Is This Okay?
Is this okay?
"…If you were a solo author, it might be different, but since several of you would be publishing together, anything over five thousand dollars as an advance is a little difficult."
"Sure. Honestly, money isn't the most important thing when it comes to work."
That was a lie. Money was the most important thing. Still, five thousand dollars seemed decent enough.
The return relative to the time invested looked good. Supplying desserts to the café was a one-off, but a book would keep earning royalties as time went on.
And if it sold well, a second offer might even come in, right?
Being just one of several contributors, the workload probably wouldn't be that crushing either.
Still, better to ask and be sure.
"We can go over the details later, of course, but could you give me at least a rough idea of how many recipes I'd need to prepare, and what type? If you just say 'baking recipes,' the range is enormous."
Evan nodded and continued.
"We're thinking of including about twenty-five to thirty original personal recipes that have never been made public. Nothing is finalized yet, but I imagine each person would prepare three or four recipes."
"Alright. Then could you tell me, even roughly, what kind of theme you're planning for the recipe book?"
"One of our staff will explain it more thoroughly in the presentation, but simply put, it's a healing theme. The classic marriage of cooking and healing."
Classic? More like a cliché, I thought—but he was the editor. He probably knew better than I did.
Plenty of books already borrowed the names of famous pastry chefs, so if they wanted to lean hard into "healing," a book built around home bakers' stories and their own distinctive recipes would at least have a point of difference.
Recipes might all be variations on a theme, but a person's story was unique.
I was more or less sold when Evan added,
"That said, we're not looking for the cozy, soft, homey image traditional home baking usually carries. We'll go for pretty, glamorous images that match SNS trends. And I think you fit that perfectly, Jun."
"Ah… well, if you look more carefully at my YouTube, you'll see I deliberately avoid showing my face directly."
"Would a side profile or a backlit shot be alright? We could even use just a silhouette cooking against the light… Nothing as obvious as a straight-on headshot. We're thinking of selecting mostly atmospheric cuts—the kind of photos people use on social media."
I thought for a moment, then nodded. I already uploaded side profiles and face-obscured shots on YouTube as it was.
"That much should be fine, I suppose. Could you show me the photos that will go in the book before they're finalized?"
He nodded, saying that was more than doable.
"After the book comes out, if you post a video on your YouTube introducing the desserts from your recipes and link the book, we'll cover the promotional costs as well."
"Ah, yes. Thank you."
From my perspective, it was having my cake and eating it too. Video revenue, ad money, book promotion that would drive more royalties—everything stacked.
I figured I'd asked everything worth asking. Royalty percentages and the like could be negotiated once I saw the contract on presentation day.
So next I decided to ask the things that might feel awkward to bring up in front of a full presentation room.
"It's not terribly important, but may I ask why you approached me for this?"
"Of course. First, I looked at your skill. This is going into a recipe book, after all… And these days, most home bakers with their own YouTube channels or blogs are nearly as good as professionals."
"That's true enough."
"In that sense, every one of your desserts was excellent. For the record, I've tried every dessert you've supplied to the café downstairs."
"Ah…"
"The presentation, the flavor—everything was flawless enough that even a professional pastry chef wouldn't find fault."
"Well… thank you."
"Also, the goal is to cast as diverse a range of people as possible. We're putting the message front and center that baking brings happiness to everyone."
In other words, he'd picked me because I was Asian.
I listened, reading between the lines, as Evan finished with a look of quiet satisfaction.
"And lastly, we want people with special life stories. This is pure gut instinct, but I have a feeling your life is full of them."
"…Is that so?"
"Yes. You're probably living a life rich with inspiration. I believe that means you'll have a great deal you want to say to people."
Not really.
Instead of saying that out loud, I offered him an ambiguous smile.
A faint chill ran through me. The man in front of me was genuinely impressive.
I held a carefully gentle smile and looked him straight in the eye.
You really are something. Our first meeting was an absolute disaster, and now you want to do business.
And not casually, either. He'd put real work into making this happen—offering me tea again and again for months, even through my cold shoulder.
Regardless of how uncomfortable things were between us, every time he looked at me he must have been assessing, with pure business eyes, what story he could extract.
And the "rich story" he was talking about was, as clear as day, about me and Luca.
…Honestly, part of me had wondered if he was finally going to apologize to Luca.
If I asked him right here whether he still had no intention of apologizing to Luca, he would probably freeze for a second—then deliver a thoroughly polite apology.
As an editor, he would choose all the right words, craft something that never once violated social convention.
