My entry for the NPR Student Podcast Competition is here and ready to stream! Listen now at this link: https://soundcloud.com/sabrina-antrosio/from-nowhere-food-and-farming-in-korean-america?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
The script is below:
From Nowhere: Food and Farming in Korean America
Madalyn Warren: Humans, we tend to get bored or we want to see other things, like the base foundational stuff is kind of boring, like food isn’t enough, like we want something else, but…You know, food is life.
Sabrina: That’s Madalyn Warren, a Korean American farmer from upstate New York who I interviewed last year. Over the past several months, I’ve been thinking a lot about how Americans relate to the environment, and especially how I as a Korean American might connect to both America and American land. So, I’ve interviewed Korean American farmers and restaurant owners about food, environment, and identity. I’m Sabrina, a high school senior from upstate New York, and here’s what I’ve learned:
As a child, my mom was one of the only Korean kids in her white suburban school. She spent a lot of time not wanting to be different, but her differences were undeniable:
Sallie: “I wanted sandwiches. Like everybody else; I didn’t want my food to look different. I liked tuna, but then because this girl said my lunch smelled bad, I didn’t want to bring tuna anymore, but that was also why I didn’t want to bring Korean food to school.”
Sabrina: Being made fun of for their food is not an uncommon experience for Asian Americans, especially before white Americans adopted certain foods from other countries and made them trendy. On the other hand, food is also a way of connecting with other people. My grandmother chimes in here about the time another Korean family, the Ahn family, moved into the neighborhood:
Young: They were really interested in what what she eat or something. So, when Ahn, the family, came, your mother was so happy, so I said, “Why you so happy? You don’t know her that much.” And your mom said, “Well, we have same dinner. Like rice. We have same food. At least we ate same food.”
Sabrina: I’m using this example from my own family to start to understand what food actually means. It isn’t just something we mindlessly consume. What we eat can be used to identify, and identify with, others. And for Asian Americans, that can be even more significant. Here’s Jinah Kim, the owner and founder of Sunhee’s, a Korean farm-to-table restaurant in upstate New York.
Jinah Kim: I’ve been able to connect with this mixed identity of not being one or the other. So I think a lot of immigrants get caught in this cross-culturalism. We struggle with Korean and American: what does it mean to be Korean and American and really make that my own, and I think food has been one of those ways that I could still hold on to tradition while introducing it to people who’ve never tried it before and being able to be proud of it.
Sabrina: Sometimes there’s this feeling of duality in Asian American or immigrant identity that Jinah has been able to celebrate through her restaurant. Making Korean food can be a kind of cultural preservation in a society that has continually told Asian Americans to assimilate. At the same time, she’s building an American community around sharing Korean American food, thereby asserting belonging in both cultures.
Another layer to this story that makes that sense of belonging Jinah has achieved even more important is the positioning of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners,” the idea that they are “un-American.”
Jinah Kim: People come up to me and be like, “Where are you from?” that classic question we get asked, and the answer is I’m from here. There’s this frustration of, why do I have to prove I’m American when I clearly am, what more can I do. But ultimately it should be the individual who gets to decide where we choose our home to be and where we invest our lives into.
Sabrina: Where we choose our home to be and where we invest our lives into. This brings me to another aspect of food–not only can it be used as a connection to one another, it’s a connection we all have with the environment. And what says belonging to a place like digging into the ground and planting seeds there? Kristyn Leach, a Korean American farmer, and I talked a bit about the history of Asian American farmers, especially in her home state of California.
Kristyn Leach: The agricultural economy here is so rooted in the labor of Asian Americans. The earliest kind of orchards and strawberries, cut flowers, horticultural feed, what the ag economy means to the state, it’s just a direct line from Chinese, and Filipino, and Japanese American communities, Korean American communities. Despite all of this, even though it’s these communities’ labor that has built this system, those families by and large weren’t able to stay on that land to pass that land on intergenerationally.
Sabrina: To this last point, according to the US Census of Agriculture, in 2017 Asian Americans made up less than 1 percent of the US farming population, while more than 95 percent of full time operators were white. Historically, though Asian Americans have been deeply involved in American agriculture. Among other examples, in the early 20th century, Japanese Americans controlled hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland in California and the majority of Korean Americans and Filipino Americans were farm laborers.
In growing food I see similar dynamics to those Jinah mentioned, of that mixed identity. Growing Korean food staples allows reconnecting to and reclaiming one’s heritage while at the same time physically rooting oneself in American land. As Leach describes:
Kristyn Leach: It can feel like a really healing way to feel rooted because of all of those other things like that you’re talking about before this, the kind of bias against different immigrant communities. It’s like those are just weird social constructs, and I think when you are mostly, you know, like in this different rhythm, doing kind of work and relating more to your natural landscape, you realize how imaginary so many of the systems we live within are. So much of life on this earth is not just based on this kind of core notion of domination.
Sabrina: Madalyn Warren, whose quote you heard at the beginning, said a similar thing.
Madalyn Warren: I am Korean American, I’m nowhere, I’m not really embraced by a Korean community, and growing up I was probably Chinese to most people so eventually you get out of it and I’m just myself.
Sabrina: Do you feel like working with the land and being a farmer allows you to be yourself more?
Madalyn Warren: Yeah. Definitely.
Sabrina: So what’s my point in all this? Well, first of all I think Asian American identity has been too long overlooked in the US and needs to be explored in all its different aspects, and I’m attempting to explore two of those here. Asian Americans are invisible, and food and farming and land in general are viewed in a disposable, consumerist way, so I’m trying to elevate all of these topics by exploring their intersections. I’m especially interested in the idea of home. As Professor David L. Eng puts it, “For Asian Americans issues of ‘home’ are particularly vexing. Historically configured as either unassimilable aliens or perversely assimilated and thus ‘whiter than white,’ Asian Americans have at best a dubious claim to citizenship and place within the US nation-state…Suspended between departure and arrival, Asian Americans remain permanently disenfranchised from home.” He uses this idea of home to explore the intersection of Asian American and queer identity. I’d like to propose using this same idea to connect Asian American and environmental identity. I want all of us to pay more attention to what we eat and where it comes from, the land we live on and how we care for it. I want us to start to redefine home and American-ness and belonging in these terms. Asian Americans, positioned as we often are in places of in-between, have a lot to offer this conversation. I want us to know that we belong here just as much as anyone else.
Works Cited
Eng, David L. “Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies.”
Social Text, no. 52/53 (1997): 31–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/466733.
Park, Allison. “Young Asian Americans Turn to Farming as a Means of Cultural Reclamation.”
NBC News, Oct. 28, 2019. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/young-asian-americans-turn-farming-means-cultural-reclamation-n1072036.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Little, Brown, 1989.