769: From Lucky Peach to the New York Times Bestseller List with Rachel Khong

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0:52It's funny, when Goodbye Vitamin came out, I got two reactions. One was, wow, there's so much food in this book. And then the other reaction was, wow, I thought there would be more food in this book. And I think everyone just thinks about food at wildly different rates or amounts. I am right now thinking about my next meal. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

1:20Rachel Kong is the former executive editor of Lucky Peach and the author of Goodbye Vitamin and the New York Times bestseller Real Americans. Her new short story collection, My Dear You, is her strangest and most daring work yet. Ten surreal, funny, and deeply felt stories about identity, love, memory, and what happens after you die. I absolutely love this collection. On this episode, we talk about the legacy of Lucky Peach, Rachel's research process for writing fiction, and why this short story endures. I hope you enjoy this episode.

2:00Rachel Kong, welcome to This Is Taste. It's a long time coming. Great to see you. Yeah, so good to see you. Happy to be here. Yeah, I just cannot wait to talk about My Dear You, your short story collection that I, the previous three things I raved about with Eliza and really pick it up. It's, I read in one sitting. Just beautiful work there, Rachel. Oh, thank you. It's, you know, we have some history in the best way possible. You know, you were an editor at Lucky Peach for years and you were Taste's first contributing editor. Yeah. I mean, I feel like you guys helped me leave my job in positive, like in a positive way.

2:39Yeah. I just enjoyed and you've written for Taste as well. And just like working with you in like Word docs and just working on copy has always been such a joy because I just love your journalism. I think you have such a cool point of view. And then seeing you flourish as a fiction writer and author has been really rad. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, and thank you for reading. Absolutely. So when you're back in New York, where do you like to dine out? I got to ask. It's such a, yeah, that's such a good question. I just got to New York yesterday, so I really didn't have time to like eat anything good.

3:11After this, I'm going to Via Carota. Yeah. Because I do kind of dream about that salad that's so good. I think of really classic spots, I guess, like Barney Greengrass.

3:25I think the truer answer is I love Kapitiam. And my family's from Malaysia, and I feel like it's so hard for some reason to have a really good Malaysian restaurant. There's just something about, I don't know, like being in America that makes it not as good. But they have come the closest to any, yeah, to any like Malaysian, like actually Malaysian restaurant. I mean, the style of service there too, when you walk in, it doesn't feel like a Manhattan cafe with like all the bells and whistles. It feels, it's of a place. It's of a place. I mean, I also love, you know, it feels casual. And that's, yeah, that's kind of, that's the sort of vibe I like too, I guess.

4:14And what about L.A.? You recently moved there a few years back, and you're finding your way there. Restaurant-wise, food scene-wise, where do you like to go? Oh, I mean, I love to go east. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, yeah, I'm still sort of acclimating, and I've been doing a lot of traveling while living there, too, so I feel like I'm still getting my sea legs there, really. But I love going to San Gabriel Valley. I love a lot of restaurants, like in Alhambra. I'll just like shout out a really small one. There's this restaurant called Min Min Meat House and it's in Alhambra and it's really good beef noodles, like homemade, you know, handmade noodles.

4:58And they also have frozen dumplings in the freezer. So you can buy like a big pack of frozen dumplings and then just make them at home. And they have meat pies, obviously. Oh, yeah, totally. I don't know that place, but I love SGV. I mean, it's such a fun place to explore. Yeah, it's really fun. Explore. Yeah. Well, I have to ask you about food writing. I mean, you're a full-time novelist and fiction writer now. I'm not sure if you're taking freelance or assignments for nonfiction. But, I mean, do you miss, like, being in this food writing world, like, day to day? Not really. Yeah, fair. I mean, I think that I really loved that sort of era of my life and getting to, I mean, as you said, like the journalism of it was so fun.

5:44Like I remember getting to harvest seaweed and visiting an endive farm, which was so funny because when I walked into their lobby, the lobby of the factory, like, you know, the office of the factory, there was this felt sign that said, California endives welcomes Rachel Kong. And they were so excited about my visit. And the endive farm itself was so cool. Like it was in the dark, you know, because they have to grow them in the dark to get them to that pale color. So I miss like meeting farmers, meeting food people, because I feel like people who care about food are so interesting and so caring.

6:26So those parts I miss, but I don't really miss like coming up with adjectives that mean delicious, you know, like it's like so like once you have written about food for a while, you're like, I don't know. I don't know. It feels like a creative exercise that's really, really challenging. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the new name for restaurant? I mean, when you get into line edits of like certain types of food writing, it can be a real puzzle. And I can see it's like pretty like it's constraining in some ways. And I think I was always drawn to a certain kind of food writing. Like I was never really a restaurant person.

