Buttermilk Graffiti Read online

  “Koreans are stubbornly shy, but it’s mostly an act,” I tell her. “The real obstacle is that they don’t trust anyone.”

  “How so?” she asks quietly.

  “Anyone who remembers the poverty after the Korean War also remembers how families were pitted against each other for what little there was to be had. Koreans saw a lot of awful things, and they never forgot them, though they won’t talk about them, either.”

  “Did your parents talk to you about it?”

  “No, but I believe sadness can be passed on through DNA. It takes generations to wipe the slate clean.”

  The staff is cleaning the last tables. We could sit here talking all day, but the restaurant is closing up. Cynthia Davis, one of the owners and the chef, is resting by the cash register as I walk up to pay. Her grandparents George and Josie started this restaurant thirty years ago in 1988. Her niece, Sheila, runs the cash register and works the phones. Her sister Shauna waits tables and helps package the take-out orders. Together, they are a force of nature. I ask Cynthia if she always runs out of food. Every day, she tells me. We talk about Montgomery. We talk about the history of her restaurant. I ask her how the okra was cooked, as I didn’t get to try it. She tells me to come back tomorrow. I say I will, if she’ll save me some sweet potato pie. I tell her I’m here to research Korean restaurants. None of these women have ever tried Korean food. Why not? I ask. Cynthia tells me she’s suspicious of what they serve.

  “Yeah,” I tease. “It’s hard to read the menu in Korean.”

  “No, I mean the meat. People sayin’ they serve all kinds of animals.” She winks and nods. I know where this is going.

  “It’s usually beef or pork,” I say.

  “Is it really, though?”

  “If I bring you some, will you try it?”

  “If you bring it, yes, I’ll try it.” She says this with the confidence of someone who believes I’ll never return.

  Food is trust, and trust is intimacy. The hardest part of trying something unfamiliar is not the fear of the unknown, but rather the mistrust of the person cooking the food. When we read about a celebrity chef in a glossy magazine, we feel we’re getting to know that chef as a person. It makes us comfortable enough to eat whatever the chef puts in front of us. I’m always amazed at the level of intimacy that perfect strangers display when they come up to me on the street. They feel they know me because of an article they’ve read. A lady once asked me to pose for a picture while holding her newborn baby. But with immigrant restaurants, we talk only about the food; rarely do we profile the chef behind it. The food may be delicious, but the cook is invisible. The trust is never quite fully formed. In a town like Montgomery, with such deep-rooted traditions, the recent wave of Korean immigrants naturally brings with it skepticism and mistrust, from both sides. The Korean culture has yet to hold hands with the Old Guard of Montgomery. It may take another generation to do so, but one day, Korean food may become as familiar to the locals here in Montgomery, Alabama, as kibbeh is to residents of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Only time will tell.

  Sarah drives me around Montgomery’s pretty neighborhoods. The trees along the parks are covered in Spanish moss, and the warm air glistens with humidity. She shows me the city of her youth, the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, where she worked. This is a picturesque city, full of history and stories. I wish we could stay here, but our story takes place along the wide traffic lanes of Eastern Boulevard, which is choked with exhaust fumes and big chain stores. There is not a tree for miles.

  The first place we visit is a Korean grocery store that makes its own kimchi and banchan, small side plates of mostly pickled vegetables, which they sell in clean, well-organized refrigerated cases. The store’s shelves are stocked with colorful bags of rice, dried noodles, spices, and at least six different kinds of seaweed. There is an entire aisle dedicated to soap, washcloths, loofahs, and Korean body scrub towels. In the back is a small makeshift kitchen lit by bright fluorescent bulbs. Two elderly ladies are silently chopping daikon radish. I make small talk, but they aren’t responsive. Sarah is recording from behind me. I ask the women what they’re doing. They tell me they’re making kakdugi, a cubed radish kimchi. My Korean is not that good, which makes the women even more skeptical of us. The older one is Mrs. Park. She married an American soldier many years ago in Seoul. She has been in Montgomery for more than twenty years. She won’t tell me if she owns the place. I want her to tell me about her family, so I start to describe my life growing up in Brooklyn.

