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Kimchi: How My Heritage Became a Hipster Pickle
Global cuisine and its untold stories
Probiotic. Raw. Vegan. Napa cabbage kimchi. We cackled at the labels on the sorry-looking mason jars filled with sallow yellow leaves.
Kimchi had become ubiquitous in my chosen spaces — a trendy fusion diner, an upscale grocery chain, YouTube channels filled with millennial cheer. It had become some sort of Asian sauerkraut, a pickle that imbued some kind of cosmopolitan flair to the irreverent melting pot of North American cuisine.
To me, kimchi is an inheritance I never asked for, a reminder of the lineage I belong to — a genealogy of women’s sacrifice and buried stories, and the painful labor that keeps our culture alive.
A colleague once prepared japchae for a potluck at work. I gazed at the plate, bemused, as she mentioned that it was vegan and gluten free.
“Cool,” I said. I was the only Korean in the room. I picked at the broccoli, inexplicably mixed with the lighter-than-usual noodles. It tasted like nothing.
Japchae is one of my least favorite foods. Its traditional ingredients include sliced carrots, spinach, onions, beef, mushrooms, and sweet potato starch noodles. It’s a colorful culmination seldom missing from important traditional holiday meals. I was in my twenties when I learned that each of the ingredients demanded different kinds of seasoning and preparation and that it was an ostentatiously time-consuming dish to prepare.
“It takes an entire day to cook for a Korean man,” my mother said.
Inside each woman’s life is a casket of hidden matrilineal stories that subvert the assumptions that seep into our thoughts as naturally as the oxygen we breathe. When my mother decided to share these stories with me, it was an induction into a lineage I didn’t know existed, didn’t know was mine to bear, and it began with that conversation.
“Cooking is the bane of my existence,” she said.
“I didn’t know that.” I was surprised and felt guilty. “I thought you liked to cook.”
“Lots of women hate cooking. They just do it out of love for their family.” She went on to list all the ladies at church: “She hates cooking, she hates…
