The weekend of Week Seven (February 19th), my friend & roommate Anahí helped coax me out of my depressive episode by proposing the two of us take the day together and go up to Federal Way to the big H Mart, a beloved Korean grocery store that my dad would take me on trips to back in Portland. It was an incredibly healing trip, filled with a softness and love I had been longing for. We first stopped at her mother’s house–the same house I rented a room from over the summer. Anahí’s mother, Hilda, is a beautiful woman who told me that if her daughter’s friends let her, she’ll treat them as her own. I was lucky enough to feel that love this past summer, and it was that love that greeted me when I walked through the front door. We enjoyed a delicious dinner, cooked by Anahí’s mother and sister, filled with lots of laughter and a warm atmosphere. The homecooked meal was healing, as well as the company. It felt good to be enveloped in that familial love I’d so been craving while depressed.
Feeling full and lethargic, Anahí and I left her mom’s to make our way to H Mart. When we arrived, night was falling, but the bright lights of the store’s signage let us know they had yet to close.
Walking through the aisles was a familiar journey of color and scents; a true assault on the senses in the best possible way. A distinctly fishy smell lingered in most rows, leading you straight to the in-store fish market where you can see various seafood live in their tanks. The crabs were vivacious, scuttling around each other, and the fish meandered their way back and forth inside their tanks. It transported me back to childhood for a moment, a vision of my father ghosting his way across my eyesight as I continued past the displays. What a funny feeling, to have one foot in the present and one in the past.
I felt cradled, almost, walking by the refrigerated banchan (side dishes) and hot food items. It’s always the most Korean food I’ve ever seen in one place; a word that comes to mind is bountiful. What a beautiful thing to find in the midst of White America, the PNW. How lucky I am to live in a time and place where I have access to this bounty. We never ate Korean food in excess throughout my childhood, there were only so many recipes Dad could remember, but we did have our go-to dishes in rotation. Kimchi jjigae being the most prominent Korean dish of my younger years, with kimchi fried rice following shortly after. These foods were something special, a once-in-a-while treat while still cooked often enough to retain their familiarity. Walking through H Mart, with its restaurants, deli, and shelves of pre-made food, I find myself vibrating in excitement at the sheer amount of opportunity to taste that is laid out before me. Most dishes I can’t translate myself, scouring for the English on the package, but I am eager to try it all. I am once again a glutton in the aisles of H Mart, a reprieve from my most recent depression-induced resistance to food.
Old, familiar brands transport me back home for the minutes I linger in front of them. My lips move silently behind my mask, soundlessly trying to sound out the Hangul I can recognize. An old trick I used to play with myself when I was in high school and had just begun endeavoring to learn Korean on my own. Go-chu-jang was whispered into the near-empty aisle, Anahí just behind me.
The rows of red and gold always make me think of my mother and sister first. We only ever buy the brand of gochujang with the gold top since they don’t use wheat, my mom and sister’s gluten intolerance the reason behind our choice of brand. I suppose each container becomes a little bit of home for me each time I pick it up from the shelf, pay for it at the cash register, and place it in my own refrigerator.
H Mart has become something of a landing pad for me as I’ve grown and branched out into adulthood, defining who I was for myself. And defining what my identity meant to me. In my corner of this vast Korean-American diaspora, I have often felt untethered; transient. My identity as a mixed Korean-American had left me on the outskirts of so many groups, with my Grandma Myo Jin dead before my siblings and I were born, it felt like I had no claim to ‘Korean.’ Me, a mixed daughter with a mixed father. Who did I belong to? Who was calling me home? Korean grocery stores, while a place of wonder in my childhood, used to be a place where I needed to prove myself; prove that I belonged there. I wanted people to see that I was Korean, too, but then a voice in my head started asking me, Why? What do you have to prove to these strangers? The voice sounded a lot like my dad. So, I stopped trying to force my way out of the ambiguity my features bestowed upon me, and instead focused on connecting with Korean food because I wanted to, not out of some need to prove myself to a crowd of people who may never accept me.
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