To the Kitchen Staff at 초밥 사랑 (Chobap Sarang)
When the sky opened with a storm, rain came down like an animal. Standing under the awning of Chobap Sarang, I squinted through the sheets of falling water at my apartment complex—a squat modern building overshadowed by the skyscraping high-rises of Mapo. My building was close enough to see, but still on the other side of the park I knew to be filled with low-flying dragon flies in autumn and hungry feral cats in spring. Now, it was summer, and a year of calling Seoul home had dwindled to a number of days I could count on my hands.
There, in front of my favorite restaurant, umbrella-less before this sudden storm, I was reminded of home, of Florida, for the first time in months. But this reminder came with no comfort, no nostalgia, no solace—only the realization that I had no interest in going home striking me like lightning.
*
For the first few months I lived in Seoul, I was terrified to leave the house. Beyond the front door of my apartment in Gongdeok were crowds of ajummas and ahjussis who would openly gape at me, impeccably dressed people who would snap photos of me on subway platforms, slack-jawed children who would stare up at me until I looked them in the eye and said, “Annyeonghaseyo?” I understood them; I too could go weeks without seeing another Black person. But being the introvert I was, the type of person who couldn’t emotionally manage undesired attention, the staring made me retreat into my home, into myself.
For these reasons, I taught myself to cook, conducted my research at my makeshift desk, and only left my apartment to go to the supermarket or to your restaurant across the street. Before moving to Korea, I had no interest in cooking. But as a means to survive my self-imposed isolation in Seoul, I went to a small grocery store with tight aisles and bought chicken breast, shrink-wrapped bell peppers and zucchini, Asian pears netted up in webs of Styrofoam. I ate each meal with disappointment as I watched Succession or Suits or some other American drama I had already seen.
Along with the isolation, I had to confront the neutron weight of imposter syndrome for the first time in my life. Growing up Black in the rural South, radical self-belief had become something of a religion for me. Before stepping off the plane at Incheon International Airport, I was twenty-four and confident at best, a narcissist at worst. In Seoul, I woke up in a mess of royal purple sheets left by the previous grantee, wondering how I’d conned a government organization into funding my research, my life here in Korea. I stayed inside as a means to stay unseen, but this thought of myself as a hoax, a sham, followed me into the kitchen as I poured a bowl of Frosted Flakes for breakfast. It followed me into the night as I stabbed uninspired baked chicken with a meat thermometer. The only things that quieted this fraudulent feeling of not belonging were the rare occasions I went to a restaurant and risked being seen.
I. 아줌마 | Ajumma
The first time I went to Chobap Sarang, I was with my American friend, another grantee in my program. As we sat down, unwinding scarves from our necks, she refused to order for me again and said I needed to get over myself, to practice speaking the language I had spent my entire adulthood studying. Even though I had studied Korean all through college, I had never spoken it outside of an American classroom before. When I did speak in Seoul, all my mispronunciations left people staring at me—like I had just asked them a riddle—until they switched to English with exasperation. This was one of the many reasons I stayed huddled in my apartment as if the world beyond my purple front door had ended.
Satisfied with her lecture, my friend pressed the call button, and you walked over from the sushi bar with your short, permed hair, and serious but kind expression. My friend ordered in Korean with the kind of fluency that only came with speaking a language since childhood. She looked at me, expectant, and I pointed to the menu and said, “Chamchi chobap jom juseyo.”
You gave me a big smile, a thumbs up, and said to my friend, “Oh, she speaks so well, doesn’t she?”
This small act of encouragement had me coming back to Chobap Sarang twice a week for the next six months. Each time I arrived, you all greeted me with a warm hello. Oppa would nod to me from behind the sushi bar, the knife in his hand cleaving through slabs of tuna and salmon. Unni would lead me to a table, smiling—her lips always lacquered with the same shade of pink. Each visit, you’d recommend new dishes to me, patiently correcting my pronunciation as I said their names back to you.
