Kimberly Jones
Under the Supervision of Dr.Naomi Macalalad Bragin
6/2/21
Abstract
Food allows connection to and remaking of memory. From the smell to the taste or even the process of making it, food tells stories. This research presentation studies the ways food preparation impacts identity formation processes for multiracial Korean Americans. I develop a creative ethnographic method which combines personal interviews with the embodied creative process of cooking with my sister. Together we make Kimchi using “traditional” and “nontraditional” methods that parallel points of connection and difference in our lived experiences, becoming a representation of our own and shared identities. I will present excerpts of our interview and process for preparing kimchi. Through embodied evidence, I reflect on the connection between making food together and lived experiences of multiracial Korean American identity.
When I walk into almost any Korean restaurant, I feel spiciness in the air. Its tingle enters my nose, intermingled with the various stews and meat the restaurant is offering. I smell the pungent, sour and salty wafting of 김치 (kimchi). I smell the subtle fishiness of anchovy and kombu broth, found in many staple Korean soups like 순두부 찌개 (soondubu jjigae – soft tofu stew) or 칼국수 (kalguksu – knife-cut noodle soup). Some places might have grills ready for their customers who come to enjoy the sizzle of Korea’s signature tabletop BBQ, along with the toasty nuttiness of sesame oil found in small 반잔 (banchan – side dishes), ready for dipping.
Food often acts as a first introduction to unfamiliar cultures, experienced through our senses. At the same time, food is one of the most intimate ways we connect to family–to our familiars–and the ways we remake memories of home. In Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives, Facio writes, “Home is not found in one location but can be found in many places and spaces.” (60) Home is not always or only the place where you grew up but also the place that you felt most comfortable–a place that you were able to rest, grow and heal. Food can help us recall aspects of home like the scent of rain on the eve of an oncoming storm, or the aroma of perfume your mother wore, that you smelled as you received her hug and kiss. I assert that food and home are linked in the ways people work to create spaces of healing and kinship connection. Food helps us make home in and across multiple locations.
Senses activate memory. I am interested in the ways learning about food and food preparation from family recipes shapes memory and identity for multiracial Korean Americans. Food itself becomes a sensorial and embodied process of study, embedding identity in stories of recipes passed between friends and family. People bond and shape connections over meals, sustain and shift kin relations, perpetuate and challenge cultural norms. Memories are not simply preserved but more so created in the process of tasting, learning and revising family recipes for cultural foods.
My exploratory research study of kimchi preparation stands at the intersections of ethnography, critical ethnic studies and food studies. I ask: How does food shape identity formation processes for multiracial Korean Americans? How is cultural memory accessed, created, learned and revised, in the process of making key family recipes? How do multiracial Korean Americans use recipes to form/reform/transform a shifting and unstable sense of racial and ethnic identity? What stories are embedded in family recipes and what overt and hidden meanings do we store and reactivate in the act of making these recipes?
For this auto-ethnographic research project, my sister and I remembered our childhood experiences as we cooked food together, reflecting on personal and shared meanings embedded in food preparation and consumption which have shaped our different relationships to Korean American identity. In this paper, I consider ways we have created and revised a sense of connection to Korean cultural identity, by making contact with food and experimenting with family recipes.
In the late fall or early winter of each year, Korean families and friends gather to participate in 김장 (kimjang), the laborious process of making large quantities of kimchi to last through the winter until summer time. Many Korean families have their own kimchi recipes. My sister and I have never experienced kimjangs in this way but have still created a sense of family ritual through the crafting of our own kimchi recipes and in a way had our own 김장.
During the in-person interview/cooking session I conducted with my sister (see Methodology section below), she talked about how small and seemingly insignificant things created large impacts in the ways she connected to Korean identity. She specifically mentioned our father’s transmission and translation of Korean food culture, from his time serving in the US military in Korea. When he was there, his landlady taught him to add eggs to Instant Ramen, which he in turn passed on to my sister and me. My sister said, “It [the egg in the ramen] was always something I was reaching for to connect”. Something as simple as adding eggs to instant noodles became a way for my sister to recognize herself as Korean American.
We talked about many other connections to food in our interview. We talked about our father’s version of 불고기 (bulgogi – stir fried beef), which is one of the most popular and iconic dishes in Korea. This meat dish is usually made of thinly cut beef and marinated in a sweet but savory sauce with strong accents of ginger, garlic, and onion. My father would use meat cut into thick strips and doused with a jarred sauce. I remember the flavor being so salty that it would hide anything else that could be associated with bulgogi (which I learned as my exposure to the nuances of Korean tastes began to grow). The jarred sauce was my dad’s way of trying to make a “palatable” connection for us to Korea, yet the saltiness was hiding other(ed) tastes. I would hide in a closet at home, trying to recover a connection to my mother that was lost–a connection that the saltiness of that jarred sauce kept hidden.
