“Winter Kimchi” by Elizabeth Lee
kim·chi
/ˈkimˌCHē/
noun
a Korean dish of spicy pickled cabbage.
In a Korean household, you will commonly find two refrigerators. One is your run-of-the-mill refrigerator stocked with everyday groceries and condiments—milk, eggs, fresh produce, ketchup, your favorite brand of hot sauce, maple syrup, leftover couscous. The second one, though it now comes in a generic upright form, was originally conceived as a top-loading cabinet, not dissimilar in appearance to a top-loading washing machine. This refrigerator contains special compartments for holding kimchi while maintaining a frigid 32 degrees Fahrenheit, low air circulation, and high humidity levels to facilitate fermentation and preservation.
If your home is very traditional, your second refrigerator is outside, and it is not a refrigerator at all but an ovoid earthenware pot ranging anywhere from one to 60 liters in size, buried deep in the earth so its mouth is level with the ground. Throughout the winter months, the jars maintain temperatures between 32 and 35 degrees Fahrenheit, their porous walls allowing evaporating salt water to escape, casting flower-like designs on their outer surfaces. These kimchi pots are referred to as onggi, though they also have more specific names based on size: danji for small jars, hangari for medium ones, and dok for the largest.
Our household is neither traditional nor high-tech, so our second refrigerator is a normal kitchen refrigerator that lives in our garage. On first glance, its insides appear gutted and ineffective, shelves spaced far apart and drawers removed or sitting crookedly atop one another, but there is a system and a logic to the arrangement. In summertime, the rickety drawers burst with produce; through the long winter months, each of the two remaining shelves hosts tall glass bottles brimming with spice-freckled napa cabbage, whole radishes stripped of their skins and floating phantasmagorically in golden brine, quartered cucumbers stacked like logs and slowly growing supple while still maintaining a good crunch (Koreans are all about the textures). Kimchi by the gallon—kimchi galore.
The layers of pickled vegetables dwindle with each passing day, served out in generous portions to be consumed alongside aromatic chicken soups infused with ginger and jujubes, braised short ribs so tender they fall off the bone, or cooked—into spicy seafood pancakes with golden-batter lace that melts on the tongue or hearty stews that evoke an otherworldly reddish glow. When we have to fish through the jars’ opaque liquid for slips of kimchi, spring is arriving, and soon, sunny harvests will fill the refrigerator drawers with raw vegetables to be salted, spiced, and fermented in the newly emptied jars, ready for winter once again.
If you are Korean, you likely already know all of this.
Excerpt from NPR’s Code Switch podcast, hosted by Shereen Marisol Meraji and Gene Demby. Episode: “Hold Up! Time For An Explanatory Comma” with guest Hari Kondabolu on December 14, 2016
DEMBY: So…on this week’s episode of Code Switch we are talking about something we’ve been calling on our team the explanatory comma.
MERAJI: It’s like Tupac Shakur, comma, the rapper-slash-actor who did this and that and all this other stuff, and we’re going to explain to you who he is. Or, you know, Taika Waititi…The filmmaker from New Zealand. He’s part Maori, part Russian Jew and 100 percent brilliant.
DEMBY: So that little aside there, that’s the explanatory comma. And it’s not really a hard and fast line when we should use it…when is it appropriate for us to explain stuff that we think people should know? And when is it appropriate for us to just let people figure it out in context and how do you decide when to let people just look through the window…
When I was in elementary school, I asked my mother to pack Korean food for my lunch. I thought it would be cool to bring something different from the other kids, that I would be able to show off my kimbap or bulgogi or gyeranmari. Also, I didn’t like the sandwiches she packed me.
My mother refused. She had the foresight to know I would have been bullied, though she never said as much. Her euphemistic explanation: Korean food was for the home; outside of it, we should eat what others eat. She took this motto to heart, always listening carefully to my lists of the latest trends at school, food or otherwise. She dropped heartfelt notes in my lunchbox; she took me shopping for skinny-jeans; she offered to buy feathers for my hair (thank goodness I declined).
