A bad Korean pt. 1

My grandma’s place smells of garlic and green onion. She sits on the floor, peels two dozen cloves with a fruit knife, and mashes them against a stone mortar. A fan drones across from her, wafting the aroma through the living room, the bathroom, all corners of the apartment. I’m struck not by the smell, because the smell is the same as what stains on my finger tips when I cook, but by the shadow of what it invokes, memories revealing themselves in the old country. They’re not yet clear in my head. I only sense their shape — a flash, a sweeping sensation.

She drums and grinds with the pestle at an even pace, a practiced body moving on its own. My grandma has dementia. She wakes up between 6 and 8 am, washes her face, watches TV from dawn til late in the evening (sound off, subtitles on), washes her face, then falls asleep. My mom tells me she likes the conservative news channels, expounding on our deteriorating social values and such. I can’t tell if she enjoys it, frankly. Her gaze seems neutral, less burning with indignation, more waiting for the day’s end.

Her hearing is almost gone. Every morning I wake up from her hearing aid from the bathroom, a sharp feedback that cuts through the apartment, then a crackle of static while she adjusts in her ear. Sometimes, she turns the boiler on when it’s 85 degrees outside. My very exasperated mother then has to shout in her good ear that she doesn’t need the heat on, that it’s the summer, that she’s going to die of a heatstroke, but grandma just laughs. I like to think she’s messing with everyone.

During her brief moments of clarity, she maintains the wherewithal to yell at me that I’m too thin. “What’s this?” She asks while grabbing my arm, surveying, swaying it as a child would to a limp doll. She clicks her tongue. “Eat more,” she says, and I eat an extra bowl of rice at dinner.

It’s harmless, I tell myself. Body shaming is a cross-cultural family affair, and mine is not above it. My mom throws her passive aggressive jabs. Grandma says I should be eating four bowls of rice and shakes her head at my meager two. My aunt agrees in her own, quiet way, flashing a warm smile that belies her concern for my lean frame. They tow me across cities and provinces so that I can gorge myself on culinary delights. I have sujebi, marinated raw crab, grilled pork belly. My mom toils for eighteen hours with twenty pounds of oxtails to make gomtang, boiling them and skimming the gunk, boiling and skimming, until a cloudy broth remains in the pot. We get twisted doughnuts and egg tarts from bakeries, tteok at subway stops, corn dogs at rest stations along the highway. We go to the grocery store and buy a feast. Steamed octopus, hanwoo sirloin, ten different kinds of instant ramen, chips and snacks I’ve long forgotten about. Ones with chocolate fillings, ones that taste like shrimp, ones that include a foldable spoon to scoop a mouthful, ones with a soft crunch that melt in your mouth, ones that you can stick on each of your fingers to look like a witch, ones that you have to break and crumble and sprinkle with spice. Ones that look like bananas, cones, corns, tubes, balls, rings, wafers, pies, squids. Again, shapes of memories.

One evening after a hike up Palgongsan, we go eat grilled duck. The server drops in a bucket of red hot coals under the grill at our table and brings an assortment of banchan, doenjang-guk, and a mound of duck breasts. My uncle-in-law starts cooking, and thus begins a marathon. Whatever life’s purpose I had up to that moment is rendered irrelevant as I distill my energy to eating what I’m fed, an inexhaustible stream of flesh and rice wrapped in perilla leaves. Perhaps, I find it a challenge, or I fear it’d be interpreted as a slight to my elders’ sensibilities if I’m too reasonable about my portions, but I eat with a fury that betrays my appetite. My mother and aunt notice, and, encouraged, start to divert their shares towards my corner of the grill, convinced that I really am as famished as I appear. I force it all down. I sweat out the meat sweats. And when the end is near, when I’m drunk and stretched and swimming in protein, my aunt asks if I want another. Another what, I’m not sure, but amidst the chorus of fats sizzling, chopsticks clinking, the slurping and chewing and crunching and gulping, I’m too disoriented to say no, and another plate of duck arrives.

I eat an entire bird that night. My stomach sits swollen inside me, and I’m uncomfortably, aggravatingly full. Though it’s not much to protest, this privileged life. To have a family’s care and attention is not always a guarantee, nor is it permanent. I ask myself, who else would scold me for not eating enough? For not taking more from this world?

