Tag Archives: Korean culture

Snake

When my father was eleven years old, his entire family was struck down by typhoid fever. Only his mother did not get sick, having developed immunity after surviving her own bout with the disease as a child. By the end of those terrible two weeks, my father’s father was dead. He left behind a widow with ten young children and a farm to run. This disastrous change in the family’s fortunes unleashed a whole chain of calamities. But this is the story of triumph over death in the midst of tragedy, and it came thanks to two venomous snakes. Here’s another installment of Stories from Easter Island, as told to me by my dad, whom we call (with great affection!) The Easter Island Head…

My second oldest brother was thirteen or fourteen when our father got sick with typhoid fever. He tried to help around the farm, but he overexerted himself and hurt his side. He was completely incapacitated for months. He got so sick, we thought he would die. We lived in the country, and there were no doctors in the vicinity.

It was monsoon season, which is when snakes come out of hiding. There were men who would catch venomous snakes to sell for medicinal purposes. These snake catchers would keep them in boxes that they would carry around on their shoulders. One of those snake catchers heard that my brother was sick, so he visited our home. He told my mother that he could heal my brother with two snakes.

He had an earthen jar with a small opening at the top. These jars were used for boiling herbs or for storing food.

He put one of the snakes in the jar with some water and then he wrapped the jar with a straw rope from the bottom to the top. He plastered mud over the rope so the jar wouldn’t heat up too quickly, and then he lit a fire under it. He slowly, slowly heated up the jar, using just a few sticks of wood at a time. The fire burned for two days. The only time he ever left the fire was to use the bathroom. For two days he ate every meal sitting on his haunches, tending the fire.

At first the water felt warm and good to the snake. But as the water heated up, the snake started to feel uncomfortable and got angry. It started to strike at the walls of the jar, releasing all of its venom into the water.

On the second day, it started to smell like boiled chicken. After two days, the snake had mostly disintegrated. The head and bones were all that remained. The man dumped everything into a hemp cloth to filter out the liquid. He squeezed the cloth so that only the bones and some meat remained. The liquid made up a bowlful of soup.

There was a layer of fatty grease on top of the liquid. I remember that he used hanji, Korean handmade paper, to soak up the grease. He did that two or three times to get all the fat out. He said that if my brother drank any of the fat, he would get diarrhea and become even more sick.

Before he would give him the soup, he very carefully checked his mouth for any sores or open wounds to make sure he would not get poisoned. When he was absolutely sure there were no wounds, he let my brother drink the soup. My brother said it tasted good.

After a one day break, he did the same thing again with the second snake and served another bowlful of soup to my brother. After two doses of snake soup, he fully recovered. Two or three years later, the snake catcher returned and told our mother that it was time for my brother to have one more bowl of snake soup so that he could maintain his good health throughout his life. He was exceptionally healthy, even into adulthood, and it was thought that it was because of the snake soup.

Pomegranate

Stories from Easter Island, continued

My dad’s fantasies have always been of the horticultural variety. How I wish I could win the lottery and make his lifelong dream of owning a walnut orchard or a cactus farm come true! Having crammed exotic plants into every corner of his own tiny suburban yard, he has begun speculating about the possibilities my yard has to offer. In a recent conversation we had, he mused about the feasibility of moving my house toward the back of the property so that my front yard could be transformed into a fruit orchard.

He’s been fascinated by fruit for as long as I can remember. You know that exotic fruit ghetto in the grocery store? That neglected little corner with strange, lumpy things no one ever buys and wouldn’t even know how to eat if they did? That’s always been my dad’s favorite part of the grocery store. He was always bringing home unusual fruits to try. You’d often find a napkin with seeds culled from these fruits, drying on our kitchen windowsill to be planted whenever he deemed the conditions to be favorable.

Over the winter holidays this year, we ate a lot of pomegranate. The only time my kids and husband and I ever eat this fruit is when we’re with my parents. It’s one of those fruits that I’ve always liked, but not enough to actually buy. For one thing, they’re a royal pain to cut open, though you can avoid some of the squirting and staining issues if you open the fruit in a large bowl of water. Over the Christmas break, my mother did all the hard work for us. Every night after dinner, she would pass around a bowl of the gorgeous, translucent seeds and a teaspoon with which to scoop them out.

