stopdisrespectingculture:

(Reposted because original poster is a terf/transphobe)

I’m so tired of white guys on TV telling me what to eat. I’m tired of
Anthony Bourdain testing the waters of Korean cuisine to report back
that, not only will our food not kill you, it actually tastes good. I
don’t care how many times you’ve traveled to Thailand, I won’t listen to
you—just like the white kids wouldn’t listen to me, the half-Korean
girl, defending the red squid tentacles in my lunch box. The same kids
who teased me relentlessly back then are the ones who now celebrate our
cuisine as the Next Big Thing.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a small college town that was
about 90 percent white. In my adolescence I hated being half Korean; I
wanted people to stop asking, “Where are you really from?” I could
barely speak the language and didn’t have any Asian friends. There was
nothing about me that felt Korean—except when it came to food.

At home my mom always prepared a Korean dinner for herself and an
American dinner for my dad. Despite the years he’d lived in Seoul,
selling cars to the military and courting my mom at the Naija Hotel
where she worked, my dad is still a white boy from Philadelphia.

So each night my mom prepared two meals. She’d steam broccoli and
grill Dad’s salmon, while boiling jjigae and plating little side dishes
known as banchan. When our rice cooker announced in its familiar robotic
voice, “Your delicious white rice will be ready soon!” the three of us
would sit down to a wondrous mash-up of East and West. I’d create true
fusion one mouthful at a time, using chopsticks to eat strips of T-bone
and codfish eggs drenched in sesame oil, all in one bite. I liked my
baked potatoes with fermented chili paste, my dried cuttlefish with
mayonnaise.

There’s a lot to love about Korean food, but what I love most is its
extremes. If a dish is supposed to be served hot, it’s scalding. If it’s
meant to be served fresh, it’s still moving. Stews are served in heavy
stone pots that hold the heat; crack an egg on top, and it will poach
before your eyes. Cold noodle soups are served in bowls made of actual
ice.

By my late teens my craving for Korean staples started to eclipse my
desire for American ones. My stomach ached for al tang and kalguksu. On
long family vacations, with no Korean restaurant in sight, my mom and I
passed up hotel buffets in favor of microwaveable rice and roasted
seaweed in our hotel room.

And when I lost my mother to a very sudden, brief, and painful fight
with cancer two years ago, Korean food was my comfort food. She was
diagnosed in 2014. That May she’d gone to the doctor for a stomachache
only to learn she had a rare squamous cell carcinoma, stage four, and
that it had spread. Our family was blindsided.

I moved back to Oregon to help my mother through chemo­therapy; over
the next four months, I watched her slowly disappear. The treatment took
everything—her hair, her spirit, her appetite. It burned sores on her
tongue. Our table, once beautiful and unique, became a battleground of
protein powders and tasteless porridge. I crushed Vicodin into ice
cream.

Dinnertime was a calculation of calories, an argument to get anything
down. The intensity of Korean flavors and spices became too much for
her to stomach. She couldn’t even eat kimchi.

I began to shrink along with my mom, becoming so consumed with her
health that I had no desire to eat. Over the course of her illness, I
lost 15 pounds. After two rounds of chemo, she decided to discontinue
treatment, and she died two months later.

As I struggled to make sense of the loss, my memories often turned to
food. When I came home from college, my mom used to make galbi ssam,
Korean short rib with lettuce wraps. She’d have marinated the meat two
days before I’d even gotten on the plane, and she’d buy my favorite
radish kimchi a week ahead to make sure it was perfectly fermented.

Then there were the childhood summers when she brought me to Seoul.
Jet-lagged and sleepless, we’d snack on homemade banchan in the blue
dark of Grandma’s humid kitchen while my rela­tives slept. My mom would
whisper, “This is how I know you’re a true Korean.”

But my mom never taught me how to make Korean food. When I would call
to ask how much water to use for rice, she’d always say, “Fill until it
reaches the back of your hand.” When I’d beg for her galbi recipe, she
gave me a haphazard ingredient list and approximate measurements and
told me to just keep tasting it until it “tastes like Mom’s.”

After
my mom died, I was so haunted by the trauma of her illness I worried
I’d never remember her as the woman she had been: stylish and
headstrong, always speaking her mind. When she appeared in my dreams,
she was always sick.

Then I started cooking. When I first searched for Korean recipes, I
found few resources, and I wasn’t about to trust Bobby Flay’s Korean
taco monstrosity or his clumsy kimchi slaw. Then, among videos of
oriental chicken salads, I found the Korean YouTube personality Maangchi.
There she was, peeling the skin off an Asian pear just like my mom: in
one long strip, index finger steadied on the back of the knife. She cut
galbi with my mom’s ambidextrous precision: positioning the chopsticks
in her right hand while snipping bite-size pieces with her left. A
Korean woman uses kitchen scissors the way a warrior brandishes a
weapon.

I’d been looking for a recipe for jatjuk, a porridge made from pine
nuts and soaked rice. It’s a dish for the sick or elderly, and it was
the first food I craved when my feelings of shock and loss finally made
way for hunger.

I followed Maangchi’s instructions carefully: soaking the rice,
breaking off the tips of the pine nuts. Memories of my mother emerged as
I worked—the way she stood in front of her little red cutting board,
the funny intonations of her speech.

For many, Julia Child is the hero who brought boeuf bourguignon into
the era of the TV dinner. She showed home cooks how to scale the
culinary mountain. Maangchi did this for me after my mom died. My
kitchen filled with jars containing cabbage, cucumbers, and radishes in
various stages of fermentation. I could hear my mom’s voice: “Never fall
in love with anyone who doesn’t like kimchi; they’ll always smell it
coming out of your pores.”

I’ve spent over a year cooking with Maangchi. Sometimes I pause and
rewind to get the steps exactly right. Other times I’ll let my hands and
taste buds take over from memory. My dishes are never exactly like my
mom’s, but that’s OK—they’re still a delicious tribute. The more I
learn, the closer I feel to her.

One night not long ago, I had a dream: I was watching my mother as
she stuffed giant heads of Napa cabbage into earthenware jars.

She looked healthy and beautiful.

How Learning to Cook Korean Food Helped Me Grieve (and Heal)