Spoonful of potato salad. When my mom said that I should talk to my dad about the traditions of food in our family, I was surprised and not very excited.
DaeYong Jang
Date: 2-08-2012
Spoonful of Potato Salad
When my mom said that I should talk to my dad about the traditions of food in our family, I was surprised and not very excited. To be honest, my father and I don’t usually talk because that’s just how it is between us. When I got into trouble when I was younger, he was the “bad cop”, compared to my mother, who was the saint, so I still had somewhat instinctive behavior to avoid any confrontation with him. Plus I never saw him cook or had any vivid memories of him in the kitchen, especially in recent years. It was going to be an awkward interview with my dad, I thought. In all honesty, the relationship between my father and I was not distant when I was younger; he and I played together on weekends, traveled a lot and ate strange foods together all the time. Realizing that some of the oldest memories I had with my dad were related to food, I had to find out more about why mom wanted me to interview him instead.
That evening, I phoned my dad and started an interview on our family’s tradition of food. Surprisingly, he was very eager to talk about it. He was born in a small town called Jun-Ju, South Korea back in 1963, just ten years after the Korean War had stopped and the country had divided in two. With mixed feeling of sadness and anger, he added that over half of the farm land was destroyed and was not safe to work on because of landmines. Raised within a large family of eight food was often scarce and sometimes his family had to skip a meal. My grandmother, who I remember as a strong woman with a big heart, spent her days on the field with my grandfather and her nights in the factory in order to feed her family. My dad, along with his brothers and sister, worked to support the family as well. Naturally, the only time when the whole family could be together was at dinner. “Those are the most important memories I have with my parents and siblings and it’s because of your grandmother,” my father said. Grandmother was a strong believer that the family should eat together at least once a day, no matter what, he said. They would then share what each of them has done at work or in school that day. The food wasn’t impressive at all: steamed rice, kimchi, and maybe some stir-fried or seasoned vegetables, depending on the season. On a good day, there would be an egg side dish as well. The meal itself didn’t mean much to my father, but I could sense a grin on his face when he recalled those memories. He said it was the not the food that made him smile, but the memories with his family. The times when his brother got an F on a test, when his sister got a boyfriend for the first time… I then realized that this was also true for me.