One evening, as my dad helped himself to a few of the seeds, he told us this story…

“We had a pomegranate bush when I was growing up. It’s not a plant that’s native to Korea, so it was quite unusual to see one. We were the only ones who had one for miles around. But, I never once got to taste a pomegranate until I was an adult.”

“Every year, there would be only a few fruits, and as soon as they were ripe, our mother would take them to give to women in our village who wanted to have a baby, but were having trouble. They’re supposed to help with fertility. They would be so happy to get the fruit!”

“Gosh, Dad!” I said, feeling sad about his childhood of deprivation, “You didn’t get to eat the sparrows and you didn’t get to eat the pomegranates!”

“Our mother was soft-hearted like that. When my dad was still alive, we didn’t have much, but we were doing OK, so she was always trying to help other people…”

Dad’s mother and four brothers who survived to adulthood

I’ve always wanted to plant a pomegranate…not so much for the fruit, as for the brilliant, flamboyant blossoms that precede it. This spring I’m going to get a couple plants at one of my favorite local nurseries: one for the notional orchard in my front yard, and one that I’m sure my dad will be able to squeeze into his own yard somewhere.

Sparrow

Let’s pretend we’ve just gorged ourselves on Korean food and are drowsily sitting in the basement, sprawled on the couch with distended bellies full of rice and garlicky banchan. Imagine that you’re listening to my dad telling you more Stories from Easter Island. Maybe it’s because there is always so much to eat nowadays, and there was so little back then that the stories are so often about food. Here’s the first one…

DadI always had a dog when I was growing up in Korea, but I don’t like having a dog here. I feel sorry for dogs in America. In Korea, no one kept dogs in the house or on a leash. The dogs would be fed in the morning and then they’d join the rest of the village dogs. They would roam free in the fields all day long…huge packs of them. There would be fifteen to twenty dogs running around together all day long, having so much fun. In the evening, they would go back to their own houses and eat whatever scraps they were given.

All the dogs were mutts, but one of our dogs happened to grow up to look almost exactly like a purebred German Shepherd. He was such a smart dog. He was really good at catching mice and birds. He’d settle himself down in a patch of sunlight and pretend to be asleep. When a sparrow would wander past, he’d suddenly attack and catch it! Just like that!

Roasted sparrow tastes really good. You only eat the breast. They’re so small that they’re just one mouthful. Nobody ate meat in those days. We only had it for special occasions…maybe a little in dduk gook once a year on New Year’s. My brothers and I always wished we could eat the birds our dog caught, but we never got a chance to. Our mother would always take them to give to other kids in our village who had colds, because roasted sparrow is supposed to be a cure for the common cold.

Next time: More Stories from Easter Island.

Wedding Ducks

These Korean wedding ducks were my anniversary present to my husband this year. Carved mandarin ducks are a traditional part of Korean wedding ceremonies. They are a symbol of fidelity, because they mate for life.

Originally, a groom would present the gift of a pair of live geese or ducks to the bride’s family. Eventually, the tradition evolved into the commissioning of carved wooden ducks. The father of the bride would ask a true and honorable friend  to carve the ducks. It would be considered a great honor to be chosen to perform this task. The friend would have to possess five “fortunes”: wealth, health, a happy marriage, a good wife, and many sons. Because the carver would be imbuing the ducks with his own spirit and good fortune to share with the couple, he could only perform the task once in his lifetime. A pair of wedding ducks would be handed down from mother to daughter.

At the wedding ceremony, the ducks would be wrapped in cloth with only the necks and heads showing. After the ceremony, the groom’s mother would toss the duck into the bride’s apron. If the bride caught the duck, her first child would be a boy; a miss would presage a girl. I know.

After the wedding, the ducks would be displayed in the couple’s home. Ducks placed bill to bill would indicate peaceful and harmonious relationships. Ducks placed tail to tail would be a sign of discord.

