A Spoonful of Perfect

For her mother, a bowl of fragrant, steaming rice, meticulously prepared every day, was a ritual, a religion, a reminder of where she'd come from, an expression of love for her family.  Nora Okja Keller discovers the importance of going with the grain--and the technique of getting it right every time.

(published in the November 2007 issue of O Magazine)

     When I got married a decade ago, my mother presented me with a rice cooker.  Squat and beige, it wasn't the prettiest appliance, but it had a button that kept the cooked rice warm.  My mother sighed with satisfaction.  "Now your family will always have something ready to eat," she said.
     My mother took her rice seriously.  Whether it was short-grain or medium, California or Japanese, mochi or brown, while we were growing up she made sure we had it every day.  "If I don't have my bowl of rice," she said once, "I still feel hungry no matter what else I eat."
     I, on the other hand, was a child who was careless with rice.  Blasting the raw grains under the kitchen faucet, then heedlessly dumping the cloudy water, I lost handfuls of our meal down the drain.
     "Rinse more carefully!" she would scold when it was my turn to wash rice.  "You're wasting too much!"
     "Why the fuss?" I grumbled.  "It's just rice."  To me rice was cheap and plentiful; for only a few dollars we could buy a bag the size of my little sister.
     You kids don't know how lucky you are, rice every day," my mother grumbled, ready to launch into one of her wartime-in-Korea stories.  "When I was little, many times we went to bed hungry.  You can't even imagine what some people would do for a handful of rice."  My mother nudged me aside and grabbed a fistful of wet rice.  "Every grain is important," she said, holding the rice to my face.  "Every grain meant that someone could eat and live that day."
      She dipped her hand back into the rice pot and scrubbed at the pellets under the water.  Massaging the rice until the water looked like skim milk, she continued: "Take your time.  Take care of the rice," she said, carefully pouring out the cloudy water, her fingers cradling the lip of the pot to hold back any floating grain.  "It's like taking care of yourself."
     After washing the rice three times, then rinsing three times, my mother filled the pot for the seventh time--the number of heaven--to boil the rice.  She measured the water with her middle finger, the knuckles her ruler, and each time her rice came out perfect: sticky but not mushy, chewy but not crunchy.
     Whenever my family visits my mother's home, we are greeted at the doorway by the scent of rice.  "Are you hungry?" my mother will ask, bustling to the door.  Before she hugs us, before she says how much she has missed her grandchildren, she'll offer food, telling us to sit and eat a bowl of rice.
     The last time we had a family get-together at my brother's house, my mother, as usual, made the rice.  While she was turning on the water to wash it, my youngest daughter dragged a stool up to the sink.
     "I want to help, Halmoni," she demanded.  She climbed onto the seat and kneeled over the basin to plunge her hands into the cold water.
     "Like this," my mother cooed, placing her hand over my daughter's, guiding her fingers as they wiggled into the submerged rice.
     My 12-year-old nephew, watching from the dining table, said, "I remember once my mom made the most perfect rice."  His voice was wistful, nostalgic, as if recalling a lost love.
     Shooting my sister-in-law a teasing smile, I goaded: "Just once?"
     "Yeah," my nephew said sadly.  "Usually we get leftover rice that's kinda yellow and hard."
     My sister-in-law let out a horrified giggle and my mother's lips thinned.
     Before my mother could deliver a lecture on how her grandchildren should have fresh-cooked rice daily, I jumped in.  "So, ah," I asked my nephew, "what made the rice so perfect?"
      My nephew, dreamy eyed, breathed, "Well, when you lifted the lid on the cooker, the steam escaped in this puff of cloud, and under the steam, the rice was like this.  Like a rainbow."  He held his hands in the air, palms down, in the shape of an upturned cup.  "And every piece was whie and perfect, not goopy or bullety."
      I nodded, caught by his reverential description, knowing just what he was talking about.
      "That's right," my mother said, smiling at him.  "Must be you know what is good rice because you're Korean, right?"
     Later that night, as the family settled around the table for what would turn out to be a three-hour meal, my mother served that perfect rice.  As we talked, trading stories about the past and present, my mother kept jumping up to scoop more rice onto our plates.  "Just chokum more," she urged, ladle loaded and poised above our heads.  "Just have a little more to keep me company."
      And so my siblings and I and our spouses and children each held our plates up to receive second and third helpings, feasting on remembrances and rice.

