Self-Portrait as Daily Sustenance

By Ae Hee Lee

To eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days.
—Li-Young Lee, “Blossoms”

While in Michigan, I make it a habit to invite friends over for dinner. I enjoy experimenting with the miscellany of ingredients in the fridge. Measurements from this country still confuse me. But instead of forcing myself to translate kilos into pounds and vice versa, I choose to trust my hands, their memory of weight. My friends, one from Honduras, another from Guatemala and Korea, say my cooking reminds them of their homes somehow. Our hearts are their own stomachs; they fill with every spoonful we take.

——

For me, a sickly child, my mother prepares a warm bowl of congee, sprinkles it with shredded chicken and sesame seeds. From across the table, she watches me take one careful mouthful of soft rice at a time, barely restraining liquid snot with whatever strength I have left in my nostrils. My mother says she likes watching how each bite makes moons rise out of my eyes.

——

After a round of pulling at each other’s hair for a trivial reason, I approach my sister with a split apple in hand—in Korean, the sound of the word apple, sagwa,¹also meaning to ask for forgiveness. We bite into the fruit and reconcile. I’m reminded forgiveness is something you can sink your teeth into, can limn what’s sharp with honey.

——

This is the first time I’m on my own. My family and friends in a different hemisphere. Homesickness is a woman with a blurry face who wears my mother’s worn apron, beckons me to cook what I cannot easily find near me. I fill the pot with broth, and she licks the spoon. What’s missing? I ask daily. She says, Maybe a dash of soy sauce, or some crushed garlic cloves, two of those little bulbous teeth, for depth. On a different day, she instructs, Rub the oregano between your fingers to wake its scent. Or, For the rice, place your hand on top, pour the water in until it makes an archipelago out of your knuckles. I try to find my way back home through the kitchen, but she scolds, Consider the potatoes: a yukon gold is a yukon gold, not a papa yungay. I move on to broil something new.

——

My grandmother takes me to Gyeongju to see the old Korean temples and palaces. On the road we meet a field of pink-winged lotuses and leaf pads colored somewhere between blue and green, so large girls could be boated in them.

Later, their roots,² nursed unseen under beds of loam, appear on my plate, each thin slice carved with the flower they bore, braised in sweet soy.

——

Five years in Peru was what it took for my father’s stomach to cease understanding the spicy love language of Korean red peppers. Now, when he cooks instant ramen, he makes sure to pinch out the crimson flakes mingling in the dehydrated forest of green onions and mushrooms.

Two in the US and I get heartburn from licking clean the lime milk from a ceviche platter.

——

A classmate comes over to my house for a school project. She asks for a glass of milk and follows me into the kitchen. As soon as I open the fridge, she pinches her nose; the sharp smell of freshly fermented kimchi greets us both. I want to say something about history and culture, recite a long list of health benefits, the hours my mother toiled to make this dish—but a glance at her grimace and a senseless sense of shame bewilder me into silence, and shame me twice.

——

At the outskirts of Trujillo, a church with a guinea pig³ pen in the back. I’m a child who slips in to play with the little creatures, bribe them with alfalfa stalks for their friendship. One day, an hermana comes and swoops up a group of them. I follow her into the kitchen, where she picks one up, twists its neck with the might of her motherly arm; the tiny bones pop with the sound of bottle caps. I can’t move. She bathes the guinea pig in boiling water, a blistering baptism, undresses it expertly from the tricolored fur I had petted just minutes ago. Its bare skin so much like mine, pinkish and veined. The hermana proceeds to remove the insides, brine the frame, embalm it with oil and cumin. The fire licks its lips over the coals until it is given the fatty meat to grill. A small beast growls inside my stomach. The people gather. Together we pray and break into the animal’s body.

——

For Alejandra, food is an infiltrator. My childhood friend tells me about a boy she loved, how he once cooked pasta for her while the sound of light rain painted the background. The boy moved to another city, but she tells me she is like a leaf, who drank deep only to realize her fate had irrevocably joined the water’s. Both the boy and the rain remain in her body still, seeping.

——

A red flower, which my memory has turned anonymous. When it blooms, its petals don’t widen. They gather and bow as one, allowing only its pistil, yellow with pollen and sun, to loll out. I’m five, and a girl from France transfers into my school. She likes to pluck the flower, leave its sepal intact, and suck the bottom for nectar. A girl with a red flower for lips. I’m twenty-five, and sometimes I think of her. I wonder if she still collects sweet things under her hummingbird tongue.

——

For a late-night snack, I want to nibble on something ancient. I go out to the streets looking for anticuchos: pieces of cow heart staked on a sugarcane stick, dipped in flame, crowned with a boiled sweet potato. They say marinating the organ in ají panca and herbs was the idea of the Incas. The skewers, of the Spanish. I bite. I taste the savory meat melded with violence. I swallow and survive another day.

——

A gift of a dozen blue eggs. My father cracks one over the pan and provokes its yolk with a fork. Come and see—it doesn’t tear. I mutter a prayer: may my life be as tenacious.⁴

——

In fairy tales and myths, people are warned not to eat from the strange place they’ve lost themselves in, or they won’t be able to leave it. Persephone swallows six pomegranate seeds from the underworld and becomes wedded to Hades forever. In each country I call home, I eat my way into belonging.⁵

——

Parents believe that if you make children plant their own vegetables, it’s more likely they will eat them. And yet I water my garden of beets with a delicate undulation of wrist and hose but will not welcome them into my mouth. A beet snaps upon harvest and the color of its meat clings onto my palm, crimson, as if to say, Look, in loneliness we are all the same.

——

Every Christmas season in Peru, a box of Panetón. Bell-shaped loaf wrapped in wax paper woven with star polyhedrons, sweet and airy bread laced with fruit jelly, golden tufts we pull apart and slather with butter—a tradition my Korean family gladly takes under their tongues.

Years later, in an aisle of an Italian market in Milwaukee, I catch the sight of a box that reads, “Panettone.” It suddenly strikes me Italian immigrants had baked them first into South American countries. All along, I’d been taking into my body centuries of trails, nourishing myself, perhaps into a morsel for someone else’s future.

——

My mother teaches me that in Korean to forget is also expressed as to have peeled, like you would an unsuspecting mango, and eaten away a memory. When I tell her I’m afraid of forgetting things—the cottony texture of guaba seeds, the freckles of the faces I’ve loved—she reminds me I may eat and forget, forget and eat, but the soul grows all the same, a little fuller each time.

————

^{1Maracuyá. Passion

fruit. Perilla

Kkaennip. Lúcuma. See

how they wreathe

my tongue,

how their sounds wet

my mouth with rolling

hunger.}

² ^{If I'm

what I eat, then let me

chew

on root, become something

like possibility}

^{3 The plate is a mirror

of the earth

we glean,

so to devour must be

to live

in karma.}

⁴ ^{In the end, the things I crave are

those that can't live

forever. An avocado that bruises,

soft, soft

with flavor.}

⁵ ^{So often my longing for

a kinder world

has been a scalded

palate, going for

another

spoonful of soup that won’t cool. And yet—}