  Just when I think she’s warmed to me a bit, she notices the microphone being pointed in her direction. She asks Sarah in broken English what she’s doing. The moment goes from awkward to belligerent so quickly that I can’t come up with the words fast enough to defuse the situation. Before we know it, Mrs. Park is throwing a fit and demanding that Sarah erase everything on her device. Two more ladies come out of nowhere to reprimand us. Mrs. Park looks at me with piercing eyes of betrayal. I feel terrible. It was my idea to start recording without asking. Sarah is backing away confused, but stalwart in her mission to get the story. I understand every nasty thing the ladies are saying. There is a long, unsettling pause, and Sarah and I assume the women have calmed down. We ask for their forgiveness and inquire if we can start over. But Koreans are not quick to forgive. I tell Sarah I know this from experience. We slink out of the store defeated and stunned.

  I have a flashback from my youth. I grew up inside this immigrant culture, with hardened grandmothers and secretive whispers. My parents, my aunts and uncles, and all their friends harbored a mistrust of American institutions. They always kept cash hidden in mattresses. They talked only to people they knew. They rarely let outsiders into their home. They told me that if a stranger took your picture, he was stealing a bit of your soul. I explain this to Sarah in the car. The ladies have a name for people like me: jemi-gyopo, a person who is Korean by blood but raised in America. It isn’t a slur exactly, but it carries with it a complex set of prejudices about someone who has traded in his Korean soul for a set of American values, who is to be regarded as a foreigner.

  The rest of the day is more productive, and we hit two other good Korean restaurants. I let Sarah do most of the talking, interpreting when necessary. At Shilla Restaurant, we eat bulgogi, thinly sliced marinated beef; scallion pancakes; and octopus stir-fry. The restaurant is eerily empty. The food tastes like that from the Korean restaurants I grew up with: a menu of popular dishes executed well but without pushing the envelope. Shilla is run by the Kim sisters, who agree to let us into their kitchen the next morning as they prepare box lunches for the executives at the Hyundai offices. They make these lunches every weekday for about two hundred people. They start at 6:00 a.m.

  That night, Sarah and I wind up at a Japanese restaurant run by Koreans. The place is cavernous, with private rooms behind curtains and a bar tucked away in a far-off corner. The phenomenon of Koreans operating Japanese restaurants was fairly common in New York City when I was a kid. I now see it all over the country. If you’re anywhere just outside a major city, chances are your favorite sushi restaurant is run by Korean immigrants pretending to be Japanese. Identity appropriation when it comes to food is nothing new in America. Swiss immigrants opened German and French restaurants. Muslims from all over the Middle East serve Lebanese food. Bangladeshi people are known to operate Indian restaurants. Still, I find something particularly insidious about this brand of identity disguise. It started in the 1980s, when sushi started to catch on like wildfire and Koreans saw a business opportunity. A generation of Korean immigrants who still remembered being mistreated and colonized by an imperialist Japanese regime arrived in a new country only to imitate the identity of their oppressors to make a living. What does that do to the psyche of a generation of immigrant Koreans?

  Sarah and I peruse the menu: volcano roll, caterpillar roll, firecracker roll—all these atro
cious interpretations of a maki roll, dipped and slathered in sweet sauce and mayo with more garnishes than a teenager on prom night. This is not the work of a Japanese person, I say to Sarah. A Japanese chef would never desecrate his culture like this. But for most Americans, when we think of sushi, this is what we picture. I, too, have been guilty of indulging in these rolls smothered in Sriracha sauce, topped with panko crumbs, stuffed with fake crabmeat and pollock roe dyed to a neon red. You taste nothing but sweet sauce and cold, vinegared rice. It is an affront to the craft of sushi. And then it hit me: was this the Korean way of getting back at the Japanese? What better revenge than to come to America and steal the cultural identity of a country’s most respected culinary craft by stuffing it with cream cheese and dousing it in cheap teriyaki sauce—all the while pretending to be Japanese and thwarting a hallowed aesthetic that Japanese immigrants have been trying to preserve for decades?