Assimilation is never easy, whether it is into the words on a page or the new life your immigrant parents are building.
When I returned from friends’ homes, she asked me what we had for lunch, or snack, or dinner, and when I had friends over, she’d prepare similar dishes: mac-and-cheese, chicken nuggets, spaghetti with meatballs. Perhaps this is why I so closely attach Korean food to my mother, and to my sense of home—for a long time, before it gained overnight popularity, we ate Korean food only at home, only when no one else was there to see it.
Confined to the viewfinder of my school-day anecdotes, my mother took pains to fit me into the snapshot of my surroundings in hopes that doors would open for me, that I would never be outside the window, looking in. Assimilation is never easy, whether it is into the words on a page or the new life your immigrant parents are building.
KONDABOLU: The explanatory comma often ends up being stuff that is about people of color or marginalized groups…ours is the stuff that has to get explained…I wanted to explain it because I want to reach as many people as possible because we’re talking about lots of complicated and big things. And at the same time I wanted to make it clear to listeners who do know what I’m talking about that, you know, this is also for us and you shouldn’t feel like, you know, this section isn’t for you…
DEMBY: OK. That is a thing that I think we feel a lot, right? It’s like, are we talking to white people here when we do that? You know what I mean? That sort of specific anxiety over that.
Sometimes I read one-star reviews for books by authors I admire:
- it was annoying that she used so many foreign words without any glossary to help those of us who don’t know the language
- I never felt like I was really in Korea; ___ never describes anything endemic to Korea or Korean culture with the kind of finesse with which ______ _______ described Iran in ____ __ _ _______ ____, which is an excellent book. So what you get is a boring book about indistinguishable characters in a blandly described environment.
- I read this book for my book club. I [had] a hard time getting into the book. The writer mixed in Spanish words which was interesting, but I often had to look words up on Google.
- the use of Korean words and phrases (without translation) was annoying.
When my friends and I discuss books we’ve read, one title that comes up is Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. An excerpt from the opening:
Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.
H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food. The H stands for han ah reum, a Korean phrase that roughly transIates to “one arm full of groceries.” H Mart is where parachute kids look to find the brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home. It’s where Korean families buy rice cakes to make tteokguk, the beef and rice cake soup that brings in the New Year. It’s the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it’s the only place that truly understands how much garlic you’ll need for the kind of food your people eat. H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle “ethnic” section in regular grocery stores. They don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here. Instead, you’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?
“Have you read it?” my white friends ask me. “It’s really good, it made me cry.”
“I stopped midway,” I reply.
In a virtual meet-up of Tiger Balm, a Korean American writer’s collective led by authors Gene Kwak and Joseph Han, guest author Crystal Hana Kim speaks on the topic of explanatory commas:
KIM: It doesn’t make sense for a Korean character to explain Korean words, if I’m in their interiority. So that was easy for me to write from their perspective, use the Korean words that are necessary and not say, like, “kimchi, comma, a fermented cabbage, comma,” like I didn’t even need to do that because it wouldn’t make sense to the emotional truth or lived experience of the characters… And then it was just really important for me to find an agent and an editor who understood what I was doing and wouldn’t say, like, “You have to italicize these words,” or “You have to explain this,” or you know, “You have to broaden or cater—or revise the story to cater to a Western or whiter audience.”
KIM: I have some Hangul throughout the novel, and it’s important for me to not translate that, and it’s important for me to have an editor who knows—because she can’t read Hangul—she will not get some of the subtleties, and if you read Hangul then you’ll understand the book in a different way at the end than someone who doesn’t, and I’m okay with that, and she is thankfully okay with that, too.
Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.
H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food. The H stands for han ah reum, a Korean phrase that roughly transIates to “one arm full of groceries.” H Mart is where parachute kids look to find the brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home. It’s where Korean families buy rice cakes to make tteokguk, the beef and rice cake soup that brings in the New Year. It’s the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it’s the only place that truly understands how much garlic you’ll need for the kind of food your people eat. H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle “ethnic” section in regular grocery stores. They don’t prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here. Instead, you’ll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom’s soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?
