Popping Sue
“Popping Sue?” Jenny repeated, raising an eyebrow. She imagined a freckle-faced girl with pig-tails, popping up and down as she skipped down the street
“Yes,” her friend confirmed, nodding vigorously.
“I don’t know,” Jenny said, jabbing her index finger into her cheek as she often did when she was nervous or confused.
“It was delicious. It’s my new favorite Korean food,” the younger woman proclaimedAlthough she tried to keep her face from showing it, Jenny was disappointed. She had prepared dozens of Korean dishes for Alicia, the local food maven, who was always eager to try exotic foods and spot new culinary trends. Jenny had introduced her friend to such traditional fare as samgyeopsal, naengmyeon, seolleongtang, bindaetteok and japchae. She loved watching Alicia’s face light up when she tasted a new Korean delicacy. But now the fickle woman was carelessly dismissing all the complex and time-consuming meals Jenny had prepared, declaring that some new dish she just tried was number one. And what was she even talking about?
“Maybe not Korean,” Jenny suggested. “I think some other country food.”
“Definitely Korean,” Alicia insisted animatedly. She was bubbling with excitement, as she always did when discussing food. “I had it at the new Korean restaurant on Fourth Street. I went there with Mrs. Park. The owner said it was a traditional Korean food. Mine had mango.”
“Mango?” Jenny repeated, more certain than ever that Alicia was mistaken. Traditional Korean food with mango? Impossible. Mangoes weren’t a part of Korean cuisine. “It was salad or kind of stew?” she asked, trying to imagine what kind of dish someone might add mango to. When it came to food she was a traditionalist and took great pains to make sure her own dishes were authentic. The thought of some monstrosity like mango kimchi horrified her.
“No, it was dessert. Mine had mangoes, like I said, but Mrs. Park had one with red beans. Beans and ice cream – what a combination! Who would have imagined? I tried some of hers and you know, it was really good.”
“Oh,” Jenny cried, suddenly enlightened, a smile on her face. “Beengsoo. You had p-a-h-t-b-e-e-n-g-s-o-o.”
“Isn’t that what I said?” Alicia asked, frowning a little.
As soon as she heard the words ice and beans Jenny knew exactly what Alicia was talking about. The American’s pronunciation of the word was a little strange because of the stress she put on the final syllable. Korean words had equal stress on each syllable. Without the proper context she didn’t recognize the word. Jenny had had plenty of similar experiences herself in English. She would say a word and repeat it over and over again but the person she was talking to would just look puzzled and not have any idea of what she was talking about. Then finally, when she got them to understand, usually by adding more words and supplying some context, they would laugh and say, oh you mean so and so. Then they would say the word exactly the way she thought she had been saying it.
It was so easy to hear words the wrong way. It happened to Jenny all the time, especially when she listened to songs on the radio. Even when she found out later what the real words were, she would often continue to hear it in the mistaken way she originally heard it. Once she told her older son, a teenager at the time, that there was a popular song about a Korean girl. He didn’t know what she was talking about, so she sang to him, “Honey, honey, Kim Mi-seon.” He broke out laughing and explained that the line was “Honey, honey, gimme some.” It became a great joke in the family, which embarrassed her and made her feel stupid, but every time she heard the song, she couldn’t shake the notion that the singer was professing his love for a girl named Kim Mi-seon. It made more sense than ‘gimme some’ which didn’t mean anything to her at all. Her first impression stuck, just as it did now with her thoughts of a freckle-faced girl named Sue which she couldn’t equate with any kind of Korean food. Only after the clues ice and beans were supplied did the picture of the popping girl blur and the words reformulate themselves to mean something else.
“Very famous food,” Jenny said, glossing over the pronunciation issue. She wasn’t about to be critical of someone else’s pronunciation. “From Chosun Dynasty, long time ago, Korea people use to eat that.”
She thought back to her childhood and what a rare treat it was to have patbingsu on a hot summer day. Ice itself was a luxury and wasn’t usually available. Who had a refrigerator or even electricity in those days? But occasionally someone carted a block of ice into town and her mother would scrounge a piece of it and scrape it into a bowl. She added sweet red bean paste and pieces of glutinous rice cake called tteok. When Jenny was lucky enough to get such a treat, the ice-cold sweetness melted in her mouth and made her feel like she was in heaven.
