lucky peach.

March 23, 2017

so, last week brought the crushing news that lucky peach, the food magazine founded by david chang and peter meehan in 2011, will be closing this year. they’ll put out their final themed issue, “suburbs,” in may and release a double issue in the fall, and, then, that will be it.

that news gutted me last week.

i first heard of lucky peach when it launched, and i’ve followed it off-and-on since, most times with less concentrated focus because, at first, i didn’t quite “get” their ‘tude and bro-ness. in the beginning, it felt very masculine, very male, like a dude’s club, and i wasn’t that interested in its irreverence, its humor, its aesthetic.

maybe that was unfair of me, but, hey, it was 6 years ago, and things change. we change. magazines change.

last year, starting roughly around may, my suicidal depression started getting really bad again. it manifested, this time, in a lack of focus and inspiration when it came to fiction; i couldn’t read; and i couldn’t muster up much of a desire to keep trying to read when everything felt so flat, which, to be clear, is an indictment of my mental state, not of the books i was trying to read.

that’s when lucky peach came in — that and food memoirs and the one and only season of top chef i have ever watched*.

when i couldn’t read fiction, i turned to food. i spent that summer trawling through all the features on the lucky peach website, opening tens of tabs and immersing myself in different worlds, different cultures, different cuisines. i nursed my growling stomach, my wanderlust, my envy of people who get to travel and eat and write for a living, people who eat and eat and eat, people doing the things i wanted (and still want) so badly to do. i want to travel; i want to eat; i want to see the world.

food writing, for me, has, thus, been a huge source of both comfort and longing. it’s something i’ve (obviously) been drawn to because i love writing and i love food, but i confess that i don’t read a whole lot of it — i find it very white and largely uninspired**. while i’ve been considerably less bothered by the lack of [asian] representation in media or even truthfully, to an extent, in literature, not seeing the food i grew up with, that i love, represented thoughtfully, respectfully, and knowledgeably in food writing has largely kept me away.

one of the greatest things that i think lucky peach has done is that it has shown what is possible. it has shown that there is food outside of what exists in white mainstream america, that we need to pay respect to these cultures (but not so much that we make farces of ourselves), that there is a balance that can be struck between the serious, the irreverent, and the soulful. through its excellent longform journalism, it has shown that food doesn’t exist in a bubble, that it is attached to society, culture, human beings, and history, and it has demonstrated that it is not only worth recognizing the places and people food comes from but that it is also necessary.

maybe it goes without saying (or repeating) that i’m going to miss this magazine a lot.

on a personal level, lucky peach made me think about my own writing in different ways, and it made me think about what i can bring to the conversation about food and culture and who we are. it gave me hope by reminding me of the worlds out there that i have yet to discover, the countries and cities i’ve yet to visit, and it helped me hold onto something good, something meaningful as my life went crashing through rock bottom after rock bottom after rock bottom. even now, as i struggle with renegotiating my relationship with food given my type 2 diagnosis, lucky peach reminds me that this diagnosis doesn’t have to be the end of everything good and delicious, that there are stories to be told about food and eating even within these new limitations.

and, as such, i am profoundly sad to think that lucky peach won’t be here anymore, that there is now this giant void in food writing, so here are 5 of my favorite pieces (i was going to give more recommendations, but my commentary started running long ...). read them while the lucky peach website is still up; it’ll be up until may 1.

* that’s not entirely true; i didn’t watch the whole season. i lost interest once kristen kish wasn’t there — like, what was the point? also, random fun fact: i have yet to finish the restaurant wars’ episode (her elimination episode); i stopped watching at one point because (01) josie was pissing me off (stefan was also fucking annoying), (02) i knew how it would end, and (03), even though i know she comes back and wins the title, i still can’t get myself to watch the judges’ table because kristen!

** feel free to correct me on this.

01. greg larson, "traveling in the north country"

having lots of food in places that lack food is always awkward. i’ve eaten lobster in nairobi, across town from the kibera slum. i’ve had a filet mignon sandwich after touring the favelas of rio de janeiro. i’ve lived, worked, and eaten well in south sudan, one of the poorest countries on earth. i was based in the remote and rural village of marial bai, overseeing the construction of a high school and educational center; as a foreigner and a guest in the community, i was served three square meals a day while most families struggled for one.
in the moment it feels strange, like playing the fiddle while rome is burning. the feeling is vaguely horrible and acutely hypocritical. but you eat anyway — because the food is there, and you’re hungry. you share your food as much as possible, of course, and make other small gestures (kindness, humility, friendship, humor) to allay the moral dilemma. but you eat. and if the food is good, you savor. there’s some cognitive dissonance at play: you understand that people all around you may be starving, but you enjoy your meal.
in north korea we committed something of a double hypocrisy: we knew people around us were starving, and that we were being served feasts, but we didn’t enjoy them.

this is one of my absolute favorite pieces, one i keep coming back to over and over again. i had this open on my browser for a while before i read it because, while i was curious, i was also hesitant, given how reductive and narrow writing about north korea can be. i was afraid that it might be trite, that it might not really bring anything new or interesting to the conversation, but i was pleasantly surprised, not only with the writer's awareness of himself as a tourist, eating in ways that north koreans do not and can not, but also in how he didn't give way to sensationalism.

north korea, for obvious reasons, is a sensitive topic, and i am always going to be wary when a non-korean goes in and comes back and tries to establish him/herself as an authority. maybe you think that's not fair, and it's a thinking i might have apologized for a year ago. honestly, though, i don't think this wariness of how non-asians approach and treat asian cultures and people and food is unfair of me at all.

i mean, the other side of it is that i genuinely appreciate pieces like this. i appreciate all the writers and chefs and editors who recognize that they are outsiders going into something that isn't theirs and start from there.