An apology with not a shred of sincerity in it would mean nothing. If he'd truly meant to apologize, he would have done it the second time we crossed paths.
Instead, he'd probably just thought something like, Kids these days—you can really tell he's never done any real socializing.
And since I was no green kid who'd never navigated the adult world, I decided to skip the pointless conversation.
I couldn't teach him. I couldn't persuade him. And I had even less reason to put effort into making him a better person.
"……"
I patted the back of Luca, who had blinked those big eyes of his and drifted off to sleep again.
That silence alone should have been enough to say everything I needed to say.
After letting the pause stretch long enough that he had to feel the discomfort, I finally put on my business smile and stood.
"Luca, don't put your foot in your mouth."
"Hee…"
"Laughing doesn't make it okay, you little stinker."
With that, I pressed his favorite teddy bear into his arms, and only then did Luca abandon his determination to eat his own foot and burst into a peal of giggles.
I stroked the head of the baby shaking his teddy and sank into thought.
Recipes with stories in them.
Honestly, wasn't that just a matter of inventing a nice little tale to match a pretty dish? People everywhere lived more or less the same lives. How many truly special stories could there be?
"Maybe that's really how it is, huh, Luca? This world's full of lies."
"Bwoo…!"
But the baby grinning up at me was pure and adorable, so the world was still worth living in.
Anyway.
Last time, the cookies I'd brought into the office as my "original recipes" had split opinions. Whatever I made this time would obviously have to be crowd-pleasing.
Crowd-pleasing and special…
What kind of order was that—modern and classic at the same time?
I caught Luca, who was now trying to roll from side to side, and started massaging his little legs, stretching them out long.
"Kyahaa…! Eeh…!"
"Yeah, that's it. Good boy, Luca."
Answering his babbling on autopilot, I rewound my conversation with Evan, hunting for anything else useful.
He'd also talked about diversity.
…Well, my background was Korean, so maybe I could pull from Korean food? But what was the overlap between Korean cuisine and baking, exactly?
When I thought of Korean food, all that came to mind was tteokbokki and gimbap.
Oh—ramen and kimchi too. Kimchi cup ramen had actually tasted pretty good.
Of course, the friend who'd first handed me that cup ramen had insisted that the Korean instant noodles sold in America tasted weird. Not spicy enough, just vaguely sweet and thick, he'd said.
To me it was still plenty spicy, so I never really understood him. And even though I hadn't tried that many Korean dishes, every single one of them had been spicy as far as I was concerned. There was a decent chance my friend had simply only ever introduced me to the spicy ones.
Either way, neither the heat nor the Korean food I knew had any natural connection to baking.
"Hmm…"
So maybe I should lean into the spice and invent something new? Gochujang cookies, for example…
Even thinking it made me shudder. Still, it had a certain outrageous spark, so I set the baby down and searched on my phone—and to my astonishment, gochujang cookies already existed in the world.
Did everyone just have the same thoughts?
There were even quite a few variations. Peanut butter cookies with gochujang stirred in. Gochujang bases mixed with caramel.
I could almost imagine the taste, and yet it stayed somehow vague.
Digging a little further turned up gochujang bread and gochujang pastries too. I snorted and muttered,
"Come on. At this rate someone's going to make a gochujang cake."
And the moment I said it, there it was: gochujang cake.
"……"
What on earth was everyone thinking?
The funny part was, the more I searched, the more fun it became. It felt like all the food-related mischief adults had forbidden when we were kids—everyone was now doing it openly, proudly, as grown-ups.
Searching around gochujang also taught me that something called strawberry gochujang existed. What kind of unholy hybrid was that?
"……"
It was even a commercially sold product.
At this point I had to wonder whether the world had gone mad, or whether I was the strange one.
If it was on the market, the taste was presumably crowd-approved, but… yeah. I still had no idea. Were Korean people okay?
I was the type who stopped eating entirely when stressed, but that Korean friend of mine, whenever something got to him, would first cook something as spicy as possible and eat a mountain of it.
He claimed eating spicy food when stressed helped let some of it out.
I still couldn't forget the sight of him, face bright red and sweating, deliberately making an extra-fiery gochujang bibimbap. It looked like self-torture.
He'd even said all Koreans ate like that. I'd half believed him at the time; looking back at what I'd just found, it might actually be true.
If, on average, people loved heat and ate it in every form imaginable, did that mean they were living under that much stress?
I was scrolling through more gochujang food images when another shocking photo stopped me cold.
Gochujang chocolate.
"……"
A box illustrated with a blazing red chili pepper and chocolate. The two did not belong together.
…Were Korean people really okay?