The closest H Mart to Colorado Springs, Colorado is in Denver, an hour’s drive away. My strongest childhood road-trip memory: Once a month, we pile into our 2000 silver Honda Odyssey—my mother, my father, my older sister and brother—and drive seventy miles to Denver, where we spend hours browsing the aisles of H Mart, filling one, sometimes two shopping carts with buckwheat noodles, gochujang, packs of gim, bags of shrimp crackers, fresh tofu, red bean popsicles, anchovies, Solomon’s seal tea, cuts of meat for galbi and samgyupsal, a box of one dozen chamoe, containers of ready-made banchan, trays of dduk and kimbap, jars of kimchi.
When my siblings and I tire of begging our parents for Yakult, mochi ice cream, and bbeongtwigi, we steal plastic bags from the long rolls in the produce section, filling them with air from our lungs before tying them closed: makeshift balloons we pass back and forth—don’t let it touch the ground!—until, inevitably, they land on some unexpecting halmeoni’s head; until, inevitably, our mother’s sharp-tongued “Ssst!” motioning to stop, calm down, hand her that bag for these melons; until, inevitably, we pile into the van and back out of the parking lot at dusk with a trunkload of H Mart goods, provisioned for yet another month, and the sky grows dimmer as we drive homewards until, inevitably, the lights of the Air Force base glitter like diamonds at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and my eyelids, grown heavy, can’t quite close on that dazzling landscape.
Texts to my friend about a book conversation I had with a coworker:
he told me the book instilled in him an interest for “books about other cultures”
and then i felt compelled to try to explain to him that he shouldn’t approach books by poc authors with the expectation that they will culture him
and i was like race is not the only differentiator of perspectives in novels by poc writers
like that would be saying that hemingway is the same as salinger is the same as etc
and i thought he was following my argument about not all white male authors being the same
so i was like and that also applies to poc authors, like not all authors of a specific race are going to have the same perspective
and he thought about this for a second and was like mm maybe
Excerpt from “Min Jin Lee on Her New Novel and Writing about the Korean Diaspora” by Marina N. Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine, February 13, 2019
“I’ve been asked why I write about Koreans,” Lee said. “And it seems like such a strange question. Because why wouldn’t I write about Koreans? To me, Koreans are mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, which means Koreans are like us; we are worthy of consideration and reflection.
KONDABOLU: The majority of the references we’re going to get fed are things that are dominant in white culture and [are] claimed to be American culture and only American culture. And then we have our other stuff, you know, like our family stuff, our community stuff. And, you know, that’s—that becomes our other consciousness…Like, that was—you know, our lives. Like, we’ve already done all that work. Why do we have to fall behind because somebody else didn’t do the required reading?
Crying in H Mart makes me cry because although it covers topics close to my diasporic upbringing, it, like so many books that came before, was not written for me. Zauner is explaining to me a world in which I already live; when I read her book, I am the one looking through the window.
Another transcription from the Tiger Balm call:
KIM: I think [for] the _____ ______ essay—I think she wanted me to italicize Korean words, and I would explain, like, why I wouldn’t, and she said, “But this is our standard formatting,” and then I couldn’t win…Sometimes I would try to push back on the italics, and they would sometimes just say like, “This is our—this is the in-house style,” but for me, the important thing is to explain what I’m doing, and if they in the end say no because it’s in-house style, then I can’t—I’m not going to push further.
When I look up “house style guides” for major publishing companies, the results are sparse, which causes me to wonder, What are they hiding from us? All I can find is Bloomsbury Publishing’s September 2016 version of House Style Guidelines for Authors and Editors. Here is the “Foreign Languages” section (underlining my own):
Use italic type for any words or phrases given in a foreign language (that have not been subsumed into English), with a translation, in parentheses and in roman, if necessary (don’t use quotation marks for this translation). Names of institutions, organizations and other proper nouns should not be italicized.