02. david chang, "a tale of two grandmas"

when a war happens, the first thing to go is the food.

to be honest, i think this could have gone deeper (i wish it had been longer), and i was hoping chang would give us more because i think this is so interesting. the korean war is something that is not that distantly removed from us; my grandparents lived through it (and through the occupation before); and my aunts tell stories of being young children and having to flee their home.

the war obviously shaped the way koreans eat — and here is where you might expect me to go into how this happened and what effect that has had on korean food today, but i'm going to give you a tangent instead.

one of the things i love about korean food (and this is not something unique to korean food) is how, fundamentally, it's pretty much the same. i mean, korea's a tiny country and hasn't seen an influx of immigration like the states where food itself varies vastly from region to region. koreans, on the other hand, tend to eat the same thing.

the variations, then, are more subtle.

take, for instance, 미역국 (mi-yuhk-guk, seaweed soup). seaweed soup is birthday soup. it's what a new mother is given after she has given birth because seaweed contains a lot of iron, and, for obvious reasons of continuity, it's what you eat on your birthday.

seaweed soup pretty much looks the same wherever you eat it. it's soupy, contains seaweed and some kind of protein, and it's seasoned with 국간장 (guk-gan-jang, soy sauce for soup), 참기름 (cham-gi-reum, sesame oil), and salt. it's made in different ways depending on region, though, and how you grew up eating it. i make mine with beef, sauteeing my meat in garlic and sesame oil before adding seaweed and drowning the whole thing in water to make a beef broth, because that's the way my mother makes hers. her mother, though, was from busan, and made her seaweed soup with clams. my mother's cousins, also from coastal cities in korea, make theirs with dried anchovies.

subtle variations, maybe, but interesting. at least, i think they are ...

03. matt rodbard, "a guide to korean banchan"

banchan translates to “side dishes,” and they are fundamental to korean eating. that is, snacked on throughout the meal with great enthusiasm. banchan is so important that restaurants should be judged by the quality of their banchan — and how often they get refilled.

whenever i see korean restaurants serving broccoli as a ban-chan, i laugh because it’s a source of “what the fuck” to some of us. how was broccoli even introduced as a side dish? is that another attempt to make the unfamiliar palatable and more recognizable to non-koreans? if so, what? why broccoli?!

anyway, this is a good guide to korean ban-chan, which are awesome, even if the illustrations don’t really show you what they actually look like.

(for the record, i did not just go through and deliberately pick out pieces that had to do with korea. i'm korean; i gravitate to the familiar because it's so nice to see — what can i say?)

04a. rene redzepi, "fantasies of a happier kitchen"
04b. david chang, "the culture of the kitchen: david chang"
04c. iliana regan, "the culture of the kitchen: iliana regan"

i think intensity can be bad when it is about those same things but for an individual’s personal gain over the other people in the picture — whether it’s just for the chef, or if it’s a battle of front of house versus back of house. (regan)

three takes on one topic — i’ve never worked in a kitchen or in a restaurant, but i find kitchen culture so interesting. i think the kitchen is this fascinating microcosm that raises questions about gender and sexuality and power, and i love reading about it and how chefs themselves are learning from their own experiences and backgrounds and trying to change things.

(like, i was also reading earlier this week about how the union square hospitality group eliminated tipping and the challenges [impossibilities?] of being a mother and keeping a career in a kitchen and healthcare.)

also, the chang piece linked above was one of the first things i read when i started my lucky peach trawl last summer, and it cracked me up.

05a. andrea nguyen, "the history of pho"
05b. rachel khong, "what's true about pho"

pho is so elemental to vietnamese culture that people talk about it in terms of romantic relationships. rice is the dutiful wife you can rely on, we say. pho is the flirty mistress you slip away to visit. (nguyen)

when the bon appetit pho fiasco broke out last year, my immediate reaction was “thank god for lucky peach.” (hilariously, the pho fiasco happened after lucky peach dedicated its summer issue to pho.)

truth be told, when a white person tries to educate people on asian foods and cultures, my immediate reaction is to roll my eyes and walk away. again, maybe this isn’t entirely fair, but my reaction is grounded in two things. first, we don’t need white people to speak for us; we can speak for ourselves; and we likely have a greater understanding of the nuances that exist in our food and culture, anyway.

second, this loops back to what i said in my post about immigrant food. even if a white person might have technical knowledge about a foreign cuisine, i don’t give him/her much credit when it’s clear that there is some level of fetishization going on — and fetishization does not always exhibit in gross, exaggerated, creepy-as-fuck ways like yellow fever. i’m not interested in hearing from a person who wants to take a food culture without respecting the people behind it, without seeing them as fellow, equal human beings who have voices of their own, who come from rich, complex histories that deserve to be recognized and respected.

a magazine that fails to do this loses massive points, too, and it's easy enough to tell when this is happening — when you bypass people of color, the people to whom this food culture belongs, and go to a white person to speak on behalf of a culture that is not his/hers, you are fetishizing a cuisine. you are trying to take and make your own something that does not belong to you, that you have neither right nor authority to speak for.

and there, honestly, is no excuse for this kind of bullshit.

the two pieces above are from that pho issue, and here are a few other great pieces in response to the bon appetit pho fiasco: a great response from andrea nguyen (who wrote "a history of pho" linked above), an op-ed from writer khanh ho, a piece by deborah kim, and this summary by you offend me you offend my family.

by the way, for the record, “i never meant to offend anyone; i’m sorry if you were offended” is not an apology. it shows that you clearly have no idea what you did that was so offensive and, worse, that you don’t care. it also shows that you’re offended that people are offended, that you think people are overreacting and being too sensitive, and, again, that you don’t care — you’re not going to try to learn; you’re not going to modify your behavior and thinking; and you’re going to be a dick again. it’s an asshole statement of “i’m not actually sorry; i’m just hoping you’re dumb enough to be placated by my non-apology just because it has the word ‘sorry’ in it” — to which, babe, whoever you are, you’re really not that clever, and we are not fooled, and we remember.

a life lived to forget, to remember.