7:02I'm very much a cook at home person and I love ingredients. I love, you know, vegetable shopping and stuff like that. And I just never felt like I was – I mean, I'm now definitely, like, out of the loop. But I think that sort of pace of, like, okay, got to pay attention to this new restaurant opening or that new restaurant opening. Like, of course, so cool when people do that and, like, want to support them. But also that's, like, not how – like, my rate of metabolism is a little different, right? Like I like sitting with subjects and I like getting deep into them and not so much like the fleeting and like fast nature.

7:41Yeah, the online version of food writing can feel that way. So wait, Endive Farm. I'm remembering Goodbye Vitamin. Did you tap into Endive a little bit? Yes, you know, it's funny. Yeah, because I was writing – I was always writing fiction alongside the food writing. And so with Goodbye Vitamin, I don't actually – I think that maybe the end dive – there was a trucker in Goodbye Vitamin who was carrying a truck of end dives because – That's it. That's it. Yeah, because I had seen – it was like a really funny catchphrase that the end dives had on this truck. I saw it in real life. I saw this truck in real life.

8:17I put it into the novel. And then because of putting it into the novel, I was like, but what are end dives? Like, how are they grown? So the sort of fictional endive trucker led me to the real life endive farm. And yeah, I guess technically on D.V. Yeah, on D.V. Yeah, either one works on our show. So it's interesting. So it actually worked in reverse because I feel and just reading through your work, you know, your work at Lucky Peach, I'm sure informed a lot of your fiction writing as well and went the other way too. It goes both ways for sure. I mean, I think that it's fiction writing, any kind of writing comes out of the tangle of your own life.

9:00Right. And and I have to be really indiscriminate with like where stuff comes from. I'm like pulling from all sorts of places. And that was true for the food writing to like sort of. Yeah. So when you think about your time at Lucky Peach, like when you're just like a quiet moment in your life, you're just like memories flashback. What first pops into your head about that time? Well, it was really, we would get really delirious when it was deadline time. So Walter Green was the designer, the art director of the magazine. And often it would just be, yeah, like very few people in the office. It was like me, Walter, Erlen Beaumont, Chris Ying, maybe a couple people in town from New York.

9:49That's the West Coast office. That's the West Coast office. We were based in San Francisco. So we would just get so giggly and weird. And I remember one deadline, I can't remember which for which issue, Walter decided he was going to prank call BevMo and ask for a ween opener. and just act as though like ween was like just with with real confidence say like um i would like to buy a ween opener where can i buy a ween you know like for red ween or white ween and he did this he called bevmo we were all cracking up so hard and then after that we just like of course we never called it wine again we had to say like um that's ma ween and like and then we came up with a whole song about it.

10:40Yeah. So that was like sort of where ween originated. And I do think about ween all the time because ween is, yeah, ween's around. That's the only way that word is pronounced. I mean, this giddiness in the office and I think, you know, having the two coasts and having different energies in each office, it seems that really was the spirit of Lucky Peach, like that collaboration and that kind of weirdness. And really, what is the legacy of Lucky Peach, at least from you, someone who worked there through the whole run of it? What do you think the takeaway is from this really important publication?

11:15Well, I don't know that I have enough perspective on it because I don't necessarily feel that I know what the food world is up to now. I know that a lot of Walter's artistic choices I've seen on other magazines. Like after Lucky Peach, all of a sudden Bon Appetit had these really handwritten fonts and things like that. So I think there is an aesthetic, you know, legacy there. And I also think maybe an openness to just like weird subjects. Right. And not necessarily, yeah, what's hot and what's new, but to sort of I mean, taste is doing so much of that, I think. Right. Like these like more interesting perspectives on food.

11:59Yeah, no joke. I mean, when we launched in 2016, it was, you know, Lucky Peach was kind of near the end. And it was a huge inspiration. Of course, I get to write for Lucky Peach. And just like seeing the way you guys created that monthly magazine was a real inspiration. We, of course, weren't print. So it was a little different. And I think you had that ultimate challenge of having the deadline of a print publication. And that's a very different energy. It definitely worked, though, like in a way that is unlike, you know, online where you can kind of push deadlines and stuff. You just had to get it all done.

12:30Yeah, it was quarterly, so not as bad as monthly. Quarterly, of course, of course. But making a print magazine obviously is so expensive, especially the way that we did it, which was full color, lots of artists and illustrators whose work was just as important as the writer's work. And so, yeah, making that magazine, it was just so much money, so much effort. It couldn't last forever, but it was fun that it lasted for the time that it did. Do you guys stay in touch, like the team? Yeah, some of us do. Yeah, yeah. I mean, definitely that, like, I was just talking about Walter and Chris. And yeah, I mean, I live 10 minutes from Chris now.

