3 Things I Loved, May 2026
Since I have this space, I want to keep a record of the things I loved each month. It can be a book, a movie, a song, an album, a manga series, something I saw on TV, or heard, a new recipe I tried, a dish I ate, or even a material object. Why? Because it’s fun to talk and read about beloved things!
So, in May 2026, I got really into:
1. Love in a Dish, M.F.K. Fisher
In a happy bit of chance, I came across this slim selection of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher’s writing for RM10 at the secondhand book store. With her reputation as one of the best food and prose writers, I’d always wanted to read her, and I’m so glad I did. She reminded me immediately of the great Anthony Bourdain at his best, who I’d read in high school and once again nearly 20 years later, roaring with laughter with my husband on a road trip listening to A Chef’s Tour as an audiobook. I laughed out loud reading Fisher too, especially at her recounting of an overenthusiastic waitress (“like a medieval woman possessed by the devil”!) and of a cat breaking into her pantry.
It’s no surprise. Someone who can accurately and evocatively write about the sensory delights of food could of course write humour with the same deft hand. And Fisher sure can write! Just read her description of a meal in which she and her parents feasted on vodka and caviar:
It was reward enough to sit in the almost empty room, chaste rococo in the slanting June sunlight, with the generous tub of pure delight between us, Mother purring there, the vodka seeping slyly through our veins, and real wood strawberries to come, to make us feel like children again and not near-gods …
Vodka “seeping slyly” and the “slanting sunlight”!! What imagery and sound! In another memorable passage she describes radishes “as fresh and delicate as dewdrops”. You can imagine it perfectly. I also luxuriated in how she writes of produce so fresh and ripe it rots within the day:
A peach bought cool and unblemished from the green grocer on the Cours Sextius at nine in the morning looked sulky by noon, and by suppertime was bruised and voluptuously dying.
Sulky peaches dying voluptuously? It’s just fine writing, original yet so immediately recognisable that everything is conveyed with complete accuracy to you. Even her description of doing the marketing—buying too much in enthusiasm, only to end up hot and harried and overladen—was so relatable that I had to smile almost in relief, even though I do my groceries in a supermarket and not a fresh market in Provence.
What further endeared me to Fisher and solidified her as a favourite is her treatment of Chinese food and culinary culture: full of respect and recognition for their long culinary history, yet never once exoticising them or their ingredients. You only have to read this passage on egg foo yong to see what I mean.
… the vegetables are diced and cooked only until they are crisply heated so that the whole texture is one of surprises, a mixture of sharp and soft, crisp and mellow, as all good Chinese dishes should be. This recipe can of course use gourmet powder (mei jing) [So many editors have shuddered away from my opinions on what we pompously call something like monoglutium sodomate that I’ll only repeat here that it is a fine thing now and then, but not all the time and in candy and coffee and on fresh green peas.] diced roasted pork (foo yuk), diced peeled water chestnuts (ma tat), diced bamboo shoots (jook tsun), and a dozen other delicious things which are sold in Chinese stores.
The note on MSG is, of course, hers. That she refers to the Chinese groceries as “delicious” rather than the more common “exotic/bizarre” othering language that still to this day surrounds Chinese food is especially noteworthy. For an American writing in the 1940’s? It’s incredible.
In this sense, M.F.K. Fisher possesses all the qualities that I think make the best food writers: an immense open-mindedness, the ability to pay attention to sensory detail and the skill to then re-evoke it through prose, and most importantly, being too besotted with the deliciousness of food to be judgemental or pretentious.
I don’t what else to say other than she is a gift who should be read at least once by everyone. I’ll end it with one last passage:
Perhaps the nearest I come to gluttony is with wine. As often as possible, when a really beautiful bottle is before me, I drink all I can of it, even when I know that I have had more than I want physically. That is gluttonous.
But I think to myself, when again will I have this taste upon my tongue? Where else in the world is there just such wine as this, with just this bouquet, at just this heat, in just this crystal cup? And when again will I be alive to it as I am this very minute … ?
2. Loud, NMIXX
NMIXX are my second-favourite K-pop group, yet they are the group I listen to the most. Somehow, their title tracks and B-sides have soundtracked some of my most beloved pieces of writing over the years, so much so that the sound of them is enough to transport me bodily back in time to the moment of my writing.
For their recent EP, it was the final track, Loud.
I love everything about this song— the magnificent confluence of factors that led to it coming to be, its lyrics, the vocals and instrumentation all supporting the building emotion of its message (its lyricist once said this about queer love: “you love who you love and there’s nothing you can do about it”, which struck me as such as such a beautiful yet simultaneously ominous sentiment), how it is the perfect way to close this very cohesive album. It all just works. And most of all it’s just a beautiful, incredibly emotionally affecting song.
(Especially when overlaid over this fanmade video edit for obvious, obvious reasons.)
3. Things I bought in Tokyo
I both love and dread shopping hauls, particularly those that follow a trip. The focus on the material consumption aspect of a holiday feels strange, like, shouldn’t a trip to a foreign country be about intangible things like culture and memories? Well, why not both? Things matter, and in a time of failing memory, physical objects matter even more.
At the same time, globalisation has made it easy to get items outside of their home countries, and being naturally averse to buying too much in one setting and also overly conscious of my limited luggage space, I restrained myself (I think) during my trip to Tokyo.
Without going into too much detail, these are some of the favourite things I bought, all immediately reminiscent of Japan, but also made all the more special by the circumstances in which I bought them. Two skeins of indigo Noro yarn from Kamata, a Moflin robot, a bottle of perfume I blended myself, and a custom-engraved medal of Hachiko from the National Museum of Nature and Science.