March 15, 2017

there are many ways to answer the question. not everyone would ask, but some would if true curiosity — a genuine desire to understand — were allowed in place of good manners. i would, too. in fact, i still do ask myself: what made you think suicide was an appropriate, even the only, option? (195)

i start with a 2:1 ratio of milk to water. i have no idea if i wrote that sentence correctly because math is not my strong suit, but, basically, start with 2 cups milk and 1 cup water. heat the milk/water on medium-high until it comes to a boil, by which i mean when the milk starts to foam and tries to overflow (and it will if you aren’t watching your pot). when the milk/water boils, lower the heat, removing the pot temporarily from it if necessary (to prevent the overflowing), and pour in a cup of grits and add a pinch or two of salt.

these days, i use fast-cooking grits because they're, well, fast, but, when i started making grits a few years ago, i used corn meal. i'd stand at my stove for 45 minutes to an hour, book in one hand, whisk in the other, stirring my grits on low heat and adding milk or water as necessary, until they were soft and cooked through. fast-cooking grits take about 5-10 minutes, though that doesn't mean you can just dump in your grits and walk away. you still have to whisk frequently to break apart lumps and prevent burning because they will burn if you just let them sit.

and don't worry if they appear too watery at first. grits will thicken as they cook.

over the last two weeks, i read yiyun li’s dear friend, from my life i write to you in your life (random house, 2017). it’s a memoir of her suicide attempts, of living with (and trying to understand) suicidal depression, and it's also a love letter to literature, to the authors she read in the years around her breakdown, suicide attempts, and subsequent hospitalization.

li doesn’t go into details about her attempts, doesn’t talk about suicide so much as a physical act, and she also doesn’t make a defense or argument for suicide. maybe that’s consistent with, as she writes, her desire not to be a political writer (is the social not tied up with the political?), but i think there's also this — that she recognizes that there is neither a way nor a need to try to explain suicide or suicidal impulses in clearly explicable terms. there is no cause and effect; there is no answer to the question why; and that is all okay.

as i type these words, though, i recognize that they are my interpretations of what she has written, that i walked into this book with my own baggage and needs and anxieties. i went into dear friend with a measure of carefulness because there is a part of me that tenses up when suicide enters public discourse, because i am still sensitive to snap judgments and condescending dismissals toward the suicidally depressed, towards people like me.

somehow, that also manifests in an anxiety towards writing by people like me, authors like me, maybe because there is a part of me that is still constantly undercutting myself, telling myself that my suicidal depression isn’t really suicidal depression, i’m just being selfish, i’m being moody, i’m being whiny and emotional and immature. i haven’t been hospitalized; i haven’t made an attempt on my life serious enough for anyone to notice; and i’m not yet on medication. what if i read this and realize what real suicidal depression looks like? what if this, what if that, never mind that that’s all bullshit, and i know that.

i have recently taken moves to get help for this, and i have recently gotten an “official” diagnosis, which is good only insofar as it helps me get the help i need. my mother marvels over all this, that i’m taking the initiative to make my doctors’ appointments, to go to my therapy sessions, to get on medication, and she says that she might not have been able to do this had she been in my shoes because it all seems so cumbersome. she marvels, too, because these are all actions outside my usual personality — i hate sitting on the phone; i hate living on a tight schedule; and, above all, i hate asking for help.

the thing she doesn’t — that she thankfully can’t — understand is that i am terrified of my brain. a few weeks ago, before i left brooklyn to drive across the country to los angeles, my brother asked what i was most afraid of in moving back to california, a state i viscerally despise. at the moment, i couldn’t voice this to him, but my greatest fear has been and continues to be that i will die in california, not in the sense that i will get stuck in this state that i loathe and grow old and eventually die, but in the sense that i will finally hit that point where everything is so totally unbearable that i will succeed in taking my own life.

to some, that might sound dramatic, but, to others, to me, this is a genuine fear, abstract though it may be. it isn’t that i’m constantly, actively suicidal; i actually haven’t thought about it since december; but i am constantly aware that there is always the possibility that i will be again.

somehow, even though li never explicitly talks about this, i feel like she knows all this, that she understands it, maybe not in these exact terms but at the heart of it. she doesn’t need to express it in clear, explicit words; it’s there in the graciousness, the matter-of-factness of her prose, in the evenness of her tone, in her refusal to make her suicidal depression either less than or more than what it is. she doesn’t diminish the seriousness of it, but neither does she cloak it in dramatics or try to pander to a depiction of suicidal depression that might be more palatable to the non-suicidal, the non-depressed.

and, for all that and for this book, i am grateful.

you have to understand, she said, a suicide attempt is selfish. yes, i know what you mean, i said to each of them. understanding cannot be willed into existence. without understanding one should not talk about feeling. one does not have the capacity to feel another person’s feelings fully — a fact of life, democratic to all, except when someone takes advantage of this fact to form a judgment. one never kills oneself from knowledge or understanding, but always out of feelings. (54)

remember to add salt when you add your grits to the milk/water. i had a flatmate once who was a chef, and she told me that you shouldn’t wait until the very end to add salt. if you do, then you’ll just taste the salt.

