* * *
When I think how attempts at connection often fail, I think back to when I stayed alone at a hostel in Cairo, two weeks before Arab Spring. My sister and I had decided, as a post-chemo celebration of life, to meet for a wedding in Bangalore and adventure abroad together for the first time. With no preplanning or foresight, I stopped over in Cairo, on the way from travel I’d already embarked on alone. I saw only two other travelers in my time staying there, and I felt lonely and scared. On my way back and forth to the solitary bathroom, I frequently passed a middle-aged white American guest.
We made eye contact, and I said something casual, like “Hi, how are you?” each time I saw him. He, in turn, greeted me respectfully in very proper-sounding Korean and a sort of head bob/bow combination. I had no idea what he was saying, since I don’t speak Korean—but I can imagine that for someone who was Korean, his politeness would have been very comforting and welcoming.
This nonsensical exchange happened numerous times before something finally clicked, and he realized I was American, just as he was. After that we ducked out of the hostel and grabbed a quick meal of kushari together—an Egyptian dish of rice, macaroni, lentils, tomato sauce, and fried onions—at a casual restaurant where we stood at a table, eating in the open air.
I don’t remember the specifics of what we talked about—beyond the time he’d spent in Korea, his work, other idle chitchat. But I do remember how silly our exchanges seemed, until finally I saw the recognition in his eyes—that we, in fact, shared common ground, though on different terrain than what he’d assumed. It was only when he saw me for what I actually was, a fellow American, rather than what he thought I was, that we could relax and bumble along as equally clueless tourists, in search of sustenance.
Sometimes our clumsy attempts to connect, as we make assumptions and projections, only create distance where none was intended. Sometimes it takes admitting what we don’t know—our fundamental foreignness as strangers to each other—to see individuals for who we actually are.
* * *
When white Americans have asked me, from the time I was little, about what I ate growing up, their statements revealed a certain longing for an easy narrative: of “home” food, in which I dined on traditional Korean food, which my mother then taught me to cook, which I could now cook for these white Americans, in turn. They’ve offered tidy stories for which they’d like confirmation—that yes, what they know of Koreans or Korean-Americans is essentially accurate.
White Americans frequently volunteer to me, apropos of nothing, that they like kimchi, or that they know bibimbop, or that they love Korean barbeque. At a writer’s conference, though my short story had nothing to do with food, my white workshop leader blurted out to me that he liked kimchi—something for which he later apologized.
“That’s great,” I say blandly, while thinking, “What does that have to do with me? Why am I provoking this particular recollection?”
I feel the same frustration in the insistence of the question I so frequently hear: “No, I mean, where are you really from?” Regardless
of the question’s intentions, its doubt renders me alien. I am American. I’ve often wished that non-Korean-Americans simply asked me different sorts of questions—ones that don’t qualify me as somehow foreign, but ones that allow me to define who I am, on my own terms.
Instead, depending on the tone of the questioner as they ask whether I’m Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, I find myself mildly correcting by saying my parents are Korean; or, if the interrogator is rude enough, insisting I’m from Colorado and ending the conversation.
Yes, I am Korean-American, but my inheritance doesn’t fit the neat and tidy parameters of what little is commonly associated with Korean-Americans. My food lineage is messy and complex, as with most individuals, with our own unique amalgamations of past travels, influences, and familial and cultural inheritances. In a place like America, seemingly devoid as it is of a monocultural tradition of food appreciation, this lack of cohesion feels fitting.
* * *
I remember an ex’s stepmother laughing in surprise, when she learned my Korean short ribs recipe came not from my mother but from the New York Times. Despite the assumptions of most who first encounter me, I didn’t learn to cook from my mother. At any stage of cooking, I taught myself.
I remember, as a fifth grader, cooking a chocolate cake for my older sister’s birthday, from a battered paperback, a red-plaid-covered Better Homes & Gardens: New Cookbook, that my mother kept in the top kitchen drawer.
Growing up I remember baking biscuits, adding Crisco to flour, rolling them out on the countertop, and cutting out circles with the floured rim of a glass. I baked these in batches, kept them in plastic bags on the counter until they ran out. I melted slices of orange American cheese over biscuits, for snacks.
