Asian Writers in North America: Korea

I went to H Mart on the weekend and bought very fresh mackerel and yellow croaker, which cost only $3 and $7 respectively. The fish have already been gutted and can be fried directly on the pan.

H Mart is the largest Asian supermarket chain in the United States. It mainly focuses on Korean food. H is the abbreviation of "Han Ah Reum". H Mart has a dazzling array of Korean fish cakes, instant noodles, kimchi, seaweed, glutinous rice cakes and various small snacks, as well as vacuum-packed ginseng chicken soup. It is also often seen that Korean aunties with stylish makeup calmly carry buckets of peeled raw garlic from the refrigerator into the shopping cart.

Speaking of vats of peeled garlic, Seoul-born American-Korean singer Michelle Zauner wrote in her memoir, Crying in H Mart, that H Mart is “the only place where you can find a vat of peeled garlic because it is The only place that really knows how much garlic is needed for the food your clan eats."

Michelle Zauner

Zauner, 33, was a singer in indie bands until the publication of his memoir Crying in H Mart, where he became a household writer across the border. This book will come out in 2021 during the Asia-Pacific Heritage Month in the United States. How popular is it? As long as you pass by a bookstore, you can see this red-covered book in the window. It is listed in the New York Times 38 weeks a year. ''s bestseller list.

Zauner's mother is from South Korea, her father is white American, she has a white name, and English is her everyday language, but she is classified as a minority. She conformed to the mainstream culture of white society, and she sneered at her mother's East Asian-style strict discipline and teaching on skin care and beauty. But an "external" mother and the culture she represents provide her with a safety net. As she writes in the book, growing up in America, mom's food was a haven she could always retreat to—because she could choose to have it or not. After a long period of rebellion, she started taking care of her cancer-stricken mother and learned to make traditional Korean dishes, but the dishes she cooked were too ill for her mother to eat. In the book, she describes the frustration: her attempts to continue her mother's cultural lineage failed; her mother gave her identity and freedom, but she could not give back. As a result, the shelves of H Mart became her time machine to the past.

Zauner studied creative writing in college, and in addition to her music career, she started publishing articles about her dual identity five or six years ago. As for Crying in H Mart, she first published a short essay of the same name on New Yorker in 2018. After this article was published, it was spotted by the publisher Knopf, signed a book contract, and became a best-selling work today.

David Chang

When it comes to writing about Korean food, I think of David Chang, a Korean-born chef who was born and raised in the northern suburbs of Virginia. In fact, classifying him as a writer is a bit of a blow to his professional status as a world-famous chef, but he founded the food magazine Lucky Peach and published his autobiography Eat a Peach. It's too much.

Strictly speaking, David Chang is considered the second generation of North Korean immigrants. His parents were both from North Korea, his mother was born in Kaesong and his father was born in Pyongyang. After the Korean peninsula was divided into two, the couple fled to South Korea first, and then his father arrived in the United States from South Korea, and settled in a restaurant in New York washing dishes for a living, 1965 In 1968, the US Immigration Act was repealed, and the Immigration and Nationality Act came into effect in 1968. My mother went to the United States to reunite with my father. The couple opened a canteen in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, and gave birth to David Chang.

Therefore, the entanglement of immigration status is also entangled in David Chang's writing. He wrote in Eat a Peach that he suffers from bipolar disorder and that "there's always a bit of anger in me". After he opened the restaurant, even the slightest mistake or inattentiveness by his people "could turn me into a twitching, furious fire", "beat the wall", "or punch me on the stainless steel cooking table". He said that he "would like to blame all this on the word hate." He felt that "hate, as an emotion in Korean, has no perfect English counterpart." "It can be imagined as a combination of struggle, restlessness, sadness and resentment. body”, “after Japan occupied Korea in the 20th century, the kind of grief and hatred that Koreans carry on their bodies no matter where they are in the world. This emotion is passed down from generation to generation and defines the art of Korean culture. , literature and film".

David Chang is a fan of McSweeney's, an independent literary magazine in San Francisco. In 2011, he founded the food magazine Lucky Peach with McSweeney's reporter Chris Ying and New York Times reporter Peter Meehan, and published it through McSweeney's, hoping to follow McSweeney's enthusiasm and witty style, write food. The cover of the magazine's inaugural issue featured a chef holding a raw chicken with both hands, and the chicken's butt was facing the reader, which was very different from the traditional food magazines with pictures of elegantly arranged dishes. Therefore, it was quite successful for a time, and later a Chinese version of the magazine "Fu Tao" was published. . Around 2017, the English version of the magazine was closed, not because of the decline of the paper media, but because of internal friction, and the three founders were also very unhappy.

Although the magazine is gone, the value will remain forever. Now the first issue of Lucky Peach, yes, is the cover with the chicken butt printed on it, and the collection price has exceeded 1,300 US dollars.

Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee (Lee Min Jung) has a very high exposure rate because of the novel Pachinko, which was recently adapted into a TV series by Apple TV.

She was born in Seoul and immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of seven. At first, she followed the route of good Asian students. She graduated from Yale University, went to Georgetown University to study law, and then became a practicing lawyer in New York. Due to physical reasons, she quit the super-intensive legal industry and transformed into a writer. At first, he wrote a lot of book reviews, food reviews and short stories, and his published works were not too systematic. Until 2007, he published his first full-length feature, Free Food for Millionaires. The theme is a Korean immigrant father who runs a laundry in New York and graduated from an Ivy League school Conflict between daughters. The rights to the book were bought by Netflix and are expected to be streamed as well.

Pachinko was written during Lee Min-jung's four-year stay in Japan. The story begins during the Japanese colonization of Korea. A Korean girl falls in love with a wealthy Japanese businessman. After the girl becomes pregnant, she finds out that the wealthy businessman has a family. Later, she comes to Japan with a priest. This is a four-generation family epic that unfolds. . I recently listened to Lee Min-jung's interview with CBS Writers and Company in Canada. She said that she has a long-standing interest in the Korean community in Japan. After moving to Japan due to her husband's job transfer, she has conducted many interviews, and this community identity For example, there are Koreans in Japan and North Koreans in Japan, and there are Koreans who have lived in Japan for generations, do not know Korean at all, but are not naturalized, and still hold Korean identity documents. It can be summed up in one word.”

Pachinko is actually a kind of gambling game in Japan. It is usually set up in a billiard room. There are colorful neon lights at the door, the music is flashing, the marbles are put into the game machine, and the lever can be played. In the eyes of many Japanese, North Korean immigrants are low-level vagabonds or even rogues, and the pinball game they run is also a symbol of evil.

Sometimes I feel that many people and things seem unrelated, but they are interconnected. When reading David Chang's works, he mentioned that his father grew up in North Korea during the Japanese occupation era, went to a Japanese school, and his living habits were all Japanese, and he didn't even eat North Korea's national food - kimchi. And Michelle Zauner's band is actually called Japanese Breakfast (Japanese breakfast). She said that the combination of American breakfast and Japan with a Far Eastern atmosphere is exotic and teasing. The "hate" written by David Chang, and the "thought" written by Michelle Zauner, more or less, have had an encounter with Min Jin Lee's Pachinko.