unless you’re cooking beans. then wait until near the end because, otherwise, the salt will impact how the beans absorb water and cook — but grits are not beans.

and, so, add the salt when you add your grits.

what do we gain from wanting to know a stranger’s life? but when we read someone’s private words, when we experience her most vulnerable moments with her, and when her words speak more eloquently of our feelings than we are able to, can we still call her a stranger? (75)

i believe that it is impossible to write anything, whether fiction or non-fiction, that is not autobiographical. writing, by nature, is autobiographical, in that we betray ourselves when we write, whether we do it intentionally or not. an attempt to hide, too, is still disclosure.

that said, if you told me a year ago that i would write so openly, so blatantly autobiographically about my mental health, i would have stared at you like you had two heads. i would have said that i was too afraid for that, too scared of any possible repercussions to put so much personal out there, too hesitant of how it might affect my family. i would have added that i would leave that kind of personal writing for other writers, writers braver than i, more generous of spirit than i.

while i still think that intensely personal writing requires generosity of spirit, i've recently been rethinking the idea of bravery and courage. i mean, even still, even as i type these words and put them out there, i don't consider myself brave or courageous at all, and, as i was reading dear friend, i don't know that i thought that it was courage that allowed li the ability to write so openly, so unashamedly about the personal — her history with suicide, her mother, her childhood and youth in china.

it’s not that i’m downplaying the role that bravery or courage plays in all this; i do agree that there is a base measure of such sentiment required to start shouting into the void; but i also tend to think that we all have that, we just don’t know it until something somehow tips the scale and makes speaking out loud unavoidable.

as human beings, we are relational creatures, and we like to recognize ourselves in the world around us. that desire manifests itself in different ways, but, fundamentally, we possess a desire to be known. it’s oftentimes why we surround ourselves with the people do, why we read the books we do, why we consume the media we do, and it also oftentimes reveals itself in what we share on social media, how we present ourselves, the stories we tell.

it is also, unsurprisingly, why we oftentimes write the things we do.

when your grits start to thicken, start tasting to see if they're cooked and if they've enough salt, keeping in mind that you will be adding cheese. if they're thicker than you prefer, add more milk or water. continue to whisk frequently until they're soft, like porridge, being careful because grits like to gurgle and spit when they're hot and cooking, even with the heat turned down to medium.

when the texture is soft and the grits are almost ready to eat, dump in whole fistfuls (plural!) of grated cheese. it doesn't really matter which cheese, i dare say, though i've only ever used hard cheeses, so i can't speak for soft ones. i usually go for cheddar (tillamook!) or parmesan or gouda, depending entirely on what i have in my fridge — and always make sure to grate your cheese yourself; this is one cooking rule i do not compromise.

reserve some grated cheese for later. whisk the cheese into your grits. taste.

how could you have thought of suicide when you have people you love? how could you have forgotten those who love you? these questions were asked, again and again. but love is the wrong thing to question. one does not will oneself to love. the difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves. (115)

when i think about whatever thing it is that drives me to share so much, i think it’s desperation. i consider it an extension of that desperate will to survive that still lives on underneath the despair, the feelings of futility, the hopelessness. i need to write in order to live, to maintain some semblance of stability, and i need to write in order to process, to learn to live with all these things i still perceive as brokenness, whether it be my depression, my anxiety, or my type 2 diabetes.

for some reason, i also need to do all this publicly; i've never been much interested in maintaining a personal journal of my own; and, sometimes, i wonder about all this sharing, whether it’s an ego thing or a something-else-i-don’t-know-what thing. i wonder constantly what good any of this writing does anyone, including myself, and i know that it sometimes hurts my family. no parent should have to come face-to-face with the brutal truth that his/her child hurts so badly, she wants do die, but, unfortunately, thinking that doesn’t negate the reality of this. thinking that doesn’t make it possible for me to sit in silence, not when i know that i am not the only one who lives with this and especially not when i know what silence does, that silence takes lives.

and i always seem to come back to this — that i shout my struggles and pains and hurts out into the void in the hopes that someone will hear me and recognize me and that, together, we can feel a little less alone. it is not that i think that i am this stellar, shining beacon of a human being, but because one of the most frightening things about suicidal depression is how it corrals you in your brokenness and makes you feel so helpless and so alone. it makes you feel unknowable, unrecognizable, and, when you cannot recognize yourself, when you cannot see yourself in the world around you, you start to wonder if you’re even really here at all.

while your grits are cooking, chop up your bacon and toss them onto a frying pan. heat the pan on medium-high heat; starting your bacon cold helps the fat render out, though i suppose that's kind of moot, health-wise, because i'm going to tell you to fry your egg in the bacon fat. remove the cooked bacon pieces to a plate or bowl covered in a paper towel so as to drain the fat.

if your bacon has cooked faster than your grits, turn the heat off the frying pan, so you can fry your egg and eat it right away. you want to get your pan (and the bacon fat) hot before you crack your egg on it because that's the secret to a great crispy egg — start the pan hot, smoking hot, crack the egg (careful not to break that yolk), and step back because the egg, as it hits the pan, should spit at you. basically, everything in this will spit at you — the grits, the bacon, the egg.

when the egg is fried, the white just set, yolk still wobbly, bottom nice and crispy (it won't take long), spoon the grits onto a plate, top with your crispy egg, sprinkle with bacon and leftover grated cheese, and eat immediately.

for those in crisis, in the US, the national suicide prevention lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. in NYC, the samaritans are 212-673-3000. in the UK and ireland, the samaritans are 116 123. all lines are confidential and available 24/7.

2017 international women's day.