Invariably my current or former partners talk of the dishes their mothers or fathers, who cooked for them on a regular basis, made for them. Invariably I visit their homes, where I witness this in action, and where I, in turn, cook for their parents.
Very few of my memories involve parental figures cooking for me. Because for so long my mother needed caretaking, and because I’m estranged from my father—who cooks very little, although he began cooking for my mother in the later stages of her illness—I’m accustomed to thinking of my partners as where I find home.
I think of home as something I build with those whom I love, and as something I find reflected within them. I remember rolling out homemade pizza dough, sautéing onions and mushrooms, dicing jalapeños, squeezing tomato paste, and grating cheese with my ex-boyfriend. I remember slicing purple cabbage, beets, and jicama with my ex-girlfriend, dousing the salad in MCT oil and apple cider vinegar, and sprinkling it with pink salt. These dishes are part of me now, part of my repertoire.
* * *
My mother’s food consumption was as varied as most of ours would be, if pressed to describe. Her story is not simple. I’ve seen many cultural influences in the food she craves, and how she craves it. I’ve seen her relationship to food change over time, in step with her illness.
When I was a teenager, when her decline was well underway, she subsisted mainly on Mr. Goodbar and other Hershey’s bars, bought by the boxful. She loved their cheapness—33 cents each, on sale. She loved the sugar. This sweet tooth was both part of her personality, and, as I later discovered, a symptom of mid-stage Alzheimer’s.
I vaguely remember, once long ago, that she made homemade doughnuts. I remember her plopping bits of dough into a cast-iron skillet full of cheap vegetable oil, pulling them out with chopsticks, draining them on paper towels. This memory stands out because it happened only once, but it reminds me of how differently she engaged with food before her decline began. These memories are so far afield from the mother who, with all her inconsistency, I mostly knew. I’ve heard from my older sisters that my mother once enjoyed cooking things like doughnuts.
I don’t think of my mother as having cooked Korean food, until smaller memories come back, when I stumble upon a dish she used to make or eat. I remember she did make homemade kimchi on a few occasions—stuffing salted cabbage into large glass jars with plastic lids, squatting on the kitchen floor as she did so, leaving them out to ferment. One batch of cucumber kimchi stored in the basement made me horribly sick—I lost my enthusiasm for eating such things after that.
Then, too, there are a few good memories of foods we shared, when I was very young, almost young enough to forget. These are memories I have to seek out—they are the exception. I remember when I see chestnuts in grocery stores and grab them fondly. I learned that instinct from her. She used to bake them, forgetting to score a few so that they would explode and rattle in the oven. We’d sit together, working patiently, the chestnuts in a metal bowl, another metal bowl waiting. We’d squeeze the chestnuts in dirtied oven mitts, try to separate the inner husk and the harder outer shell from the sweet meat inside. My thumb would get tiny cuts from rubbing against the sharpness of the inner husks, which often stuck unrelentingly to the sweet meat.
I learned, too, how to roast leaves of seaweed from her, though as an adult I rarely use this skill. She’d brush them over the electric coils of our old stovetop, massage the crumbly sheaths in her hands with sesame oil, stack them, fold them into halves and then halves again, quartering them with a serrated knife. As a child I sat next to her, helping her by doing the same.
There are other Korean foods with which I’m familiar, too, ones I was ashamed to eat as a child for the ways they provoked remarks on their perceived oddity from the children around me, including my childhood friends, back before I saw mainstream American culture making gestures toward welcoming diversity. These are foods that are still not commonly associated with Korean culture, because they’re the things that are eaten privately, without fanfare. Their textures and specificities are different from what others assume. These foods occupy only a small portion of my cravings, but they’re there, nonetheless. They’re remarkable only because so few share similar cravings.
My mother was not simply Korean—she was also someone who resisted Korean culture and left it behind as much as she could. We each chafe against aspects of the culture we’ve inherited, to varying degrees. She wasn’t particularly good at cooking Asian dishes—she made a handful of recipes. She was just as passionate about picking up Wendy’s chili and Chinese takeout as anything else.