When his mother finally dies after a period of sickness, Romesh Dissanayake’s narrator searches for answers by starting a noodle shop. Admittedly leaning into the “food-loving immigrant stereotype”, he commits to serving authentic food he grew up with, and mastering the carrot salad his mother left behind. The novel’s title becomes a meditative refrain as the narrator begins each workday and works through his grief.
Business is slow and customer interest in the shop soon dwindles to nothing. Eventually, the narrator cannot afford to pay his expenses and the menu shrinks out of necessity and lack of motivation to a handful of items.
The carrot salad, like a fading memory, has long lost its shine. It tastes nothing like the original and is criticised when it’s served. The failing start-up feeds into a series of poor decisions culminating in one of the worst road trips imaginable, which serves as the catalyst for our narrator’s catharsis.
The narrator’s ambiguity – unnamed and ethnically unidentified for much of the novel – serves to heighten his sense of dislocation. After his mother’s death he is essentially orphaned, abandoned earlier by his father, a local musician who returned to their homeland shortly after leaving because he failed to assimilate.
Dissanayake describes with deft and heart-breaking clarity the father’s mounting resentment at their new life: “[He was] so proud that he downplayed how he had to clean school toilets during the day and stack supermarket shelves late at night just to get by. His fingers and hands, which had once contained melodies, now held only box cutters and scrubbing brushes. Something was changing him. He went inside himself and all that came out of him were grunts.”
The shop becomes a microcosm of the migrant experience; a behind-the-counter look at starting over. The protagonist’s struggles are his ancestors’ struggles. In a culture where food is an ultimate expression of love and service, we witness it also bringing trouble, yearning and dissonance. There is an artful symmetry to the novel. Repeated images punctuate the text like an act of remembering – various characters carry worn-out backpacks; a young man is relieved from the burden of caring for his sick mother only to realise after she’s gone that this is what she alone has done for him his whole life.
Pockets of humour keep the writing buoyant and nostalgic details of childhood make anyone who grew up in early-2000s Aotearoa feel as if the author is winking at them. The novel’s form – floating effortlessly between prose and poetry, realism and surrealism and incorporating MSN messages, stream of consciousness and mythology – is reminiscent of the sonic experimentation in Frank Ocean’s album Blonde. Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington emerges as a rich, omnipresent character – at times an overbearing reminder of a broken family, but also a place of hope.
Dissanayake’s novel is an unconventional study on how to respond to grief and the way personal tragedy intersects with the compounding pressures of immigration and expected masculinity. Our narrator is finally named in the third act by a long-time friend-turned-partner who delivers it at a friend’s dinner party with a fluency even he himself does not have. This small but attentive act is an affirming gift – to share a language and be seen completely by those we love grounds us and quiets the alienation. The family the narrator finds in his community then is what allows him to change, rebuild himself and claim the city as his kin.
When I Open the Shop by Romesh Dissanayake (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is out now.
