Trading Fall Favorites
by Johanna Alexander, ETA ’20 Content warning: this is a recipe BLOG and as such it will read like one. Don’t like? Don’t read. #livelaughlove #suburbanMom-sona As you all might already know, Korean Starbucks BARELY carries The Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL). It’s there for like two weeks and gone before Halloween. To some this may be devastating, but to me, this crime is overshadowed by one much more heinous, almost sinister in nature: there is no apple cider! I worked on a farm last year so I was blessed with free cider every week during fall apple season. Blessed and also cursed, for as soon as we ripped August off our paper calendar, a certain withdrawal-like feeling crept into my body…What do you mean it’s September? The leaves are changing colors? Who gave them permission?? The queen has not yet sat upon her throne with spiced cider in her golden chalice!!!!!! Just as I was about to succumb to the cognitive dissonance of fall with no liquid indicator of the change of seasons, my host mom sat a glass of something oranger than orange juice down at the breakfast table. The second I took my first sip I felt the impact of the season’s first amber leaf hitting the ground. It was full of pumpkin flavor, a little sweet. Refreshing. A little tangy. 단호박 식혜. Sweet pumpkin rice drink. A beverage that, though lacking caffeine, could rival the reigning champ PSL for pumpkin drink of the season. I decided that I MUST learn how to make this pumpkin sikhye; in return, I would show my host mom how to make apple cider. First, I learned the ways of sikhye. My host mom, watchful eyes aflame with the embodied spirit of Gordon Ramsey himself, guided my hand in the measuring, chopping, pouring, stirring and straining of our nightly sikhye sessions. I was Hercules and she Chiron, meticulously preparing me to make a sikhye fit for the gods—lest her honored name be shamed by a mistake in my recount of her sacred recipe. Halfway through our sikye olympic training (we made a total of four batches), I discovered the magic of slushie-cold sikhye (freezing it in the kimchi fridge is the secret!). A refreshing ending to the hot days of summer and a foreshadow to the chilly fall days ahead. Next, was the apple cider. I didn’t realize how much seasonal weight rested on a 16 oz glass of muddled apples until I came to Korea this year and was unable to drink it at my leisure. As Joni Mitchel once said, “You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” If you have ever lived away from home, you will understand how tiny, seemingly insignificant details of your daily life –things that you’d never think twice about –suddenly become so remarkably consequential that you think you ought to repent for lack of proper exaltation of their name until now. Oh great Apple Cider, Goddess of Fall, your humble servant shall now proselytize in your blessed name. “Chilsung cider?” “Apple juice?” “Apple cider vinegar?” It proved to be quite the elusive beverage. We bought 15 apples for 5,000 won from the old man selling fruit by our house. What a steal! I then went about finding spices. “Spices?” my host mom asked. “We have red pepper powder here. Won’t that work?” My brain short circuited for a second before I realized the confusion about the word spice. This spice combination was new to my family. A lot of cinnamon and funny shaped cloves, allspice, and nutmeg that they said smelled just like black pepper. Perhaps more impressive than my family’s reaction upon tasting the finished product was their reaction to the smell of all the spices boiling in the pot. When the apple cider was all finished and bottled, they each tried a glass and agreed that it would be great when the weather got chillier or when they had a cold. I shared extra cider (and fall memories) with my Gumi friends, who in turn shared it with their friends, co-workers, and families. Though I was wary at first that no one would kneel with me in praise of the fall goddess, I heard through the whispers of Hermes’s messengers that the kids and office teachers were thoroughly convinced; “Now this is a drink we can get behind!” It seems we have reached a happy ending to the story of a girl and her mission to trade fall favorites. I have not only fulfilled my duty as a scribe to the ways of pumpkin sikhye and helping hand to its creator, but also successfully welcomed fall with my family and friends in Gumi through the warmth and flavors of spiced apple cider. However, a prophet’s work is never done. For you, my dear readers, for you I shall now share recipes for both pumpkin sikhye and apple cider. So, when fall is in full swing all my fellow Fulbrighters will be juiced up with the powers of both American apple cider and Korean pumpkin sikhye. Then, we will collectively be unstoppable. We’ll welcome the wind and the rain and the darkness of the fall season with mouthfuls of apple, pumpkin, and spice; with heartfuls of warmth, memories, and everything nice! Part 1: Korean Pumpkin Sikhye Makes about 8 liters which is a helluva lot of sikhye so either give it to friends, throw a party, drink it all yourself—pumpkin is good for digestion—or reduce the recipe. Total time: 6 hours Ingredients: 500 grams malted barley flour (엿질금 – In Korea it’s kind of chunky but in the USA you might only be able to find finely ground malted barley flour…good luck to us) 8 liters of water 2 bowls of cooked rice 1.5 steamed sweet pumpkins, skin removed 5 palm-sized pouches of dried ginger root About 600 grams of sugar Tools: Big mesh bag (like a cheese cloth) Big pot for the stove (찜통) Large bowl Immersion blender, food processor,