Still, it surprised Jenny that a simple treat like that had made such a big impression on Alicia who was, after all, very sophisticated in her tastes and accustomed to the most decadent desserts. Jenny herself had tasted such mouth-watering delicacies at Alicia’s house as chocolate éclairs, almond truffle tarts, fruit-laden cheese cake, fluffy meringue pies and many-layered tiramisu that was almost too rich for her to eat. There were even extravagant productions like crème brûlée and baked Alaska that were set aflame before they were served. How could a simple shaved ice dessert impress a woman used to such wonders? Jenny didn’t know but still felt a sense of pride that the humble food from her native country was making such a splash in her adopted country.
Jenny had been stunned at the emergence of Korean foods as prized American specialty fare. She used to be ashamed if any odor of the pickled cabbage kimchi or the fermented soybean paste called doenjang – comfort foods she ate in private – lingered in the kitchen. Eating those smelly concoctions felt like a secret vice to her that she did her best to hide from the outside world and even her own family. But now kimchi had become an obsession with American foodies. It was everywhere. In hot dogs, meatloaf, burritos and tacos, on hamburgers, pizza and grilled cheese sandwiches. You could buy containers of it at the local supermarket, usually not very good, but people paid high prices for it anyhow. Her own kimchi, which was much better, was in high demand these days and people were curious to see how she made it. It was confusing how what once was regarded as a nasty food from a third world country had become such a valued commodity. And it wasn’t only food. Korean television dramas and pop music had also become popular and glamorous. Somewhere along the line Korean culture had unexpectedly attained celebrity. What had been scorned was now valued. Alicia used to say, “The ugly caterpillar turns into a gorgeous butterfly. It’s there all along but people don’t recognize it.” Alicia was obsessed with finding the caterpillar before anyone else suspected its potential, spotting new food trends before they became popular.
Food now played a large part in Jenny’s life, much more so than when her husband was alive. How odd it was to be spending more time in the kitchen now when she was cooking just for herself than when she had four mouths to feed. It wasn’t because her appetite had grown or because she had been lax about feeding her family. The truth was that her husband and children hadn’t been wild about Korean food, and the American style meals they preferred didn’t take much time to prepare. Throw some macaroni into a pot to boil and cook up some sauce and it’s ready in half an hour. It took no time at all to fry up some steaks or bake a meatloaf. But a good Korean meal takes all day to prepare. She was lucky that her family didn’t care for Korean food. It would have been so much more work.
When her husband and younger son died in a car crash, friends and neighbors came by with bouquets of flowers and platters of food. After she had recovered sufficiently to perform such duties, she started inviting those good people to her house to thank them for their kindness and prepared some traditional Korean dishes for them. It was what she knew how to do. She felt more confident serving them dishes like seaweed-wrapped rice known as gimbap, or meat-filled dumplings called mandu, which she could prepare expertly, than something like lasagna, which, she feared, wouldn’t measure up to her guests’ standards. Those who were open to trying new foods liked what they tasted. In fact, it knocked their socks off. It happened to be a time when Korean cuisine was becoming popular. Some of the more savvy folks were already familiar with kimchi and bulgogi, but the meals they had at Jenny’s beat anything they tasted before. Her reputation as a cook quickly spread and food enthusiasts flocked to her house. Preparing food was good therapy for her after her loss and a way of making friends.
Food was her salvation. Had it not been for people seeking her out about matters related to food she might have stayed home and become a recluse. As it was, people were constantly asking her to prepare favorite dishes, begging to watch her work in her kitchen, coaxing her to go shopping at the Asian markets with them and explain what the different items on the shelves were and how to use them. And they invited her to their houses. They eagerly placed the fare they prepared in front of her and asked her opinion of it. Never in her life had she been so popular, so much in demand. Not only that. For the first time she had an area of expertise that she was respected for. Her self-esteem grew and she became more relaxed around people. Initially she was shy about speaking because she was embarrassed about her English, but in time she cared less about making mistakes. People were more interested in what she had to say than in how she said it, and she gained confidence in her ability to communicate. She had managed to become friends with people of different ages and backgrounds that she would never have had contact with in her previous existence. Her friendship with Alicia, a fashionable gourmet cook thirty years her junior, would have been inconceivable to her before.
