Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson

as straps, I slung the bag over my shoulders and headed out for the fifteen-minute walk to the train station. Because I’d made this same transfer traveling with my soccer teams many times before, and because I was still in a Scandinavian country, I felt more at home than abroad, a feeling that stayed with me all the way down through the peninsula of Jutland, until the train crossed over the border from Denmark to Germany.
    I was going to Switzerland, to be a
commis
for six months at a famous resort hotel in Interlaken called Victoria Jungfrau.
    My father had greeted the news of this job as he did anything that had to do with the physical world—through the lens of geography. “Ahh, you’ll be right at the foot of the Jungfrau,” he said, pulling an atlas from the shelf. “That’s in the Bernese Alps.” As he ran his index finger down the book’s index, he squinted, scanning his memory for the details of Switzerland that mattered. He spread the open book across the kitchen table. “It is a landlocked country,” he said, lips pursing in disapproval. His Smögen-born bias toward living near the ocean was immense. “But at least you’ll be between two lakes. That’s how the town got its name, of course.
Inter. Laken
.” He tapped at the three-mile-wide strip of land that bridged the Thun and Brienz lakes. “There you are. And you have the Aare River running through.” Once again, he narrowed his eyes, then talked about how significant water was for the Swiss: how it had been harnessed for centuries as a source of manufacturing power; how two of Europe’s most significant rivers, the Rhône and the Rhine, started there; and, of course, how important it was when it came in the form of snow, to support the ski tourism that held up a large portion of the economy.
    My mother passed through the room just as he finished his assessment. She looked over his shoulder at the map.
    “Is it cold there?” she asked. “Will he need to bring extra sweaters?”
    First and foremost, I had packed my knives—my most treasured possessions—which I’d wrapped in the leather roll my grandmother had made for me.
    “Don’t buy that,” she’d said when she saw how much the rolls cost. She went and studied them in a store downtown, then came home and fashioned one herself, sturdier and more handsome than the cheap nylon ones she’d seen.
    I wrapped the roll, my French pepper mill, and a Japanese sharpening stone Christina had given me inside the two chef’s jackets that my Belle Avenue coworkers had presented to me as a going-away gift. On my last day of work the hotel chef, Tony, had handed them to me, which seemed fitting since he was the one who had arranged the gig for me at Victoria in the first place. He’d been a
commis
there himself, ten years before.
    “Don’t fuck this up,” he told me. “I’ll hear about it if you do.”
    My other essentials included jeans, running shoes and the turquoise blue Converse sneakers I wore for work, my Walkman, and a pile of fresh notepads and pens so I could write down everything I saw, learned, and tasted.
    Back in Göteborg, I’d left some ends tied up more cleanly than others. Belle Avenue was easy: Tony was part of the establishment and he was the one sending me away, so everyone treated me as a graduate rather than a traitor. My girlfriend, Christina, on the other hand, didn’t want to let go. When Tony made me the offer, I thought the timing was perfect. Christina had gotten an offer to model in Japan, a place she had wanted to know better and where her half-Swedish looks would definitely give her a competitive edge. We would both move on to the rest of our lives, I figured. It was time.
    Christina saw it differently.
    “I’ll wait for you, then,” she said when I told her about Switzerland.
    “No, no,” I said. “You should go to Tokyo and live with your aunt.”
    “No. I’ll wait for you right here.”
    I didn’t want her to wait. I didn’t want to have any