Cures For The Outside Looking In
by Katherine Seibert, ETA ’20 Much like any afternoon, my office mates and I took a stroll around our school after lunch. And, much like any afternoon, I was mostly quiet. At lunch, I had missed yet another conversation between my co-teacher and the woman sitting opposite to her. From the words I recognized, I guessed they were swapping plans about their summers. When I lost the thread of what the conversation was about, I had resigned myself to listening for words or phrases in Korean I did know. Being continually on the outskirts of a conversation I barely understand can be isolating, and this isolation can feel all-consuming. I cannot expect my co-teacher to stop and translate every conversation of which I stand on the edge. But still, it’s better to be in the conversation as opposed to missing the chance to be present at all. This day was no different. Despite the summer heat descending upon Korea, everyone at school seemed determined to make loops around the worn track until we were all sweaty. We walked in relative silence, with my coworkers acknowledging my occasional attempts to describe the weather or the school garden with patient smiles. We took a final loop around the school and stopped to chat with a woman who worked in administration. The conversation was the most animated of the afternoon – my co-teacher, who had mentioned how tired she was earlier that morning, suddenly became chatty. Hands resting protectively on their stomachs, they laughed so loudly I’m sure they could be heard across the school. I, however, was more lost than ever. It wasn’t until the woman from administration leaned to place a hand on my co-teacher’s stomach that I remembered I had just learned that my Fulbright co-teacher was pregnant. And, I realized, with her baby bump showing in her sundress, so was the woman we spoke to. Putting this together, I tried to tune back into the conversation. I did my best to keep up – yet there’s been no chapter in a beginner’s Korean textbook on “making office small talk about being pregnant” so my vocabulary was limited to catching due dates and hearing basic words like “아프다” (hurt). What’s wonderful is that body language is universal, and womens’ stories of children and motherhood are not that different from country to country. Most of the Korean language evaded me in this conversation, but the context and the body language – women swapping the questions of – how’s your stomach? Are you eating okay? Does your back hurt? How far along are you? Six months? What date are you due? Oh, only one day before me! – and, the friendly teasing of – you’re not showing at all! Look at how skinny you are! – were all the same. Their hand gestures, waving in the air, mimicking a slim waist, were universal. Very soon there was a cluster of other teachers, some older and younger women, chuckling and talking about how much they showed during their own pregnancies, how much their backs hurt, whether their first pregnancy was worse than the second. Older women shook their heads, smiling, as the younger expectant mothers supported their own aching backs. We were surrounded by communal joy, spurred by shared experiences. How lovely community is in any language, and how grateful I was to stand on the outside looking in and see the joy. Afterwards, I asked my co-teacher to give me a rundown of the conversation. I was pleasantly surprised that most of my assumptions were correct, and she helped to fill in the gaps of what I missed – mainly morning sickness remedies from the older women passed on from generation to generation. After sharing my own version of the conversation, my co-teacher seemed surprised at first that I understood, and then shrugged. These conversations happen every day, all over the world, she said. Not just here. It was a brief and welcome chance for me to feel connected to the people around me. On that after-lunch walk, the gap between my life and theirs didn’t seem that large. [Featured Photo by Christa Hoskins]
From a Great Distance: Notes on Identity and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings
