Burning Your Mouth to Spite Your Heart

I need something that is going to tingle, tell me the food is alive. Because I want to be alive, too.

This is Bad Kimchi, a column by Noah Cho about how food and cooking can inform our identities.

It usually doesn’t start strongly enough, the burning. Every time I go into a restaurant, I run my eyes over the menu scanning for keywords—“spicy”; “hot”—or the relevant meter, dishes rated by the number of tiny chili peppers. It doesn’t matter if it’s fast food, a casual restaurant, or a fine dining experience—I need something that is going to tingle, tell me the food is alive. Because I want to be alive, too.

Sometimes I try to lock eyes with the server when I’m ordering. “How hot is your hot?” I’ll ask.

“Oh, very hot,” they usually respond. More often than not, this is a lie. Sometimes there’s a wink or a knowing smile when they say that it’ll be hot enough; it’ll be the pain I’m looking for. When it’s not a lie, I almost want to hug them in relief.

But sometimes, even if it’s a five-chili-pepper-rated dish on the menu, it’s not enough. Sometimes the menu or that waiter or the online reviews have promised me that it’s going to hurt, that I am going to feel something, and then I face nothing but the faint echo of a hot pepper, a whisper of spice. I am profoundly saddened in these moments—I want to grab someone who works in the restaurant and tell them, It’s not hot enough. I need to suffer. When it is right, though—when I finally get the burning I crave—that’s when I begin to feel some peace.

When did I start to feel the need to feel pain when I eat, to push my tolerance ever higher, to burn my heart for the hour or so my meal takes? I have flashes of childhood memories in which my father dips a long, green chili pepper into a small bowl of doenjang, pungent and briny and smelling of earth that is both fresh and long decayed. Even when he was dying, he wanted spicy food. What did he want to feel? Was the pain from the spices stronger than the pain of his cancer or his chemotherapy?

When did I start to feel the need to feel pain when I eat, to push my tolerance ever higher?

There are days where I am deep into a dish that is almost too hot for even my pain-calloused tongue, and that is when I feel most connected to my dad—that is when my memories of him come roaring back. If it is hot enough to make me cry, I feel, in some way, fulfilled. In these moments, my pores push out sweat, my heart races, and I do not think about the other things weighing on my heart. I concentrate only on the next bite—not wanting to stop, addicted to the flames scorching the roof of my mouth. Sometimes I can even feel it in my teeth as I grit down, closing my eyes and letting myself simply feel.

If you’ve ever accidentally touched your fingers to your eyes after eating sauce-drenched wings or seeding chilies, you’ve felt that uncomfortable tingle and the burn that follows. After a recent bout of intense crying, I felt nearly the same amount of stinging and scorching in my eyes, but without the benefit of having eaten something good. Crying is cathartic, and eating something that can draw tears is worthwhile to me for the same reason.

Yet I don’t deal well with physical pain. Last fall, when I broke my foot, the pain and shock made me pass out. The pain from hot foods and sauces is something different—much in the way that cooking Korean food has made me feel more connected to my identity, eating spicy foods can serve the same purpose.

I never feel like a whole Korean except around the food; making it as spicy as possible is perhaps both a form of self-flagellation for not being “Korean enough,” and undeniable proof that I am Korean—that I am here, and present, and can feel the truth of it burning my mouth and my heart.

Making Korean food as spicy as possible is both a form of self-flagellation for not being “Korean enough,” and undeniable proof that I am Korean.

It probably seems strange that one of the things I love the most in this world is also something I doctor up to make sure that it hurts me while I eat it. It doesn’t matter if it’s my morning eggs, a giant bowl of pasta, or a sandwich—with almost every meal I cook, I carefully consider which hot sauce or spicy additive I want to put into the dish. Which salsa promises me sweet relief from normalcy? Which brand of hot sauce strikes the right balance between acidic and corrosively painful flavors? This recipe for corn chowder calls for black pepper, but what if I use twenty Thai bird’s-eye chilies instead?

There’s a certain heaviness I feel, simply existing in this world. Sometimes I feel a dread only partially stymied by therapy or medication or quiet moments of reflection. And deep within my body lives a yearning to break out and scream the rage I know is there. I do not often show that I am upset, even when I am—I stuff it down, push it away until it is nothing more than an itch on my skin or a twinge of pain in my neck. These are the feelings I tap into when I seek out spicy food; this is what eating it does for me: When I turn to ever hotter foods, I hurt myself in the only way I can, burning my mouth to spite my heart.