Culinary Korea

1. Fishhead soup
2. Shellfish
3. Duck




"A carton of milk."

"A carton of milk, a carton of chocolate milk."

"A carton of milk, a carton of chocolate milk, a carton of juice."

"A carton of milk, a carton of chocolate milk, a carton of... peach juice."

"A carton of milk, a carton of chocolate milk, a carton of peach juice, a carton of watermelon. Juice."

"A carton of milk, a carton of... chocolate milk, a cart of.. a carton of peach juice, a carton of watermelon juice, a carton of...... of.... egg juice."

This is an excerpt from a typical memory game we play in class. Today was my first day back after five days of vacation. The longer you have off, the harder it is to come back. Until, that is, you hear a raspy little voice croaking, "Hi teacher", and you turn from your perch at the computer in the teacher's lounge to see a messy-haired eight-year old peeking in the door. Jacob just wanted to grin and say hi, because he has a difficult time saying much else. Or paying attention for that matter. In a country where ADHD is a shame to the family and stimulants aren't handed out like cough drops, you just have to accept that some kids will spend most of their class time in another world.

Yesterday I visited a church in Ansan. It was a refreshing 10 minute taxi ride. The taxi driver didn't seem to mind at all that I can't speak Korean, because he chatted me up the whole time. I used all the Korean words I know. "Sun-say-nim" (teacher), "An-yon-haseyo" (Hello), "Kam-sam-nida" (thankyou), "yogiyo" (here), and "ne" (yes). He threw in some great English words like "America" and "Christian". I am trying to soak Korean up, I really am, but it's Korean. I'm not as fluent as everyone thinks I should be. I'm getting better at meat words: I can now say tuna, duck, and I learned the word for sea squirt last night. I don't even know what that means in English.

Erin was nice enough to meet me in front of Dongsan church to show me her apartment. It's half the size of mine. I've decided that since I seem to be blessed with the most spacious apartment out of all of my friends, it means I need to open it up to Korea. I've been stealing every office chair I can find on the street. I'm up to five. The problem is that I like to steal but I don't like to clean. Hopefully no one will mind.

A girl who lived in Erin's apartment stuck her head in the door to invite her to lunch after church, how convenient! I went with her, which was nice because it meant I didn't have to navigate the five-story three-piece building alone. I ran into another girl I've met before. I met about 20 new people yesterday, two of them who live on my street. I met gorgeous Korean girls in miniskirts, Nigerian students, University professors, two southerners, and a Korean guy who asked me if America needs missionaries. I wasn't sure how to respond. I got in a van with a bunch of strangers (always a good idea) and rode out to the countryside to eat in a restaurant/park. It looked like a huge wooden cottage and surrounding it were plastic tables, fountains, sand, and a hillside. Again, something I've never seen and have difficulty describing. The meat we cooked at our own table was also something I had never seen. It looked like long strips of ham. We dumped a heap of it onto our grill and pushed it around with our chopsticks. Mark, a Korean who went to Tennessee and "didn't study, just traveled" (much to his father's chagrin) told me about his job putting in air conditioners and kept pulling out his cellphone to translate. It is great how all the cellphones here have translators built in. The lapses in conversation need be no longer than two minutes. After stuffing myself with meat, garlic cloves, rice, lettuce, and kimchi, I found out I was eating duck. Why not. And why not pull the grill cover off with some tongs and pull out some treasures among the coals: tinfoil wrapped sweet potatoes. These Koreans really are clever. The green toothpicks here are edible, it feels like you're chewing plastic but it really will melt in your mouth, eventually.

Two of my new friends showed me how to catch the bus back to where we live and I had the most delightfully familiar experience of my whole time here. Jamie introduced me to a coffee shop (minutes away from my apartment!!), and we sat in green velvet-backed chairs, sipping Guatemalan roast out of porcelain teacups, with French music tinkling overhead. If I had any sport in college, it was getting coffee with anyone who would come. Old friends, roomates, football-loving neighbors, people I met through the sliding glass window of Student Health Services (my taxing 10 hr. a week job), nervous freshmen from BCM, djimbe-toting musicians, it didn't MATTER. I've really missed it here. We talked about Australia and Hong-Kong (her roots), and I tried to explain the South. I never can. All that comes out of my mouth is "sweet tea, sun, pearl earrings, sometimes uneducated, relaxed, religion, friendly, fried food...." The South is such an enigma because until you experience it stereotypes will suffice. When my friends visited last April I didn't know what to do with them, but then I realized it was because we don't do much! And that's the beauty of it! Except for 21 credit hours, the pseudo-full time job of ministry at BCM, a part time job, studying, and playing music, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. Reading on the beach, sprawling in camping chairs on the porch (or the hammock, for the glorious month it was up), riding my bike under Spanish moss and along the water, eating at new restaurants, cooking dinner with my next door neighbors, making midnight roommate runs to Harris Teeter to buy ice cream and wine, and watching dolphins peek above the waves as the sun set over the battery.

