When I think back on my life, from now to the beginning, I am struck with the realization of just how integral food has been in my life, how food studies and cultural studies made up a vast part of my childhood and adolescence without me ever realizing. And when I say food is an integral part of my life, I don’t just mean by virtue of I eat food every day, same as most; what I mean is that I’ve lived entrenched in food as place-making, cultural practice, intercultural communication, and so much more.
Growing up, the shows I remember my family & I watching most as we all sat down for dinner together were M*A*S*H, Good Eats with Alton Brown, Julia Childs, and Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives with Guy Fieri—of course, these are interspersed with vague memories of How It’s Made and Anthony Bourdain. Even now, when I visit home, cooking or food-centric shows are what I watch most with my dad. Though, more recently it’s been episodes of Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern & Korean Food Made Simple with Judy Joo. On my own time, I love watching & re-watching episodes of Take Out With Lisa Ling. Many of these food-centric shows not only provide good recipes & good restaurants, they also tell us stories; how this dish came to be, the culture behind the cuisine. Without knowing it, I had already begun down the path of food studies simply by sitting down to dinner with my family.
Beyond that, my parents began teaching my siblings and I to cook from a very young age. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home without sexism in the kitchen and two parents who were both passionate about instilling their children with the important survival skill of feeding yourself. One of my earliest memories of cooking is making grilled cheese sandwiches with my mom. I was three years old and about three feet in height, so I had to use a step-stool to reach the stovetop, where the griddle laid over the flame. My job was to help flip the sandwiches, and so spatula in hand I went for the grilled cheese farthest away from my short reach, subsequently burning my arm on the griddle. I don’t remember the pain, but I do remember both Mom and Dad fussing over me as they assisted me in scooting the step-stool over to the kitchen sink, instructing me to run my burned arm under the cool tap water. Quite a few of my clearest childhood memories involve cooking with my parents or watching them cook.
I grew up cooking an assortment of foods and flavors, my household a myriad of sauces, vinegars, oils, and spices. Not only were we a multicultural household, we had a multicultural palette and lived in an ethnically and racially diverse area, bursting with a multitude of restaurants and culturally specific grocery stores. My parents weren’t people to cook in half-measures, and so they sought out stores that fit their culinary needs. Some of my favorite dishes were chicken adobo, baked ziti, buchimgae, tandoori chicken, SPAM musubi, chicken tacos—but specifically the marinated chicken that a Mexican food truck sold from the parking lot of a convenience store up the street—to name a few. And that was just what we cooked at home. My life has always been an abundance of cultural foods, learned through neighbors, coworkers, grocery store clerks, the internet, cookbooks, and cooking shows. In the living room back home, we used to have shelves of cookbooks, some well-loved and some relatively unused save for a recipe or two. Not to mention the white binder that houses Mom’s handwritten recipes, recipes clipped from newspapers or printed from the internet. Of course, we also have our oral recipes like Dad’s chili—which he still laments about how he’s had to cut back on the spice level since having kids.
A huge part of my food-story is the fact that we live in a place where there’s readily available access to these ingredients that I now struggle to find here in the Olympia-Tumwater area. Some of my fondest memories are of afternoons passed in restaurants with Dad and my siblings, standing in the kitchen and talking as Mom cooked most weeknights, and morning trips to Fubonn Shopping Center or Boo Han. Sometimes I think I’m happiest in a big-ass Asian grocery store, bursting with color and language, snack and ingredients familiar and unknown. When I was little, I’d hold Dad’s hand for as long as he’d allow while he herded my siblings and I through the aisles. I remember one of the first times I stepped foot in Boo Han, my family’s usual Korean store, when I was five or so (read: old enough to not run wild in the store). I was wonderstruck by all the new smells and sights as I held Dad’s hand, worried I’d get lost if I let go. I forget if one or both of my siblings were with us, but I do remember Dad grabbing us each a package of Botan rice candy when we got to the register. The workers recognized him and cooed over the cute kids following him like ducklings. I thought it was absolutely magical. Even now, when I visit home and Dad asks me if I want to go to Boo Han or Uwajimaya with him in the morning I get so excited. Grocery store trips are one of the only things I’ll voluntarily wake up early for. Dad’s always been an efficient shopper, not liking to waste time meandering through every aisle, a difference from how I like to shop. So, maybe I don’t get to linger through the aisles looking at everything like I usually do on my own, but he still lets me hold his hand as we walk from the care, and suddenly I’m eight years old instead of twenty-one.
I get the same feeling standing in the kitchen with Mom these past couple of years. I talk with her, or at her, and watch as she goes through the motions of cooking or baking. My favorite time used to be when December rolled around and she would bake molasses spice cookies, rolling the thick balls of dough in turbinado sugar. I would stand next to her, back when I only reached her waist, and ask for a ball of dough, big brown eyes on display. Usually, she’d pass a small sugar-coated clump of dough to my brother, sister, and I before shooing us away so she could get the cookies in the oven. The house filled with the sweet and spicy smell of the cookies when she pulled them out. Oh, how I couldn’t wait to eat those cookies, a couple times quite literally. Once or twice, I hid around the corner and waited until Mom turned her back before snatching a hot cookie off the cooling rack and rushing back to my room to devour my treat in peace. Of course, my impatience was a double-edged sword as I burned my mouth each time, but you just couldn’t beat the satisfaction of eating my mom’s molasses spice cookies fresh from the oven. My sister does most of the cooking nowadays since Mom works longer hours than she did when the three of us were kids, so when I’m home I trail after Miranda in the kitchen, talking and laughing with her as I watch her cook.
It almost feels as if I’m straddling time, finding home in hyphens and slashes. As I get older, I realize how food allows us to carve out our own place in these vast spaces and becomes our last tether to the places and people we can no longer remember, but I believe they’re still there. Lingering in the echoes of our laughs and the stirring of our spoons.
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