13:10He's just a little bit north of me. Chris, I mean, podcast star, like Netflix star. You know, the Chris Ying career trajectory has been fun to follow. He's so talented, not just as an editor, but like just he's a fun personality online. Yeah, yeah. He's been doing, yeah, lots of podcasts. He's also a really fun thing that he's been doing is he hosts an improv cooking show, basically. So he'll be on stage. Oh, with Bobby Moynihan. Yes, cooking dishes and then you know how like improv, they just need like one sort of element from whatever conversation and then they'll just run with it. And so Chris actually helped me roast my 40th birthday party pig in my driveway.

13:58And it was on the sweltering July day. It was so hot. I felt so bad. I was like, I can't believe, like, I owe you my, you know, my life, really. He cooked this whole pig in the heat. And then he mentioned that story on stage. And there was some fun comedy that came out of the pig. Because really the funniest thing about that was that we were getting the pig from Peds. And they were on the west side. And I'm on the east side. And that's like a whole, I mean, it's a whole trek. It's a real endeavor. And I was like, I do not have time to go that way. Come back, you know, bring my pig. So the farmer was like, I'll get a courier to send you the like bring the pig over.

14:42But in the end, what that meant was that the pig came in an Uber. And it was just like in this like bag in an Uber in the backseat. Wild. Slightly cheaper than transporting a human, actually. Yeah, I would say it's probably like a few decimal points differently. And, you know, bless our Uber drivers for taking this assignment. I mean, it made me think they must have seen worse. Yeah. I mean, they probably have seen unbagged. Yeah. Yeah. Unbagged. Hopefully not people. Yeah. Well, it's L.A., so obviously people are getting transported around the city every day in Ubers, corpses. We're all in the process of dying.

15:22Yeah, we are. To bring it back to your collection, death is a very rich text for you. Yeah. You really, I feel, have some strong opinions about the afterlife. I think I have some speculations about it. I don't know that I have strong opinions about many things in the book. It's more like, yeah, what would this be like? Speculations is better. That's why you're the writer. I mean, it is speculative fiction. On a recent episode of This is Taste, I spoke with Erica Roby, barbecue champion, former criminal defense attorney, and the person who taught me exactly what to look for when buying a brisket.

16:00She wants striations. She wants white flecks throughout. She described it like a kaleidoscope. Because fat is flavor and that marbling is the whole game. It's what keeps brisket moist from the smoker all the way to the moment the judge takes a bite. We also heard from Tucker Brown, a sixth-generation Texas cattle rancher whose family has been in business since 1895. That's episode 754 of This Is Taste. This episode is presented by Beef. It's what's for dinner on behalf of the Beef Checkoff. You know how much effort goes into taking care of yourself physically, eating the right amount of protein, drinking the latest probiotic soda, hitting those Peloton personal records.

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17:25You deserve mental health care that works for you, not against your budget. Well, I want to keep talking about food. You know, you wrote this terrific piece about Malaysian cookbooks early in Taste Run. I love that piece so much. And we've published it. We've put it in our newsletter a few times. And I just want to know how Malaysian food shows up now in your fiction. You know, it's your culture. You've reported on it. But then you find it in, you know, in this collection is a beautiful story set in Malaysia that I absolutely love. But what's it like? Yeah, well, like I said, it's hard to sort of separate the tangle of, you know, what is going into the fiction, going into the writing.

18:06I mean, it's funny when Goodbye Vitamin came out, I got two reactions. One was, wow, there's so much food in this book. And then the other reaction was, wow, I thought there would be more food in this book. And I think everyone just thinks about food at wildly different rates or amounts. And I think I think about food fairly often. Like I'm always thinking, I am right now thinking about my next meal. Via Corona Sal, it's going to be good. Yeah, yeah, I'm really excited about it. But yeah, so I think in the fiction, I'm always thinking about food like pretty often. And so it does enter more frequently than I think it would for people who just don't care about it as much.

18:52And Malaysian food specifically, it has to depend on like the project, right? And like what it's sort of calling for. I think that in fiction, it's weird because it's made up, but it's also I'm sort of going for a feeling of truth. And that feeling of truth has to come from the characters themselves, the situations, the sort of like trueness of the sentences, for lack of a better way to put it. And so sometimes, yeah, so I think for certain stories, like there's a story set in Malaysia, there's a story set in China, and it was fun to sort of make the food in those stories like fit in with the places.

19:33Yeah, the places they were set. You built a whole universe in Real Americans around oyster farming. Yeah. Which was just I saw the work. I mean, you clearly researched oyster. oyster. Well, that also, and I can't remember which came first, but I wrote a piece for Eater that was all about trying oysters all up along the coast. I started in San Francisco, did a road trip with my brothers, and we went up to Washington and we stopped at oyster farms along the way. And I think it was probably that article. I mean, I already had oysters in the book, but I was so inspired by the farmers. There was one farmer that we met.

