Discussion Notes: Omakase
This week’s story: Omakase by Weike Wang
Next week’s story: Us and Them by David Sedaris
Rated: Clean
Alli Hoff Kosik
This week we welcomed Alli Hoff Kosik as a guest to discuss “Omakase” by Weike Wang. She is a full-time freelance writer. Her work has been published in outlets like Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Brit + Co, Medium, The Kitchn, Real Simple, and more. She’s also the host of The SSR Podcast, on which each week she invites a guest to revisit a book from their middle or high school days. Alli lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and her golden retriever pup, Irv.
Gerald, Anais and Alli discuss this brilliant story and explore themes of class, race, romance, and even coin a new phrase “aggressive confidence,” aka swagger.
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(This comment includes spoilers) I really enjoyed this story and had an interesting experience after reading it. The way the woman was wondering if she overthinks everything or not, reminded me of myself. Though her thoughts were swirling around a different subject, race and complications associated with it, I can relate to her deeply. The challenging thing about overthinking is that it can turn to a vicious cycle and at any point you try to stop it, it comes ti this: Am I caring too much? and then you then take a few steps forward and then comes the second question: Oh no, Am I not caring enough? And so the cycle goes on!
I gave this story 5.5, on the scale of 1 to 6 as you guys do. The story made me question and rethink a few things. And I loved many things about it.
How the man leaves everything to fate or his mood is interesting, how he takes it easy. Especially when they’re both supposed to search for jobs in both cities and later she wonders whether he put as much effort in doing so as she did.
About the future of this couple I don’t know whether they’d stay together or not but in a way I imagine maybe if they were to break up, their problems will have taken a different root than what it used to be. She seems to be patient with him for now, and since this is what has preoccupied her mind maybe this is only what she’s noticing. What happens when they get past this?
The story already talks about different things, a couple of details, and though it’s not quite short, it covers a lot. But there’s one thing in the text, that tickles me and I want to know more about. There’s a part when she mentions how she likes the man because he is not interested in money or she doesn’t have to be in competition with him. “She did something he couldn’t in a million years do. Numbers, graphs,…” So, there’s a competitive side to her which I would have liked to discover more but already got so much from this story. Thank you for a great episode.