Tribute

When I was in my early twenties, I got caught up in the fanciful notion that I would learn to properly cook a Korean dish or two. I figured this would take me–what–a few hours, perhaps? My 이모 (maternal aunt) had always been a fantastic cook so when she and I were both at my parent’s house for a family event, I asked her to teach me.

“I’m going to learn to cook Korean food, okay?” I said. I figured  I could be her sous chef for the family gathering.

She nodded without comment.

The next morning, I woke up and stumbled into the kitchen. It was early but it was obvious that my aunt had already been up for hours. Washed and prepped vegetables were piled into large bowls. My aunt sat crouched on the floor, hard at work. She moved steadily, assuredly, without ceasing.

In that moment, I realized how presumptuous it had been for me to think I could learn how to cook Korean food in a day. My aunt had been working in the kitchen since she was a small child. She had the 10,000 hours for mastery described by Malcolm Gladwell, and then some. I, on the other hand, was an impatient youngster brought up short by my own hubris. I turned around and went back to bed.

My aunt passed away five days before we arrived in Korea. She was genial and relentless about feeding the people she loved delicious morsels of perfectly seasoned tastiness.

Even when she was battling the last stage of stomach cancer, she insisted that when we visited her she would cook for us. When my mother objected, my aunt scolded. “Are you saying you’ll come to my house but refuse to eat even one bite of my cooking?”

When she had to move to hospice, she still insisted on feeding us. She left instructions for her daughter, my cousin.

“Make oi sobaegi for Bora, because cucumber kimchi her favorite. Your aunt can’t eat very spicy things, so you need to make water kimchi for her. For Wes and the girls, you need to make a batch of regular kimchi.”

My cousin protested that she couldn’t both care for my (at that point very, very sick) aunt and make kimchi.

“Do it,” my aunt said. “You can leave me alone while you do it.”

When we met her grieving daughter in Seoul, she greeted us with homemade kimchi.