by Sarah Berg, Fulbright Alumna Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020) is a collection of personal essays that interrogate the contradictions inherent in the very idea of Asian American identity. Simultaneously acerbic and thoughtful, the essays in Minor Feelings revisit periods of Hong’s life upon which a multiplicity of theses about Asian American existence are scaffolded with a stability that might be surprising if Hong didn’t take such care in illustrating each supporting point with bold, honest prose. For this Asian American, these essays are a revelation. Hong and I have our differences (while we are both Korean American, I am 20 years younger and half white), but the way her topics resonated with me was uncanny—somehow, she directly referenced things that I knew. Reading the essays, I learned that, like me, Hong studied writing and art at a university in Ohio, navigated the deterioration of friendship through mental illness, and is drawn to the writers and artists Hito Steryl, Ocean Vuong, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Jos Charles, and most importantly to both of us, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Obviously, these interests are not exclusively mine, but to read a book that builds itself around a base of knowledge that I already had was wholly new. Minor Feelings’ speculative underpinning revealed itself to me thusly, humming with what-ifs—what if the literary canon was not solely composed by and about white men, what if our art bore the merit it deserves, what if people’s experiences are not in fact universal, but inextricable from the racial identities we inhabit? It made me feel like an intelligent and credible reader, banishing the wariness that can accompany reading an identity text when you are of the identity in question—that anxious second self peering over your shoulder, asking nervously, “How will this deny your own ideas of yourself? Will you be okay with it?” It is instinctual to fear these questions, but with “an unreliable narrator, hypervigilant to the point of being paranoid” like Hong, Minor Feelings allows readers to resist the idea that a book must be an echo chamber of affirmation or its author an infallible source, a pressure that often falls upon writers of color (I would run out of fingers counting the times all heads turned expectantly toward me when a question nebulously about Korea would arise in my college classes). Some of my opinions differ from those expressed by Hong in the text. I, for example, bristled at her generalizing statements about Korean women being “so self-conscious about the size of their faces that they will go under the knife to shave their jawlines down,” but found that her commitment to feelings—as minor or as major as we find them to be—was a fitting driving force for such a reckoning. Direct, uncertain, messy, and purposeful, Hong’s words grant complexity to readers like me who have been led to believe that they must define themselves by a certain singular “we.” But what about readers not like me? As I turned the pages of Minor Feelings, I found myself repeatedly wishing that it had been taught in all my college classes, been made required reading for white classmates who took Asian/Asian American studies courses only to gain so-called “Global Initiatives” credits or learn how to do business with China. I thought not only about these classmates, but about my white friends, too. As genuinely well-intentioned as they are, it has always been the white people I love whose genuine innocence (ignorance) has done the most harm. In the essay titled “White Innocence,” Hong writes, “Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality.” Reading Minor Feelings, I found myself preemptively stifling my urge to recommend it to my white friends, knowing that somehow, I would end up having to explain such personal truths to them over and over again. Something my white friends love is “representation,” an all-too-well-known literary buzzword that once may have oh-so-innocently referred to the deliberate media portrayal of certain groups or experiences but has since become disappointingly derivative. It’s something that my younger self wrung out books, movies, and music in an attempt to find before realizing that it exists only at the intersection of the white gaze and capitalist marketability. Hong quotes poet Jos Charles in saying, “It is horrible to be tangible inside capital,” which succinctly describes the sickly disappointment I realized young me was experiencing. Even in the hands of the most well-intentioned creators, I found Asian American stories, in all their scarcity, to be devastatingly whitewashed. Why would I want to view myself as white people view me? It’s difficult to describe the dissonance that rings within my head when I see, for example, Vietnamese Lana Condor play half-white, half-Korean Lara Jean in To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before [1]. It’s an adorable, well-acted movie adapted from a book by a Korean American writer, but when white friends gush about how it will make me feel seen, not even its plethora of strategically placed yogurt drinks can keep me from feeling that I’m really just being looked at, briefly and perhaps from a great distance. Are an “Asian” [2] face and scattering of palatable cultural symbols all that are needed to conjure my image? If we want to free representation from its neoliberal bounds, we must commit to complexity, which Minor Feelings does. Hong thwarts the smug self-awareness that grants representation its invisible, performative capital R, resisting the commodification of the “Asian American experience” as purposefully and fearlessly as she lays bare her observations of it. Dissonance is a steady presence in my life, but I encountered a new kind when I moved to Korea in 2019. Six months before the start of the pandemic, my face assumed a label