why? To get a good job. Why? To make money. Why? So you can provide for your family one day. Why? Stop asking why and do as you’re told. Why didn’t they have an answer for this?
I used to find this bleak. A chain of means with no terminal end, every instrument pointing at the next instrument, an infinite regression of purpose. My parents’ parents did the same for them. Theirs before that. People who write about this sort of thing call it alienation, or instrumental reason, or the logic of capital, and they write about it as though it were a disease. A world of means without ends — soulless, extractive, absurd.
But my parents were not accumulating means for power. Let me ask you: what was the purpose of Curry House? There was likely a purpose for the owner, whether it be to make people happy, purely for profit, or some complex combination of reasons; I have no clue. I originally liked going there because the food tasted good. My reasons were different later on, the Sawtelle Curry House reminding me of the days we’d make the trip down to Anaheim. This is probably different from the reason my dad went, or the reason my mom reluctantly went to make the rest of the family happy.
My parents could not know why I ate chicken katsu curry or write or do anything else in life. They were building roads. They may network out, and of course, roads have no single destination. But they are built such that no one is prevented from going where they’d like to go.
A Japanese curry chain in Los Angeles, serving spaghetti and corn chowder to a Korean family who drove 45 minutes through traffic to get there. A mother recreating a dish she didn’t particularly like because her family did. A father who wanted to build cars for a living, who instead drove a Prius for years, and who, when he finally bought the car he wanted, used it to teach his sons to shift before he let it go. A box of curry roux on a shelf, never opened, never discarded — means held in suspension, waiting for someone to choose an end.
I think that’s the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me.
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