The red-billed duck represents the bride and the blue-billed duck represents the groom. In some duck pairs, a string is tied only around the girl duck’s beak. This symbolizes the need to refrain from criticism or harsh words. Both ducks in the pair I got for my husband have strings around their beaks. Tradition is one thing…but it is 2014 after all!

 

 

 

Weekend Snapshots 5

We’ve had many family celebrations here over the years…

Peking GourmetThis unprepossessing restaurant in a sightly shabby strip mall in Falls Church, Virginia is a D.C. institution. The walls of Peking Gourmet Inn are covered with framed, signed photos of illustrious guests such as presidents, senators, and generals. The restaurant’s reputation rests on its Peking duck, brought whole to the table, expertly carved, and served in pancakes with scallions, cucumbers, and hoisin sauce. This weekend we noticed that one V.I.P. had been bumped from the most prominent spot on the wall in the lobby area for a far more important personage:

PSYYup. Psy.

Our family gathered there this Saturday for the first birthday celebration of my cousin’s daughter:

For the doljabi ceremony, she did a wardrobe change into the traditional hanbok first worn by her aunt and then by her cousin for their first birthday celebrations:

After lengthy deliberation…

…she finally decided upon:

The pen!

It was a lovely occasion:

Happy Birthday!

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Squirrels Eat Acorns. So Does My Family.

There are certain foods that my kids simply won’t eat. I don’t force them to eat everything I put before them, but I do insist that they have at least one bite before they reject it. Occasionally this backfires on me. Once when my daughter was three, I made her try “just one little bite of butternut squash.” She grudgingly acquiesced and then promptly threw up. Still streaming vomit, she whipped her head around to glare at me accusingly, and with an unmistakable note of triumph in her voice, she said, “SEE?!”IMG_7880

When unfortunate events such as this happen, the food is entered into the special Foods-That-Make-the-Kids-Gag category. My rule for these foods is that while I remove them from regular rotation, I make the kids try at least one teensy, tiny, miniscule bite of them once a year. This strategy has yielded some amazing breakthroughs! One of the foods they used to loathe was potatoes. We tried them in 2006. We tried them in 2007, and then: BINGO! In 2008 potatoes became one of their favorite foods. After years and years of trying, we still haven’t rounded the corner on tomatoes, but they’re on the schedule for summer 2013.

It’s hard for me to feel any great sympathy for my kids when they complain about the food I give them. Butternut squash? Potatoes? Tomatoes? PUH-LEEZE! I’m dealing far more charitably with my kids than my own parents ever did with me when it came to food. If we complained about what was put before us, my normally taciturn dad would bark, “If Mom puts a rock on your plate, YOU EAT IT!” And we did. Every single last bite of tripe, raw liver, or whatever else was being served up that day. We choked down some pretty challenging foods for kids growing up in America.

Between the ages of 5 and 8 I lived deep in the darkest heart of the American sticks, in a sleepy backwater town in Pennsylvania. To put things in perspective, Scranton – now practically a byword for shabby, benighted little townlet – was the glittering big city to our town. Reeking of kimchi and fermented soybeans, we might as well have been Martians when our family of six rolled into this microscopic, blindingly white village with a population of around 5,000 something.

The moment I first appeared on the playground of my new elementary school, the noisy chatter and laughter of children at play abruptly ceased, as if someone had pushed a magic mute button. Feverish whispering closely followed the eerie hush that had suddenly descended upon the playground. Little blond heads leaned in close together as the children conferred with each other in obvious bewilderment and consternation at the appearance of this alien in their midst. Innocently, they tried to work out how my face got so very flat, whether my eyes hurt all the time, or whether one would eventually get used to the pain of having eyes like mine…

I have no word of reproach for those children. During our four years in this town, we worked tirelessly, albeit unwittingly to reinforce our reputation as freakish interlopers. Our idiosyncratic approach to food did much to shape this profile. While our neighbors cultivated neat flower beds with nothing more exotic than the odd rose bush, our front yard burst forth with abundant harvests of bok choy and wild sesame. Our school projects were held together not with Elmer’s Glue, but with homemade glue made of water and rice. We kept a giant red Rubbermaid cooler filled with enough rice to put Elmer’s Glue out of business and end world hunger. Even when my parents embraced some culinary aspect of the culture we were living in, they would tweak it somehow so that it was still nonstandard. We would have salad, but it would be tossed with soy sauce, sesame seeds, and red pepper flakes. We’d have Neopolitan ice cream, but instead of scooping it out, my mom would put the carton on a chopping board, cut away the carton, and then slice up the block of ice cream with her largest butcher knife.

