Summers start with a little heartbreak

Our cultural foods hold us together.

Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but the warm braised cabbage wrapped around a cube of silky cold tofu simmered in chili paste and soy sauce is what coming home feels like. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten food like this. I pick up a piece of young radish kimchi with my wooden chopsticks and feel the slight carbonation on my tongue and the warmth of the heat slide through my organs, all the way down to my stomach. But the path of food through the body doesn’t stop there, of course. I’m testing my limits.

I don’t know if I can make peace with the idea that certain foods have suddenly moved over to the “bad” list. How can you tell me that what I’ve consumed my entire life is no longer safe to eat? After six weeks of eliminating pretty much everything that I love, I start the slow process of adding a few back in.

There is some evidence that ancestral foods can reverse some symptomatic effects of ill health. It’s about cultural connectedness and the emotional grounding of memories etched in the familiar. Our bodies carry the biological memory of our cultural diets, but modern Westernized eating patterns threaten to disrupt the balance of our microbiomes that have adapted over generations to our native foods. So even if certain items have now moved over to my so-called “bad” list because of spice, fermentation, or soy, I decide that completely abstaining from them is non-negotiable. I’ll just suffer the consequences for Korean food (and I did, to some degree, later that evening).

I’m reminded of the time when my cousins and I left my brother’s funeral in California, in a ceremony where our side of the family was not welcomed. This was right after Memorial Day eleven years ago. The first instinct in our collective brains was to make a beeline to a Korean restaurant in Ktown to surround ourselves with “our people” and “our food.” We were desperate to shake off the animosity of what we had just experienced.

We felt the bad energy melt away with each mouthful of spicy soondubu. The stew, still bubbling in the hot stone pot, mirrored our heartbreak and anger, its fiery red broth numbing the insides of our mouths. It was comforting in how it grounded us back to what we knew made sense after a week of uncovering the circumstances around a death that didn’t make sense at all.

Memorial Day weekend is the weekend of my dad and brother’s birthdays, so it’s fitting that we’re gathered with my mom to eat at an old school throwback of a Korean restaurant where they pile the table with banchan. All these years later and I still have that last text thread with my brother saved on my phone. Sometimes, I scroll through my texts to pull it up and stare at my last words to him.

Time stamp: May 26.
Hey, you still there? Can you just check in??
That hanging question forever unanswered.

Twice a year on Memorial Day and Christmas, I trace the stone etchings on their graves with my finger and observe how the inside crevices darken over time, making the names more legible. The end dates of their deaths are spaced exactly three years apart: my brother’s etched name from 2014, the darkest. Then my grandmother, and lastly, my dad.

There’s an unmarked quadrant reserved for my mother that completes the square on the wall at the cemetery, but there isn’t a place for me on our family square. I don’t really know how to feel about that.

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Later that weekend, we drive the kids to HMart to stock up on groceries. They’ve been home from college for two weeks and want to fill the cart with all their favorite foods they’ve been craving. Packets of naengmun cold noodle and soondubu kits, pillowy rice cakes filed with red bean paste, dumplings, kimchi stew, and acorn jelly. The convenience of modern Korean cooking comes packaged in plastic and makes me guilty for filling landfills, but not enough for me to stop buying them.

I think back to my weekly childhood chores of picking off the stringy roots of soybeans and helping my grandmother coat squares of seaweed with a quick brush of sesame oil. Cooking our traditional foods was a tedious, time-consuming task, but now you can buy them all pre-made in clear plastic containers neatly stacked in aisles at the grocery store.

At HMart, we go through the vegetable and fruit aisles together as a family before scattering off in different directions, each with our own personal shopping agenda. We weave our way back to our cart with armfuls of staples and cravings while Mark sticks strictly to a shopping list of planned meals.

Our apartment is not the kind of home with a perpetually full fridge and a stocked pantry. We don’t even have a pantry in our Brooklyn kitchen. Mark shops for what we need for meals and he’s gotten grocery shopping down to a science of efficiency and economy, earned from years of experience as a chef.

My mother’s fridge and cupboards, on the other hand, are always overflowing. At our monthly visits, we make a sweep when she’s not looking and throw out long-expired foods. I notice that she’s converted a closet as a pantry and is hoarding dry goods, I assume, from all this talk of empty store shelves from tariff threats. It drives me nuts to see the amount of food that inevitably will go to waste, but then I pause for a moment.