If I missed a week, you’d take the menu from me and ask where I’d been. I’d usually just say bappasseoyo—I was busy—but if I was brave that day, I’d tell you about my trip to Sokcho or Busan or Jeju, and you’d nod along, helping me find the right words as needed. Some days, you brought me free pieces of shrimp chobap topped with lightly torched sauce or egg chobap belted together with a thin strip of seaweed, or even a free can of soda. You placed them on the table, called them “seobiseu.” It would take weeks for my dumb waygookin brain to realize the word was service with Korean pronunciation.
II. 오빠 | Oppa
I visited the US for most of March. Back in my white town in Florida, my mother and I went about our day going to Publix and the dine-in movie theater. In the dim light of the theater, I handed my menu to the waiter, and I saw in his eyes something I hadn’t noticed before I lived in Korea, something that—in this moment—I realized I had seen on every cashier and usher’s face that day. In their eyes, I could see how they all viewed my mother and me, how they applied their own internalized perceptions of Black people to the two Black women they now saw before them. So much of my experience at home was rooted in negotiating the pressures and expectations of whiteness. There, amid the fading lights of the movie theater, I realized I wanted nothing more than to go back to Korea, back to the place where people’s staring was one of curiosity, not of assumption or disdain. In Seoul, no one hesitated before sitting next to me on the subway or followed me around stores assuming I would steal. Korea was a place in which I could see myself more clearly, a place where the possibilities of the person I could be were free from the misunderstood boundaries of my community.
“Korea was a place in which I could see myself more clearly, a place where the possibilities of the person I could be were free from the misunderstood boundaries of my community.”
When I came back to Chobap Sarang for the first time in a month, Unni looked at me from behind the register and gasped, “She’s back!”
You glanced up from the tuna you were slicing, bowed slightly, and said, “Welcome back. You should sit at the bar today.” I hopped onto a stool at the sushi bar. Through the glass, I watched your knuckles hold the raw, ruby fish in place while your knife split the meat. “We thought you left for good. You didn’t move back to America, did you?”
I shook my head. “Anio. I just visited my family.”
“Good, you can’t leave us so soon.”
You placed my usual order of chamchi chobap on the counter, and next to it, you set down a beautiful hand roll bright with amber roe, emerald greens, and yellow radish. The salty sweet of the first bite tasted like home.
III. 언니 | Unni
The day of that summer rainstorm, as I stood under Chobap Sarang’s awning, the door opened behind me, and you stepped out in your apron with a red umbrella in your hands. Shoulder to shoulder, we marveled at the sudden storm, its wall-thick rainfall, the power of each thunderclap. You offered the umbrella to me and said in slow, syncopated Korean that I was grateful for, “Next time you come, you can bring it back.” I looked at the red umbrella in your hands. Ppalgan usan. The first phrase I had learned in Korean as my eighth-grade roommate played Yozoh songs and taught me the colors. This moment with you, like so many moments when speaking my second language, made me feel like a child. But the humanity of this gesture, the weight of its kindness opened something within me. Looking at you with this umbrella—this ppalgan usan—outstretched like a flower, like something precious, I understood that this was all I ever wanted as a Black woman—to be seen. To be treated as human.
*
On my last day in Seoul, I went to Chobap Sarang before sunset. I sat at my table like normal, ordered like normal, said a grateful gamsahabnida for the seobiseu like normal. Two pieces of tuna chobap away from the end of my final meal, I tried to muster the courage to tell Ajumma that this would be the last time for real, to tell you thank you again for the umbrella, to tell Oppa behind the bar that I still think about that hand roll, that all of your kindness meant so much it hurt. But my eyes stung at the thought of saying good-bye, at the fact that you had probably forgotten about the umbrella, Oppa the hand roll, Ajumma the first visit. And so, I left without a word, walked through the park along the old train tracks that once went all the way up to Pyongyang and Sinuiju. When I got to the end of the park, the sun had set. I stood with my home that would soon not be my home behind me, watching the neon sign of 초밥 사랑 light up like a beacon in the night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kat Lewis is a recipient of a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Khôra, PANK Magazine, and The Rumpus. She is currently at work on a novel about the Black experience in South Korea.
Read Kat’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Markus Winkler.
