I am getting fat.  I noticed this earlier today.  My face is fuller than a cream puff on Christmas Eve.  With what I have been craving, cooking, and consuming lately, there could be no other outcome.  Yes.  I am, indeed, gaining some serious weight.  Upon reflection, I realize that my current writing project may be to blame for my recent unexpected expansion.  This project involves writing my memoir or what someone called a shortened autobiography focused on my life experiences as a Korean adoptee.  My writing comes not without much pondering, remembering, and, it seems, eating.

People familiar with Korean cuisine might picture me noshing on bulgogi, a popular beef dish, or kimchi, a spicy fermented cabbage, or bowls of plain steamed rice preferred by the Korean population.  Wrong.  I am, indeed, an intercountry adoptee plucked from my motherland and raised by a White mama from North Carolina.  I have been craving like crazy and subsequently stuffing myself with southern comfort cuisine.       

I just returned from my local grocery with the makings for creamed chipped beef gravy, homemade macaroni and cheese, mustard greens swimming in bacon grease, fried okra and tomatoes, and chilled canned fruit cocktail.      

The cans of fruit cocktail go promptly into the refrigerator along with the perishable items, such as the big carton of half n’half, the two cartons of 18 large white eggs, a big slab of thick cut bacon, and for good measure the sizeable block of Velveeta cheese.  Velveeta cheese does not require refrigeration before you break its seal, but it is easier to cut when firm from the cold.  You can consider that your Southern Cooking 101 tip of the day.      

Meanwhile, having glanced at the kitchen clock, I see a chunk of time has passed since I sprang from my desk and out the door with my driving goal of bringing home this bounty.  So down the hall I trundle, back to my afternoon of remembering and memoir writing.      

In times of stress, we humans often look to familiar things for comfort and a sense of security.  Familiar does not always mean good or even fond filled memories.  Familiar just means things from the past that give us a sense of continuity and a history of ourselves.  If you are lucky, familiar could also mean a feeling of safety.  I think my familiar lends itself more to the “at least I remember this so let’s do it again” category.      

For it is true that neither food, the preparation of the food, meal times, or grocery shopping brought our family much joy or grand feelings.  We were poor.  One such less-than-comforting recollection is sitting in the backseat of our blue station wagon in the heat of a Maryland summer day.  I remember being hot and sweaty and my legs sticking to the car seat while my sister and I sat listening to Mama and Daddy argue over the week’s grocery allowance.  The arguing came on the heels of Daddy handing Mama twenty-five dollars to which Mama asked, “Where’s the rest?” and Daddy said, “That’s it.”  Their conversation went south from there.  The gist of the argument was that Mama was expected to buy groceries for all of us with what even in the 1960’s on the east coast did not amount to much.  It was not until I was grown that I realized how little Daddy made a week employed as a welder at a local farm equipment repair shop.  In a typical week, he brought home around one hundred dollars before Uncle Sam took his share.  No wonder we ate a lot of scrapple, a meat product made from the scraps of animals, that when fired up crisp is very tasty.       

Nonetheless, I sit around daydreaming about the perfect creamed chipped beef gravy served over toast.  I picture just how it feels to blend the white flour into the white milk, whisking it thoroughly to rid it of any lumps.  Looking forward to the sizzle of the melting butter in the pan, I sit wishing that I owned a seasoned cast iron skillet while marveling at the fact in my midlife, I do not.  Every good southern cook has at least one serviceable frequently used cast iron skillet.  The kind that is black and is totally smooth on the inside, burnished with a fine veneer of lard.  Is this proof of my denial of my southern roots?        

Making good cream gravy is a mandatory skill for a good Southern cook.  Because I am lacking in this skill, I do not consider myself a good cook by southern standards.  Gravy making scares the hell out of me.  Have you ever wondered who buys the packets of dry gravy mix or the jars of already made up gravy?  Gravy challenged cooks like me, that’s who.  I would bet a homemade vinegar apple pie that most southern women do not purchase their gravy in a jar.      

Chipped beef gravy is the kind of meal that tastes so comforting and delicious with the first bite but only continues to taste as good when gobbled up fast while still hot.  For when it cools and congeals, the last bite coming toward your lips causes your throat to involuntarily clamp down but you eat it anyway because of how good it tasted in the beginning.        