Example: doppelgänger (double)
Give titles of foreign-language works in italic, in the language in which they were written / composed / painted etc., and follow with an English translation of the title, in parentheses and in roman.
Example: l’Étranger (The Outsider)
When you quote in languages other than English, use roman type inside quotation marks.
Example: ‘Au fait, beau T-shirt’
Localized terminology that may be unfamiliar or confusing to non-native readers should be avoided, and replaced by appropriate terminology for the language chosen. (Example: the term lakh would be unfamiliar to non–South Asian readers.) If the term must be included, add an explanation in parentheses.
Example: Jewels and slaves worth ‘5 lakh’ (500,000 Rupees) were stolen.
Example: Out of endless possibilities, the worth of ‘5 lakh’ (500,000 Rupees) was attributed to an Orientalized, subjugated juxtaposition of “jewels and slaves.”
Example: Could the estrangement be any clearer than when providing the title, l’Étranger (The Outsider), as an example?
Example: Some sense of my language legitimacy as both an American and ‘hanguk saram’ (Korean) was stolen.
Due to its prevalence on menus of contemporary non-Korean restaurants, its plentiful stock in beloved grocery stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and increasingly non-italicized usage, one might say that the word “kimchi” has been subsumed into the English language.
But kimchi has always been a part of my English. Whose English has this word now been subsumed into?
Example: Some sense of my language legitimacy as both an American and ‘hanguk saram’ (Korean) was stolen.
Hello _____,
Thank you for the opportunity to publish my short story…I looked at the proof and took note of a few corrections needed…
I noticed that “Aiya” is italicized in:
“Aiya”, I heard Baba say
when it originally was not. This also occurs for “xiaolongbao” on pages 116, 117, 118, and 120. I’d appreciate it if we could change the formatting on those words back to non-italics. I understand that italicization is a common editorial practice for non-English words, but it is important to me that non-English words be incorporated seamlessly in my text to emulate the natural way they occur in dialogue in multilingual households.
I’ve truly enjoyed working with _____ on the edits for this piece and appreciate the journal’s openness in accommodating my storytelling choices thus far. I look forward to the issue!
Best,
Elizabeth
— —
Hi Elizabeth,
Thank you for your reply and close read!
Our house style has traditionally been to italicize words in another language, but this discussion has been evolving. We will return those words to Roman. Please take a look the attached revised proof to be sure I’ve fixed everything.
Thank you!
Best,
_____
Crystal Hana Kim was my college workshop professor. In class, she emphasized that the writer should never feel compelled to explain to the reader. After the Tiger Balm call, I followed up on our longstanding email exchange.
I especially enjoyed the conversation [with Tiger Balm] about the explanatory comma and italicization in publishing—I actually had my own encounter with this recently…she was very understanding of what I was trying to do, although we compromised on providing inline hints for Korean words. It’s interesting to me that such small editing choices can have such profound effects—each time I try to reword a sentence to provide contextual clues, I wonder if I’m toeing that explanatory comma line. With each edit, each decision, I have to evaluate if it betrays some part of my literary agenda. All this to say, editing is such a careful and meaningful process.
KONDABOLU: Certainly…there [were] a ton of comedy references that we didn’t explain… like, we didn’t explain what biryani is. And I would like to think people know what biryani is… And it’s not just like, “you mean the Eastern version of paella?” I mean, I would lose my mind. I would lose my mind.
DEMBY: Yeah, that’s the other thing. Like, what if you do the explanatory comma wrong? Like, what if your explanation is actually trash?
KONDABOLU: Yeah. I mean, you got to be careful because it almost causes more damage, right? You know, and also how you minimize something that’s important to a group of people…
Cho Dang Gol is a homey restaurant my parents found in New York City after dropping me off for my first semester of college. They take me there for dinner before heading back to Boise.
“Come here when you miss Korean food,” my mother tells me as we cut into blocks of homemade tofu with our spoons, the mildly sour taste refreshing in the late-summer heat. So at the start of my first Thanksgiving break away from home, three months since I last tasted Korean food, I do.