After her friend’s departure, instead of turning on the TV as she normally would have at that hour, she went back into the kitchen. As if in a trance, she rinsed some adzuki beans and started to cook them down to make a sweet bean paste. She often made this same paste for danpatbbang and sesame ball cakes, pastries that her American friends referred to as Korean jelly donuts. After the beans cooled down she crushed some ice cubes in a food processor the way her friends had shown her to do to make margaritas and daiquiris, and dumped it into a bowl. She spooned some bean paste on top of it. Remembering that she had a piece of rainbow tteok, she got it out of the refrigerator, cut it into small pieces, and sprinkled them on the mound. Then she carried the bowl to a straw mat in the living room and sat down. She closed her eyes and brought a spoonful of the concoction to her lips. The taste of the patbingsu was for her what the madeleine was for Proust. It brought the past back not as a memory but as something she was actually living. In a rush she saw and smelled and tasted sensations she hadn’t experienced in more than fifty years.
She was once again in the little hovel that was her home. Her father had died the year she was born and her mother did the best she could to provide for the two of them in a country ravaged by war and mired in poverty. Despite the dire circumstances her mother had somehow managed to make a special treat for her. As she sat in her own comfortable living room with the bowl of patbingsu on her lap, she lived over again that precious, fleeting moment that felt like heaven.
Not long after the day of that miraculous patbingsu, her mother died, finally worn out by the daily struggle, and life became almost unbearable for Jenny, or, as she was known then, Jin-hee. She was sent off to an orphanage where she knew only drudgery and abuse. Day after day, week after week, year after year she lived through a nightmare that she believed would never end. But when she was eighteen years old, something extraordinary occurred. On one December day, when she was peddling chestnuts in the street, an occupation which didn’t provide much money but kept her hands warm as she roasted the brown pods on a charcoal grill, an American soldier stopped and bought a handful. She had never met a foreigner before and she thought him very strange. It seemed that he didn’t know what to do with the chestnuts and she had to show him how to peel and eat them. His clumsiness almost made her laugh and she had to place her hand in front of her face in order not to appear rude. He didn’t seem to notice. She knew only a few words of English and he knew even less Korean, but they managed to communicate. The next day he returned and bought more chestnuts from her. He was there again the following day and almost every day afterwards for weeks to come. She had never met anyone who liked chestnuts so much and was very surprised to learn, years later, after they were married, that he didn’t care for chestnuts at all.
Like a prince from a fairy tale, Eric had arrived out of nowhere and plucked her from a life of adversity. She never imagined such a thing could happen. Just over a year after she handed him those first chestnuts, she was on an airplane with him, leaving behind forever her miserable existence and heading for a magical land full of wonder and happiness. America. The land of opportunity where she would start her life again. Everything that came before could be shaken off like a bad dream.
When she arrived in her adopted country she was amazed at its vastness, its beauty, its variety. It was everything she dreamed it would be, at least in the beginning. In the great new land she had come to, she no longer had to endure most of the hardships she suffered in her native country. But there were other hardships, less easy to define, that she never would have imagined. She had a comfortable house, modern appliances, even a car, and most importantly a husband who doted on her. It should have been perfect, but somehow it wasn’t. Language, of course, was a problem. She had learned enough English to get by but not enough to understand what people were saying in serious conversations or to express herself on anything but the most basic level. Sometimes people said things that made other people laugh and she had no idea what was funny. Learning English felt like climbing a mountain that went higher and higher with no end in sight. She would never get to the top of it.
But it wasn’t only language. She didn’t understand what people thought or how they felt. She was living among creatures who sometimes seemed to be of an entirely different species. She wasn’t like them and didn’t belong. People looked at her in a strange way and sometimes said rude things for no reason. And even when people were friendly to her it didn’t always feel comfortable. She was often treated like a “China doll” that wasn’t quite real. Eric was her interface to the world, her translator and buffer. While that made life easier, it also retarded her English progress and made her feel that she had reached a plateau that she would never go beyond. She was like a child in her dependency, but it was a childhood without end. Sometimes it seemed that her old life in Korea with all its misery and hardships was preferable to her comfortable life in the US.
At the time she left, she wanted nothing more to do with the country of her birth. She longed to expunge it from her existence, erase every trace of it from her being. How peculiar it was then, when after just a few months in the promised land, she felt a craving, a gnawing in the pit of her stomach, for something that wasn’t satisfied by the food she ate. Never had so much food been available to her. All kinds of meat, fruit and vegetables. In a month she consumed more meat than she would have in a year or more in Korea, yet she was hungry. She added rice to her diet and that helped but it wasn’t enough. For one thing, the rice in the supermarket wasn’t the same as the short-grained glutinous variety she was used to. There were also other tastes she longed for. The sharp, biting flavor of a good kimchi, the rich, satisfying nuttiness of a steaming bowl of doenjang jjigae. When she tried adding those dishes to the dinner table, her husband held his nose, so she began preparing and consuming them when he wasn’t home and cleaning up all traces of their existence. He didn’t care what she ate in private as long as he didn’t have to see or smell the food she made. So began her secret culinary life.
