Who knew they were so great?!

Last Tuesday we hosted an after-party for our dear friend Thorina and her new book, The Heartbreak Diet. She's an illustrator turned graphic novelist and we couldn't be more proud of her beautiful, easy to read but intense new book. Like Persepolis, the book is a fast-read, intense but immediately accessible - the perfect summer read. In any case, we had the fortune of meeting several of her illustrator friends, most of whom are here in Brooklyn, and it was party kismet - everyone was so down-to-earth, smart and engaging with none of that artist weirdness that can happen at gallery events or other such related parties.

James Yang besides being known as Illustrator Extraordinaire is the first KA I've met from Oklahoma. (I wouldn't have known having had assessed him as Chinese in my mind - am I the only oddball that does that? categorize Asians?) And give him time enough, that accent does slip out... We're waiting for our very own copy of his new book as I write...

And lastly and totally unrelated except that she is an author, I just finished The Liar's Club for the second time, and even though it's been a few days I can't get her voice out of my head. If anyone hasn't read this amazing memoir you can get cheap copies on half.com - it's one of those books you can't put down. I was trying to read it again without getting sucked in (part of my casual ongoing discussion with my friend, who just happens to be the best writing teacher in all of New York, about the blurring distinctions between non-fiction and fiction) but it got me. Again.

From the moment my first son was born, I was thrown into a heightened sense of physicality; of disbelief of what my body could and went through; of the impossible idea that a whole new person living in my body and then passing from it into the world; and of a child who so obviously was mine and my husband's.

Everything about him seemed highlighted, and every inch of him was known, those early emergencies of diaper rash, eczema, watery stools were the million tiny steps to which we came to know him as a whole, and from this emerged a sheer exhileration with his physical beauty and perfection, an almost drunkenness at times in beholding him.

I'd never experienced this before.

And in an instant I understood for the first time all those naked baby fountains squirting water from their penises, all that Greek admiration for the naked male form because I felt the same exact way about my son. I understood for the first time why Korean parents used to take giddy photos of their newborns and their penises before passing them around to all the family to experience firsthand and why they would string the household in dried peppers, over and over and this was apart I believe from the imbedded notions of patriarchy and preference from males. I really believe somewhere in all that happiness - apart from the relief of having a male heir and all that - there was a glorious kind of celebration of the perfection of a child.

And while I don't think we need to resurrect the pepper party ritual (something that seemed to disappear instantly with our generation) I do wish we had some modern equivalent to take it's place. I think that culture gives us a specific way to express universal things,and with assimilation yet another profound thing becomes relegated to the private individual sphere.

Except the "Yale" part.

Photographer Hee Jin Kang's one of those one to watch types and her documentary work, esp the collection "Sandy's deli" makes me uncomfortable it is so close to home.

There are a few words we use in our family that my siblings and I cannot seem to find used in any other Korean family. It's weird because for us it was as if we grew up to discover "bop" didn't mean really "rice" or "ppo-ppo" didn't mean "kiss." My theory is that these are regional North Korean words because my grandparents were from the northernmost part of Korea, just south of the Chinese border...

My whole maternal side family says "jji-jji" for "dirty" - not "ji-ji" with the soft "j" sound but double consonant, hard "jj" which to our horror as adults, we learned is actually the common slang term for "boobs". My mom swears it is a normal word, "It mean REALLY dirty. Emphasize. You know, for the kids."

We also used the word "jjoy" for "breasts". Again, hard double consonant "j". When the Joy dish soap commercials first came out, my cousins and I would collapse into a fit of giggles at the refrain, "Just let your Joy show! In the things you do! Just let your Joy show!" ( We also eventually made a dance routine to this song that involved, unfortunately, flashing our chests whenever the word came up while belting out the chorus, a moment only eclipsed by the time we thought it would be cool to give our haraboji a nickname so for one whole Christmas day we ran around screaming "Hey Boji, we love you Boji!" )

("Boji" is the Korean word for "vagina".)

