We’re back with more Asian book and snack pairings! Don’t read this post with an empty stomach because you will end up with cravings. You have been warned.

Tteokbokki chips – I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee; translated by Anton Hur

If you’re a fan of Korean cuisine, then you’re probably familiar with the street food tteokbokki, or simmered rice cakes that are usually cooked in spicy chilly paste. But have you heard of tteokbokki chips? Crunchy and tubed-shaped, the chips have a mildly sweet and spicy taste. They’re a good snack to have on hand whenever you have a sudden craving for tteokbokki like author Baek Sehee does during her bouts of dysthymia.  

In I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Baek shares transcripts from her therapy sessions and her self-reflections on what she calls “this vague state of being not-fine and not-devastated at the same time.” She also examines the pressures Korean women face in society and learns how she can avoid constantly judging herself and others. 

We talked to Anton Hur about his experience translating Baek’s book. You can listen to our chat on Episode 199.

Tanghulu – This Time It’s Real by Ann Liang

Glazed in hardened sugar syrup and served on a bamboo skewer, tanghulu is quite the enticing treat you’ll find at Chinese street vendors. The candied hawthorn berries shine like rubies in the sunlight, and due to their lucky red color, tanghulus are extra special treats during Lunar New Year celebrations. You’ll find Eliza Lin munching on this crunchy sweet in the streets of Beijing in Ann Liang’s second YA novel, This Time It’s Real. 

After Eliza’s essay describing her relationship with her boyfriend goes viral, a popular literary website offers her a six-month paid internship for which she is expected to write weekly blog posts about her relationship and offer romantic advice to readers. There’s only one problem: She doesn’t have a boyfriend. Being a third-culture kid who’s constantly moving from country to country means that Eliza struggles forming friendships, much less romantic relationships. So she strikes a bargain with her Chinese American classmate and popular TV actor Caz Song to be her fake boyfriend. What begins as a mutually beneficial business relationship soon turns into a budding romance that becomes as sweet as tanghulu.

Chocolate mushroom biscuits – Ghost Music by An Yu

From one glance at the cover, it’s obvious why we chose to pair An Yu’s novel Ghost Music with chocolate mushroom biscuits. Tiny and cute with a milk chocolate mushroom-shaped cap, these biscuits are a childhood favorite among Korean and Japanese households. 

Ghost Music is an eerie and surreal novel that is infused with yearning, classical music, and mushrooms–both the edible kind and ghostly talking ones with possible human consciousness. The book follows Song Yan, a former concert pianist in Beijing stuck in a lonely marriage with a husband who is reluctant to have children with her. As tension rises in the household after her critical mother-in-law moves in, Yan begins to dream of a doorless room populated only by a strange, talking orange mushroom. Even stranger are the boxes of mushrooms native to her mother-in-law’s province that are mysteriously delivered to her home every week without a return address. When a letter from the anonymous sender of the mushrooms arrives, Yan finds Bai Yu, a once world-famous pianist who disappeared ten years ago, and her world begins to tilt further into the surreal.

Crown Naemam Molang Jelly – Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min

Since Lio Min’s Beating Heart Baby is a coming-of-age story about two queer Asian American teens who bond over anime, we originally paired the YA novel with Pocky. After reconsideration, we realized that Pocky is too mainstream for the book’s cool teen heroes and switched our snack pairing to Crown Naemam Molang Jelly. “Naemam molang” is a cute Korean way of saying “Do you know my heart?”. The heart-shaped gummy comes in two flavors, peach and green apple, and has a gooey jelly center that’s as soft and sweet as Santi. 

Beating Heart Baby is split into an A-side and B-side, much like a record album. In fact, the chapters are titled as track numbers. The A-side is written in Santi’s perspective while the B-side is narrated by Suwa. The book begins with Santi arriving at his new high school in L.A. for marching band camp, where he is welcomed by everyone except for the surly musical prodigy and trans boy Suwa. But as Santi and Suwa open up more to each other about their painful pasts, their tentative friendship blossoms into something more.

We talked to Lio Min about their debut book on Episode 185.

Mooncake – When You Wish Upon a Lantern by Gloria Chao

While mooncakes are synonymous with Lunar New Year, you can still enjoy them at some Chinatown bakeries year-round. Kai, the male love interest in Gloria Chao’s luminous YA novel When You Wish Upon a Lantern, works at such a bakery. His family’s Chicago Chinatown bakery is aptly named Once Upon a Mooncake for the dense but tender pastry they specialize in making. 

When Liya learns that her family’s wishing lantern shop, When You Wish Upon a Lantern, is in danger of closing, she decides to resume her late grandmother’s tradition of fulfilling the wishes customers write on their lanterns in hopes of boosting sales. She enlists the help of her estranged childhood best friend Kai, whose family business is also struggling. Together, they covertly grant wishes through arranging meet-cutes and tucking inspiring notes inside mooncakes. Liya and Kai gradually rekindle their friendship and make their own wishes granted along the way. 

We talked to Gloria Chao about her third YA book on Episode 210. 

Konpeito – Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

For Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars, we decided to go literal and pair it with konpeito, Japan’s iconic star-shaped sugar candy. Konpeito may be tiny but they carry a huge amount of history. The candy was first introduced to Japan in the 16th century by Portuguese traders. The word “konpeito” itself comes from the Portuguese word “confeito,” which means confection. Since sugar was scarce and exorbitantly expensive in the 16th century, it wasn’t until the Meiji era that konpeito was canonized as one of Japan’s standard sweets.