In time things got better. The birth of her children added meaning and purpose to her life and kept her occupied. The discomfort of her first years in the US had diminished, and although thorough mastery of English remained elusive, she was fluent enough. She was and would remain an alien in a foreign country, but her condition wasn’t so different, she felt, from other “outsiders”. Many of them were American-born – gays, Afro-Americans, children and grandchildren of immigrants – but were treated the same way that she was, sometimes with hostility, often with apprehension, tolerated at best. She didn’t have many friends but a few casual acquaintances with whom she went shopping or to an occasional movie. She wasn’t unhappy. At least no more unhappy than anyone else. And that’s the way the years slipped by until the accident. That changed everything. Where the fullness of her life had been there was now a gaping void. Her older son, thankfully, was still alive and well, but was already a college student living in a distant city. He came back home for a few weeks after the accident, but then he was gone, except for occasional short visits. She was alone in the world again, just as she had been after her mother died.
This was not what Jenny was thinking about as she lifted the spoon from the bowl to her lips. The patbingsu brought her back to a time in her life that she had all but forgotten, those days of her early childhood, before the orphanage, when her mother was still alive and when there was someone in the world who loved her with her entire soul. They were tough times. Often there was no food to eat and no means of heating their little home through the bitterly cold Korean winter. They were not happy times but there were moments of happiness. The days at the orphanage had erased the good memories and focused her mind on bare survival. Now those early memories, reborn, flooded over her and she wept. She wept for the losses she suffered and in gratitude for what she once had. Her hot tears fell on the flavored ice and added another dimension of complexity to its taste.
That night she slept well. Her dreams weren’t overshadowed, as they often were, by ominous portents and unknown dreads. When she awoke she thought of the patbingsu and she was puzzled. For her that food held a world of meaning. It transported her to another place and time that she had forgotten and lost sight of. But why was Alicia so crazy about the patbingsu she had at the restaurant? It was just flavored ice. It held no special meaning for her. It was a mystery and Jenny aimed to get to the bottom of it. She dialed Francine’s number. Francine was her closest American friend. She was a regular person, not a food fanatic like Alicia. She was also about Jenny’s age and had lots of time on her hands.
“Francie?”
“Jenny, I was just going to call you.”
“What you doing today?
“Now?”
“No, afternoon.”
“This afternoon? The usual – nothing. Why? What’s up?”
“You come with me? There’s new restaurant I want to go.”
“Count me in. What time?”
A few hours later the ladies walked through the doors of Choi’s Chic-Dang.
“I know what chic means,” Francine said, “but why Dang? I hope we don’t end up saying, ‘Dang it, we shouldn’t have eaten there’.”
Jenny laughed and said, “Shikdang mean restaurant in Korean. I don’t know why they spell c-h, not s-h. That not right. Maybe they only have chicken food here,” she conjectured.
This time it was Francine’s turn to laugh. “No, chic is a French word. It means ‘fashionable’, ‘stylish’, ‘elegant’, you know, ‘trendy’, ‘la-di-dah’.” Francine was a retired middle school teacher and loved to dispense information.
“Oh, I know,” Jenny said, smacking her forehead with her palm. She had heard the word many times but thought it was spelled s-h-e-e-k or something like that. English spelling was so much more confusing than hangul, the Korean writing system.
“Anyhow,” Francine said, “clever name.” Jenny thought so too. It was an interesting fusion of Western and Asian. But she worried that the food would be a similar kind of fusion and that prospect didn’t please her.
They picked up their menus and studied them. After a few minutes Francine plopped hers down and said, “You decide for me. I have no idea what to get.”
In short order, the table was crowded with a multitude of small dishes containing marinated bean sprouts, steamed eggplant, braised tofu, dried squid, spicy cucumber salad, glazed lotus root, seasoned spinach, stir-fried anchovies, sweet potato noodles, beef dumplings and several kinds of kimchi.
“Oh, my,” Francine said. “You ordered so much food.”
“I didn’t order,” Jenny told her friend. “We call that banchan. Korean side dish. Every meal has. Our food coming soon.” Francine shook her head in amazement but sampled every dish while Jenny explained what each one was and how it was prepared.