(The adults apparently were too mortified to correct us, as evidenced by the memory of my grandfather's face from that day - a kind of grimace when we thought it was so fun.)

Now besides the fact that our family seems to talk about breasts an awful lot, why would we be the only Korean family to use these words?

Finally made it to the Korean market in Jackson Heights and came home with these beauties. This time of year makes me long for the garden I had in LA and I just learned these melons are easy to grow at home...

And I am sporting some serious Lena Horne. It turns out my #2 tans even faster than I do so if you happen to see a 16 month old toddling around Brooklyn with the brownest little limbs you've ever seen on a half-Asian, please don't judge me - I've gone through five bottles of sunscreen in eight days and apparently with us, you have to sunscreen our genes (My husband and #1 though apparently have yang-ban genes, they have a nice golden glow but nothing that shouts out eight days of weak ozone layers.)

Hope everyone is having a good start to their summers!

... sleep Korean style (co-sleep) with your kids?
... bathe with them?
...deh mi-rroh? the kids?
...oboo-bah?
...ear pick them?

I need to know.

Recently, a Korean-American friend of my husband’s found my blog and declared she hadn’t realized how Korean I was. The comment gave me pause for a number of reasons but first of all because it was ironic – I’d started this blog as a place to wool gather about things I love about Korean culture but really it was also a way to define things as well. Anyone who knows me would answer in kind, “She’s not Korean Korean, she married white-latino and doesn’t hang out with Koreans.” Because, you know, Korean Koreans pretty much only hang out with other Koreans especially if they are a part of a church and while they might socialize with their work or school buddies they don’t date or have intimate relationships with non-Koreans.”

It’s an odd divide when I think about it, and kind of huge really. Because for some reason, there are very few who mix as easily in both cultures and two of those few are my sister and brother. I used to think it was a generational thing, that 1.5’ers being the first to truly assimilate either became Americanized or they clung together and formed their own identity, which we now call Korean-American. And even within those who clung together there were degrees, mostly determined by how fresh off the boat they were. Literally. And all of this came about because the seventies and eighties were not so much kind to the minority folk, it was not cool to be ethnic even if affirmative action was big. It really took the late nineties for people to internalize the great multi-cult message and I remember my amazement still at watching my brother and sister date across the ethnic lines at the very same high school where a popular boy told me that I wasn’t really Korean but very pretty. To my own shame I took this as the compliment it was meant to be – at that time I was the second Korean/ethnic girl ever to be popular, a path trail blazed by the wondrous junior Juyoung (she used her Korean name even!) who dated the most popular senior in high school, well on my way to finding out that the path to cool was even more treacherous than korean.

So what is this invisible wall exactly? Why can’t Korean Koreans mix as intimately with non-Koreans and why don’t KA girls like me feel as comfortable in the KA world?

Here is our favorite Korean music book for kids - it's sweetly illustrated, easy to understand and has a great selection of traditional and new songs for kids. I got this at Koryo Books in Koreatown and they can probably special order it for anyone interested say in Kansas City (Hi Grace!) or elsewhere... Though it sounds like there must be a Korean bookstore nearby in a city that size.

Otherwise, I can't seem to find it online. It's published by Samsung and when I went to their website I panicked at all that flashing Korean type and had to click away. No luck on any of the usual book ordering sites, probably because the whole thing is in Korean.

Here's the ISBN just in case, (there are two because of the CD): ISBN 89-02560-1 and ISBN 89-15-02558-X

And Unha? No website for our music group but please feel free to email me if you want do discuss. Our group is purposely homegrown, just a bunch of parents at someone's home and a great local music teacher who comes with her box of instruments.

One interesting thing about our Korean music group is that all the kids except one are bi-racial. This means one of the parents, usually the mom, married caucasian or in my case Latino-Irish but pretty much looks caucasian, and an early irony a few of us chuckled over was how much we'd spent our youth breaking from Korean tradition and how now as parents we were trying to find a way back.