March 8, 2017

yiyun li, dear friend from my life i write to you in your life (random house, 2017)
julie otsuka, the buddha in the attic (anchor books, 2012)
annabelle kim, tiger pelt (leaf-land press, 2016)
rachel khong, goodbye, vitamin (henry holt, forthcoming, 2017)
catherine chung, forgotten country (riverhead, 2012)
susan choi, the foreign student (harper perennial, 2004)
min-jin lee, pachinko (grand central publishing, 2017)
esmé weijun wang, the border of paradise (unnamed press, 2016)
ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin, 2013)
krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016)
celeste ng, everything i never told you (penguin press, 2014)
jung yun, shelter (picador, 2016)
padma lakshmi, love, loss, and what we ate (ecco, 2016)
alexandra kleeman, you too can have a body like mine (harper, 2015)
shawna yang ryan, green island (knopf, 2016)

it’s international women’s day, so here’s a stack that i am so fucking jazzed i can even make: i have no substantial data to back this up, but i do feel like, in the last few years, we've seen a greater rise of asian[-american] writers being published. who knows, though; maybe i've only noticed this because i've become much more intentional about who i'm reading in recent years, so maybe it’s more correct for me to say that i’m jazzed that i have a collection of books that allows me to curate such a fine stack.

(is that too self-congratulatory? but i do generally stand by my taste.)

it's international women's day, and you might be saying that this stack is so narrow in scope as to miss the point. however, i wanted to make a stack of asian-american women, so here is a stack of women writers who are either immigrants or the daughters of immigrants because the point i wanted to make is simple and universal: that we, under whichever broad ethnic umbrella people want to place and stereotype us, come from a myriad of different backgrounds, carrying so many different struggles and concerns and fears, and one of the things we, as immigrants and immigrant children, bring to this country are our stories.

to be asian-american, to be anything-american, is not to be one collective person from one collective culture. it is to be a myriad of people, to contain multitudes of women, and i wanted to create a stack that would reflect this, the international backgrounds we come from that influence, in so many different ways, the stories we are compelled to tell.

in a political climate under a toxic administration that is feeding and fostering hate against non-white, non-christian, non-straight immigrants, this is what i wanted to celebrate today — that this is a country that has welcomed people from so many places, and this, this stack here is a result of that. i want to point at this stack and say, look, look at this wealth. look at the worlds these pages contain. look at the humanity these books expose. look.

so, here is to us, all of us women, regardless of ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or the physical bodies we were born into. here is to the countries, the cultures, the peoples we come from. here is to the women we come from, women who have sacrificed much so we can be the women we are, women who have shown us strength and love and dedication. here is to the women who have failed us, to the women we will fail, to the women who are broken and fucked up and damaged because they are women, and to be a woman is to be human.

and here is to us. here is to the women we are and the women we are becoming and the women we will be. may we be strong and continue to tell our stories and refuse to be silenced.

[thursday recs] 그림자.

March 6, 2017

i can package a certain story as a dream and tell it that way. i can disguise my childhood, and as i disguise it i can make allusions, and as i reveal details about the allusions, i can make them appear fictitious, and in this way, i can deceive you all. but you won’t be deceived. (han, 148)

i always hated writing introductions — introductions and conclusions. in college, i’d always start with the stuff in the middle, oftentimes without even establishing a thesis first because the middle had to be worked through for me to discover what my thesis even was. once all that was written and done and good, i’d write the conclusion. then i’d write the introduction. none of this has changed.

coming back to korean literature-in-translation after some time away is one kind of homecoming, and i love how we’re getting more and more of it here in the west. i love that i’ve been reading more and more of it because, a few years ago, this was a wish of mine: to read more korean literature, to be able to know more of it, to be able to share more of it.

and i am so happy to be able to share more of it.

hwang jungeun, one hundred shadows (tilted axis, 2016)

one of the things that i love about korean literature is that it often seems to exist in a korea different from the glittery, technologically-advanced, prosperous, high-achieving state that korea seems to present itself as. hallyu shows off a romantic view of korea, with its cutesy, perky pop stars and shiny dramas, a lot of which has been the product of the government pouring resources into hallyu and generating an idol-making machine within its entertainment industry, while literature has gotten considerably less attention until recently.

i don’t want to go so far as to claim that, as a result of that, korean literature took on different tones (though i have heard that theory before), especially as there is also the question of what and how literature is translated. is it that the gatekeepers to translation just have a love for korean literature that tells narratives of those who exist on the fringes of society? who bear witness to the startling wealth gaps that exist in sometimes jarring juxtaposition in korea?

regardless of whether it’s a translation thing or a trend in korean literature, i’m glad that this literature exists. i’m glad that there are writers out there who aren’t enthralled with this one depiction of korea, who write novels that go beneath the glossy veneer and explore the effects of prosperity, who write about people who exist outside the aspirational “norm.”

hwang jungeun’s one hundred shadows is one such novel.

the novel is set primarily in an electronics market in korea, and it’s a rundown market, one that developers want to tear down and build into something new. unsurprisingly, they use all kinds of means to try to bully the storeowners to leave, whether by convincing them to take a sum of money and relocate their shop in some unclear new location or by blocking off the main entrance of the market so customers believe they’re closed. it’s not that hwang focuses on this aspect of the story; one hundred shadows is largely a story about two characters who work at different shops in the market; and it’s a story, also, about the people in this market, these people who don’t have much, who exist on the outside edges of an upward society, who are trying to resist the shadows that rise and threaten to consume them.

i think that’s the strength of the novel, though, that hwang tells the story of these economic differences in korea without directly telling them. she doesn’t get into social issues or into the nitty-gritty of the conflicts that might exist between these shop owners and the developers — the details are there if you read for them in the way that these stresses and worries are present in and shape people’s lives without necessarily taking center stage.

