04. Eggs

A meditation on anxiety, Thai style omelettes, and a unilocular ovarian cyst.

Eggs by Addi Panadero

On the back of a motorcycle with no helmet, driving up a highway in Bangkok in between two lanes, I imagined all the ways this could go wrong.

Like dropping my phone in transit (don’t text while on the back of a motorcycle), or my bag falling from my grip, leaving a trail of trinkets along Soi Nana. Or perhaps we’d lose our balance on a turn, the right side of my face scraping against the Silom asphalt until we peeter to a halt. 

I was meeting friends of friends at Khrua Som Hom, a highly recommended Bangkok eatery, vouched for by at least five individuals back home. It was some 12 kilometers away from our Airbnb along Sukhumvit. At rush hour, taking a car or the trains would make me late to the point of rudeness. The only way to get there on time was by motorcycle, something I had only done maybe twice in my life. “Might be a nice way to experience the city,” said a friend who waited with me for my ride to arrive. I agreed. I was scared. I hoped it was going to be worth it.

In a 2017 New Yorker profile, the late Anthony Bourdain told writer Patrick Radden Keefe that the best way to experience Hanoi was on the back of the scooter. He relished the anonymity, to be just “a figure in the middle of a million little dramas and comedies happening on a million bikes.” He loved the smells. The traffic! “It occurred to me that this would, at any rate, be a memorable way to die,” Keefe wrote.

As we wove our way through traffic — in between cars, offroad into gutters — there were only two kinds of back riders: scared shitless, arm muscles straining from holding on tight, or hands-on-lap, totally composed; just another body getting from point A to point B. I could die. I could fucking die. But the odds seemed good that I’d arrive at my destination safely. 

I was terrified, but I’d be lying if I said that’s all I was. As we rounded one of the more gentle bends in the city center, I was struck by the sight of Yaowarat at dusk. The main artery of Bangkok’s historic Chinatown is spectacular. A wide avenue bounded by street food hawkers on both sides, illuminated by vertical neon signs in Thai and Chinese script. The sheer amount of people meant that vehicles had to drive with caution. Without a helmet, you could see, hear, and smell everything. The chatter of tourists rising with the smell of charcoal and smog. It filled my heart. I teared up. For that brief moment in time, I felt free. If I wasn’t so scared, I’d have pulled out my phone for a picture. 

🥚

One thing I’ve noticed about my friends who became parents is that they’ve always wanted to be parents. Natsu, the mid-thirties writer heroine in Mieko Kawakami’s “Breast and Eggs” wanted a baby because she wanted to meet her baby. In my early thirties, I’ve been thinking a lot about babies. Not because I want to become a mother, but because I’ve been wondering who’s going to talk to the geriatric doctor about the right mix of anti-psychotics I’m going to need when I’m old, demented, and a danger to myself and society. Assuming I even get that far.

“God, just hire a nurse,” said a friend when I told her my latest case for motherhood. It seems that all of the reasons I have aren’t good ones, all born out of fear or self-preservation. Like, what’s going to happen to me when my husband dies? What’s going to happen to him if I die first? Never mind what kind of world my potential kids would be born into or if I could be an ideal parent to them in the first place. Too much generational trauma comes out in my worst moments, and I imagine that parenthood has a lot of those. Let alone surviving the physical hardships of pregnancy. Am I a coward? Absolutely. Am I selfish? Sure, but the bottom line is that I’m not too confident that I’d be a good parent. And even if I was, what would it matter in this economy? This post-pandemic, climate crisis epoch?

All that aside, I’m thinking about babies because my period, my very regular period, has vanished. But seven negative pregnancy tests (four in Manila, three in Bangkok) and one transvaginal ultrasound later revealed a unilocular cyst on my left ovary. 

“Is it an ectopic pregnancy? Is it ovarian cancer?” I asked blithely from behind the stirrups. The doctor just smiled. 

“Your OB will know what to do.”

🥚

Khrua Som Hom is on the ground floor of a shophouse in Phraeng Phuthon, an old neighborhood just a few blocks away from Bangkok’s Grand Palace and Temple of the Emerald Buddha. A turn-of-the-century construction campaign initiated by King Rama V, Phraeng Phuthon is a collection of two-story mixed-use buildings done in Sino-European architecture, all painted in the same cream and teal green. “We call this old town,” says Prim when I settle down after my motorcycle ride. 

More eatery than a restaurant, Som Hom is run by a pair of grandparents and their family. Their personal effects such as an impressive cat apartment mix with the jumble of chairs and tables set aside for the eatery’s patrons. A portrait of Rama X, the “Playboy King” of Thailand, hangs over the kitchen door. Som Hom gained a loyal following among the district’s young creatives, who designed and printed English menus and signages to help the eatery’s international visitors with little to no Thai communicate their orders with the least friction. 

“How has your Bangkok trip been so far?” Felix asked.

Still a little shaken from the motorcycle ride, I reached for the easiest, most universal insight. “The food is great,” I said.

“So what have you had?” 