I've had the great opportunity to get to know some of the parents better outside the group and inevitably much of our discussion centers around what the group brings up for us - what our families were like, how we rebelled as kids, how much we actually understood of Korean language... my friend who started the group dubbed me as the most Korean of the group which shows you how low the bar is for us and just how complicated our relationships were with our identities. Nothing new of course we're classic 1.5'ers but what is new is that we are now parents and are suddenly conscious of the environment we want/need/are creating for our kids.

Social anthropologists have a classic model of assimilation for immigrants and as 1.5'ers we can probably find ourselves uneasily somewhere well past the first step of having lost our language and the fourth step of only the food from our culture remaining. I imagine if our kids marry Caucasian, it will not be long before their Korean heritage is completely buried and the thought makes me sad despite having no real regrets with the decisions I've made to get here. How much longer before we are like the west coast Japanese, many of them now fourth and fifth generation, their own histories not so much connected to thousands of years as a culture but newly forged, in decades really, and as American as anyone else.

Except that we are the new Americans. And that is my point really. I can mourn the loss of tradition (what I'm really mourning is my own childhood probably, my own eventual demise) but have it consciously inform the choices I make now.

It's the thing I love about Brooklyn - that most of us have chosen to be here and that we have self-consciously created our lives. I cannot imagine a group of people more aware of the choices they make, with an even greater awareness of how other folks live including the way we were brought up themselves. This of course is our own worst fault as well, often getting in the way of being able to relax or relate simply because we are in the same space but then I look at my kids- my eldest at three has memorized all the Korean songs phonetically and can just as easily switch to Spanish lullabies, and my younger son, who is still discovering food, can be coaxed out of a tantrum for the moment with some dried squid or seaweed- and I can't imagine them being allowed to be themselves in this way, so freely, anywhere, or anytime else. (okay except parts of the west coast, and vancouver maybe)

Little about it is easy of course, and I don't want to gloss over the many tensions that still exist, will always probably exist for anyone bi-cultured. ( I am still shocked when we go to Europe, which has always symbolized post-modernity and progressive lifestyles for me, and we are confronted regularly by folks who need to discuss our cross racial marriage, and not just discuss in general but discuss actually whether it's right or good and then the inevitable shrug, "But that's Americans - they marry anyone over there.") But for now, here in Brooklyn, we've managed to do one thing right.

"Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."

- Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Custom-House"

(From the forward to Jhumpa Lahiri's new book)

(A sticky note on a piece of junk mail mom forwarded to me about an outfit I wore months prior)

gochujang + sugar melted in a bit of hot water = instant banchan sauce!

Basically you can use this on almost any green vegetable and turn it into banchan: steamed broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussel sprouts, spinach.. not to mention a veggie filled bibim- naengmyun!

Maybe everyone already knows this but it didn't hit me until I discovered this baby swiss chard banchan at a korean restaurant, it was simply blanched and then covered in this sauce. The slightly bitter leafiness of the chard balanced nicely with the spicy sweet sauce and I couldn't stop eating it:

(and many apologies for the headache inducing iphone photo - obviously I was too hungry while taking this one!)

We have a Korean music group for tots here in Brooklyn and had our first dinner together at our place, a bibimbop party where everyone brought one of the sides. It was great fun and something about the smells of bulgogi (that was my offering) sauteeing while little Korean feet ran about made me feel as though another unnamed something has come full circle in my life.

Curious about New York (and New Jersey) Koreans? This is a well-written and easy read about a KA gal in New York trying to figure out her love life, her relationship with her father, and what she should be doing as a career.

