Recreating the Taste of Home CHAPTER
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Janne Olsby and Marit Myrvoll 133 CHAPTER 09 Recreating the Taste of Home Haeree Shim MA Cultural Heritage Studies, UCL Institute of Archaeology 134 Chapter 9 Recreating the Taste of Home Introduction e biggest North Korean migrant community outside East Asia is located in a somewhat unlikely place, New Malden, UK, a suburb in southwest London (see Figure 1). Approximately 1,000 North Koreans live alongside the established community of over 12,000 South Koreans. In the foreign kitchen, what North Korean migrants do is recreate authentic traditional North Korean food that they have not had for such a long time. Decades of famine and national isolation have alienated people from basic meals and dishes that are part of the history and traditions of their country. It is ironic that their culinary heritage is being rediscovered, enriched and preserved in New Malden, while it is rapidly disappearing in their homeland. is paper tackles the following questions: how they recreate their own but unfamiliar tradition, how cooking traditional food abroad aects safeguarding North Korea’s culinary heritage, how the experience of cooking traditional food as an immigrant has affected the reconciliation between the two ethnic groups. I used ethnographic methods to critically understand the role of culinary heritage in community life of migrants. Interviews and participant observations were used, notably including volunteering in the communal kitchen, joining community events, and having meals in North Korean families’ homes in 2018. Having had deeper involvement with the community, it has become clear that North Korean immigrants’ cooking or practicing of traditional food was unique due to their distinctive life experiences back in North Korea; age-old famine and poverty, limited freedom of movement, and international isolation. The street view of New Malden © Haeree Shim Haeree Shim 135 Recreating the Taste That You Do Not Know Due to poverty, most North Koreans have been cut from their rich traditional food heritage and repeatedly have had the same simple meals made of one or two ingredients for decades. North Korean migrants who arrive in Britain experience an environment that they have never experienced before; they can find, get, and buy anything they need. This abundance and freedom has allowed them to make cuisine precisely according to the original recipe, whereas people were often unable to follow the recipe correctly for decades in North Korea because of the lack of ingredients. They could cook traditional North Korean dishes more authentically in London than in almost any other city in North Korea. A North Korean migrant woman, Sunmi Lim (assumed name), provides a good example. During the past summer, some South Korean friends and I were invited to a home of a North Korean escapee family in New Malden for a classic Pyongyang dish of cold noodles called naengmyeon . It was the same cuisine that the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, brought to Seoul for the president of South Korea at the inter-Korean summit in early 2018. e host, Lim, a mother of two, told us that she had never had Pyongyang naengmyeon when she was in North Korea and had only heard about its fame. It was the icy-cold, subtle-savory taste that she had imagined every summer for a long time: I lived in North Korea, but I did not see or have Pyongyang naengmyeon. I have never been to Pyongyang, nor the area nearby. I guess the people living in Pyongyang can sometimes have naengmyeon. It was told that the dish was something that usually high-ranking o!cials and foreign tourists could have. I heard that patrons needed to pay in dollars when they had it. People like us could not dream of having it. She said the above while calmly preparing the naengmyeon ingredients—beef broth, beef brisket, buckwheat noodle, cucumber, spring onion, chilli, and ice—which seemed quite ordinary, even humble. One guest said, as if it had suddenly come to her mind: I happened to have had Pyongyang naengmyeon at the famous restaurant Okryugwan when I travelled to Pyongyang a few years ago. 136 Chapter 9 Recreating the Taste of Home en Lim instantly asked: What was the real North Korean naengmyeon like? It was an ironic moment, a North Korean asked about the authentic taste of her home to a foreigner who happened to visit her country, a taste that she only dreamt of. e guest answered: It was a so"er and more delicate taste than I imagined, there was no ice, and it was served with a mung bean pancake. What Lim made for us was not the same as authentic Pyongyang A North Korean woman making naengmyeon, but