What is importance of Pasta?

The pasta that Young cooks for hyung when hyung comes to his mother's house is a symbol of Young's desperate desire to have a real relationship with hyung. He recalls, "I must say I was enamored by this image of myself cooking for him, seeing myself wiping the occasional bead of sweat from my forehead. It gave me joy that food I had made with my own hands would become part of his body" (120-1). Young is imagining this to be a scene of quiet domesticity between a genuine couple, when in fact hyung has simply come to tell Young that he was never in love with him. It is humorous that Young is cooking pasta because prior to this, when Young asked hyung to go to a hotel and eat pasta with him, hyung declared, "It's just too strange...Two men eating pasta at a restaurant" (110). He did not wish to be perceived as gay in public, and rather than realizing that this meant the relationship was unhealthy, Young tried to get hyung to eat pasta with him in private instead.