I recently read a new release called The Commoner by Jonathan Burnham Schwartz. It was a quick read, in two late night sittings, the kind that kept me up when I really should have been sleeping so I wouldn't be grumpy and snappish all the next day. But I get starved for literature and I'd heard about the book on a random radio station where the author was being interviewed. It's a fictionalized account of the first non-royal Japanese girl to marry into the Imperial family of Japan, Empress Michiko.

I was especially drawn to the rare opportunity to imagine life inside those palace walls where the Emperor until Japan's defeat by the Americans in WWII was considered a god. Not 'as' a god, but actually a god whom you could not look at directly like the sun. When the Americans defeated Japan, they forced the emperor to announce over the radio his humanity, and published widely photos of the Japanese emperor in everyday clothes while standing next to the much taller (therefore superior) American general. It was also known that the Imperial family spoke an archaic form of royal Japanese, such that if left on the streets, the prince would not know the names of some ordinary objects. Intriguing, no?

But I bet if you took a moment you could guess what the book would be about ultimately, especially if you knew the author was a white American guy (who'd spent a good number of years in Japan in his youth)... It'd be about a woman who loses herself, to the point of near destruction, because of a culture that valued the good of the group (in this case, Japan) over the individual.

The novel in general had technical issues, the rhythm/pacing/narrative believability – all solidly average – but the sticking point for me was the almost foregone conclusion that a woman in Japanese culture would be destroyed by putting the needs of a group before her own. Very Western, very individualistic point of view.

And it reminds me of the time when I discovered the truly great Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-Soo (the first real contemporary Korean auteur in my opinion) in a New York Film Festival screening of Woman is the Future of Man. During the Q + A afterward, a very angry white woman stood up shaking while asking Mr. Hong whether a feminist revolution was not long overdue. She asked this because this like most of his films explored sexuality in contemporary Korean society without apologizing for it — including a scene where a woman is raped by her former boyfriend and her current boyfriend has sex with her to 'clean' her. Excruciating subject matter to present without judgment but that's what the filmmaker does. And it leaves the viewer with an unflinching look at Korean relationships, the dynamics,and the nature of it's attraction.

Which finally brings me to my point: While I agree with most everything that can go wrong with denying oneself for the sake of the group, westerners have never really learned what Asians know — that there is also great pleasure and abundance in living one's life for the good of the group. Korean mothers are especially gifted at this because even in what should be the most oppressive Confucian society like ours, it is mostly driven I believe, by its mothers. Mothers who I swear love better than all other mothers, because it is boundless (and therefore crazy-making in many cases) and yes, it is selfless. It is, or can be, much like the Buddhist way of finding oneself by losing oneself, or like the Christian understanding of dying to oneself to save yourself.

Westerners have a hard time with this for obvious reasons, and it is at the heart of what ails our society I believe, why families fall apart so easily, why marriage is devalued, why women are so much at war with themselves and their men so often lost. And not to say Koreans or Asian cultures don't experience these things as well but they are experienced differently, and to a lesser degree.

In the movie there is another stunning one minute scene where out of nowhere, almost incidentally, the main character goes to a play. We see the audience then the stage where a mother starves trying to keep her son fed during war times, and all we hear is a piercing wail: "Ommmmaaa!" And in that minute we understand almost everything Koreans feel about their mothers and what Korean mothers do for their children. That is, they give away everything, and so become everything. And that is what should have been the starting point of Mr. Burnham's book.

Gabriel, Dol, March 1st, 2008

mixes nicely with:

soft brown rice
pressed barley
wheat bulghur
thai royal purple sticky wild rices (small handful)
american wild rice (small handful)

throw a handful in your rice cooker and voila, whole grain meals!

My Mom is in Korea right now, visiting my brother in Seoul. Every time she goes, it reminds me of an earlier trip years ago when she hadn't been back since emigrating in 1973, right after I was born. Our phone call on her return:

Me: Omma! Welcome back! How was it?

Mom: (pause) You know what? Too many Korean people.

Me: Um, huh?