Up to that point, I had eaten the most touristy of tourist meals. Pad Thai, Sticky Mango Rice, Kra Pao Moo (Phed Mark…), Green Curry. I listed down the things I had that were fairly new to me: Larb and Baan Kanom Thai. I told them about an expensive meal we had at a posh restaurant called Fatboy Izakaya, which was filled with well-dressed 20-somethings, drinking craft highballs and sharing small plates on a weeknight. 

“Well, our meal won’t even cost a tenth of what you spent,” Felix says with a laugh. 

The first dish out was Khai Jeow, an immaculate crispy omelette with stir-fried chicken and red curry paste, and basil. Immediately followed by a tower of deep-fried morning glory with a spicy vinaigrette sauce and shrimp in red assam curry soup. Food is a great social adhesive. It can foster immediate connections in the absence of deeper ones. You might not be childhood friends, but you can learn something about a person by what they love or pass up at the dinner table. 

The best meal at Khrua Som Hom

Grace, a bartender at the nearby speakeasy called Ku, would clap every time I asked for more rice. Kat, who calls herself a “slow baker”, promised me a list of essential Bangkok restaurants for my next visit. I asked Thyme, a flower artist, if she found any of the things we ate particularly spicy. “No, all of this is normal,” she replied with a smile. 

🥚

By the time we got back from Bangkok, my period had been late for two weeks. I saw two gynecologists back to back. The first, visibly annoyed at my lateness, rushed through the appointment. “Are you stressed? Did you gain weight? You need to lose weight,” she said. 

I am, I have, I tell her. Both things are a point of shame. Things I already knew and didn’t want to be reminded of. The fact that I never have time for myself, for introspection, for a newsletter that I said would be monthly. Any free time I could spare was spent on the instantly gratifying, like video games and sweet drinks. Never mind eight hours of sleep and proper exercise. 

The second gynecologist was more eloquent in her treatment. “Losing weight might help you regulate your hormones better,” she said. “More fat or adipose tissues can lead to more estrogen, which basically leads to a hormonal imbalance that can affect ovulation, menstruation, and so on.”

“I don’t think you have PCOS, because there’s only one cystic structure here,” she adds and points to the single sphere in the ultrasound. “This is your egg and it didn’t fall.”

I looked at my ultrasound results again. “So I’m not pregnant,” I say. 

“No, I don’t see a gestational sac anywhere,” pointing at the dark matter of my uterus. No growing embryo latched onto the walls. “We can run a few more tests to rule out hormone imbalances like your testosterone levels and even throw in a blood pregnancy test if you’re really that paranoid.”

“So, is it true that stress can cause this?” I ask her.

“It can,” she says to me. “It’s clear that this was some sort of a hormonal change, but sometimes that hormonal change can be because your brain didn’t signal your pituitary gland to produce the hormones that should have signaled your egg to fall.”

On my way home, I read more about Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and endometriosis. How it’s more common in older women. Bigger women. About how our fallopian tubes could “malfunction” or how our ovaries could “fail,” words that left me feeling a little unmoored. As if my reproductive system, with all the emotional havoc it wreaks, was simply a machine that wore down over time. Anything out of line was merely a mechanical issue that needed repairing or otherwise retiring.

🥚

I was convinced that hardboiled eggs with chalky gray yolks and rubbery whites are some of the worst foods ever. My revulsion fully formed the day my father split open a warm balut—cooked fertilized duck egg—to reveal the stillborn black chick, which he set aside to either amuse or terrify me (What is it with parents who try to rile up their kids?) We kept chickens at home, so I knew chicks needed heat to survive. So I gently patted the chick dry, wrapped it in tissue, and placed it in a warm place outside. It was later stolen by the cats that made our garage their home. The adults laughed their big ugly laughs. How cute. How sweet of you. I was devastated and embarrassed. Don’t the mother ducks feel bad that we eat their babies? I asked. My sister who was already old enough to know the truth, told me that a scrambled egg is the same as a balut. “We’re already eating their babies anyway every time we eat eggs,” she said. For years, I couldn’t eat an egg without hot bile rising in my throat. The shame and betrayal that my instinct to care was something to laugh at.

🥚

In Manila, it’s either torrential rains or putrefying heat. On the back of a motorcycle, the city looks like it’s always been. Highrise buildings covered in dust. A sea of red brake lights ply our botched and beat-up roads. Harsh sunbeams bounce off glass panels onto every hapless person who isn’t sitting around inside the comfort of a tinted and air-conditioned car. Like a bunch of ants scorching underneath a giant magnifying glass. After Bangkok, I wanted to see Manila in a new light. To see the smog and crowds and think that maybe, just maybe, there was something wonderful about it.

I got off the bike, paid my driver, and walked into the nearest coffee shop to cool off. I popped one of the progesterone pills my gynecologist gave me to jumpstart my period. There were still at least 40 minutes till my next meeting which meant I could drink my coffee slowly. Next to me, a group was discussing the work needed to develop a new app for their company. Across were two ladies talking animatedly about the long weekend. I remembered a moment in Bangkok when I wished I knew a little more Thai so I could understand the idle chatter in the places we visited. I remember wondering what was the baseline of mundane for people there and how different was it from Manila. Was there a point to knowing? Would the similarities or differences be a source of awe or comfort? I couldn’t say.