  Sarah and I are eating a pot of pig’s feet and drinking beer. The walls of the restaurant are lined with garish neon signs, and K-pop plays on the radio. Everyone here is speaking Korean. The sushi chef politely refuses to answer my questions. For all intents and purposes, we could be Americans in Seoul, but we are in Montgomery, Alabama. And that is the story for me: this idea of an American identity draped around an immigrant population deep in the South. The waitstaff is composed mostly of Korean American college students, and they answer our questions with a smile and a shrug. We give up asking and return to our food. We are huddled in the safety of our shared language, pretending to be expatriates in a foreign land.

  The next day, Sarah is up early to record the Kim sisters prepping box lunches in their kitchen. By the time I arrive, Mrs. Kim, the elder, is cutting up acorn jelly for a salad. A spicy miso stew is simmering in a kettle in the corner. Banchan are being apportioned and wrapped. The ladies are wearing colorful aprons and spongy work shoes. They move in tandem. They are not fast, they are not strong, they are not even particularly efficient, but they are persistent. They move on to the next task without hesitation. Not once do they stop moving or chopping or cleaning. You can get so much done when you work without breaks.

  Shilla was the third Korean restaurant to open in Montgomery, more than twenty-five years ago, long before the Hyundai plant arrived. The Kim sisters work from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. every day except Sunday. That is their day off, but once a month Mrs. Kim will take a day to drive to Atlanta to stock up on ingredients. She is wearing a lace hairnet and lipstick; her husband sells beauty supplies. She won’t do this forever, she says. She’ll retire one day and take cruises around the world with her husband. I ask her where she learned all her recipes. She tells me that it is just something all Korean women know; it is a shared knowledge. There is nothing precious about her food. Anyone can make this food, she says. She just does it with a little more precision. Still, I can tell she is proud of her work. She tells me that she makes these box lunches five days a week and never repeats a menu within a month’s time. She shows me a calendar of her menus; it reads like a tutorial on Korean food.

  I ask if her kids can cook all these different dishes. No, she says, but that’s okay. They came to America for a different life, a better life, so they can take advantage of all the opportunities here. Mrs. Kim could be my mother. Her story is not very different. I run out of questions to ask her, mostly because I already know the answers.

  We leave Shilla and go for lunch at Budnamu. The menu is the same as that of the other restaurants we’ve tried, but it’s the best version of it so far. The nak-jibokum, kalbi, homemade kimchi, and doenjang stew are all deeply satisfying. We talk to the owner, who gives us rehearsed answers about the food. I peek inside the kitchen and see a lone woman meticulously plating food. She’s too busy to talk to us but smiles profusely.

  I ask them to wrap up three dishes for me, so I can bring them to the women at the Davis Café. Bulgogi, thin slices of marinated beef sautéed with onions and peppers, will be the crowd-pleaser. Doenjang guk, an umami-rich miso soup with stewed vegetables and chunks of pork, will be a little more challenging for the ladies but still within the realm of familiarity. The last is nakji bokum, chewy curls of octopus tentacles sautéed with vegetables and a spicy fermented chile sauce. I figure if the ladies at the Davis try the first two dishes without incident, I can up the ante with this one.

  We have to wait until Cynthia is finished in the kitchen. She seems surprised to see me again. She did not save me any pie. It takes her a few minutes to get up the nerve to try the bulgogi from Budnamu. She takes a bite the size of a peanut. Then she goes in for a bigger bite. She’s never eaten any other kind of food but soul food, she says, so this is a big step for her. She takes a sip of the miso soup as her sisters watch in horrified anticipation. She frowns immediately. Not for me, she says. She then opens the Styrofoam box of octopus and looks at me, incredulous.

  “What is it?” she asks. I tell her. “Oh, hell noooo,” she says.

  We all have a good laugh. Even the customers are having fun with it, but no one will try the octopus. Everyone is daring Cynthia to try it, but she won’t budge. I see that Sarah is diligently recording, though I’m not sure how much of this interaction will make it into her story.

  I’ve been studying the way Sarah interviews people. Her questions are direct and precise, but her delivery is disarming. She gives her subjects the space to speak. If there is a silence, she allows it. She doesn’t jump in to fill the void. She’s patient. She lets the person come to the question at her own pace. If she doesn’t answer a question, she moves on to the next one. I decide to take a stab at interviewing Cynthia myself while she’s in a good mood.