In doing this work, I am interested in the ways food and recipes have been used to resist or unsettle enforced processes of forgetting under cultural hegemony. Finding ways to make these processes visible is especially important in a US American context of cultural assimilation that devalues non-Western cultures and where remembering often carries generational trauma for immigrants and children of immigrants. In processes of eating and preparing food, hidden tastes (and hidden knowledges) can be revealed as forms of memory-shaping and identity formation.
* * *
My sister and I grew up in Bertrand, Missouri, located next to the muddy Mississippi River. Bertrand had no more than 800 residents. There were no paved roads–only dusty orange dirt that kicked up as you drove by. For the first few years of my life, we lived with our white American father, who grew up in Bertrand, and mother, a first generation immigrant from Wonju, South Korea. Besides our mother, my sister and I were the only Asian people living there. Our classmates were either white or African American; no one looked like me except for my sister and to a lesser degree, our mother. I was relentlessly picked on by other kids because of my different, racially “mixed” appearance. We also lived in a few other states as my father searched for work. Colorado was the last place we all lived together, before my parents divorced and my father took me and my sister back to Bertrand.
As a child, I struggled to identify with either of my parents. My mother would send us care packages, put together from her trips back and forth between Korea and Colorado. At one point, the packages stopped coming. My sister and I thought she didn’t care about us anymore. She would call and ask my grandmother (my father’s mother, whom we were living with at the time) where my sister and I were. I remember one particular time when my grandmother told my mother over the phone, “I don’t know where they are.” We were standing there in the same room.
For twelve years my family kept me and my sister hidden from my mother. We were lost children. I felt embarrassed when people would ask me why I didn’t speak Korean or know anything about Korean culture. Despite this distance and sense of loss in geographic location and spoken language, I nonetheless found ways to experience an intimate, and complicated, connection to my mother and Koreanness through my senses–a blending of smells, tastes, textures, colors. Food was my point of access and I clung to it.
My father did try to keep us somewhat connected to Korea through the food he cooked, yet we experienced disconnection–not only physical but also cultural. Remembering back, these foods familiar to my childhood were not even what I now consider “good” Korean food! My father would find food that had some semblance to the food he had eaten when he was in Korea, while serving in the US military. He cooked with an overly salty jarred sauce that lacked subtle and distinct flavors. In that jar I remember the obligatory taste of soy sauce, blended with a vague ginger taste. I remember the mealy texture of instant rice that we boiled in the bag.
The form of Korean food my father made for us represented something that was two-fold within my life. The jarred sauce created a discourse of Korea that was suitable for my family’s tastes, while continuing to hide significant flavors (and significant parts of my identity). (Hall, pg. 261) This form of (mis)representation is a way in which “power produces a new discourse, new kind of knowledge, and it shapes new practices” of colonization and hegemony. (Hall, ibid)
My mother’s care packages from Korea would be filled with whole dried squid and seaweed that my grandmother called “black paper”. I make whiteness visible here to reveal how my grandmother’s struggle with her whiteness allowed her to estrange me from my Korean identity, figuratively “blackening” (my mother’s) seaweed through her choice of words. Stuart Hall argues the construction of “otherness” is made possible through exclusion, solidified in the creation of stereotypes and perpetuation of power imbalances. Hall goes on to say, “the establishment of normalcy through stereotypes is one aspect of the ruling group’s […] attempt to fashion the whole of society according to their own world views, value systems, sensibilities, and ideologies.” (259) In other words, it was not my grandmother’s love for me as family/kin but rather her fear of otherness and the (white) act of protecting me from otherness that allowed her to perform and maintain a violent form of separation from my birth mother and from my Koreanness.
I would, nonetheless, hide with the 김 (gim – seaweed) and 오징어 (ohjingoh – squid) inside a little closet behind my grandmother’s couch or outside among the flowers in her garden, tasting and eating in secret while I imagined running away to live with my mother and my family in Korea. I would cry in my grandma’s flowers, eating and wondering about the deep sense of loneliness I felt. Even while my family in the US hid me from my mother, I learned to hide myself from them. In this process of hiding, I uncovered other(ed) dimensions of my multiracial identity.
