who I am
I only had her for 8 years but my mother was the best cook ever. My Japanese-Korean mother stood 2 inches taller than my German-Spanish father. Hungarian goulash one night and then Korean seafood pancake another. Fish bone stew with Japanese sticky rice and then homemade spaghetti with meat sauce and noodles. For those 8 years I believed this was the way every middle-class American ate.
I know now, I was lucky.
Maybe not so much in the very beginning. My parents told me that my first experience with chicken was frightening. I ate every molecule of meat off the bone, then the gristle, and then proceeded to gnaw at the actual bone. If they weren’t there to stop me, things might have turned out differently. But I was new to the family at age 3 and new to the country of plenty. I must have had to fight over anything that resembled food pre adoption.
Even though I lost her at age 12, I felt no one could be so lucky for much longer than that. The ones left behind learned to nourish themselves with frozen dinners. I could list off every combination of meat-vegetable-starch AND desert for each brand and line of frozen entrees, the temperature, and time.
Was it wrong to miss my mother for her cooking? And even then, it wasn’t that bad. I loved those frozen entrees! That was when I realized I was a foody. Foody before there was such a word for that label. I lived to eat; I planned what to eat for dinner at school each day; I dreamt of food. So how I became a graphic designer instead of a chef, I’ll never know. Girls didn’t become chefs back then.
I am lucky. I was able to have a pretty good career in design and it still came full circle to food. Food brings me joy. Cooking food brings me happiness. Teaching cooking food… is this heaven on earth. My religion, I share with you.