How do we heal from self-betrayal?
Nourishing ourselves back to wholeness with Grace P. Cho
I met today’s guest writer on a retreat last year with my acquisitions editor at Baker Books, and I’m delighted to introduce you. Grace P. Cho is warm, thoughtful, nurturing person, and a soft place to land for anyone in her presence. She is a Korean American writer, poet, speaker, and a senior acquisitions editor at Revell, an imprint of Baker Publishing Group.
Her words fed my soul and I know they will nourish yours, too. Grab a cup and savor!
I grab the 5-pound blue bag of kongnamul from the refrigerated shelf, mainly because the $5.99 price tag beats the $2.99 price for a third of the amount. I check through the transparent window of the bag to make sure the soybean sprouts are fresh, then add them to the grocery cart. I think through my mental list of dishes I can make out of them – kongnamul soup, kongnamul banchan (side dish), kongnamul bap (rice). Then, as naturally as all the other ajummas (older ladies) in the grocery store, I shuffle my way around the rest of the produce and refrigerated sections, picking up the essentials – a sleeve of garlic, a bunch of green onions, a package of tofu. Then, as always happens while shopping for Korean food, I go through the rest of the aisles and pick up the essential non-essentials – a box of Jin ramen, some shrimp crackers, and a variety pack of rice cakes, just because.
I notice how at ease I am, shopping and meal planning on the fly, and I smile to myself. I imagine how my mother would laugh with amazement that I even know how to cook kongnamul. She’s always amused and surprised by things like that. I assume it’s because she’s never really had the chance to teach me, and somehow, here I am, knowing how to cook banchan like my grandmother.
The threads that tie me to my Koreanness are sparse. Being a child of Korean immigrants who later became missionaries to Kazakhstan, I grew up multi-cultured trilingual but identified mostly as American, even prided myself on it. But when I moved back to the States for my last two years of high school, being American became a confusing concept. Being from America, having been born here, didn’t seem to make me American. Despite the plethora of Asians and Asian Americans at my school, there were many days when people would ask where I was from, and when I’d explain that my parents were from Korea (though that wasn’t where I was from), they wouldn’t know where that was, or they’d ask, “North or South?”
Like every other sixteen-year-old, I just wanted to fit in and be considered normal. But when “normal” seemed to be equated to being white and popular, a Korean American, third-culture kid like myself didn’t have a spot to fit into.
Neither did I have the awareness and self-love to find belonging in myself. Instead, I chose assimilation as my way to salvific belonging. Become like them, and maybe I’ll belong to them, I reasoned. But as you might imagine, I wasn’t saved at all. Instead, I began to disassociate myself from the parts of me that made me seem too Asian. I cut away and rejected my Koreanness and judged other Asian Americans for holding on to their culture, heritage, and language. I did this harm for almost two decades. For half my life, I had prided myself on being American; for another half, I learned to hate myself for being Korean.
How do we heal from that kind of self-betrayal? How do we nourish ourselves back to wholeness when we’ve dissected ourselves apart and only called some parts right and good?
Kongnamul. When any of us are sick, my mother-in-law will make kongnamul kimchi soup. It’s a simple anchovy-based broth with soybean sprouts, fermented kimchi, and some tofu cubes if we’re feeling fancy. “Food is medicine,” she says, and I believe her. Whether or not the soup contains vitamin C and all the other immune-boosting properties she claims it does, I know that food is love, and love can heal. I find parts of myself while grocery shopping at the Korean market, while living with my in-laws, and hearing our language spoken daily. I nurture the pieces I’ve despised for so long every time I chop garlic and mix it with soy sauce, sesame oil, green onions, and Korean red chili flakes. When I perfect a dish like gyeranjjim (steamed eggs), replicating the same flavors my grandmother used but adding my take on it, I know I’m defining what it means to be Korean American not only for myself, but also for my kids. They’re receiving the inheritance of sohn maht.
“Sohn” means hand, and “maht” means taste. It’s the special something we can’t pinpoint in a home-cooked meal, the reason why a dish we cook can taste differently from our grandmother’s when we’ve followed the recipe exactly.
To me, it simply translates to mean love.
I don’t have much to offer my kids when it comes to teaching them what it means to be Korean American. I don’t know enough about our history. I stumble over my words in Korean. I can try to learn and then pass it down to my kids, but sohn maht is something I can give to them now. I can shape their taste buds to long for the flavors of home when they’ve lost their way in the world. Food can be the way they can come home to themselves.
I thought assimilation would save me, but I was wrong. It’s the familiar flavors of my childhood that are saving me, healing me, and making me whole again.
I unload the groceries from my car and get two big bowls. I fill one with big handfuls of kongnamul and get to the gloriously mundane work of cleaning the sprouts. I pinch off the roots of each one and throw the clean ones into the other bowl. The repetitive movements are natural as if I’ve been doing this for generations. I see my mother’s and my grandmother’s hands in my own, and I’m proud of the Korean I’m becoming.
Grace P. Cho is a Korean American writer, poet, speaker, and a senior acquisitions editor at Revell, an imprint of Baker Publishing Group. She is the co-author of Empowered: More of Him for All of You, the author of the (in)courage Bible studies, Courageous Influence and Create in Me a Heart of Wisdom, and a contributor to Voices of Lament: Reflections on Brokenness and Hope in a World Longing for Justice. Learn more at @gracepcho and at gracepcho.com. And follow her words and wisdom on instagram.
“I know that food is love, and love can heal.” What a beautiful journey back to oneself. What a gift to hear a bit of Grace’s story. 🙏🏽