Lynn Strong

I’m working on getting Haroun and the Study of Mischief ready for publication — that isn’t the book I thought was coming next! But it went from 0 to 60 in 8 madcap days over spring break for the Cozy Quill Pitchfest, and then I had a finished standalone book! And I’m still figuring out what to do with its existence now that I know more of what I should have done before Chai and Cat-tales.

(Chai and Charmcraft is still coming! It’s just probably not coming first.)

So I was chatting with my editor Dove this morning, and we got to talking about the implications of italicizing non-English words, what happens when different characters speak or don’t speak multiple languages, and Ranveer.

The conversation about italicizing non-English words gets extra complicated when you have native speakers of at minimum three different languages as narrators! If you’ve noticed that I italicized court-sourced words like shahzada and phirni and habibti, but I didn’t italicize chai and dal and haldi and sahib? The reason for that is that the “common” language of Tel-Bastet considers those words native to itself. And on the other hand Rahat is speaking the court language when he calls Ashar ya majid, ya rafiq, ya hasan. From Ashar’s point of view, he doesn’t exactly know what those courtly poet-words mean either, but he knows chai, and he knows dal.

And then we get to Ranveer, who speaks the common language, has frantically studied spellbooks written in the court language, has probably never heard it spoken, and didn’t actually realize that the court wizards didn’t write down the minor details like vowels in their spells or their records.

Ranveer is the self-taught student of life who can’t afford a university, who’s trying out the word “visionary” for a job title on the business cards that don’t exist in Tel-Bastet. He already discarded “alchemist” when his landlady threatened to end his lease if his acid pots gnawed any more holes in her floors or ceilings or building foundations. And “inventor” has the unfortunate implication that people would expect the things he creates to actually, you know, work.

Ranveer is as close to a teenaged self-insert as I’ve ever come in fiction. In this day-and-time he would absolutely be a queer theater kid who loves cats and books and magic of both the theatrical and the literal kind. He would have improvised his flight spells by running the magic-and-court-language lyrics of “Defying Gravity” through Google Translate and coming up with something that he knows can’t possibly have the right number of vowels in it, but he can’t translate the spellbook for himself and he doesn’t know any fancy court-trained magicians and he really desperately wants to know so many things he hasn’t got a teacher for.

That’s how I started osmosing Japanese five years before I had access to lessons, and how I started cooking things I’d read the descriptions of before there was an Internet, let alone any English language authentic cookbooks (as opposed to the 1950s-housewife-with-extra-Jello don’t-worry-it’ll-be-fiiiiiine cookbooks) that would be available in my small rural area. The thing I invented that I thought was supposed to be something like yakisoba was actually more like lower-fish-sauced pad thai. I didn’t know that for several more years, until I finally got the chance to see and taste the real thing.

But on the culinary front, my all time winner of the Honorary Ranveer Prize for Jumping Up And Down On The End of the Loveseat Hanging Out The Fifth Story Window and Figuring Out The Flight Spell On the Way Down? That wasn’t the burnt Kool-aid, because the burnt Kool-aid was never technically meant as food. The Honorary Ranveer Prize Winner was Dagobah Swamp Ramen.

I feel like I can poke fun at Ranveer more than my other characters because I have been there and done that. Before there was commercial Internet, I wanted to know things from other places so badly, and there wasn’t a way to get there, and there wasn’t a way to find a teacher in the tiny rural nowheresville town I lived in. So I had books. Sometimes they were in languages I didn’t read. So I taught myself how to read languages I couldn’t speak in order to read more books, because the library usually had starting language-learning books for languages that we didn’t have teachers for — and remember, this was before the Internet, this was before YouTube.

Now it is so much easier to learn languages from real people who speak that language! Now it is so much easier to meet people from around the world from wherever you are! Now it is just a few clicks to watch other languages’ media and have them translated and start osmosing the way the language works! But as a queer, neurodivergent, theater-kid outcast in the 1980s in the middle of uber-conservative rural nowhere? I didn’t know that queer and autistic (and even not-conservative) were things I could be. I just knew that I didn’t fit anywhere with anyone, and not even the teachers were safe.

So I had books. On paper, without a search function!

Throughout history, education has been hard to get. And for many people it’s still hard and expensive to get formal education, even if the informal education for the dangerously self-motivated like Ranveer and me has gotten easier.

So, here and now with the resources I have, I am all about talking to real people who live different lives and have different experiences. And while I was physically able to do it, I was also all about experimental archaeology: learning what it was like to sleep in a tent made of cloth held up with sticks instead of super modern ultraengineered performance plastics, learning how long it took to weave your own clothes and cook your own food, learning the hard way how likely it was I would have died before I turned 5 thanks to the array of lung problems exacerbated by camping in canvas tents that were likely mold vectors. Learning By Experience “like you do,” right?

I remember being Ranveer. I remember that if I had had a way to stick a loveseat out my bedroom window and escape, I would have done it even if I didn’t know whether the flight spell was going to work until gravity took hold and I was on the way down. I remember being that hungry for knowledge, that hungry for freedom.