it was a recreation of the dish that she had imagined (see Naengmyeon, a traditional Pyongyang Figure 2). delicacy © Haeree Shim Haeree Shim 137 Another case comes from Jong-hyun Park (assumed name), a man in his mid-50s working in a warehouse in a Korean supermarket in New Malden. He came from North Hamgyeong Province, known as the poorest and coldest area in North Korea. He and his family escaped the homeland in early 2000. When he settled in New Malden, what fascinated him was that he could !nd fresh napa cabbage and other vegetables in the grocery market any time of the year. It allowed him to make authentic kimchi, a staple vegetable dish that he had not been able to make properly for a decade back home: Until the mid-1980s the government distributed several hundred Chinese cabbages per family, so that households could prepare kimchi in late autumn. Kimchi was almost the only food we could have to survive winter and early spring. In the 1990s, as the national economy collapsed; it became harder to get the cabbage and other basic ingredients to make kimchi. One time, we used the seawater instead of salt. We could not a#ord the garlic and chili $akes as well, so we omitted putting them in Kimchi. For about a decade he couldn’t make authentic kimchi in his hometown due to the lack of ingredients. Kimchi is a staple food and a traditional custom in both Koreas. It is gastronomically and socially an essential custom of Korean culture. The Tradition of Kimchi-Making in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was inscribed by UNESCO in 2015 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The nomination file says ‘Kimchi-making knowledge and skills are transmitted from parents to children, and also transferred among neighbors to prepare Women in North Korea making Kimchi © Korea National Heritage Preservation large quantities of kimchi for the winter months. This activity, known as Agency, 2013 kimjang , boosts cooperation among families, villages, and communities, contributing to social cohesion’ (UNESCO, 2015) (see Figure 3). However, 138 Chapter 9 Recreating the Taste of Home what Park’s interview showed was that a tradition cannot be prevented from disappearing in a society just because it is inscribed on a UNESCO list. Now living in New Malden for eleven years, Park said: Now, I am able to make kimchi every time we run out of it, because I can buy napa cabbage whenever and wherever I want in New Malden. Fresh vegetables are always in the market throughout the year. Although the frequency and timing of his kimchi-making has changed, he has come to follow a more authentic recipe with original ingredients that he can get in New Malden. He restored and recreated the taste he had lost for some time. It seemed that authenticity has become more significant to North Korean migrants as it was felt to be closely related to nostalgia and national identity. Lim told us the surprising story about how she consumes North Korean !sh at her home in Britain: To make the dish authentic as we had in North Korea, I buy North Korean pollock in New Malden. You can purchase it through a private retailer. You call this person and he will get you the fish. Of course, it is more expensive than the one you buy in Tesco but is worth the price to us. %is North Korean pollock is imported from the China-North Korea border. It is sweeter and more savory than the one from Britain or Russia. I can tell. Pollock is not hard to find in England. Actually, it is one of Britain's most popular fish (Adams, 2009), but Lim’s family purchases imported pollock from North Korea. She and her family are able to savor the nostalgic past through the North Korean pollock: We used to have seasoned and broiled pollock dish a couple times a year in North Korea on our biggest national holidays, like Kim Il-sung’s birthday or a memorial ceremony for our ancestors. Perhaps people living near the sea would have eaten it more o"en. %e pollock dish was very special, and I really liked it. I wanted to have it more o"en but couldn’t. Haeree Shim 139 Culinary Heritage Transmitted in a Foreign Land While North Korean migrants enjoy their home ingredients outside their country, ironically traditional/local recipes have been disappearing in North Korea during recent decades. A female escapee told me: I miss North Korean sardines. Until the 1980s we had fish markets. We used to buy sardines and boil them with water parsley and white radish. It was a delicacy in Cheongjin, a small &shing village, where I came from. We also dried pollock and had it with cooked rice in winter. However, &sh markets started to disappear from the mid-1980s, and a"er that, it became very di!cult to &nd &sh at all.