The darkness of my grandma’s closet invited a different kind of hiddenness and intimacy, through which I was able to access different knowledges often overlooked in plain sight. My visual sense was lowered as my other(ed) senses deepened: the smell, touch, taste of the “black paper”. I felt the oiliness from the 김 (gim – seaweed) between my fingers and the subtle scent of the ocean filled the space of the small closet. There was a slight crinkle with every bite I took as I would quietly try to grab another piece from the package without being heard. I would savor every piece of fruit-flavored jelly candy and small little pieces of squid that my mother sent. It was in my grandmother’s closet where I nurtured an intimate connection to my birth mother–where the darkness of the closet could feel like the warm, nurturing space of my mother’s womb, and where I received the nutrients of the seaweed in some way acting like an umbilical cord connection to Koreanness.
Senses are intimate. Senses activate memory and connection. The activation of my senses of smell, touch, sound and taste, through childhood memory and food preparation, have allowed me to create an intimate connection to my mother, despite her physical absence.
My sister makes kimchi her way to create connections with her friends and because she wants to share her Korean food with them. Many of her friends have a variety of dietary restrictions that prevent them from being able to try many Korean foods, so my sister painstakingly, with many trial and errors, came up with a recipe for vegan kimchi that she could share. In my sister’s recipe she excludes some of the more common additions to accommodate the vegan alternatives. She didn’t use 새우젓 (sae-eujeot – fermented shrimp) or 액젓 (aekjeot – fish sauce) and instead supplemented with different fruits like apple with the skin on to preserve the nutrients. All of her ingredients can be found in any white American grocery store which further adds to the convenience of her recipe for those who are not close to or have access to grocery stores that specialize in Asian ingredients.
My sister’s process is much faster than my own–only taking a couple of hours while my preparation takes closer to four hours. I have to wash and salt every single cabbage leaf. I make sure each piece is covered with the spicy paste that gives kimchi its unique taste. Making kimchi is a laborious process. I have chosen to learn a more traditional technique for preparing kimchi, in order to find a connection to Koreanness I felt I had lost for a really long time.
A key reason food has such a powerful impact on identity formation is that it is an active, embodied process. We use our hands and sense of smell, touch, taste, sight, to continue the traditions passed to us through our families. In the process we are also remaking traditions, especially crucial in circumstances of loss and cultural erasure. Food is an active way we continue fellowship, uncovering aspects of our identities that are hidden and may yet to be discovered.
Theoretical Framework
B.C. Standen does a lot of the work I was initially interested in, in his study on multiracial Korean Americans. One of his findings in his various interviews with other multiracial Korean Americans was this idea of rejection coming from the Korean community due to the lack of Korean language fluency. (Standen, pg. 257) Standen’s study focuses on identity on macro and quantitative levels, asking questions about phenotypes and how the participants in his research identify in general rather than a closer study of specific aspects of Korean/Korean American culture.
Studies like Standen’s have focused on psychological facets of multiracial identity. Much research has also used a deficit model, which emphasizes damage yet doesn’t give close attention to interpersonal experience–how multiracial identity shapes and is shaped by ways of relating or what personal stories might reveal about trauma. (Root. M, Brunsma, D. L., & Delgado, D. J. Williams-León, T., Nakashima, C. L., & Omi, M.) In order to help fill these gaps, I focus attention on embodiment and the senses to describe the felt multiracial experiences that have shaped me and my familial relations. I show that the process of identity formation is not abstract, straightforward or static, but active, fluid and constantly shifting.
I also draw from critical race theory (CRT) as a theoretical framework, in order to examine how racialization is bound to the making of identity and relations of power. (Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, Angela Harris) CRT states that race is socially constructed, as is identity. Critical ethnic studies scholar Lila Sharif focuses on the production and consumption of the Palestinian olive as a site of Palestinian erasure and survival. Sharif states, “The site of the kitchen cannot be suspended to a space―beyond all the discourses, positions, and the polemics, particularly within the context of settler colonialism.” (Sharif pg. 218) Sharif directly contradicts the United States’ picturesque portrayal of the kitchen as a space where problems disappear. In fact, the kitchen is a site and stage of cultural struggles and identity formation.
Food cultures morph into new cultural hybrids, as the gourmet food world often (re)presents ethnic foods to make them appear, smell and taste palatable to mainstream audiences in ways that reinscribe Western Eurocentric cultural dominance. We see this cultural hegemony in the food stories of immigrants and children of immigrants, whose food is described as being smelly, inedible and savage.
In their separate works, centered on histories of Mexicans and Tejanos in the United States, Jeffrey Pilcher and Gustavo Arellano describe the discursive operations by which ethnic foods are taken and reimagined in ways that degrade and misrepresent their origins. White food industry establishments, in regions throughout the Southwestern U.S. and Mexico, have continually staked claims to profit while attempting to erase the labor of Indigenous and Mexican people and food cultures who continue to produce, create and innovate these foods.
