when did korean food get so popular?
before you make a vlog of yourself swooning over boiled, overly sweet bulgogi meat, say you're sorry for calling me a 'dirty gook' for bringing my grandma's to school to eat
Korean street stalls were a dirty business. We didn’t have luxuries, like sugar, beef, or eggs. Back as far as the late 1990s-early 2000s, you couldn’t find anything decent to eat in Seoul, other than lame barbecue, with cheap, suspicious meats (handled by women who coughed and spit near your plate), and maybe the same fruit popsicles you’d find in Mexico.
I grew up for three-four years in the mid-‘60s near Seoul in a place my mom called Sonyuri. I can’t find it on a map now, but a prolonged search led me to a close proximity east of the city.
Sonyuri was little more than dirt roads, little snails in little newspaper cones, early ready-made ramen I’d raw-dog straight out of the package, Bacchus-D drinks, and Army surplus, like the Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup I’d eat straight out of a can.
Real Korea, motherfucker.
When my (adopted) white Army sergeant dad rescued us out of poverty, I discovered the wonders of American fast food. Kentucky Fried Chicken came in a cheap bucket, and lots of it. Dennis, the Menace’s Dairy Queen became my new lover. Pop rocks and button candy, my main line to civilization.
I grew to hate my dirty, stinking roots, thanks to the in-your-face racism that systematically made me hide behind the Marcia Bradys and Pam Griers of a civilized world, and hide who I truly was deep inside until…I forgot myself completely.
I allowed stupid, privileged, prissy white people make me out to be angry, loud, vulgar, and wrong all the time.
I felt hideously, monstrously ugly standing next to their delicate white features to where I still can’t bear looking at my reflection.
They’d push me away with disgust and hiss, “don’t touch me!” and “keep it down!,” when I was just being my gregarious, loud, handsy Korean self.
They’d borderline accuse me of verbal child abuse, just because they could hear me telling my son not to forget his cleats before soccer practice while in my garage.
I wasn’t mad at him. That’s just how Koreans talk. We’re very loud, extreme, and easily misunderstood. But I didn’t know that then. I do now. Now, I’m mad.
They’d take a Korean euphemism like, “I’ll pull your intestines out and jump rope with them!,” or “You wanna die?,” and think I was some serial killer for my similarly strongly worded hyperbole. They’d report me to the authorities because I didn’t express or channel my strong emotions like a proper, uptight WASP.
I’m not really going to jump rope with your intestines, you know. Calm down.
Thanks to the popularity of k-dramas, I know they were the ones who were wrong all along. Don’t worry, I’m not a danger to society, I’m just Korean.
What was a social faux-pas then has become acceptable now.
A Rover sitter all of a sudden started bitching about my terrible rescue dog Bungee and how he’d attack the other guest dogs in her home one time, because she said I was mad at her when I wasn’t. I guess it was her way of getting back at me?
Koreans are infamous for our resting bitch faces, as well as our terse way with words.
As for the food…ask an Asian immigrant how it felt to go to the school cafeteria with mom’s/grandma’s homemade lunch and have to deal with all the little black and white children on the warpath about how gross it smelled and did we eat dogs btw?
Now, Korean food is all the rage with those very same black and white grown children making a living off of OUR FUCKING HUMBLE STINKING PEASANT FOOD.
They’re even culturally appropriating what they once disparaged to charge upwards of $20-$30 for high-end Korean cuisine. It’s “cuisine,” now.
What a joke.
I was DMing Ona Lee of Clara’s Canning Company, a WA- / NM- based chef/caterer/small farmer I admire, about this bullshit recently. She remembered the same cultural disconnect growing up, and she’s white (but from the wrong side of the tracks, like me):
“100% I definitely had some Korean kids at my schools and remember others making big deals about kimchi. Now look at all of ‘em” — Ona Lee
“If just one would acknowledge the disconnect before acting like they practically invented the trend...” — me
“I think this would take far too much honesty and lack of ego [LOL]” — Ona Lee
The over-the-top reactions of these insta-K-fans also amuse/appall me to no end. You’d think they discovered a boat-load of free lobsters, or snuck into a Russian royal wedding with all-you-can-eat caviar blinis — over basic peasant food that humble peasant Koreans squeezed together, blood from literal stone.
