| Africa Yoon, author of 'The Korean,' poses with vegetables and “banchan” (Korean side dish) including kimchi. Getty Images / Marco Garcia |
By Kwon Mee-yoo
| The Cover of Africa Yoon's memoir “The Korean” / Courtesy of Blackyoonicorn |
An experience at a Korean grocery store in New Jersey changed her life completely when Yoon was in her late 20s. Back then she gained weight from stress coming from being an activist and when she was trying a sample of Korean cream bread, an elderly Korean woman told Yoon that she was "fat" and she should eat Korean food.
Instead of being offended, Yoon asked the elderly woman, whom she later calls "halmoni" (the Korean word for grandmother), to help her and Yoon began to explore a whole new realm of Korean food and its ingredients.
"When I ate the kimchi the halmoni gave me, I started to feel all the ingredients of Korean food. I was like feeling the food with all the senses. I was really starting to experience food in another way,” Yoon told The Korea Times during a Zoom interview, Dec. 9.
However, her first encounter with kimchi was way back when she attended the United Nations school after moving to the U.S. at the age of six with her father who was Cameroon's ambassador to the U.N.
"I had a lot of different people from around the world as friends and so I ate a lot of different things at a lot of different places. Eating is what helps in global relations for people to get along, so that's what made me so open to other foods," Yoon said.
When a young boy brought kimchi to school, she had a chance to try it as one of many different foods from different parts of the world.
"I actually liked the kimchi. In my culture, there is a small pepper that we have on the side of the table, so I became able to take spice. So when I ate kimchi, it was okay for me to taste it and I liked it since. But I thought about it only in terms of flavor.”
| Africa Yoon poses with her husband and three children. Getty Images / Marco Garcia |
Yoon met the Korean elderly woman at the Korean grocery every Sunday and she helped Yoon shop for ingredients, which were mainly vegetable, to make Korean food.
"If you look at Korean food, you will find so many vegetables. From my perspective, I really had such a variety of things and I think that's what made me stick to being healthy, because I had so many choices," Yoon said.
The vegetable-centered Korean cuisine got her back in shape, both mentally and physically.
Yoon's encounter with the halmoni ended rather mysteriously since her Korean food guide suddenly stopped coming to the Korean store on Sundays without explanation and nobody at the mart knew who the woman was.
Yoon said writing the book was one of her own ways of looking for the woman who suddenly appeared and disappeared from her life.
"Because she was so important for me, I'm always looking for her in a way. When I see people (I imagine that) she's somebody's mom and that they are going to say 'Oh, my mom told me about this. It was my mom.' I wonder if marrying a Korean-American was part of me looking for her," she said.
"She was tough. She loved me. I felt like I belong to her. She saved my life and she didn't have to, but she did. My life is still benefiting to this day, from the things that she taught me."
Later, when the young Cameroonian-American got married to Korean-American, she not only changed her last name to her husband's family name, Yoon, but also changed her birth name, Suzanne, to her activist nickname, Africa, to maintain her place of birth in her name.
Kimchi saved Yoon's health and life once again when she was suffering from grief after losing one of her twins during pregnancy and suffering thyroid problems.
Now Yoon divides her time between Hawaii and Busan with her husband and three children.
"I really thank Korean culture for my health and for my life. My life has been changed because of Korean food and Korean culture," Yoon said.
"Maybe my life and my experience with food has made me to be somebody that can talk about good relationships between people of different races so that people can see that we can get along if we can be open to each other's culture, respect each other and dive into who other people and their cultures are."