… for me this whole area is inextricably tangled up with those memories and the way they make me feel, and when i hear people call this place a slum, well, it just doesn’t seem right to me. calling a person poor is one thing, that’s an objective fact in a way, but ‘slum’ … mujae trailed off.
i wonder if they call this kind of place a slum because if you called it someone’s home or their livelihood that would make things awkward when it comes to tearing it down. (hwang, 102)

sometimes, i read sentences and laugh a little to myself because i wonder how they must read in korean, how much of a tangle they must have been to translate. other times, i read sentences that make me wonder what the original korean is, what kinds of decisions the translator must have made and why, what kinds of liberties the translator may have taken. other times, i read sentences that make me sad because i’m sure a lot was lost in translation, that the korean must be achingly beautiful in the ways that korean can be, in the ways that english cannot.

i love the korean language. it’s lyrical and poetic, and you can run the language around in these exquisite loops that seem like they can go on forever without losing themselves. i love the lack of clear third-person pronouns, and i love the ambiguity you can create because pronouns aren’t necessary — in korean, the subject pronoun is often implied, a quirk about the language that is used to create ambiguity in quiet, powerful ways.

i love the words themselves, too, and, sometimes, when i think of korean and i think of english, i find myself thinking how limited a language english is. there are words in korean that cannot be found in english, that require a paragraph just to try to define; there are ways to feel in korean that do not exist in english; and there are ways of encompassing a national identity that cannot be so clearly distilled to be consumed and understood.

in general, i love how much language can reflect culture, and i’m fascinated by and interested in the act of translating, how it’s an act of loss, not simply of words but of culture and history and societal context. this is one of the reasons i love reading korean literature-in-translation, too, because the very fact of it being translation — crucially, of it being translation from korean, a language and culture i know to a certain degree of intimacy — alters the reading experience. in many ways, i feel like i am a much more active reader when it comes to translated korean literature, and that is something i appreciate.

i don’t really like people who go around saying they don’t have any debt. this might sound a little harsh, but i think people who claim to be in no debt of any kind are shameless, unless they sprang up naked in the woods one day without having borrowed anyone’s belly, and live without a single thread on their back, and without using any industrial products. (hwang, 18-9)

han yujoo, the impossible fairy tale (graywolf press, 2017)

choi mia had two fathers. she received twice as many presents as the other children received on birthdays and christmas. she had no siblings. the other children were jealous of her face, clothes, and school supplies. she has never been jealous of other children. choi mia was not given enough time to learn about jealousy. (han, 92)

there is a beauty to the way han yujoo writes violence in the impossible fairy tale — or maybe “beauty” is the wrong word because it’s not that she makes it beautiful or tries to render it so. she’s brutal about it, writes about it in ways that make you flinch, but she does it indirectly without giving way to sensationalism or even without putting it into clearly defined words.

i can’t even figure out a way to summarize this book, maybe that it’s a story about two children, one who has everything and one who does not. it’s a story about violence against children, about the violence children are capable of, about the way violence begets violence in the way that violence is trauma that is felt on every level. it’s a story about how we all must find outlets for our fear, our anger, our desperation — or that, even if we don’t, if we try to suppress everything, things will somehow escape, sometimes to catastrophic results.

somehow, that’s not even the most interesting part of the book, though, because han does a pretty damn stellar pivot with part two, bringing us into an i-narrative voice. it’s unclear who this “i” is, though; is she one of the students in part one? is she one of the two children? what are these dreams she keeps writing about? who is she? why are we suddenly looking at things from her perspective? why am i automatically assigning the female gender to her?

at first, i thought the dream sequences in part two were going on for too long, wondered if han weren’t falling prey to art for art’s sake, ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake, which is a particular peeve of mine. i don’t want to discuss any details because i don’t want to give any of it away, but part two unfolds in surprising, thoughtful ways that make the meandering worthwhile.

reading, after all, is an act of trust; to a certain degree, we need to be able to trust the author. we need to be able to trust that she’s taking us on a worthwhile journey (“worthwhile” being entirely subjective), that she is thoughtfully using language, that she knows what she is doing, the story she is telling. we need to be able to trust that she purposefully created this experience for us, that none of these choices is casual or lacking in deliberation. we need to be able to trust that she will raise questions that she will answer satisfactorily, that she isn’t abusing her position as author and creator to send us in circles without reason.

han asks us for this trust, and she asks a lot of questions about what it means to create. she asks what these lives are that we, as writers, as artists, create and give body to, these characters we build and into whom we infuse life and personality quirks and histories. she asks about the limitations of creating, of fiction, of story; she asks about the responsibility of these acts of creating.

she doesn’t necessarily give us any hard answers to any of these questions, though, but that doesn’t mean she leaves us dissatisfied. the questions she’s asking aren’t meant to have hard answers, anyway. they’re meant to get us questioning, to make us active readers, cognizant of the ways in which we might be complicit in the actions of these characters, because the point, as always, is to consider.

in this way, the sole objective of the stories i want to tell is to throw you into an unclear state, to make you believe while you’re not able to believe. (han, 150)

i feel like noting that han does some really interesting things with language in the impossible fairy tale, and i’m so curious (01) to read this in korean and (02) how the translator, janet hong, made some of the decisions she did. i don’t mean the latter in an accusatory way or to imply that she did a bad job; i’m genuinely curious because i love language and have dabbled in translation and regard it with a fair amount of wonderment.

bandi, the accusation (grove press, 2017)

i confess that i have yet to finish reading the accusation. that is not going to stop me from writing about it now, especially as it is a book i am certain to revisit in the future.

