How to Make Non-Korean Kimchi
3 cups water
1 1/2 cups glutinous rice flour
1/4 cup sugar
10 lbs of napa cabbage
1 cup of kosher salt
1 cup fish sauce
1 cup peeled garlic
2 Korean pears
1 onion
2 inches of ginger
2 cups of gochugaru
1 cup of julienned carrots
10 diced scallions, sliced thin
Think about your mother-in-law’s kimchi. Violently crimson and glossy, redder and thicker than blood, thinly sweet and floral fragrant, garlic and spice that burst through with every crunch. Sour, beautifully sour. The acidity in the juice tells time with more accuracy and honesty than she ever could. What do you mean file for bankruptcy? Debts? What debts? But Heeyoung, why are we just learning of this? If the kimchi puckered your lips, Heeyoung made it half a year ago. If it was just starting to bloom, change taste, two weeks.
Right now, in Rochester, snow is falling in earnest, heavy and blinding. The winters in upstate New York, their unforgiving beauty and unrelenting cruelty, reminded Heeyoung of Busan. She often told this story where, one January, near the fields of a Presbyterian church, a child fell through the snow and was never seen again until spring. The local deer fed on the carcass. A pair of shed buck antlers were found by the ripped scalp—fur and hair patchy and intermixed as one. A cautionary fairy tale that had no dates, no names, just morals and tragedy. Her dinnertime favorite.
Scrub the white stem of the cabbage. Chop into bite-sized pieces. Sprinkle with water. In a large basin, kosher salt and turn, kosher salt and turn. Your wife told you how, growing up, she hated being Asian, let alone Korean. I was quiet, no one looked like me, everyone was Jewish or Black. Then the school told me I was stunted. I’d be retarded if I was learning two languages. My dad told my umma to stop speaking Korean to me but she didn’t know any English. So, for years, she just didn’t talk to me at all. This process takes over an hour—the salt penetrates the leaves, draws out water, kills any microbes, preserves the flavor.
Stir the mochiko into a boiling pot of water. It’s thin at first, but over time it’ll bubble into a thick white paste. Watch over this carefully. Anything sweet burns easily, turns acrid and bitter faster than a blink. You remember the groundhogs in Heeyoung’s garden. While the neighborhood children shot the pups with BB pellets and slingshots, aiming for their skulls, a quick death, Heeyoung left the ugly bits of produce out on her deck, the butts of onions, the leaves of radishes. They came back every year, raised families, tunneled under the foundations of her home, sinking her porch and columnar trees a couple inches every spring. You need to call pest control, you said once, and Heeyoung, without blinking, hurled a King James Bible at you, not because you were right, not because you were wrong, but for ordering her around in her own home. It means she treats you as family, your wife said. She threw scissors at me once. Or was it a knife? Cool the paste when it boils. Add white sugar. Cover it with your favorite tea towel.
Next: blend garlic, ginger, onion, and fish sauce. The resulting smoothie is brown, sharp, and, of course, fishy. You dip a spoon in, churn the porridge, unsure if you want a taste, unsure if this is a cultural abomination, a crime you’re committing somehow. Before she passed, Heeyoung racked up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. This you knew eventually, pried the truth out of her as she ground her teeth and dug her pride into the crocodile skin purses and Burlington mink coats she could no longer afford. This you and your wife paid for, swept the bills away each month. You lick the porridge. It’s odd. Funky. Garlicky. Before she married, Heeyoung had another daughter in Korea. This you only know when your wife’s half-sister, ten years older, called you yesterday, because you were the one who left your phone number behind at the funeral home. You don’t know how to tell your wife, not yet. You justify to yourself that this isn’t deceit, merely an omission of truth, a withholding to spare her the pain of knowing. But you realize the irony, the bitterness of it flooding your mouth: was this, too, the same lie Heeyoung told herself?
Everyone adds a special touch to their kimchi, a signature, a fingerprint. Instead of pears, you wanted to use persimmons, which is what Heeyoung said she liked using best—old Buddhist monks sweeten their kimchi with the red pulp, mashing it into a seedy jelly, states an article you clipped last week. But they don’t sell persimmons at Wegmans, and, for a moment, as you quarter and mortar the pear flesh, you worry that you’ve made yet another mistake. Two days ago, your wife, sent out for milk and eggs, returned from the store empty-handed, eyes blank. I saw Pastor Ahn with his daughter, she said. He asked why Umma hasn’t been coming to church. Your wife stared out the gaping front door, watching the neighbors salt their steps with blue and pink crystals. And I can’t—I know it was bad—I don’t know why—but I told him she moved back to Korea. Why did I do that? You consider calling your own mother in San Francisco. Asking her to ship the persimmons from one of her familiar haunts in Chinatown or Little Vietnam, but you know she would end up guilt-tripping you. Make the conversation about the lack of children. How you never come home. How you picked up more Korean words than you ever did in your own mother tongue.
