A Life Well Seasoned: Newsday writer launches book on food and travel

Paul Hadden has been a mainstay of Sunday Newsday's WMN magazine for more than six
years. His stories of food, travels and musings on humanity have immersed readers for a brief few moments in the world of a Caribbean traveller in a foreign land. As the son of a pilot, travel and the strange new foods that came with it were an early first love for Hadden, a language teacher as well as a writer.

It was in writing about these experiences that he found a home and ultimately an audience when he landed in Japan – as far away from home as one can be as a Trinidadian.

Hadden recently compiled those weekly columns into a new book available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback formats.

A Life Well Seasoned: Volume 1 – Trinidad and Japan, the title of his debut book, is a collection of over 50 of his stories covering experiences in Trinidad and Japan, told mostly through food and the people he encounters. And with four years spent in Japan through the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Programme (Jet), there are many more stories and, likely, further print volumes planned.

"I have always loved food – cooking it for certain, but eating it for sure," Hadden hinted.

"The weekly column with Newsday allowed me to explore food not just at face value, but though the prism of the people and stories behind it," he pointed out in our interview at the end of his online classes for the day. Hadden is currently a private English teacher as well as a French teacher with the Alliance Francaise.

Having participated in the Jet programme as an assistant teacher from 2011-2014 and then again from 2018-2019. He continued to write his columns for WMN from the other side of the globe.

The Jet programme was established globally in 1987 to create a mutual understanding between the people of Japan and other countries. In 2019, there were 5,761 participants from 57 participating countries.

"I highly recommend Jet to anyone," he said. "I loved it having spent four years in Japan I can safely say that it's a unique opportunity to experience a different culture and one that we have a special bond with too."

Over the past decade, an unexpected musical symbiosis has developed between Trini culture and the Japanese people, with soca and pan finding a new space in a faraway land. Hadden noted this in A Life Well Seasoned too. One of the stories in a column and his book is his experience of attending the Kobe Steel Pan Festival, which he cites for some wonderful reasons. "You can travel to the ends of the earth, only to be greeted with the same familiar things you thought you left far behind," he points out in a chapter titled Steelpan in Kobe City.

Kobe is known globally for its famous marbled Kobe beef and for a devastating earthquake. It is also the annual home of a steelpan festival that brings players from across Japan to play TT's national instrument.

"It was such a strange and wonderful experience; the coming together of cultures," he noted on our interview call. "You had people selling traditional Japanese food alongside stalls selling food you would find in panyards in Port of Spain, and people playing J-pop songs mixed in with calypso and soca.

"Again, it was a reminder that no matter how different we may seem, we can always find our commonality in things like our music and our food," he added.

A Well Seasoned Life takes readers through the writer's culinary experience and immerses them in the deeper aspects of culture and the people behind the food.

"I remember attending a Japanese tea ceremony, something we have all heard about and thought. 'This must be the best way to experience the best cup of tea in the world.' And while the tea is good, the irony I discovered is that it's not just about the tea. It's actually about the person who has invited you to the ceremony and you, the invitee. It's also about learning to appreciate the natural world as the room would often be decorated with flowers or plants that are currently in season.

"It's definitely more of an experience than simply having tea. It's about developing or deepening bonds between people – the person doing the ceremony and the guest or guests. At the end you come to realise it's not really about the actual tea: it's about gratitude, connection and appreciation which is something we can all learn from," he explained.

A book on global travel could not arrive at a stranger or perhaps, a better time in recent history. The lockdown in TT allowed the writer to assess and compile his stories, which span 200 unique articles and over 200,000 words – but of course has left us unable to travel since. Hadden wants readers to remember their natural wanderlust – which is very innate to Trinidadian culture. "I think there really is no greater experience than travelling and learning from another culture. I think that I'm both a foodie and a bit of a nomad because of my adventures to places like New York with my dad, where I discovered things like sushi that at the time weren't a thing for sale here in TT.

"It led me to want to learn more and know more about the world. And I think that if you are presented with the opportunity to move abroad for a while, then definitely do that too.

"The Jet programme is one way to experience living abroad, but there are many other opportunities out there as well."

While travel may be limited for nationals in the next year, Hadden's book offers dozens of easily digestible stories imbued with emotions that range from immersion in a new culture to detachment from his previous life at home. In one story, he spends New Year's Eve drinking amazake, a sweet, ever-so-slightly-fermented rice drink at a Japanese Buddhist temple, while flipping through his phone to see pictures of friends and family back home celebrating much more loudly.

His musings also cover life in Trinidad and Tobago in an incredibly engaging way. A sip on peanut punch here at home sends him back a decade to memories of when he sipped the sweet drink with a Rastafarian co-worker who made every piece of clothing he owned and claimed to have invented his own style of kung fu. Each story is a studied look at life captured for a fleeting moment but joyfully relived in perpetuity with each read. The author captures not just the scene but the feeling and often the meaning of the moment too.

Hadden continues to teach and, in particular, teach people to write in English and other languages, which is something he is particularly adept at.

"Having this chance to combine food and travel with writing has allowed me to take two of the things I love together and channel it into a career of sorts, as I also spend my time as a teacher helping people learn to write.

"If you are a writer too, I highly encourage you to consider putting your writing out there and just letting it reach people.

"This entire journey started because I had a short conversation with a friend (via e-mail) where they asked if I had any interest concerning food and recipe-writing. And here we are, 300 stories later," he recalls. "And though yes, there are downsides to big companies like Amazon taking over everything, there is this other side to it too – where you can literally bypass publishing houses and self-publish your own work to the world. If you are a writer and have something that you would like to share with the world, then I say, go for it!"

A Life Well Seasoned: Volume 1 – Trinidad and Japan is available via amazon.com in paperback and Kindle editions, with plans for further volumes in the works.