20:10I think I gave him the same name just as a nod to him like a secret nod although i haven't told him about it but he had boots of every size for us to put on and so we like waded out into the water with him um and he had so much history for us he was so fascinating um and um yeah and so that was it felt so rich and it felt right for the story i loved that farmer character because it showed he was rough but he had real um empathy towards nick the character and really had love for mentoring this this young boy. And also he was just an example. I think I wanted to have this person who was sort of living outside of, I mean, he was still, of course, like farming oysters existing in capitalism, but he had created this life for himself that was really distinct and really, yeah, that was his sort of chosen thing.

20:59Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was clearly for money, but it wasn't the reason that drove him to do it. Yeah, exactly. I like that kind of tension there. Well, let's talk about Good Spirits. It's the story set in 1980s Malaysia. It's a ghost story as well. And I think, you know, there's this magical realism. There's some supernatural elements in all of your writing, which really makes it just really interesting. It doesn't have to be a food fan who loves your work. Your work is multidimensional. And I think, not a food question, but just in general, that this story really struck me. And I think it's a tougher read, you know.

21:33It's a pretty dramatic story. What inspired it? Yeah, well, I was reading, I don't remember how I stumbled across this, but I was reading a paper, a scholarly paper that was about the, like, industrialization. It was by an author and professor, her last name's Ong, and it was about Malaysia's sort of, you know, turn toward industrialization and how many of these young women who came from small villages, they would be doing factory work and then suddenly be possessed or act like they were possessed. And the author was writing about how it was a form of resistance, really, right? Like spirit possession.

22:22And Malaysia is such a, you know, it's a place that has so many different cultures. And so, so many different cultures, views of ghosts and spirits and ancestors and all of that is swirling around. And so, that felt so rich to me, so interesting. I left Malaysia when I was two. My parents brought us here to America. And so, it's always, you know, been part of my imagination, but like I feel kind of separate from it too. I feel like I don't know as much as I would like to. And so in my current project, I am like writing Malaysian characters. And so I'm doing more research on that. And that was probably how I stumbled across this paper, to be quite honest.

23:09And so, yeah, I think I'm really interested in, like, obviously I'm interested in eating the food, but like on a more like fascinations level, I'm really interested in all the different cultures and yeah, how they come together, how their beliefs in like invisible things kind of converge or not converge. And, you know, my parents converted to Christianity. They were really like my childhood. I was raised really Christian. So they were all about like there's no, you know, there's the Holy Spirit, right? There's no other. We can't talk about other spirits. Which is brought up in the short story.

23:49It is brought up in the short story. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that kind of makes me now want to know like all the things that I didn't get to learn because I was raised in this specific way. Yeah. It's unpacking your history and understanding that these differences in Malaysia, this dynamic at that time. Yeah. It's got to be, you know, for you, it's very personal to write about these characters. Yeah. And I love the beginning of that story because there are some really nice food details. Yeah. You really set the scene in this village setting where food, there is some scarcity. Yeah. You know, the character is, I think, if you remind me, it's like a box lunch is presented in some cool way.

24:26Yeah, well, it's like, you know, a lot of food in Malaysia, especially food that's meant to go, comes in banana leaves. That's it, yeah. I mean, now it comes in plastic and paper, but it was banana leaves and that was, I mean, it's so, like, in fiction, I think I'm always looking for a detail that you can really picture, you know, that you can sort of hang on to that feels like the reader can co-create it with you. And so like when I think of banana leaves, like that's like I can see it, right? Like they're like beautiful and green and glossy. And yeah, so it felt really right to have that in the story.

24:59And I love the 1980s with like the Industrial Revolution happening there in the factory movement. These two young women and their relationship with their specific factories, the different styles of factories. Yeah. And so you're tapping into that for a new project perhaps? A little bit, yeah. Yeah, just, yeah, you know, just like Malaysian culture itself. I mean, I have so much to learn, and I plan to go later this year, actually. It's been a long time since I've been. So, you know, I see, Rachel, your reporter's eye in so many of these stories. You know, you do this really, it seems like deep research into vintage antique wagons in Portugal and Brisbane.

25:36Yeah. There is a lifelike companion doll, I'll call it, that features prominently, and there's some great reporters' beats in there. You know, online dating and animal behavior. How do you do that research? Is it just your curiosity? I know you're an editor at heart, just reading a lot of random things that build these worlds. I think it, yeah, when I think of research for a fiction writer, it's more like I'm calling it research in quotes. You know, I think research can be anything. It can be your life. It can be misunderstanding even. It can be just like being fascinated by something and then getting it a little bit wrong.