Julie Motz's initial experience with Macrobiotics

an excerpt from her book Hands of Life (1998):

     [I]n the summer of 1985, the Gilligans' only child, Patrick, was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  It threw us all into a state of shock, and he was quickly swept up into the medical world of surgery and radiation.  Michelle Clifton remembered reading a book about some kind of diet that had saved the life of a cancer patient, and I was soon in a bookstore, tracking down Anthony Satillero's Recalled by Life.  Just beside it I noticed The Cancer Prevention Diet, by Michio Kushi and Alex Jack, and decided on impulse to buy that as well.
     I read them both in two days and emerged from the glut of words and information hopeful, if a little stunned.  Satillero's book recounted the story of his recovery from a near-fatal cancer, due to a chance encounter with some hitchhikers who turned him on to a strange diet consisting mostly of whole grains, vegetables, beans, something called miso soup, and (ugh, yes) seaweed!  As an anesthesiologist and administrator at a major Philadelphia hospital, he was not at all temperamentally or intellectually inclined toward a dietary approach.  But his scans had been getting worse and worse, his energy was failing, and he was desperate.  He later returned to the health food store where he had dropped them off, to be inducted into the strange (and as it turned our, life-saving) practice of macrobiotics.
     In Micho Kushi's book I read with horror all about what the great American diet (or my version of it, which inclined more heavily toward Diet Coke than Twinkies) was doing to my body and my emotional well-being.
     Kushi puts forth the simple argument that cancer, like all forms of disease, represents an imbalance in the body.  A tumor represents the body's attempt to limit the expression of that imbalance to one area, so the rest of the body can continue to function.  The most effective way to heal is to restore balance, and the key to doing that is to have a diet that allows the body to function easily and efficiently, wasting no extra energy on getting rid of unnecessary, unnatural, and toxic substances.
     Until that time I had blithely assumed that one of Nature's greatest miracles was the ability to take whatever I ate and magically turn it into more of me.  My only concern, like that of so many American women, was that it sometimes made it into much more of me than I wanted to be carrying around.  Now I was discovering that with almost every mouthful, I was slowly but surely shortening my life.
     Never one to embrace half-measures, I threw myself into the rituals of macrobiotic cooking, starting with the recipes at the back of Kushi's book.  I figured I could make myself do just about anything for three months, and at the end of that time, I could evaluate its effects and see if I wanted to continue.  So after shelling out a couple hundred dollars for the requisite equipment (pressure cooker, stainless steel pots and pans, really sharp knives, and sushi mats), I launched into a regime that seemed at first to fill up my life with shopping for food, washing food, cutting food, cooking food, chewing food (at least a hundred times each mouthful), washing dishes, and then going out to shop for food again.
     Within three weeks I noticed some remarkable changes.  For one, my lifelong insomnia had vanished.  I, who hadn't slept soundly for two nights in a row since childhood, was putting my head down on the pillow and drifting off almost immediately for a solid eight hours, night after blissful night.  My swimming time had improved, and all kinds of little aches and pains I had developed from weight training just disappeared.  I could actually lower myself into the bathtub at the end of the day without creaking.  Finally, my mood swings were gone--the ones that came along out of nowhere, with little voices urging me to step in front of a truck on a beautiful sunny day.

Begin Now

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand . . . and melting like a snowflake.  Let us use it before it is too late.

- Marie Beyon Ray

on Meditation

Meditation is not a complicated act.  It's to be in the simplicity of the moment, empty, seeing that nothing is needed, nothing needs to be achieved and nothing has to be improved - not because you are depriving yourself from something, but because you realize you are already content, you are already whole.

- Tyohar

In meditation, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible.
Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self,
release all grasping, and relax into your true nature.

- Sogyal Rinpoche