William Penn grew up in Luxembourg. Since moving to Dublin in 2018, his poems and essays have been featured in the Summer Hill Magazine, and the Gorko Gazette. He writes film reviews for Film Ireland. His work grapples with the natural world, memory, and food.

Hyphens

By William Penn

I hadn’t smelled the stench of a smoked joint in the rain in 4 years. With a kaleidoscopic intensity, it brings me back to having just moved to Dublin from Luxembourg. It was a time of excitement, when weed didn’t fill me with the profound existential numbness as it does now. I don’t smoke much now but I still appreciate the memories it can unfurl in me – unfamiliar streets to be discovered, new names like Pearse, Parnell, Gardiner, tall dark windows alive with groups of friends and family all laughing. 

For as long as I can remember, I have always sought “a local”. Growing up in Luxembourg, the local was a colloquial phrase that seemed out of place. It captured somewhere romantic in its familiarity, a place in which I aspired to be recognised andyet undisturbed by familiar faces. Until I moved to Dublin – and, I admit, for a while when I was here – my life had felt like a transitive space, a series of moments between moments,where excited frame as their parents pursued career goals that we didn’t have the vocabulary to understand. My want of this “local” was some familiarity of place, a place that was reliably there at the end of the day. 

Maybe this was what I sought on my nighttime walks with only a lit joint for company. Somewhere where I might sit down after a long day, recognise a few faces with no need to talk to them, and be brought something soothing and steadying. The clichéd image of “the local” is a pub where you could buy a pint of tall dark beer, a few rooms of dark booths and hazy stories. However, I feel that the details of a local are all veneer – what I was seeking, I realise, is the reassurance in the unassuming dining room of Szechuan Chili King on Parnell Street. 

I ordered Kung Pao chicken with a few college friends inearly 2019 the first time I was there. The freezing rain had chilled us to our bones on a foggy February morning that was beginning to stretch into the afternoon. After all, we were hungover, which also meant we were famished and broke. Looking around the unremarkable decor as the door clanged behind with a snap, we weren’t sure that this was going to be the answer to our burgeoning hangovers. But we didn’t want to go back outsides and besides, I was pretty sure that this was the one that a friend had recommended to me, I assured my friends. I had tried a few restaurants on Parnell Street, but had found them underwhelming, mostly because I never knew what to order. The translations betrayed me, bringing instead some underwhelming noodles or something that was deep fried and made my stomach hurt.

But that first time, the growing satisfaction ebbed from adeeper place than just stemming my hangover. I felt sated in finding this place, in being served delicious food away from home. There is a unique feeling in having found the hidden, tucked away in its unassuming modesty. It feels like you are suddenly a part of something. I feel this most whenever they hand me a menu. Szechuan Chili King has both an English and a Mandarin menu. The English features stir-fried noodles and rice, Kung Pao Chicken, Sweet and Sour Pork. However, the Mandarin menu will lead with all sorts of delightful options, handily outlined with pictures so I can point and smile in my simple way. They have pages of wok fried green beans, misspelled aubergines, tofu dishes, sizzling beef, soups, rice, teas. 

But I always pick out the saliva chicken. It is delightfully spicy and wickedly sour, combining the fresh crunch of cucumber and peanuts with a deep, unctuous chicken thighs. This is my “the usual, please”. It has saved me from hungover afternoons that jeopardise their evenings, St Patrick’s when everywhere else has been too busy. I recall a desolate boxing day where my wife and I stumbled jetlagged and alone back to our city, it was the only thing that was open. I remember picturing my family at home around the fire, hungover and gorged on chocolate, Christmas pudding, ham. The image began to fade as the table slowly filled with sizzling tofu, century egg, fish boiled in spicy deliciousness. And that delicious saliva chicken. 

It is only in looking back that what we seek becomes apparent. I realise that what I had wanted from my local wassome kind of home away from home. There are always younger family members there, taking our orders in English and scribbling them down in Mandarin, offering us chopsticks or a knife and fork. The clientele doesn’t seem to change much – white couples picking at something new, or Chinese families concentrated on mounds of food. But I remember once watching two young men, one Asian and the other Irish, enjoying a meal together. My wife and I couldn’t figure out what the dynamic between them was – the Chinese boy was detailing the food while the Irish boy ate hungrily and enthusiastically. We weren’t sure if they were on a date, or part of the same college. What was striking was the convergence of two opposing ends of Dublin. 

The restaurant holds between its modest walls two opposed forces within life – the utterly new and the totally familiar. As we clear our bowls, grinning as we tell them that it was great, once again, and ask for the bill, our servers smile a familiar smile. It tells a universal “We know it’s great. Please don’t tell too many people.” And, as a child of people who emigrated from their homelands, I feel most at home within this place of opposites. And while the restaurant and the people who make it such a special place aren’t my stories to tell, I now feel a connection to these places between places.