bandi is the pseudonym for a north korean writer currently still living in north korea, and the accusation is a collection culled from a manuscript that he has been writing for years. the manuscript was smuggled out of north korea, an action that put not only bandi’s life but also the lives of everyone involved in danger. it was bandi’s hope that his stories be published in south korea, but he never dreamed that they’d be translated and be read outside of korea.

the accusation was published in south korea in 2014. it is published by grove press in the US and serpent’s tail in the UK on tuesday, 2017 march 7. bandi, in korean, means firefly.

as may be inevitable, we give certain books more weight than others, and the accusation certainly is one of such book. as crucial as journalistic and investigative stories about north korea are, as important as memoirs by refugees are, there is a void when it comes to fiction, and i am glad to have this collection.

because here is where i get down to story: i often get annoyed by people who constantly try to downplay the humanities, sneering at books and literature and fiction like they’re mere child’s play. part of this is that i grew up in an environment that considers fiction useless; the korean phrase used to dismiss fiction is “쓸떼 없다,” which translates literally to “there is no use for that.” even now, i continue to be told that the books i read are pointless, that they’re making me see the world in negative ways, that i need to read more essays, more philosophy, more non-fiction, less stories.

and yet.

stories are the means through which we see the world. they are how we see ourselves in the world, and, similarly, they are how we see others in the world. stories are how essays, philosophy, and non-fiction are structured; stories lie beneath food, art, music. stories are part of our everyday lives as well — when we go home and talk to our family, our friends, we tell them stories from our days at work, at school, at wherever. when we meet new people, we tell them stories about ourselves — where we’re from, what we do, who we are. when we give a presentation, make an argument, think about our futures, we are telling stories, and, when we write, when we create, we are doing just that — we are telling stories, stories about ourselves, our obsessions, the circumstances of our lives.

you might ask, “if stories are in every part of life, then why do we need fiction?” the thing is that, sometimes, fiction allows us to go places that non-fiction doesn’t. sometimes, fiction opens up barriers that might exist in non-fiction that make some stories impossible to tell. sometimes, fiction makes it easier for us to explore darknesses and fears and truths that we might not otherwise confront.

similarly, sometimes, fiction opens up windows to communicate with others, to provide people opportunities to open their hearts in ways that non-fiction cannot. sometimes, fiction makes it easier to consider a new way of seeing people, to empathize in deeper, more personal ways, to realize that we are all people — we are all human, and we all exist on this planet, and we can work to make things better for each other.

by tapping into our empathetic selves, fiction challenges us to feel and, in doing so, hopefully challenges us to be better people and to do good. it hopefully challenges us to see the people hidden behind an oppressive regime and see them as people.

in the afterword to the accusation, kim seong-dong, a writer for the monthly chosun, tells us this: that bandi started by joining the chosun literature and art general league in north korea, that he was published in various periodicals but came to a realization that led to the stories in this book.

and yet, something began to weigh on him: the great famine of the early to mid-1990s, exacerbated by floods but stemming from the disastrous economic policies of previous decades, which the government insisted on referring to by the officially mandated code words “the arduous march.” witnessing scenes of misery and deprivation, in which many of his friends and colleagues perished, provoked him to reflect deeply on the society in which he lived, and his role there as a writer. a writer’s strength, he found, is best deployed within writing. and so he began to record the lives of those whom hunger and social contradictions had brought to an untimely death, or who had been forced to leave their homes and roam the countryside in search of food. now, when bandi picked up his pencil, he did so in order to denounce the system. (232-3)

rather than himself trying to escape from north korea, the writer bandi has sent his work out as an envoy, risking his life in the process. surely this is because he believes that external efforts can transform the slave society he lives in more quickly than internal ones. on handing his manuscript over, bandi said that even if his work was published only in south korea, that would be enough for him. this work should be heard as an earnest entreaty to shine a spotlight on north korea’s oppressive regime. (241)

i sincerely hope that the accusation is received accordingly. i will definitely be revisiting it in the future.

whether something is harmful or not is a matter of personal standards. (hwang, 57)

to be honest, while one of the reasons i started this weekly post series was very much to fight back against a toxic administration, another reason was purely selfish: to give myself a sense of purpose and something to fight for outside the brokenness in my brain and my body.

i live with what is called major depressive disorder, recurrent episode, and panic disorder, and i also struggle with suicidal thinking and hopelessness and general despair. i go to sleep at night hoping i won’t wake up in the morning, and i wake up in the morning disappointed to find myself still here. add onto that that i was also recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes*, so there’s that extra dose of self-loathing added onto everything else, especially when food was that one last comfort i had, that one last lifeline i was holding onto to get me through the days, to get me out of bed and try to care for myself. all of that, with one blood test, is gone — or, at least, altered beyond what i am currently able to handle.

most days, i find myself helpless, unable even to make that effort to care. when i check my blood sugar and my meter gives me back that triple-digit reading despite it only being a week of monitoring and trying to bring my glucose down, i don’t know what to do, so i shut down, stop eating, hope this kills me. maybe it goes without saying that i’m still processing the anger and resentment that comes with this diagnosis, letting the mental temper tantrums run loose when the numbness wears off, and trying to tell myself that it’s not that big a deal, it’s manageable, it’s not life or death — but, truth be told, i hate that, i always have — it’s just another way for people to enforce shame via diminishing, blaming, belittling.

because here’s the truth: something doesn’t have to endanger your life to threaten it, and just because something is manageable doesn’t mean that it isn’t devastating. context matters. the whole of a person matters. and had this happened at some other point, when i wasn’t already so broken, so empty-handed, so hopeless, i might have reacted differently. i might have squared my shoulders and said, okay, and simply dealt with it. but it didn’t — it happened now, and, when all the pieces of my life are lying in shambles at my feet, it’s impossible to take this in stride and get on with it, even as i know that, given time, i will learn to live with it.

so that’s a long-winded way of saying that i won't be continuing these thursday posts. i won’t stop blogging and will continue posting regularly, but, as of this moment, i am not able to continue this once a week schedule. for one, i barely have the ability to focus these days, much less finish books at the pace i did before and write posts with such tight turnaround time, and, for another, even as i know that this is disappointment in myself speaking, a huge part of me, frankly, doesn’t really see the point. thank you for following along thus far; it means more to me than i can express.