In his book Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher explains how this operation of cultural exclusion becomes specifically intertwined with Indigenous erasure in the context of a culinary industry which profits off of (and at the same time devalues) non-European cuisine. For example, Pilcher describes how, “the Mexican government assembled ‘a brigade of six Mexican chefs,’ listed by name on the presidential website, ‘and five indigenous cooks,’ listed by region. Once again, the elite perpetuated a distinction between the artistry of classically trained chefs and the ethnography of village cooks.” (229) Indigenous people are separated and positioned as “cooks”–culturally below “classically” (read European) trained “chefs.” Indigenous people and cultures are (re)represented as novelty rather than artist-creators.
Fast food imitators like Taco Bell continue to dominate representation of what is seen as Mexican food on a global level. White Minnesotan founder Glen Bell states, “I didn’t invent the taco, but I believe I improved it.” (Arellano, pg. 59). Pilcher adds, “Mexico petitioned the United Nations cultural authority for the first time in 2005, arguing that the country’s unique culinary artistry needed protection both from fast-food imitators and from genetically modified invaders.” (228)
The New York City restaurant known as Lucky Lee’s similarly transformed Chinese American food. The owner and her husband, neither of whom have Chinese or other Asian ancestry, promoted their version of Chinese food premised on their language of making dishes “clean and health-ifying.” (Otterman 2019) It is often not until whiteness as the operating power structure in the United States takes and turns non-Western food cultures into tastes that can be consumed for profit that they are deemed acceptable to dominant America.
Methodology
- Research Participants
Research participants for this exploratory study will be myself and my sister. I chose to focus on our familial relationship because although we grew up together our processes of identity formation are vastly different. Our task is to share our recipes for kimchi, as we discuss differences in preparation, purpose and memories we associate with the cooking process and our memories of the food.
- Interview Questions
How do you identify racially? Where are you from/your family from? What cultures do you identify with?
What foods did you eat as a child? What is your strongest childhood memory of food?
What kind of foods are typical at your family table? Can you describe a food or recipe that you have a strong memory of?
Where is the food from?
Who showed you/taught you how to make it?
How have your family food recipes influenced shifts in your choices around racial and ethnic identity?
- Methods: (Auto) Ethnography
I will arrange an in-person cooking session with the research participant (my sister). We will begin by preparing our different recipe of kimchi, while discussing the recipe’s meanings, both outward and hidden, including details of historical and social context and any stories she remembers about the original creator of the recipe.
This method will serve as a comparative study of our lived experiences of multiracial Korean identity as it connects to memory formation. I will document the cooking session, using a combination of audio and video recording, and handwritten or typed field notes which I will take during and immediately after the session. I will then edit excerpts of the recordings, producing a nontraditional cooking video which includes audio from the interview overlayed and woven through the visual recordings.
After cooking together, we will eat the food and continue the interview. I will ask follow up questions. What recipe(s) are we making today? Why did you choose to share this recipe with me? What is the history behind this recipe? What is the most prominent memory you associate with this food? Does cooking this particular recipe help you feel connected to Korean culture? Why or why not? Who did you learn this recipe from? Is it written down? Did you memorize it by heart? Where do you keep/store this recipe? What does this recipe mean to you and/or your family?
I will record audio with Audacity. I will take handwritten notes during the recording as well. I will review and code the interviews, taking extensive notes. If time permits, I will view the cooking session I edited with the interviewee. I will also share the edited video with the participant as a gift of acknowledgement for participating in the research study.
Works Cited
Arellano, G. (2013). Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. Scribner.
Delgado, R., Stefancic, J., & Harris, A. P. (2017). Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
Facio, E., & Lara, I. (2014). Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives. The University of Arizona Press.
Hall, S. (2013). “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’.” In Representation: Culture Representation and Signifying Practice. Essay, Open University.
Otterman, S. (2019, April 12). “A White Restaurateur Advertised ‘Clean’ Chinese Food. Chinese-Americans Had Something to Say About It.” The New York Times.
Pilcher, J. M. (2017). Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican food. Oxford University Press.
Root, M. (1998). “Experiences and Processes Affecting Racial Identity Development: Preliminary Results From the Biracial Sibling Project.” Cultural Diversity and Mental Health, 4(3), 237-247.
Sharif, L. (2014). Savory Politics: Land, Memory, and the Ecological Occupation of Palestine. UC San Diego. ProQuest
Standen, B. C. “Without a Template: The Biracial Korean/White Experience. The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier,” 245-260.
Williams-León, T., Nakashima, C. L., & Omi, M. (2010). The sum of our parts: mixed-heritage Asian Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.