You could probably smell the contents of our refrigerator long before our house came into view. If you were to open the refrigerator, you might find vats of soup with rubbery strands of seaweed floating in murky liquid, pungent dishes of marinated bracken fern shoots, or jars crammed with tiny little salted baby shrimp staring out at you with millions of black unseeing eyes. For years we ate sea cucumbers thinking they were vegetables until my sister watched a movie in biology class and saw the dinner we’d had the night before propelling itself in grotesque slow motion like a gigantic, warty slug across the screen. From that day forward, if one of us asked what a certain dish was and the answer was: “Just eat it,” four forks would instantaneously and simultaneously fall onto the table with a loud clatter.

We began to make a weekly escape from our little town when my dad became the pastor of a Korean congregation, which met in a church on the corner of 76th Street and Broadway in New York City. When people from our town found out that we were voluntarily going to the Son of Sam’s lair they shook their heads in disbelief and real concern. But for us it was a blessed relief to hang around with other dark-haired people who understood that roasted seaweed and dried squid were delicious snack foods.

The heavy price we paid for our furlough was the two and a half hour drive to New York. Every Sunday morning at the crack of dawn we would pile into our light blue Chevy Malibu station wagon and head off to the big city. My two older sisters would occupy the bench seat, while my younger brother and I would roll around like a sack of potatoes in the cargo area. The car was not without amenities. There was a gigantic hole in the rusted out bottom of the car and if you lifted the floor mat, you could watch the highway rushing by. If it got too hot, you could always roll down the windows. It was even equipped with a dual-purpose coffee can that made an admirable puke bucket, and could serve as a toilet in a pinch.

On the way back from church we would break up the journey by stopping off at a grocery store to buy lunch. We would buy a loaf of bread, some salami, yogurt, and pickles. Usually we would sit in the parking lot of the Grand Union dining on this Grand Repast in our chariot of fire. When the weather was good, we would drive a little further to a rest area that had picnic tables. One day we sat at a picnic table somewhere on the interstate in our Sunday best, feasting on pickles and salami like kings and queens. My parents were gazing at the tall oak trees that surrounded us when they had a sudden brainstorm. Before we could lick the pickle juice off our fingers we were hustled over to gather acorns that had fallen from the trees. Travelers did double takes, squirrels glared resentfully as we stooped over to collect acorns, their acorns. Because, as everyone knows, squirrels eat acorns. So do Korean people. These acorns would later be peeled, puverized, and transformed into a tasteless, glistening, gelatinous substance. It’s a lot of effort, really, for not very much at all, and hardly worth it when you factor in the enormous psychological cost of having to steal food from squirrels in plain view of everyone traveling on I-80.

We eventually moved when my parents decided it was time to seek the company of like-minded fellow acorn-eaters in the far more populous and diverse suburbs of Washington, DC. I remember staring out the back window of the old rusted-out Malibu as we drove away, taking a final look at the place that had become our home, despite the intense sense of dislocation and alienation we had felt there for so much of the time. I may even have shed a few tears.

When I tell my kids, who have grown up on such innocuous foods as pasta, chicken nuggets, and pizza about my years in Pennsylvania, I tell them about real hardships and how they humbled, but also strengthened us. If we could make it there, we could make it anywhere, blah, blah, blah-buhty, blah…And let’s get real, kids: Do I make you eat raw organs? Am I dishing up sea slugs? Have I ever once made you eat squirrel jello?! So if Mom puts a tomato on your plate, YOU EAT IT!”