Kim chee is all the rage today. But did you know it was made from dire necessity, to stave off winter starvation? Everything about the long, arduous process screamed the opposite of white privilege. My grandmother made it right, bare-handing every partially opened Napa cabbage leaf with her own concoction, made from fish parts, Korean chili, and precious, thick slabs of wet sea salt before burying giant clay jars underground deep for winter harvest.
She’d make kim chee jjigae (stew) with some of it. Let me tell you, that jjigae was the best I’d ever had. Nobody else in this 21st century comes close. Her kim chee was translucent, the sign of perfect fermenting, tastefully sour, and totally addictive.
There was no such thing as quick kim chee in our family, in any Korean family, back in the 1960s-‘70s. Quick kim chee is an oxymoronic insult to our grandmothers literally slaving away to feed their families.
I’ll give this jjigae tip away for free: add butter. It’s the secret ingredient that makes it smooth, not bitter.
Korean Fried Chicken, btw, was an invention of the American-obsessed post-modern Koreans, and is not real Korean food. Not in my book.
Remember, I’m one of the few older, surviving Koreans who knew what it was really like in Korea, before k-pop and k-dramas turned into cross-over hits. (They had amazing artists back then, too. But nobody outside Korea ever heard of them.)
Real Korean food is as unsophisticated, uncomfortable, vulgar, stinky, loud and proud as real Koreans. No amount of Americanized dumbing/dimming down will change that fact.
A part of me — the part that was constantly bullied in school — remains jaded about the egregious fanfare over Korean cuisine from white America, the same white America that didn’t ever want to take the time to learn and respect our culture, or appreciate just how far we’ve come, with our own bare hands.
I don’t quite believe you when you roll your eyes and squeal with delight over something our grandmas cooked from scratch, with nothing more than ingenuity, spit, and a prayer…much less elevate and charge $37 for, over some truffle oil, wagyu beef gimbap.
I keep waiting for the punchline. A “What is this, black dog, you flat-faced, slant-eyed gook?”
I could write a book about the common Korean food we had to eat, not because we wanted to, but because it was all we had. We’ve spent a lifetime eyeing delicious dishes we couldn’t afford at our overseas wealthy friends’ homes, daring to incorporate their favorite, clean ingredients into our dirty mix for upscale fusions, while denying our true identity.
The hit k-drama, “When Life Gives You Tangerines,” is singlehandedly helping to muddy those bottled bubbly waters, elevating, appreciating, and honoring the Korean culture that made bulgogi, bibimbap, mandoo, chap chae, tteokguk a household name — honestly.
Award-winning screenwriter Lim Sang-choon (“When the Camellia Blooms”) wrote the tender love letter to the Korea the rest of us left behind know firsthand, because we lived it, from the 1960s onwards.
No gauzy, top influencer Jeju vlog could ever top that experience.
I admit I repressed/forgot a lot of my early childhood until I started watching this show. I also forgave myself for a lot of hurt suffered as a result, and am finding hard-won pride in who I already was, despite the black and white world trying to tamp me down.
Who knows, one day, I may be able to glance in the mirror while brushing my teeth and see signs of IU (Oh Ae-sun/Yang Geum-myeong), and smile. Given my sketchy family tree, I may very well be related to her and half the cast.
In hindsight, “When Life Gives You Tangerines’” lead character Oh Ae-sun could’ve been me, if my parents didn’t drag me to America to find my fortune and be made a fool of by privileged, clueless white people next door who thought I was a savage, fucked up animal more than a human being worth befriending.
Gosh, what if I’d stayed? What would my life have become? Would I be an actress like IU? A screenwriter capable of “When Life Gives You Tangerines?” An entertainment reporter covering k-drama actors and their lives? Would I marry someone like Gwan-sik and have daughters?
The k-drama is filling in a lot of what-if blanks, and healing me.
If the rest of the world gets to know and appreciate a little more of why Korean culture got to where it has, and it hasn’t always been Hollywood pretty, maybe all that racist bullshit was worth going through.
Maybe then, you will understand why a really good kim chee jjigae with grilled Corvina fish, however stinky and un-American, is everything to us.
An apology would be nice too.