Just the other day I read of the Cambodian staple called prahok, a salty fermented paste made from fish stomped by human feet into a kind of fish cheese.  The writer, obviously not a prahok connoisseur, talked about the stench of the decaying fish flesh and even went so far as to call it horrifying.  I guess scrapple might seem horrifying to those who did not grow up smelling the delicious chopped up intestines and fatty bits of stuff nobody else wanted, frying up in the cast iron skillet.      

The writer quoted a Cambodian farmer as saying, “When I smell prahok, I am happy and my heart aches with hunger.”  That is what my heart has been doing lately, “aching with hunger” as I write my memoir.  Aching for the foods that were so familiar to me as a child and more importantly aching for a connection with my southern Mama.  Intertwined in these longings are my own southern roots that grew out of my upbringing.      

Like many things southern, southern cooking is often times scorned by northerners.  I find myself acting protectively about my cooking and the many dishes that I am producing in my tiny kitchen.  My partner is of Swedish ancestry and grew up in Minnesota.  He is a northerner.  He tries to compare my creamed chipped beef gravy to a hot turkey sandwich.  When he complains about the greasy cholesterol laden fried fare I place in front of him, I remind him that his ancestors ate lutefisk, a dried codfish that calls for a bucket of lye and a barn door in its preparation.      

While defending southern comfort food, I see where I have been a turncoat to my southerness.  In a country where it is no longer politically correct to call me a gook, to my face at least, it is still okay to call people white trash, trailer park trash, or rednecks.  From the long ago day that I learned it was not okay to call Brazil nuts, nigger toes, I began backing away from all things southern.      

Still, there are southern parts of me.  Like when I tell a story, digression plays a big role.  In my love of the smell of rich dark soil.  In my craving for scrapple.  I do not know what it is like to be a gentrified southerner.  Mama was dirt poor growing up.  There really are such things as tarpaper shacks.  Mama’s mama lived in one and we visited her there.  She came from poor roots and so did my adoptive father and all of his family.  There is nothing romantic about being poor and from the south.  Throw in being a Korean adoptee and you have got yourself a mess of trouble.      

The south has much to be ashamed of if one looks only at their legacy of slavery and continued racial intolerance through the years.  Comics get a lot of mileage from the southern stereotypes of too much inbreeding between close relatives and ignorant hillbillies running around with their chickens and pigs.  My family had plenty of chickens and the occasional pig and Mama accused Daddy’s kin of insanity due to inbreeding.  So, I guess in the end, we were what jokes are made of.  Without conscious thought, it must have felt enough to wear a foreign face in this land of plenty much less to be a poor southern groupie.      

I see that there has not been much from the south that I wanted to claim but that there are parts of the south that claim me.  I think of what a countrywoman I am and know that being raised poor and in rural areas influenced my love of nature.  Growing up poor, running barefoot all summer, growing our own vegetables, digging big fat juicy earthworms behind our dilapidated barn to go fishing in our leaky rowboat, pulling the honeysuckle blossoms off their branches to suck out the sweet nectar, having the world go by at a slower pace, all of this is flows from being raised by a southerner.  What came before my arrival here in American shaped me in unknown ways.      

So, there is this undeniable blending of cultures that have influenced me.  I eat with wooden chopsticks.  I love kimchi.  I lively up my southern cooking with fiery spices.  Take fried okra and tomatoes for instance.  It is almost impossible to make this dish in the traditional southern way here in Alaska.  Green tomatoes are not sold at the local grocery and fresh okra is rarely available.  So I improvise, sometimes using canned or frozen okra and either fresh or canned red tomatoes.  I still use the other traditional ingredients of yellow corn meal, white flour, onions, and salt.  But I stray from southern tradition, by adding a generous amount of cayenne pepper or I douse it with a hot red Asian chili pepper sauce, a staple in my kitchen.      

It is during one of these blended cooking frenzies, that I realize to my surprise that I am not craving to be Korean anymore.  This realization is huge.  I stand still, barely breathing, reflecting on this newly gained insight.  I see that I will never be a traditional Korean woman just as I will never be the traditional White or Black Southern woman.  I am simply me.  I am a culture unto myself and there is a group to which I belong.  The group is comprised of other intercountry adoptees who were raised outside of their culture and ethnic groups.  I can claim my membership to this group without turning my back on my roots.  Now, it is my challenge to explore what this belonging means to me and what I, with my cultural mix, bring to this group.  

    

@junemoon 2003 (previously published under the name of Jung Leehi)