Mom: Yeah. Too many Korean people everywhere. I miss United State. So when I tire look at all the Korean people I close my eye and pretend they are the black people.

Me: HUH?

Mom: Yeah. On the bus. I close eyes.

Me: (laughing of course) But did you have fun?!

Mom: Oh yeah. Korea is amazing. Everybody rich!

Another two weeks probably just went by.

I've been trapped in the two-kid-time-suck without any of the fun that happens with magical wardrobes or wrinkles in time though we did manage to have a dol for my #2 this past weekend in Philadelphia with my family. Photo to come. More postings to come soon. Promise.

Meanwhile check out my cousin's blog here. She is a very talented artist with an amazing graphic novel in the works, the first Korean-American graphic novel ever. Or so I say. She's also obsessed with Korean related things and I particularly love the old archival photos of Korean-Americans she digs up at the LA library like this one:

And for those mom readers out there I'd welcome any time management advice you have!

Out of the twelve or so Korean cookbooks I've collected over the years my favorite so far has been Everyday Korean Cooking. When it was in print it was $12 but now the cheapest copy I could find was $50! In any case, I love that it is homemade looking, with a basic wire binder that they'll do for you at Kinko's and a font that reminds me of the early days when you had about two choices on your home computer.

I learned most of my basic dishes from this book and as I got used to making them I'd add ingredients and techniques from other cookbooks. (I find the nationalism and OCD aspects of Koreans come out when writing cookbooks because the recipes can get very long with almost arcane techniques and discussion such as one recipe which mourned the use of metal knives to cut vegetables when historically it was considered a kind of profanity, you ought to tear vegetables by hand.)

Here is a simple recipe for shigumchi, kongnamul, or soochoo namul:

1 bunch of spinach/ 1 bag of sprouts (pre-washed spinach will save you heartache)
3-4 diced scallions
2-3 minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon sugar
salt, pepper
soy sauce
sesame oil
sesame seeds (not essential but close)
1 teaspoon vinegar (again, not essential especially if you want to keep the banchan around for longer than two days, the vinegar quickly overripens the vegetables)

Directions:
1. Boil water in a medium sized pot.
2. When boiling, lower heat to high simmer, then blanch batches of vegetables for at least 20 seconds until wilted. (Blanching=dipping in hot water then removing) Vegetables should wilt but be slightly crunchy.
3. Drain and squeeze blanched vegetables. (Your armful of spinach will now fit in your hand)
4. Throw in garlic, scallion, and seeds (sesame seeds can be toasted) until it looks good to your eye. Taste.
5. Pour a bit of sesame oil in your hand and rub into vegetables. Taste.
6. Pour a bit of soy sauce in your hand and do the same.
7. Add sugar.
8. Add vinegar.

Mix and serve chilled if desired.

A spot of sunshine on a rainy day:

28 E. 18th, betw. Broadway and Park Ave. South.

...in my house.

One shrinks tupperware tops.

Another stops up the sprayer on my hairspray bottle. (I especially hate it when he stops up only part of the sprayer - that one useless stream of hairspray does nothing.)

A third puts just one tiny grease spot on the chest part of my favorite shirts.

They are driving me nuts.

Part of my narrative legacy as a 1.5 Korean-American is the burden of my parents' roles as Koreans in the inner-city. Their generation, which for me, includes six aunts, one uncle and a set of grandparents on my maternal side share a similar mindset regarding black Americans despite the fact that only my parents were the typical inner-city grocers.

We lived in Philadelphia. A city that is %12 black and one whose Korea town was and is a mean little strip of busy 5th street set squarely in a poor barely working class neighborhood. Trash fly around in the street in front of rowhouses that look more propped up than standing and yet Korean immigrants came and built their restaurants (the best jja-jjang mein is found here for less than $5), beauty salons and cell phone shops right next to beauty discount stores and fish and chicken fry houses with milky thick bulletproof windows.

Why?