* for anyone concerned, i made my kimchi fried rice with brown rice. also, i am new to this and still figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

a measure of how we are.

February 28, 2017

food. mom’s way of encouraging the family is to cook food in the old kitchen of the house. whenever the family encounters unbearable grief, mom steps into her old-fashioned kitchen. the men of the house. father, whom she loved but was sometimes difficult to understand, and her sons, who were growing into adults — whenever they disappointed her, she would go into the kitchen, her steps feeble. as she did when she was in shock, at the daughter lashing back at her, “you have no idea!” by the fuel hole of the furnace, or the shelf lined with upside-down bowls, inside the old-fashioned kitchen of that house, that was the only place where mom could endure the grief that has invaded her heart. and there she would regain her courage, as if the kitchen spirit had breathed a new energy into her. when she was delighted, when her heart ached, when someone left, or came back, mom made food, set the table, made the family sit down, and pushed the bowl, piled with food, in front of the one who was leaving or had returned. offering, endlessly, “have some more. try some of this. eat before it gets cold. have that, too.” (shin kyung-sook, the girl who wrote loneliness, 299)

sometimes, i joke that someone should marry me because i’d make a great wife (kinda), but that’s a joke only i’m allowed to make. (don’t conflate a woman’s love for cooking into something more than just that — a love for cooking. similarly, don’t put a woman down and call her a “bad” woman for not liking or not knowing how to cook.)

i say “kinda” because it’s really mostly because i love to cook for people — and not a general people-plural but my people — and i’d love cooking for my partner. there’s just something so satisfying about feeding someone you love, but, alas, i don’t have a partner yet (am not even close, sobs), so, these days, i cook for my parents, and i cook for friends.

sometimes, i also joke that it’s when i’ve come into your kitchen and cooked you a meal that we know we’ve become good friends. i have no idea how common this is with other people, but i tend to find myself cooking in friends’ kitchens often, from full-on meals to simple snacks to blue apron boxes, and it’s honestly one of my favorite things to do. it’s fun if we’re cooking together, but it’s also just as fun if i’m cooking and the friend is hanging out with a glass of wine — or even if said friend is busy with a deadline and had originally planned to cook me dinner but couldn’t get as much done during the afternoon as hoped.

as long as there is food to cook and share and eat with people i love, i’m happy.

and, so, it’s no surprise that i did some cooking while in san francisco last week, nothing fancy or elaborate, just simple, homey food with my best friend. these kitchen moments were some of my favorite moments from the week.

i like my omelettes plain, fluffy, and cheesy. i use two eggs, whisk them up with chopsticks in a bowl (or a mug or a clear glass), adding a splash of milk (never skim, never fat-free, sometimes cream, sometimes half-and-half) and a tiny pinch of salt, and i whisk it all together until the yolks and whites are broken, the milk combined, and the whole thing looks like it would produce a soft, fluffy omelette. (i don’t know how else to describe it.)

i use a non-stick pan, heat it on medium-high heat until it’s just hot enough that a pat of butter will hit the pan and immediately start to foam but not so hot that the butter will brown — you want a clean, yellow omelette. after i’ve spread the butter to coat the pan, i give my egg mixture one last quick whisk (in case it’s settled while buttering my pan) and pour it into the center, tilting the pan as necessary to spread the eggs in an even layer. i lower the heat slightly (again! clean, yellow omelette!) and smile at that satisfying sizzle of eggs meeting melted butter on a hot surface.

when the omelette has just barely started to set but still looks wet, i use two spatulas to fold a fourth of the omelette over itself, then do the same on the other end, before liberally dumping grated cheese down the middle and folding the omelette in half again. once the cheese has melted, which only takes a minute or so, the omelette is done. it should be eaten immediately.

something i do love about california is the easy access to tillamook cheese — and different kinds of tillamook cheese, at that. tillamook is harder to come by on the east coast, but it’s one of my favorite cheeses — clean flavors, nothing snooty or fancy, just good cheese that makes for great grilled cheese sandwiches, grits, omelettes, etcetera.

i’d say that part of it is also just nostalgia, though i don’t know what i’m nostalgic for when it comes to tillamook, given that i didn’t grow up eating much cheese and kraft singles were all you could find in my house growing up. (i still love kraft singles.) and, yet, somehow, tillamook taps into a part of my brain that finds it comforting and seeks it out because it associates it with warmth and comfort and familiarity, all emotional responses i want when it comes to cheese in general.

tillamook is also a great cheese to use when making cheez-its. which are totally worth it, by the way.

i am also obsessed with these turkey ricotta meatballs. they’re from julia turshen’s small victories, and not only are they fucking delicious (and don’t require eggs or breadcrumbs), but i also love the story behind them — that they were the first thing julia cooked for her wife, grace, that grace didn’t even have a pot in her apartment, so julia made the meatballs at her own apartment and brought a pot and ingredients for sauce and a box of pasta to cook for grace at her apartment. stories like these are what make food so special and one reason i cook — because food is all about story, and one of the things we do with food is share stories, rewrite bad stories, and create new ones together.