My Mother's Cooking was a Taste of Korea

It took me years to understand why her friend stopped by when I was home alone

For the past couple days, I’ve been posting Korean food onto my Instagram feed. It’s basic dishes compared to the meals my mother prepared from scratch every single night after she got home from work. And it’s a reminder that the food I took for granted was literally a labor of love from my 엄마.

I was a latchkey kid. My parents both worked and my siblings were older. So, while my parents were at work and my siblings went to their summer jobs, I stayed at home.

Every morning, my mother would set our rice cooker so that I could have fresh rice at lunch. She would set aside some banchan (side dishes), meat or fish and a bowl of kimchi in the fridge for me.

One day when I was about 10 or 11, I had just finished heating up my meal when the doorbell rang. I was debating whether or not to answer it, but when I peeked through the window, I saw that it was one of my mother's friends. Before I could get out a proper greeting, she was already climbing up the stairs, limping a bit, telling me that she had been out shopping all day and was starving.

I was too young to wonder, "Why didn't you go to a restaurant then? Why would you come here, knowing that my parents weren't home?"

She looked at my lunch on the table and clapped her hands.

"This looks so delicious!" she said, as she sat down at the table. "Your mother is the best cook!"

As I stood there watching, she ate every single bit of the food my mom had left for me. It had never occurred to her that there wasn't enough to share and that she was eating my meal. She happily chattered away at me as I tried to pretend I didn't hate her at the moment.

When she was done eating, she left.

There was no frozen pizza for me to stick in the oven. I didn't know how to cook and wasn't very good at using the stove. We lived too far away from a grocery store or a fastfood joint for me to walk to. And even if we had lived closer, I didn’t have any money.

I was hungry and furious.

When my mother came home from work, I complained about what had happened. My mother laughed softly and said that her friend shouldn't have eaten my meal. But, she correctly pointed out that I could've made a sandwich, or eaten a bowl of cereal, or heated up a can of soup.

Of course, I didn't want to hear any of that and stalked off to my room to sulk.

Later, I would learn that my mother's friend had worked as a waitress in Korea. She was very beautiful and had the tiniest waist. During the Korean War, American GIs used to come to the restaurant where she worked and flirt with her. Some would proposition her. When she turned them down, some of them grew angry.

One day, when my mother's friend was delivering food to a table, a GI stuck his leg out to trip her. He had wanted to watch her fall. He wanted to put the beautiful waitress in her place. He wanted her to know that while she may have turned him down, he had the power to humiliate her with no repercussion.

As she struggled to get up, he and his friends laughed. They thought it was funny that they had just crippled a young woman.

My mother's friend was too poor to get proper medical attention. So, her leg and hip never healed properly. She was still beautiful, but now she walked with a limp.

Not too long after, she would meet a man, fall in love and move to America with him and start a family. She would meet my parents and the two couples would become friends. She would call my mother unni (older sister) and try to emulate my mother's fantastic cooking. But, she could not.

That day she came to our house when my parents weren't home? She hadn't come to steal food from a child. She had stopped at our house because she was hungry, and because she wanted a taste of home, and because my mother's cooking was just that to her — a reminder of home.

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