In Busan, they also add diced raw seafood into their onggi. Fermented shrimp, pink as a peach. Raw squid, slimy and gray. They bury their clay pots underground in the winter, unearthing them come spring. You’re not sure what else Heeyoung added in her kimchi, can’t ask her now, couldn’t ask even when she was alive. She never liked either of you in the kitchen. Any offer to cook, to chop, to wash dishes was rebuffed with a scowl. All she ever wanted was for you two to rest. To sit still. To not wander out of sight. To never lift a finger under her care. You work so much, so much, she said, and layered both of you with heated mink blankets, bundling you tight tight tight, handing you mug after mug of ginseng and honey tea while you watched the snow pile through her garden window, sheeting over any semblance of life.
Her passing, too, had lain in dormancy, waiting to be discovered. Ever since you’d known her, she rarely picked up the landline and refused, on principle, to use a cell phone or computer. You and your wife never spoke to or saw Heeyoung until the biweekly dinners, a frequency that Heeyoung dictated. When she didn’t answer the door that afternoon—typical, as her presence often marked itself in the kitchen or backyard—you and your wife entered with a spare key. Later, in private, the mortician told you it was fortunate that this winter was an especially cold one.
When you cut your thumb julienning carrots, dicing scallions, your wife comes by with a first aid kit. She cleans and bandages the wound, then nibbles on the skin of a Korean pear, the exposed white ribbon pinkened with your blood. As an adult, your wife tried to learn Korean from Duolingo, nonsense sentences the app had her memorize but would never say to a sane person in or out of context. The boy jumps on the crazy horse. The temperature is 152 degrees Celsius. Do you eat parsnips in the rain? When she repeated the phrases to Heeyoung, Heeyoung laughed, unkindly. Don’t even try. You’re not smart enough, and you began to protest, but your wife kicked you under the blankets, her fingernails digging deep deep deep into your ribs.
Rinse the cabbage. Rinse three times, and when you still taste salt, still taste grief and resentment, keep rinsing. The saltwater burns your cut and eventually the bandage loosens. Mix the paste in with the carrots and scallions, the brown porridge, the mashed pears, the glittering gochugaru flakes, then pour it all atop the cabbage: everything slops together into something that might resemble kimchi. The color is red, but still lighter than you remember. Shake some more flakes. Then another handful. Then a last pinch for luck. Pleased, you accidentally rub your eyes and cry out, screaming. This is why you hate spicy food. Your wife rushes in, alarmed, and laughs for the first time in weeks. A full belly chuckle that sounds like flowers and winning.
For dinner, you microwave instant rice. Boil a miso soup. Cut up some tofu. Toss in wakame. Add soy sauce. Drizzle sesame oil. Asian food for Asian people playacting as Asians. You dress the kimchi with sesame seeds. I’m not sure if it’s any good, you say. It’s probably not, because you two never cook any Asian food. Thank you for trying, she says. Her eyes look just like Heeyoung’s. You wonder if her sister also inherited the same taper, the same upturn. Your wife takes a bite and winces. Bad? you ask. I can throw it away—
No, no. She takes another bite and the crunch almost echoes. It’s good. Sharp. She eats the rice and her mouth gapes open, letting the steam escape. It’s just fresh, you know, so it doesn’t taste like hers. Maybe since it’s not sour enough. We should wait a while.
You agree. The next day, the kimchi juice bubbles when you press the surface with a spoon, signaling its fermentation. Double wrap the Tupperware in a plastic bag, then a brown paper one, so it doesn’t overwhelm the fridge with its scent, its overpowering presence. In two months, in March, you’ll take it out, pray that it hasn’t grown mold. You’ll dress the cabbage once more in sesame seeds. You’ll make instant rice again. If the kimchi tastes right, if it tastes correct, if it tastes ready, you’ll give it to your wife. You’ll give her a phone number and tell her that, across the ocean, someone is waiting for her to call.
(for 박정숙)
Stephanie Isan (she/they) (@stephanieisan) is the pen name of a queer Taiwanese American writer, poet, and software engineer. Their work has been generously supported by Kundiman and the Tin House Workshop, and their writing is published and/or forthcoming in Five Points, Joyland, The Bellevue Literary Review, Frontier Poetry, Epiphany, and others. You can find out more about her at stephanieisan.com.