Because Koreans of this generation are by and large thrifty. Cheap. Forever looking for a deal. And they would never spend their hard-earned money on something as valueless as real estate, especially rented real estate, when their point is to make money, in cash. And because Korean customers have the same understanding they look straight past appearances and think only of what they're going to order to eat, or how their hair should be done and they'll go just as easily from a burnt out city strip mall restaurant to church to their usually much nicer homes in the suburbs. No problem.

But there's another reason Korean immigrants felt at ease in the inner city. More than cheap real estate they felt at ease with poor black people because even before they moved to the States from Korea, they came with an understanding that they were superior in status to black people and therefore, superior. Period. (A problem with Confucian ideology in general is great at organizing society and relationships, bad at valuing human life.) Then throw into the mix some crazy culture shock, shame issues about being seen as shopkeepers with poor English, and a profound sense of dislocation, and a fair number of our parents could be found following their black customers around the store and muttering to each other disparaging comments about black people in general. No stranger to violence, many owned guns and guard dogs.

Alot of these issues were obviously related to the same problems of violence, crime and poverty that plague the inner city. Our parents stumbled into the mess almost randomly but then became players in their own right. Meanwhile most of us kids reaped the rewards, probably somewhere in the suburbs with nice homes, cars and schooling — we were the point after all — but few of us were in the dark about where we got our money. Weekends and after school days spent at the store collecting food stamps and coins, fending off racist slurs, drunks and gangsters while overcompensating with politeness toward our good customers- the single moms, the grandmothers, the church ladies and worker men. We were able to live in two profoundly opposite cultures daily without much thought to it at all. It was just the way it was.

Now as an adult, I think of this part of our history, and wonder about a narrative for it all. It's already come and gone for the most part, our parents by and large succeeded and we have moved on from the inner-city shops to everything from white collar professions to wandering artists (much to their dismay). We aren't the model minority for nothing. And yet this is our past. Our very recent past. And we have witnessed things that they don't talk about it in the ongoing white-black discourse about race relations and the inner-city. We know things about entrenched cultural values, whether good or bad, and we know most of all how much we owe a countless number of poor black Americans whose food stamps and dollars paid for our rice, our church picnics, and college educations. Those same dollars are helping many of us still.

As a critical part of our legacy, and one many 1.5 KA's still struggle with (racism is after all inherited), I see how many of us now are trying to find their places as citizens, as adults in our chosen society and country. And all this comes to mind when I saw and heard thisBarack Obama's speech to a Christian social action group called the Sojourners. He was speaking on christianity and religion as it related to politics. His message was so simple and yet profound it almost knocked me off my feet and made me realize how jaded I had really become. And how much I could be doing in the world for good. And how much my past ties me to the desperate needs in the world right now. And in a sudden moment of clarity, I see that this is how my past becomes the future, it's how I understand it in order to live right now.

Happy Valentine's Day.

A lovely photographer based in Seoul. I'm drawn especially to the humor in her work and the immediate sense of accessibility. My husband met her in Santa Fe last year and learned she'd been a 'regular' housewife before pursuing photography. When asked if her husband appreciated her career she answered with a grin, "He change mind when I make money." Koreans are if anything a practical people...

A link to her online portfolio is here.

I get in these eating moods where all I seem to do is look for kimchee substitutions, especially when I don't have any at home. Everything gets covered in some kind of hot sauce: falafels, tacos, vietnamese pork chops, scrambled eggs... and the best is of course when that hot sauce is also vinegary like salsa, or vietnamese sriracha sauce which is already vinegary but WITH the little pickled carrots and daikon can almost make you forget you were really needing some kimchee. I know every Korean has eaten his share of ramen with pickles so apparently that extra salt-vinegar-pickle crunch on top of salty savory broth can also hit the spot.

But what is it exactly about kimchee that so defines our cuisine? Why do we have to have it, crave it, and so, are cursed by it?