I decided yesterday that I don't want to travel. I want to meet everyone I can wherever I am and see the world through their eyes. I want to help what needs helping until it's time to move on.

While we were flipping through a Korean fashion magazine (eyes wide in fascination) a girl from church came in and recognized us. She sat down (at our persistent invitations), offered us every junk food she had in her shopping bag, chatted, and invited us to her house for lunch next Sunday. She asked me the question I hear at least once a day, "What kind of Korean food do you like?" I named everything I could remember. "Ok I like to cook so... what day is good for you?" Did it really take me almost two months to realize there were coffee shops here??

I think I expected Korea to be traditional, slightly run-down, a bit dirtier than the US, bright-pink patterns everywhere and stray dogs sleeping on street corners. I WAS QUITE MISTAKEN!! This country is every bit as progressive and developed as the US. You can summon your waiter with a button. There is a remote-control for my air-conditioning. It takes no more than twenty minutes for take-out to arrive after you order it, in real dishes, with real silverware, and sometimes a tablecloth. All the cars are either silver or black, and they sparkle. Women cross the street with a leashed Poodle in one hand and a Pomeranian in the other. Girls wear their bright, geometric clothes boldly and unapologetically, and it is uncommon not to wear high heels. I kept trying to call it Western because parts of it felt familiar, but just because a country is developed doesn't mean it's western. For me, Asia is the type of place I thought I had figured out, but it was only initially. With each day that passes there is a new nuance I am startled to find. People stare blankly past you but if you so much as mumble or smile, they'll flash you a grin that makes me blush. Koreans who understand English do not hesitate to let you know. They'll peek over you in a crowded subway car, "Hello!" or approach you when you're looking at a map, "Do you need help?" Mothers at school look irritated as they talk with counter-teachers (our Korean coworkers), but often there is a feast of grapes, vitamin C juice (tastes like Red Bull) or a crate of rice cakes sitting in the teacher's lounge, hand-delivered by my students' parents and grandparents. Girls seldom leave the house without makeup but grown women hang over their shopping carts in the grocery store, pushing themselves forward with a foot.

I always try to compare somewhere I go with somewhere I've been, but for all the moaning about globalization, the world is starkly different. It just takes time for our eyes to adjust.

Ok so Jamie and I crossed the street to another coffee shop where my other new friend was (this place- equally comforting) and I went with them and five other people I didn't know to eat dinner. Since it was a holiday weekend, most things were closed except for a restaurant I really didn't think I would be braving this soon in the game.

There are a lot of these restaurants. Outside, fish, eels, and squid happily swim in blue-watered tanks. There is no front wall, and people sit cross-legged on light-stained wood floors, contentedly eating with their chopsticks, their faces flushed from soju. The smell has always deterred me, it's quite fishy and I just don't feel very appetized when I smell that. When I found out that those happy little fish were dinner, I was even less inclined to dine at one of these establishments. No thanks, I don't want to watch the naive siblings of my dinner swimming about, absentmindedly wondering what happened to little Nemo. Alas, I was with seven strangers, I couldn't complain. When I looked at Tommy's face though, I realized I wasn't alone. "I'm not eating this," he said matter-of-factly. (This came as a surprise to me, because he's Chinese-American, and I thought surely he must eat some weird food). For the rest of dinner, his comments were the audible expression of the squealing, shrieking voice in my head.

I was ravenously hungry at the coffee shop. When I sat down at this restaurant, I wanted to bolt out of the wide-open entrance. I am not a picky eater. But despite my own will, my stomach was turning violently. I don't think I've felt this way since I had to finish a three-course meal at my friend's house in Nepal. I remember swallowing gulps of homemade, unsweetened yogurt whole, begging myself to keep going after the spicy rice, chicken, goat, egg, potatoes, lentils, curry, bread, and spinach I had just consumed.