  Q. What scares you about Korean food?

  A. I just grew up with simple food. We didn’t go out to eat, so I never ate nothing but what we cooked.

  Q. Will you go to a Korean restaurant now that you know what to order?

  A. Maybe. I’ll see. I don’t have much time to myself. This place takes everything.

  Q. If not you, then who else can run this place?

  A. Nobody. It’s just me and my sisters. When we go, the restaurant goes as well.

  Q. Will you be sad if this goes away, this restaurant?

  A. No, honey. Everything comes to an end. I won’t be sad one bit. My children will do something better. Doing all this day in, day out is hard. I don’t want my kids to have this life.

  Q. But who will keep up the tradition?

  A. They all cook at home. Every black family cooks at home around here. The tradition ain’t going nowhere. It will live on in their homes.

  Q. But not for someone like me. What happens when I want this food?

  A. Hmm . . .

  Q. What makes a woman better in the kitchen than a man?

  A. Well, a woman’s gonna stick it out until the end. A man is more likely to go away when things get tough. You see, if a marriage don’t work out, a man’s gonna leave and start a new family and leave the other one behind.

  A woman’s gonna stick it out and see it through till the end. That’s why we all sisters running this business.

  Q. Do you like what you do?

  A. Yes. My mamma would have been proud of me, but I don’t want this for my kids.

  Q. How much longer can you do this?

  A. I will do this till God tells me I can’t do it no more. I don’t want to do anything else. This is my work. God gave me the strength to do this every single day, and He will tell me when I can’t do it no more.

  I ask for a hug, and Cynthia comes out from behind the counter. She is a large woman, and her embrace feels good. It feels real. Then she tells me in a calm but stern voice, “It’s been real nice talking to you, but I have to go clean up now.” She walks away, but just before she disappears into the kitchen, she turns her head sharply toward me and says, “And don’t forget to take that octopus back with you, now.”

  Sarah and I ar
e standing on the street in front of Davis when we say good-bye. It is a sunny day, but the light feels drab, melancholic. It’s odd for me to tell someone I just met two days ago that I’ll miss her, so I don’t. She has another interview lined up, and she hurries on her way.

  Driving out of Montgomery, I drop by the Waffle House in Prattville, which is famous for its singing waitress. Her name is Valerie. I order a bowl of chili and hash browns, smothered and covered. Valerie’s daughter works alongside her. The entire staff here is composed of women. Valerie works the griddle station and belts out rock-and-roll classics all the while, changing the lyrics to make waffle and egg references. She has a deep, soulful voice and a bright energy that seems impossible to sustain for an entire shift.

  I ask her when she started singing. She tells me it was during an overnight shift. There were a bunch of drunk men getting ready to fight. She started singing to defuse the situation, and it worked. She’s been singing ever since.

  Next to me at the counter is an old cowboy in a wheelchair. There’s a young couple in a booth with a baby in a stroller. Another man, sitting across from me, is obviously a regular. He banters back and forth with Valerie. Customers drop in and say hello. The women behind the counter seem to know them all. I end up staying for an hour and talking to everyone in the store. They ask me what I’m doing, and they wish me good luck. Valerie’s daughter gets off early because she has a class. Everyone waves good-bye to her. Valerie starts belting out another tune; I recognize the lyrics of a Whitney Houston song.

  I try to keep an open mind when I visit a new place, but I already have stories in my head that I want to tell. I want these stories to be perfect. I want the outcome to be just what I set out to prove. But it rarely works out that way. Inside this Waffle House, a chain restaurant, I find the culture I wish I had found inside all those Korean restaurants. All these people come here for a reason, not just for Valerie, but for the food, the social comfort, the intimacy. I wish I hadn’t found this intimacy sitting in a chain restaurant next to a Shell station and across from a McDonald’s. But maybe this is the culture as it stands right now in America. I could spend the rest of my life eating in Michelin-starred restaurants, or I could start to include places like this one in my deeper understanding of food in America. I wish Sarah were here so we could argue this out. There are many questions I should have asked her but forgot to. I could fill a room with all the regrets I collect.