I read once in some online dissertation that Korean food had six flavors unlike other cuisines which normally have five. Salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter and pungent. This writer included kimchee as pungent before spicy which of course it is also. In any case, he didn't really address why or what it meant, just that acquiring this sixth flavor was difficult but transformative once you got it.

My take on this is from a cook's perspective.

Cooking is a primal kind of alchemy. You hunt, you gather, and add fire to transform flesh and field into flavor, into nutrition, and render something that was once out there either as blood and muscle or soil and sun, into an intimate experience which you take into yourself. (This is why food and sex in my opinion go hand in hand and why smoking, the element of fire, is also a natural factor. But I digress.)

At the core of this alchemy is the idea of change, of transformation and, now bear with me, the experience of eating Korean food is predicated on this idea. Where western food is meant to be experienced finally and separately - such as the lovely steak with it's separate side dishes none of which are meant per se to be eaten in the same bite. Korean food is all about shifting flavor and hence, shifting experience. You start with a clean palate, a base of pure white carbohydrate and go through a wonderful choreography of choosing banchan, and no two bites are the same.

Now enter kimchee.

That mouthful of warm sticky rice plus beef and bit of shigumchi (spinach) you're chewing and enjoying, chewing and swallowing then bam! in comes a fireball of salt/sweet/fiery crunch and - a sudden crescendo - the rice, beef and spinach are again transformed. How complicated is that?

And as if it weren't enough to have all this, Koreans add still more to the table — the elements of energy which changes the food even more and right before your eyes. I'm talking about the stew that arrives boiling, or the bibimbop that crackles in it's stone bowl, the cold soups with chunks of ice floating among the cucumber and pear.

Which is why those who do not get Korean food are so hard to watch. They sit at the feast, picking singly at a strand of bean sprout before washing it down with water, or dig into their meal of white rice and bulgogi without even a glance at the symphony around them. And forget kimchee, the smell alone offendeth.

The musical element to eating I think is no accident. For every banchan you add to the table a whole new note is added, and the orchestration of your meal becomes that much more enriched. But the point is kimchee, that final beat which brings it all home. It marries the flavors and instead of ending your mouthful of experience in a quiet fade, it brings it up and loud. It's the punctuation to our score, the last beat in each measure without which the experience is chaotic and unorganized, lacking structure and meaning, a string of notes that sound okay but has no beat.

In her book Things Korean, O-Young Lee writes about a traditional measuring cup called the kobong. Used to measure grain, especially rice which was a main form of currency for much of Korean history, she writes:

Kobong is a concept which has no one-word equivalent in other languages... It means heaping the measuring cup till it overflows, and even then some.

... To provide a some idea of how high it is heaped, a dishonest measure in Korea is one where the grain is heaped to overflowing only twice, not three or four times. If it is not absolutely spilling over, that is being pretty stingy. p.14

In other words, the kobong was not a measure of scientific accuracy, but of inaccuracy. And it's importance was not so much the grain itself but what it meant relationally.

I love this because Koreans aren't anything if not relationship oriented. And I love that once, in our highly ordered Confucian culture, even the smallest objects had a place and it's purpose too was relational.

On the flip side, I think this is what was especially hard for Korean immigrants to the US. To come from the highly ordered to the un-ordered, and because meaning itself was found in the order, for many, meaning itself was destroyed.

I am thinking of someone, of course, as I write this. An uncle here, another there but in general of all the Korean men who moved here and found themselves as grocers and dry cleaners and janitors despite their educations and degrees, and slowly lost themselves to their invisible places as non-Americans. For them, I wish kobong.

Now maybe it's because my mom saves every piece of plastic take-out container and food jar, or always cleans her plate (and yours) and still manages to be about 95 pounds of trim, South Korean churchlady but I love recipes that use every bit of it's ingredients. Like Kori Tang.