I only made it about 40 miles, but that was far enough to get to a university with a community and friends that have changed my life.

Dagobah Swamp Ramen is the product of the first year in that university town, where they had six international grocery stores! And dozens of international restaurants! And eight libraries! And so many books I had a crisis of the soul knowing I could never manage to read them all in my life.

I was free for the first time in my life. My life was my own for the first time ever. But I had never been the only person in charge of my life before, either. I had never lived alone in an apartment with no meal plan, bills in my own name, no savings, and no one to ask for help when the oven broke and your landlord refused to fix it.

(The landlord refused to fix it for the next decade. I moved out before he fixed it.)

I was a theater kid with more intellect than common sense, and admitting failure would mean I had to move back in with the family of magats and do the socially expected thing for the gender I was assigned at birth, and so failure was not an option.

So I taught myself to rewire the broken electric stove to get one of the burners working. And it didn’t catch fire, which was a win!

And I bought a rice cooker, because I knew Japanese food didn’t depend on ovens. I lived for ten years with one working burner and a rice cooker and all the ovenless Japanese recipes I could try to recreate.

During part of that ten years I actually had a foray into semiprofessionally teaching cooking classes, as in people paid me to teach them how to make things you could eat. After all, if I could make things edible with one burner and one rice cooker, I could probably help university students feed themselves in similarly disreputable apartments (with possibly the same landlord).

Dagobah Swamp Ramen is what happens when you go to an international grocery store where everything is labeled in the appropriate language for its country of origin, and you don’t read enough of that language yet, because a lot of it was Korean rather than Japanese. And you kind of guess based on what you can see through the packaging, and you buy things that you think you might know what they are, and you take it home to try to figure out how to make it edible because the restaurants were too expensive for everyday and the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. (This is also how I lived on lima bean not-quite-curry not-quite-salad for several weeks.)

Oh, and the key part: Dagobah Swamp Ramen is what happens when you recognize that nori is seaweed from having seen it on sushi. But you do not recognize the difference between nori and konbu. And you did not know that more than one kind of seaweed was edible. But you had your bag of groceries and your rice cooker and one working stove burner, and a whole lot of determination to make it work somehow.

I’m still really hella motivated to make it work somehow. If you need help figuring out how to make food suit what your dietary needs are and your physical capabilities are, I am what happens when you combine really wild ingenuity with really limited capacity, so let’s brainstorm.

Dagobah Swamp Ramen*

*Honestly, not recommended.

But I guarantee Ranveer would have made this if he lived in an era with university students, grocery stores, ramen, and nori.

• One package of some kind of noodles that you can’t read the label on, but which look like they’re about the right thickness and waviness?
• One package nori — you can’t read the label on this either but it’s got a picture of being wrapped around rice, that’s gotta mean it’s seaweed, and seaweed is seaweed, right?
  • If this is a small rectangular package of nori in Korean, it might even have sesame oil already applied! Flavor bonus!
• Some green onions or chives if you can find them, no worries if you can’t
  • If you have some dried or frozen small-cut vegetables, this is an opportunity for ~*~*~nutrition~*~*~ too
• Flavor splurge: Some sesame seeds or a container of sesame oil that is actually labeled in a language you speak**
  • **and also does not have a picture of a chili pepper on it, speaking of Learned By Experience
• An egg, if it’s not too expensive
• Some soy sauce — this does come labeled in a language you can read, probably, and might be left over from a restaurant takeout
• A sugar packet or two, possibly left over from having ordered tea with your takeout
• A bouillon cube maybe?
  • Or maybe your noodle packet has something silver in it, and when you open it and sniff it it hasn’t burned out all your nose hairs?
• One working burner
• One pot
• One bowl, spoon optional
• ~*~*~Determination~*~*~

Get some water boiling in your pot on your burner.

Cook the noodles and any available vegetables until pulling a noodle out and blowing on it and tasting it suggests it’s cooked.

If you’ve gotten hold of an egg, crack it in and stir it through so it will kind of cook and shred on the way. (It will not look attractive. There is a reason we have called this Dagobah Swamp Ramen.)

Eyeball the difference between the size of your pot and the size of your intended bowl, and tip out some of the boiling water so it’s reasonably likely to fit.

Add a spoonful or so of soy sauce, a sugar packet or two (otherwise known as 1-2 tsp), and whatever tastes right for any variety of sesame you may have acquired.

Stir and taste.

If it needs more flavor, cautiously sprinkle or crumble in your bouillon or ramen packet until you hit a good balance between flavor and oh-my-gods-salt-lick.

Brace yourself.

Open the package of nori.

Crumble some of it into the soup pot, and watch in horror as it disintegrates into green slime.

Apply contents of pot to bowl. Make sure the burner is turned off.

Eat, and taste ~*~*~determination~*~*~.

(It may taste better with your eyes closed.)