I’ve been told that the owner of the Korean Village Restaurant on Bloor Street was a big soap opera star back home. She often serves as hostess, and always has a lot of make-up on her face, giving her a very pale appearance, as if she was some sort of Kabuki master. When she serves you your food, she always leans into your booth, her eyes bright, and points at the dish, exclaiming, “Yum-Yum!”
Whenever I see her, I imagine her image flickering away, contained within some old TV set, located in some Korean past. There she is in a rage, attacking a handsome man with a candlestick holder! Oh, she’s fallen into a coma after a spider bite, and her family and friends are weeping at her bedside! Now she’s an Olympic judge who has fallen in love with a rival nation’s star athlete, and they’re kissing passionately in the back of a car!
It’s a funny place, and on the walls leading into the restaurant there are hundreds of photographs. The ones that are featured most prominently are of her and various celebrities who have stopped into the restaurant.
Nelly Furtado.
Yun-Fat Chow.
Keifer Sutherland.
Mats Sundin.
The rest of the photographs are of various customers. Typically, everybody’s beaming after another excellent meal of Yum-Yum, and I always make a point of poring through these pictures. Last week, after Rachelle and I had finished our lunch, I stumbled across a wall photo that we were in.
In the picture there were five us– three guys and two girls– and we all stood arm in arm, smiling like we had just won the lottery.
I had completely forgotten about the evening. I was new to Toronto, and was entirely excited about this restaurant, which for me was a cavalcade of the fun, strange and exotic. Some of our friends indulged my enthusiasm, and joined Rachelle and I for dinner there. It was a nice and unremarkable evening, the sort of night that instantly falls from your mind, until suddenly, a few years later, you’re shown the visual evidence and the night comes flooding back.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, our friends– who looked so happy and confident in that picture– were each labouring beneath the complications of a heavy life. I had no idea their lives were in such flux, and I guess they didn’t know it either, but now, two years later we can all look back and see that photograph as a sort of unwitting starting point, one that’s led each of them through remarkable and brilliant events—every bit as dramatic as the soap operas the owner starred in– that have led them to relationships and lives that they never could have conceived of just a short while ago.
I don’t know, it sort of makes you sit down and think.