Salmon Teriyaki and Veggie Tempura Bento Box
Status: Restaurant (Shin's Sushi)
Satisfaction: 8.
Associated with: Alicia, My Story by Alicia Appleman-Jurman
For some reason, I was having trouble making associations with this particular meal--probably because it's nothing out of the ordinary compared to what I usually eat--and I had been staring at the photo for several minutes when a book I had first read in eighth grade popped into my head: Alice, My Story. The author is a Holocaust survivor who relates her experiences as a fugitive Jew during World War II, and she came to speak at our middle school, which was when I bought her book. In her narrative, she talks about how she used to chew bits of wheat from the fields to keep off the gnawing hunger--and oddly enough, looking at the compartments of my bento must have triggered my memory of this passage, because I imagined her experience to be almost as if she could see into the filled compartments--salmon, tempura--but all she got was the tiny empty compartment in the middle, or the orange peel. It was more of a bizarre trigger than anything else--it certainly wasn't intended to be a deep metaphor--but food for thought nonetheless.
