Storytelling Saturday #3: “No, I want the authentic.”
Welcome back to Storytelling Saturday, where I share stories about my experiences as an international student and immigrant. It’s great to be an ethnicity that is surfacing in the mainstream, but it comes with its own stories.
The word you’re looking for is ‘exotic,’ not ‘authentic.’
I really didn’t see it coming. Seemingly overnight, people seem to like Korea. People in the UK, where I mostly live now, suddenly want to talk about K-entertainments like the Squid Game and want to discuss dishes that appeared on Culinary Class Wars—an Iron Chef-type Korean cookery series on Netflix. They want to learn – from me – the Korean ways of living, eating and entertaining. Is this what fame feels like?
Among many avenues of questions about Korea, I am the happiest when I am answering about the food, for I am a lover of cooking as well as eating what I make. People would often ask what Korean food they could make with a random assortment of goods they bought from their local Asian groceries, and I would give them recommendations as best as I could. The only time I drew the line was when a colleague sent me a picture that showed a packet of Somen (thin noodles) and a box of mushroom-shaped chocolate biscuits and asked me what to make with the two. I told him that those particular items wouldn’t make anything worthy of eating, unless he plans to disrespect his own tongue.
It’s been a surreal couple of months of representing the country that I emigrated out of and being thanked for being Korean. I don’t feel confident in being Korean, yet I am acting as an ambassador to my peers. Am I Korean enough to give these suggestions to people? Then, as if to pour oil into my flame of anxiety, this happened.
Not too long ago, one of my friends asked me for a recommendation for Gochujang, a spicy chilli paste. I had given her my favourite brand and type of Gochujang, but I was asked to… do better. “No, show me how to make Gochujang so I can be as authentic as possible”, she said. I have never ever made my own Gochujang from scratch. Am I not Korean enough to give these suggestions?
I have seen my grandmother make Gochujang. She dries her chilli in the sun, mills it into powder and mixes them into a sauce. Then, the paste is put into a big clay pot and is left outside to be aerated for months before it is lidded to be matured for several seasons. The sunshine, the air, the temperature and the changing seasons chime in to make Gochujang. Korea makes Gochujang. At the same time, my nan buys her Ganjang and Doenjang from the shops because they are too difficult and smelly to ferment at home at her age. She compromises. Is she authentic enough either?
I have never, perhaps naively, questioned whether the labels I have used in Korea growing up is authentic. Even more naively, it took me years of caressing the discomfort I felt from that exchange to realise that it wasn’t me who is not authentically Korean, but it was the shallowness of the understanding of what authenticity is. Authentic Korean food to me is one that reminds me of home. The yearning for an experience of a culture that doesn’t reflect the lives of that culture can only be described as yearning for the exotic. As Korea becomes more famous, I am asked to fulfil or validate their idea of Korea rather than asking what makes us Korean.
Is this what fame feels like?
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