Jenny wasn’t especially impressed with the sundubu jjigae she ordered, although it was decent enough. She thought her own was maybe just a little bit better, a little closer to what it was supposed to taste like. But Francine thoroughly enjoyed her entrée and when she finished she looked up at her friend and said, “So tell me, Jenny, what did I just eat?”
“Your food called bibimbap.”
“Bibimbap? I love that name! So alliterative. I’m going to remember that.”
Jenny understood that a catchy name adds to a food’s panache. She thought of shishkebab, chimichanga and jambalaya and wondered if they didn’t owe at least some of their popularity to their names, which seemed to roll off your tongue and make you smile. Just based on the name she wasn’t surprised that bibimbap was one of the first Korean foods to catch on in America.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked as she cleared away the dishes.
Francine was shaking her head but Jenny said, “Yes, we like some patbingsu.”
“Popping Sue?” said the American girl in exactly the same way Alicia pronounced it. “Of course. We have coffee, chocolate, melon, blueberry, strawberry, mango cheese and red bean.”
“So many choice,” Jenny marveled. “For me mango cheese. How about you, Francie?”
“I’ll have coffee,” Francine said, thinking she was ordering a cup of java.
After a while the waitress returned carrying a tray with two heaping bowls. “Oh, my,” Francine shrieked. “What’s all this?”
“My treat,” Jenny said smiling. “Special Korean dessert,” she added, thinking as she said it that it didn’t look like any Korean dessert she’d ever had. The icy mounds were studded with fruit, nuts and pieces of cake. The women lifted their spoons at the same time and dug in.
“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” Francine gushed. “This is s-o-o-o good.”
Jenny understood what Alicia had been raving about. The dessert melted in her mouth leaving behind a trace of subtle flavors. Instead of shaved ice, the patbingsu seemed to be composed of a light, delicate snow, like manna from heaven.
“Better than ice cream,” was Francine’s verdict. “It’s so light.”
Jenny agreed. The two ladies were busily dipping their spoons into each other’s bowls when an Asian woman in an apron stepped in front of their table and asked if they had enjoyed their meal. She introduced herself as Mrs. Choi, the owner and cook. Speaking in Korean, Jenny expressed her surprise to Mrs. Choi about the patbingsu and told her how different it was from the simple red bean dessert she had had as a child. Mrs. Choi explained how the snow was made from frozen condensed milk rather than regular ice cubes and talked generally about how food and everything else was changing in Korea. She was shocked to hear that Jenny hadn’t been back to Korea since she left in the late 1960’s and told her that she needed to go back and see the big changes that had taken place. “You have to go,” she urged her. “You won’t believe it. After you see Seoul, you will think that Korea is more modern and developed than America.”
When she went to bed that night, Jenny thought about the patbingsu she had eaten and how the mango was not such a bad addition. Sweet red bean paste, after all, was not so different from a fruit jam, so what was the harm in substituting other kinds of fruit, as long as the end result was good? And it was delicious.
It wasn’t only the exquisite taste of the modern version of patbingsu that occupied her thoughts as she lay in her bed. She recalled what the restaurant owner had said about Korea, how different it was these days. To her own great surprise, an idea popped into her mind that had never occurred to her before – visiting her native country. She had spent much of her life trying to be a real American and ridding herself of her Korean-ness. Did it make sense to visit the place that was the source of so much of her trouble? She had no friends or relatives there. But things had changed. The attention she was getting these days was not in spite of the Korean part of her but because of it. It made her special. She was American, an American citizen, but she was Korean too.
She thought again of the patbingsu and marveled at how a simple traditional dish could be modified and transformed into something fresh and exciting. Accomplished a cook as she was, she had always been focused on preparing authentic dishes that tasted precisely as they were supposed to taste, as they had always tasted. But what if she could create dishes even better than the originals by using techniques, equipment and ingredients not available before? Why limit herself to re-creating what had already been done? Would it be the end of the world if she added some mango to a crock of cabbage kimchi? Such ideas had been anathema to her before, almost blasphemy. But now she wondered. If an entire country could change, surely she could change. She didn’t have to limit herself. The thought was immediately liberating, like casting off a weighty garment that used to be necessary, or was at least deemed so, but which had become only an encumbrance. When Jenny finally drifted off to sleep, there was a smile on her face, the almost mischievous smile of a child contemplating a tomorrow of endless possibilities.
End
© 2018 Mark Feder