Summary

In Chapter 6, although years have passed since the narrator’s time on the mountain, many still “speak with longing” of the dinners served there (93). It was not just the food that impressed, but the narrator’s performance as Eun-Young.

The narrator tried inhabiting Eun-Young. Because no one on the mountain “had met Eun-Young,” the employer was unconcerned that the narrator looked nothing like her (95). He thought it an advantage that no one could tell Asian women apart (95). The narrator recalled all the times she had been “mistaken for Japanese or Korean or Lao women” (95). Still, the narrator studied her solitary image of Eun-Young. She begged the employer to tell her about her. He insisted this was irrelevant.

The longer she cooked, the better the narrator understood the mountain’s ethos. Although later deemed “decadent, gluttonous,” it was also a “connoisseurship of loss” (99). Meanwhile...