It’s selfish to think that any trip outside of the country is going to magically change my life. That it’d cure whatever ennui I’d acquired over the course of a busier-than-busy year. And that I’d land in Manila and my brain would finally release the hormones I needed to signal to my uterus to release the blood that’s been building up inside me for the past four weeks. All those days abroad would make me feel happy and safe enough to be fertile. Trick all those old biological systems into exiting fight-or-flight mode.

“Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started,” writes Agnes Callard in her somewhat rage-bait essay called The Case Against Travel. She asks if a person can really profoundly change—their habits, virtues, interests, and basic living arrangements—after a leisure trip. The essay ticked off a lot of my peers (myself included) because of the knowledge that white people (Callard is a Hungary-born American) move through the world differently. That it’s different when you’re from a developing country and you’re suddenly in a place where things work. Or at the very least, work better than where we come from.

But Callard’s question is a simple one. Why do we assign such a significant “aura of virtue” to travel in the first place? For her, one possible answer came in the form of the prompt: Imagine a life where we couldn’t travel. That we’d simply just have to move through the uneventful humdrum of our lives with nothing to look forward to until we die. Perhaps travel is a way for us to obscure the “certainty of annihilation,” because of how it allows us to “experience”, “to connect”, and “to be transformed.” None of these are bad. In a way, don’t these things better prepare us for the inevitable? I imagine death is easier to swallow when we can narrate to ourselves that we’ve lived “good” and “fulfilling” lives.

🥚

In 2020, I was obsessed with making tamagoyaki. It was palliative like most of my routines were back then. A direct response to all the unknowns about the future after COVID-19. Again, I didn’t even really like eggs. But for some reason, I picked up a pair of chopsticks and started whisking, frying, and rolling eggs. The ingredients never changed. It was after all just eggs, mirin, dashi, soy sauce, and sugar. If I ever did change anything, it was only ratios and even then, any adjustment was marginal. What I was after was aesthetic perfection—the perfect egg roll with no burnt spots, tears, or layers out of line. It was forced meditation, demanding my full attention for at least eight minutes or until I ran out of egg mixture. The variables were how steady my hands were and the economy of heat. Too much or too little makes all the difference. The best part about it was seeing how I improved with every roll. It was a measurable and predictable progress that resulted from total control.

🥚

After 10 days of progesterone-induced nausea, back pains, and an unexplainable craving for soy-cured yolks, my period finally arrived. Nearly a full month after our Bangkok trip. For weeks, I thought it’d come out like hot, thick, black tar. I had an image of my uterus wringing itself out in disappointment over my barrenness. But when it did come, it was lighter than usual. Bright red and warm, as if fresh. It was also quick, literally over before I knew it.

The relief was accompanied by some regret. How often did I get in the way of my own enjoyment? I thought about the Bangkok trip and all the time I spent so tightly wound and clenched. No amount of marijuana and Thai massages could loosen me up into enjoying myself.

The Airbnb we rented out in Bangkok was a narrow five-floor building wedged in one of Sukhumvit’s side streets. It wasn’t a particularly luxurious accommodation, but it had a kitchen and a living room, and it could fit 15 people comfortably. It was also a two-minute walk from Phra Khanong station, which made it easy for all of us to go off on our own. In the early mornings, we bought food from the same hawkers who sold fresh fruit, moo ping, and sweet-savory sticky rice. “Maybe as good as our barbecue,” Kay said over a stick of moo ping. In the afternoons, we drank cold apple cider and smoked joints at a dispensary a few steps away from the apartment. In the evenings, we’d sit in the living room and snack on mala peanuts and colorful jellies. But at night, tucked in bed, my thoughts often turned to my anxieties.

“I think you need to relax,” my husband said gently after my third negative pregnancy test.

“It’s hard to let go,” I said. The situation escalated into a petty argument that dragged on unnecessarily. I looked at the time.

“Will you still come with me to Khrua Som Hom?” I asked with a straight face.

“You go ahead,” he replied dolefully. His not coming meant I would either sit in an expensive, prolonged car ride alone or…

Annoyed and pressed for time, I knew the only way, the fastest and surest way, was to get over myself.

“Fine, I’ll take a motorcycle there.”

🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚

---

Hello.

It’s been a while. If you’ve gotten this far down, thank you. Thank you for reading. I mean it. Second, I’d like to apologize for the lack of updates. I know I said this was going to be a monthly thing, but it’s been hard for me to find the time or the words to say about food.

I don’t think I can commit to the monthly updates I promised (I’m really, super sorry about this!) but I will definitely try to get in a few more stories before the year is up. I didn’t realize how out of practice I was until I finally got around to writing this. Thank you also to Addi for the wonderful artwork.

I hope you’re all doing well wherever you are.

Toni