Anyways I'm digressing. Our first course was shellfish. Sounds good enough. What appeared was a platter of raw prawns (their black eyes bulging out of their corpses), snails of varying sizes, an unidentifiable gummy ruffled purple looking thing (which the Koreans delightedly announced as "sea squirt"), and smaller tentacles. The seaweed soup had mussel shells resting at the bottom, and I tackled that first with my chopsticks. I am adjusting. To my American eyes, this was water with seaweed floating in it. Seaweed is something you brush off your arm at Folly Beach, and the squid are the jellyfish that really was the seaweed that made you scream in the first place. I put a good deal of wasabi in my soy sauce, and dipped the snail right in. Did I mention everything was RAW?! We Americans think we're so progressive with our cream-cheese covered sushi and sashimi. We are preposterous. I thought Tsunami, the popular Japanese bar in Charleston, had me well prepared for Asian cuisine. I'm too ashamed to even laugh at myself.

To my American taste buds, the snail tasted like salt, blood, and copper. I guess the more I eat it, the more I'll like it? I leaned back in my chair and took a deep breath, holding my chin up. "Are you kidding me..." Tommy commented, his eyes narrowed, nausea creeping up his face. Jamie sat to my right, delightedly scraping out the inside of a snail. "This isn't that bad!" I can't lie: my respect for this girl skyrocketed with every bit of sea creature she put in her mouth.

When the platter of sliced, white, raw fish encircled in silver scales came out, I reminded myself that this was what Jesus ate. And Jesus really liked it. He sat around eating fish all the time. I delicately closed my chopsticks around a floppy piece of it, plummeted it in soy sauce, and started chewing. Not that bad! Nothing could beat the sea squirt, fanned across the platter like Ursula's gown. I chewed as much gummy raw fish as I could handle, taking small breaths in between each mouthful, gazing nervously at the arching plate of it which never seemed to diminish.

A waiter came over and flicked our grill on. (There are always gas grills lowered in the middle of a table in a Korean restaurant). He returned with a black pot of red soup. "Now that's what I'm talking about," Tommy declared as the waiter skillfully placed it on the burner. "Something cooked."

I blinked. Yes, that was right. There was a fish tail floating up from one end of the bowl. A pile of raw greens rose from the middle, sprinkled with chili pepper the way you would coat a casserole with Ritz crackers. Jamie began to serve each one of us, spooning bits of soup, greens, and bits of fish into our bowls. I'm getting better with spicy food. This was a welcome spice, because although it scorched the inside of my mouth, it was kind enough not to burn my throat going down. When I mentioned this, Jamie quipped, "Yeah! Chili!" As I bit into my fish I realized it wasn't fish at all! It was a dumpling. Upon closer examination, the fish head protruded from one side of the pot, the tail from the other, and.... there were bones in between. Fish head soup. "My grandma says it's great for your skin," Jamie explained.

By the end of the meal, I was picking tiny bits of meat out of the ribcage with her, tossing eyeballs into a stray bowl and flipping the head around to get to the good parts.

We went to Baskin Robbins afterwards, and I gratefully inhaled a cup of blueberry cheesecake ice cream. Comfort food is one of the most merciful friends I've ever had: always available, and never judgmental.

I think everyone I know is worried about what to do with their life. If they're doing something right, they're afraid it's the wrong thing. If they're bored, they wonder when the right thing will come. I was frustrated Saturday night because an earthquake in Indonesia may have trapped 4,000 people underground. I couldn't find a way to volunteer online. You have to have a master's degree and five years of volunteer experience to work for the UN, I checked. I have ten days for Christmas and I'm already worried because I don't want to waste it. I don't know whether I should stay here in this rich country or take my student loans with me to scrape by in a poor one. I don't know if I should borrow more money to get more education and be more qualified, or if I should sacrifice five years and the quality of my emotional health to teach in inner-city New York, so the government will pay them off. If you sat down with a pen and wrote your options, I'm sure it would go on for a while. Either cynicism or a current obligation would stop you. It would take a while for you to remember what you really love, because you've taught yourself not the think about or believe in it for so long. The biggest dreams are only possible with a miracle. And I guess it should be that way.

Be comforted, here is what God told me:
"Oh, the DEPTH of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out!"
- Romans 11:33

I keep trying to trace his path. I try to trace it behind and ahead of me. I can do neither one. Gradually, I'm finding peace in that.