My K-Pop Secret by J.L. Lee

Author:J.L. Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub

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Doyoon

The twentieth naked potato looked much better than the first one I’d peeled, and I beamed at it for a second before immediately feeling stupid for being proud over a potato. My designer sneakers were covered in a pile of peels. Great.

I was sitting on a dusty old crate in a junkyard cluttered with rusty tools, discarded car parts, barrels leaking black puddles of grease and...prepping food for a restaurant? They must be breaking every rule in the food safety code book. Even more surprising was that people could see this happening, and still willingly come here to eat. Several latecomers had passed by while I was sitting outside, peeling the damn potatoes, and not a single one had even batted an eyelash at these very unsanitary conditions.

Come to think of it, why am I still doing this? I could very easily walk away right now and probably make it to the next town over by dark. Before I could decide one way or another, Mr. Jung plopped down on a crate next to me and got to work on his own potato.

“If you don’t pick up the pace, Jimin will come over and bite your ear off!”

“Sir?” I ventured, “I’m not sure I quite understand. What are you two doing here, exactly?”

The old man chuckled, slapping his knee at my obvious confusion. “Never seen anything like it in the city, eh boy? We’re a garage by day, restaurant by night! Brilliant idea, isn’t it?”

“Why’d you decide to do two businesses?” I hoped he couldn’t hear the skepticism in my voice.

His weathered face softened like old leather. “Wasn’t me. All Jimin’s idea,” he beamed proudly. “That girl can’t ever just sit still. When she’s not tinkering ’round the shop, she’s in the kitchen, whipping up something new. She just loves to cook. Before long, people would pop ’round the shop without a single thing wrong with their cars, just to have a taste! Before we knew it, Jimin was cooking for twenty, thirty, forty people—just made sense to start charging some of the old bags. How many other kids do you know who can build their own car from scrap metal, then cook a feast for a king in the same night?” he shook his head.

Every parent and grandparent was the same, it seemed, when it came to their family. We finished the last of the potatoes in companionable silence, although I was secretly dreading the moment we finished and I’d have to try his granddaughter’s apparently god-like food.

I cast another look around the cluttered yard and snorted. Yeah, right.

“What’s so funny?” I nearly jumped out of my skin. Jimin was standing behind me with a bowl of nangmyeon, a refreshing bowl of cold noodles.

“Nothing,” I said hastily. She placed the bowl of plain-looking buckwheat noodles in front of me and I nodded my thanks. Hopefully, I was hungry enough to like it. I wasn’t trying to be snobby, but when you regularly ate at Michelin-star restaurants, home-cooked food just didn’t cut it anymore.

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