There is a reason for this behavior and it should have been more obvious to me. She knows what it’s like to go hungry, to have nothing but rice and a few bites of fermented vegetables to eat year round. To have to leave your home within a moment’s notice to flee the enemy. So I let it go as I sweep through her fridge and toss out cups of expired yogurts and moldy tangerines at the bottom of the crisper.

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We’re now at the unofficial start of summer.

It’s been unseasonably cold and wet lately from a rare Nor’easter that swept its way east. I saw people in winter coats in late May, a sight I don’t remember seeing, ever. There were even a few moments when I was tempted to turn on the heat.

Even though Memorial Day weekend is the official start to beach season, the beaches on Long Island are largely empty and we have it mostly to ourselves. We’re here to teach the kids how to drive in the empty parking lot, a feat that is nearly impossible to accomplish with NYC kids who don’t want to learn. But after taking a turn at the wheel, we sit on the boardwalk and watch our shadows grow long. We don’t get a sunset—too many clouds for that—but instead, we’re treated to a strange golden hour glow and a very faint rainbow.

Every year, Memorial Day weekend gets a little easier. Instead of guilt and reflections on the fragility of life, we remember all the small details that turn into memories of the people we miss. And at the end of the weekend, always, we make our way to the foods that feel like home.

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Related reading

A letter to my brother, ten years later

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A whole lotta links

To read:

• Kimchi Has Always Been a Part of My English – A word that’s been subsumed into the English language doesn’t get italicized. But whose English does this rule refer to? (Electric Lit)

• Purging Old Clothes? Here’s How to Responsibly Donate and Repurpose Your Castoffs (Wirecutter)
  Spring is often purging season, but nobody wants your ratty old clothes.

• Virginians Are Restoring a Forest Economy Built on Herbs and Tradition – Farmers have banded together to make the market for herbal supplements and remedies, part of Appalachia’s cultural heritage, more sustainable and more profitable. (NY Times)
  I’ve definitely been diving back deep into my witchy herbal concoction ways to help alleviate some of my symptoms. I now have a cupboard full of marshmallow roots, uva ursi, holy basil, nettles, and slippery elm.

• Our Business Is Killing – I never understood why veterinarians are at such a high risk of suicide. Until I became one. (Slate)
  I think about this a lot. Yes, my brother was a veterinarian.

• The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons (The New Yorker)
  The unimaginable tragedy of losing two sons to suicide. An essay by Yiyun Li, in her own words, and this interview with her (Orion Mag) about gardening, loss, and the end of metaphor.

• A Bronx high schooler showed up for a routine immigration court date. ICE was waiting (Chalkbeat)
  The cruelty of this administration, handcuffing a high school student in the Bronx and separating him from his family—and for what?

• When Native Foods Heal (Atmos)
  Shereena Baker turns to her native foods of her Karuk and Southern Ute tribes for healing.

• The Yoshitomo Nara nail art trend combines cuteness and anti-war slogans (Dazed Digital)
  I’m fascinated by nail art and the impossibly tiny paintings that humans can create on nails. I couldn’t wear them, but these are incredibly intricate.

An exhibition I recently(ish) saw in NYC:

• These two photos of Laura Owen’s recent installation at Matthew Marks don’t do it any justice—actually no photos do it justice (and this newsletter is already getting too long for email, so see more from this review here). I love when you go into an exhibition with no expectations and enter an immersive world full of surprises at every corner.
  
  If you look at the first photo, you can see two outline of doors. I didn’t realize you can push them open and enter another entirely different space, rich with painterly textures, patterns, trompe l’oeil illusions, and whimsy.

  

  

What I’m watching:

• Silo (Apple TV) - Why we keep watching these sci-fi series about the dystopian future, I’ll never know. People live in a giant silo underground because the world is toxic. There’s always one person who uncovers some lies and then, you know, a bunch of stuff happens.

• Shrinking (also, Apple TV. We have a free 3 month trial lol). Ok, NOT sci-fi. A show about loss and therapy and human relationships. Sweet and also, funny.