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My body is slow to adjust to the time change, as is my mind, which is lacking the presence and sensibility to register my being here for the first time in over a decade as something of significance. At least that was the assumption before I boarded the plane. Either there’s a lag in my emotions, or I’ve found cracks in the narrative I’ve weaved over the last few years, of a wayward son returning home, brimming with possibilities of epiphanies, reconciliation, relief, etc. A homecoming. It was this potentiality, this expectation for something grand and true, that was the most enticing when I decided on this long, overdue visit. Yet, at the core of this assumption was that Korea is my home, which carries with it the illusion that my Koreanness, whatever that means, is something hidden in the kernel of my being, a buried truth, and not a quality susceptible to change and erosion with time and indifference. Now that I’m re-examining it in the right light, this root feels more hollow, more withered than whole.

I left Korea when I was eight; the last time I stepped foot was in 2010. In between those milestones was a handful of trips with my parents, who wanted to remind me the value of a heritage I then thought was assured. My mom used to tell me I’d always be a Korean at heart, though she largely sounded wishful. We spoke in Korean and ate Korean food and watched Korean shows at home and attended Korean church. But I didn’t lend these habits the attention they deserved, these rituals to keep the thread in tact, and my life split in two: one that embraced the past to guide my future, and another that embraced a future severed from my past. One could not have both, or so I thought, for it was far too taxing to maintain two personas, two cultures, two truths, a plurality of selves.

I chose the latter. And so, a decade later, I’m a Korean by name, who shies away from practicing his native tongue, eats more brussel sprouts than kimchi, knows the history of the West more than the history of his people. A “bad” Korean.

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An observation as someone with an “-American” distinction visiting the prefix of my identity:

I realize I don’t really look Korean. I look Korean-American, which may feel like splitting hair to some, but there is a marked difference. Most men under the age of 40 in Seoul dress awesomely well, albeit in some combination of the same five outfits. Trending now are minimal, oversized, neutral-toned, 90’s vibes. And if they don’t have the clothes, they’re at least sporting the same haircuts. Fashion has never been my MO. I invested just enough to look clean, though the pandemic and remote work has sapped whatever energy for fashionability I had left. Walking down the street in my stained white cap and ill-fitting jeans that are much too hot in this humidity, I realize how woefully unprepared I am for the silent expectations of the public.

I’m wary of generalizing a mass I’ve only had cursory interactions with, yet I don’t think my use of “everyone” is completely inappropriate. It’s a competitive, homogeneous culture. Everyone has great skin. Everyone follows trends. Everyone strives to fit in, to embrace a stressfully narrow definition of beauty and culture endorsed by pretty people on screens, with perfect teeth and porcelain skin and a charm that’s somehow both unique and duplicative of all the other copies of copies of copies plastered on billboards and buses. Everyone adopts the looks of the mass, rushes to catch the next wave of cool, defies age with surgeries and diets and supplements. South Korea had the fifth most plastic surgeons in the world in 2020, which was also the most per capita: 2,581 surgeons, compared to US’s 7,000 (#1), despite having less than a sixth of the US’s total population. Walk around Gangnam district and you can find a clinic on every block. “Beautiful” is less instinctive than manufactured, a collective experience to be joined and accepted into than what any individual feels for themselves.

All of this is a matter of degree, of course. All big cities have communities that are prohibitively materialistic, and consumerist frenzy is not unique to Seoul. I mean, Instagram exists for a reason. Yet, it’s the uniformity of what constitutes beauty in Korea that feels stifling. I always saw the subway in New York as a great equalizer of class and values; the spectrum of fashionability is so wide and diverse that I never felt out of place for what I wore on the train, even on my slovenliest days. I could look like ass, but no one cared. Here, I look like ass, and an alarm goes off inside my head. My hair is not just long but ugly. My shirt is not just loud but unseemly. I somehow feel smaller. And the fact that, by appearance, I should be one of them, yet am an outlier who doesn’t meet the standard for what amounts to norm and success, or more likely, an outlier who just so openly looks like a 외국인, makes this otherness feel more acute.

Notably, a distinction between those who live here and elsewhere is that the care with which folks craft their appearance seems more like a necessity than a choice. Attractiveness is an economic asset, and emphasis is placed on a person’s first impression. It wasn’t until a few years ago that most companies required an applicant’s headshot to be included with their resume. How tall you are, how well you dress, what car you drive, and beyond that, like what school you went to, where your hometown is, what your family history is like — the facts and figures of an individual carry an uncomfortable weight here.

I struggle to situate myself in the city. On one hand, I have a great desire to carry myself with some conviction, tinged with a foreigner’s naivety, that would hopefully give my inadequacies a look of protest, as if to say, I know I look shaggy, but here I am, an individual no less. On the other hand, that feels misguided. I’m feeling just as inclined to drop a pretty penny at the mall, to flex, to look the part. Why shouldn’t I care about my appearance? It feels good to look good, to fit in. I feel the pull of my surroundings, a reversion to a life I never lived as a Korean, not as an American.