Light from Uncommon Stars is a peculiar book, as it blends queer romance, a coming-of-age story, fantasy, and space adventure all into one symphony. Set in San Gabriel Valley, the story follows Katrina Nguyen, a runaway trans girl with extraordinary and raw musical talent. Her playing catches the ear of legendary violin teacher Shizuka Satomi, who made a Faustian bargain with the devil to deliver the souls of seven brilliant violinists in exchange for an escape from eternal damnation. Shizuka has already delivered six souls, and her final candidate is Katrina. Meanwhile, Lan Tran is trying to keep her donut shop afloat and take care of her family after fleeing an intergalactic war on their home planet. Her plans are complicated when she befriends Shizuka. 

Aoki draws on her own experience as a Japanese American trans woman to show what threats queer women of color face in the world and how compassion can transform and save people. You can listen to our discussion of her book on Episode 173.

Cheese ice cream – Chloe and the Kaishao Boys by Mae Coyiuto 

Non-Filipinos may find cheese to be an unusual ice cream flavor, but cheese (locally known as quezo or keso) is a flavor as classic as vanilla or chocolate in the Philippines. Sorbeteros, ice cream street vendors, sell keso ice cream by the cone or sandwich. Locals call ice creams sold by these street vendors “dirty ice cream” because of their dirt-cheap price, not because the ice cream is filthy itself! 

Readers will notice Chloe Liang eating scoops of keso ice cream (and other cheese-flavored snacks) in Mae Coyiuto’s YA romance Chloe and the Kaishao Boys. When Chinese Filipina teen Chloe gets off the waitlist at the University of Southern California, she is one step closer to achieving her dream of becoming an animator in the U.S. Her aunt and father, however, aren’t thrilled about her leaving the Philippines. Before Chloe leaves for school, her aunt insists on throwing a big, traditional Filipino debut for her eighteenth birthday despite Chloe wanting to keep it low-key. Meanwhile her father is intent on finding her the perfect escort for her debut and sets her up on kaishaos, arranged dates, with Chinese Filipino boys in hopes of convincing her to stay home for college and help out with the family business. When Chloe begins to fall for one of the boys, she becomes torn between leaving for California or following family expectations. 

Dried fish – The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Dried fish is one of the oldest snacks in world history. Before modern refrigeration existed, fishermen would dehydrate seafood in the open air and then salt them for preservation. If you walk down the snack aisle at your local Asian grocery store, you will no doubt find dozens of different brands of dried fish, whether it’s filefish, cuttlefish, squid, or tuna. And if you grew up in an Asian household that believes in the whole “eating fish makes people smarter” proverb, then you probably bought a family-sized bag to devour during study sessions.

Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation takes place in a Singapore fishing village and begins in the year 1941 when a seven-year-old boy named Ah Boon discovers a cluster of moving, magical islands where there’s an endless supply of fish. It is Ah Boon’s unique ability to navigate these islands that allows his village to survive throughout Japanese occupation and World War II. As he and his friend Siok Mei grow up in the backdrop of colonialism, war, resistance, and pursuit of modernity, the two must decide what they’re willing to sacrifice for their respective visions of a better future, even if it means the country’s coastline shifting underneath their feet.

We talked to Rachel Heng about her book on Episode 214. 

Mukhwas – A Bit of Earth by Karuna Riazi 

Technically an after-meal mouth freshener, mukhwas can still count as a refreshing snack. These colorful and fragrant seeds are eaten in South Asia as digestive aid after a heavy meal. Common seeds used are fennel, coriander, sesame, and anise. Traditional mukhwas date back to Delhi in the 13th and 14th centuries, and modern-day mukhwas come in rainbow, candy-coated forms.  

We thought mukhwas would be a perfect pairing to Karuna Riazi’s A Bit of Earth since its heroine tends to a long-forgotten garden. A reimagining of The Secret Garden, Riazi’s middle grade novel follows Maria Latif, a young orphan who is used to being called “difficult.” After being bounced around from relative to relative in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Maria is sent to live with her late parents’ friends in New York. When Maria arrives at the Long Island estate of the Claybournes, who read as white, things are not quite what she was expecting. The sprawling house is riddled with secrets, and soon Maria stumbles upon a mysterious garden. Despite the garden being clearly off-limits, Maria begins to revitalize the garden and cultivate a place where she feels at home.

Tom’s Farm Black Sugar Milk Tea Almonds – Death by Bubble Tea by Jennifer Chow

While some high-quality boba are to die for, we don’t actually expect to die from drinking it. The worst-case scenario we imagine is choking on a tapioca ball. Well, in Jennifer Chow’s cozy mystery Death by Bubble Tea, someone does actually die from drinking bubble tea. To be more accurate, they’re murdered. In Chow’s novel, Yale Yee and her influencer cousin Celine run a food stall together at Hong Kong’s Eastwood Village Night Market. Business is slow at first, but it eventually picks up thanks to Celine’s marketing ideas. Their bubble tea is a hit after Celine makes it more grammable by adding gold garnish. But when one of their customers turns up dead, Yale and Celine become prime suspects, and the two polar opposite cousins must work together to find out what really happened to the victim. 

Over the last few years, milk tea has become a wildly popular flavor. Korean snack manufacturer Tom’s Farm went viral for its black sugar milk tea almonds, with foodies swearing the almonds taste exactly like the real thing. The almonds resemble Milk Duds with its chocolate and black sugar coating. As far as we know, no one has died from eating these milk tea almonds yet.

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Check out our previous Asian book and snack pairings post here. All books featured are available on our Bookshop.org affiliate shop, where 10% of sales go to support our podcast and another 10% gets donated to indie bookstores across America. Let us know in the comments what your go-to reading snacks are!