Now for those of you who have yet to get over the TAIL portion of oxtail please know it is BEEF, tastes just like beef but manages to be both lean and tender at the same time. It is a delicacy because it is a small portion compared to other cuts, and there's something about the ample bits of beef wrapped snugly around a big marrow-filled bone that give it an essence of beef flavor. In a subtle but pure way versus the in-your-face big flavor of steaks and grilling meats.

This soup is full of protein, calcium and iron in addition to all the vegetable goodness you can add in. (Turnip is traditional, it absorbs the beef broth perfectly while marrying it to a just a hint of turnip flavor. The kids hardly notice it and it will also mash well into rice for the most finicky of eaters!)

Ingredients:
Oxtail (found in the beef section of your grocery store)
Water
5-8 garlic cloves
1-2 onions
Med. Korean betchoo or 2-3 American turnips
Salt and Pepper to taste
Scallion for garnish

The Recipe:
For a full stock pot, use about seven or as many pieces of oxtail as will fit comfortable on the bottom. (For 2/3 of a stock pot of soup, use about five big pieces.)

Fill with water as discussed above.

Add 5-8 garlic cloves, 1-2 sliced onions.

Bring to boil, then simmer on the lowest simmer setting for at least an hour.

Remove oxtail and when cool, nudge off the meat and add back to the soup. (My mom always set aside some of the meat and would urge us kids into the kitchen to eat it while it was still hot. Sprinkled with salt and sometimes soy sauce, the meat would disappear in minutes!)

Add peeled and cubed betchoo (turnip).

Salt and pepper liberally to taste.

Return to simmer for about twenty minutes or however soft you like your turnip.

Eat as much as you want or remove as much as you want for eating before the next step.

...Add bones (probably without the small knob bits that fall off each oxtail piece) back to the soup and simmer again for about two or so hours until the bones release their marrow.

Soup will be milky white.

Garnish with scallion if you prefer.

(For a non-fat version, simply place soup after initial simmer in the refrigerator overnight and skim off hardened fat in the morning.)

Among all the many loving discussions about the wonderful unique taste of kimchee, of it's health benefits, it's history, it's many forms, I've never heard discussed the one thing about kimchee that makes it truly fantastic. It's the one thing that differentiates your kimchee from my kimchee, no matter how equal our ingredients. That is, your Choom. SALIVA. Yours, your mom's, your siblings, your roommate's all add that truly unique ingredient, the actual stuff of fermentation that gives the kimchee it's flavor.

Now, of course, the little shrimp or oyster used in the kimchee begins the process but as anyone who finishes the smaller serving of kimchee kept in tupperware and goes back to original giant jar for more finds the original kimchee much less fermented, less ripened as we'd say. Now take that same kimchee and track it's distribution to different households and I daresay it tastes different in each home. (In my previous life without kids I'd love to try this experiment but will throw my hypothesis out there for anyone else to try!)

I guess it's the gross-out factor that prevents much talk about this say over dinner while you're actually eating it. (Yumm, your friend so-and-so really added something new to the kimchee..) But let me take a moment to parse out the gross bits and make an inquiry into the science of fermention...

The enzymes from your saliva act in the same way as the shrimp/oyster and foster the ripening of the kimchee from a stiff plain cabbage dressed with dried korean chiles and salt to a rich leafy cabbage, absorbed with the flavors of chile, salt and sugar. The salt forces the water out of the cabbage, the enzymes from the shrimp break down the cabbage cells, and the seasoning takes on the sharp piquant, almost vinegary flavor that defines korean kimchee. The enzymes from your saliva hasten this process in degrees, basically as much as you take the kimchee out of the fridge and eat some, and you get to experience the wonder of eating kimchee in many stages, culminating in hopefully a kick-ass stew, made best only with the most fermented, most enzyme-filled kimchee around. (Or as my sister says, leave that kimchee in the fridge until it becomes jigae all by itself!)

Enzymes, anyone?