My college friends, C and P, are both from the tri-state area; they go home for every school break, be it three days or three weeks. Under their parents’ roofs, they sleep in their childhood beds and eat their parents’ cooking. It is the start of Thanksgiving break; they are due to go home the next day, but they accompany me to Cho Dang Gol for dinner that evening.
The soondubujjigae is hot and comforting; though it doesn’t taste like my mother’s, it tastes like home. But more than the stew, I am fixated on the banchan, specifically the kimchi. When the mains have been cleared away, I extend my chopsticks toward the toppling mound of kimchi on its flat, round dish. C and P stare at me with wide, curious eyes as I shovel piece after piece of kimchi into my mouth, one right after another. It’s the good kind, ripe and spicy, so hot it burns my tongue, but I don’t stop—it’s been so long, too long, since I’ve tasted kimchi. I consume enough to last me the next few weeks before I fly back home: monthly provisions.
When I can’t handle the spice anymore, I set down my chopsticks, glug water. Only a few stray pieces remain in the dish.
“Wow,” says C, who is also Korean American. “I’ve never seen anyone eat kimchi like that.”
Meaning, she hadn’t seen anyone eat kimchi on its own, as neither ingredient nor side dish. But I watched my dad do it all the time. He would sit at the table before dinner was ready and lift a chopstickful of kimchi to his lips, munching it like a starter salad. He did this after dinner, too, when the only thing remaining was the communal dish of kimchi which, if nearly empty, he would clear with ease, kimchi juice and all.
Meaning, my relationship to kimchi is vastly different from C’s.
Excerpt from Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home by Eric Kim, New York Times staff food writer. Section title: “Kimchi Is A Verb”
Let me start off by saying that, no, kimchi is not literally a verb. It’s a noun used to describe an array of salted vegetables fermented until sour with lactic acid bacteria. And while a jar of the red, cabbage-based variety is probably sitting in your fridge right now—and is, to be sure, a mainstay of Korean cuisine—there are a million other shapes, sizes and flavors in the pantheon of kimchis. “Many things, like cucumbers, chives, and apples, can also be kimchi’d,” write Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard in Koreatown: A Cookbook, in which they explore the myriad ways in which kimchi is more of a technique than just a single item, “more of a verb than a noun.”
A handful of the million types of kimchi:
Baechu kimchi
Kkakdugi
Oi sobagi
Pa kimchi
Nabak kimchi
Altari mu kimchi
Gat kimchi
Baek kimchi
Geotjeori
Bossam kimchi
Yeolmu kimchi
Dongchimi
Buchu kimchi
Kkaenip kimchi
When we move to Boise, Idaho, there are no H Marts in the entire state. The Asian marts that do exist—a Vietnamese grocery store, a Chinese market—stock kimchi in limited, unreliably scheduled amounts, with little variety. So my mother takes it upon herself to make her own.
Even the mere acquisition of ingredients for this task is difficult; in Boise, Idaho, it is nearly impossible to procure the correct radishes for kimjang, but my parents have a supplier. Once a year, my dad’s coworker’s church’s community farm harvests vast supplies of radishes, a portion of which my mother then turns into bottles of altari mu kimchi.
The kimjang process is long and painstaking. First you must wash and trim mounds of vegetables—volumes that overflow the sink. Then you salt them in layers so they are evenly coated and let them sit for two to eight hours until they grow supple. You must rinse them once again, then mix and spread a red pepper paste (or other seasoning) among the vegetables. It takes a lot of time and care to ensure each radish, cabbage, green onion, is equally coated in red pepper paste. By the end of it, your hands sustain a garish orange hue and tingle from prolonged contact with salt and spice.
In the fall, my mother makes jars upon jars of kimchi, all of our favorites—baechu kimchi, altari mu kimchi, dongchimi, oi sobagi. She never asks me to help, though one time, when I am visiting home, I do. The two of us stand in the yellow haze of the kitchen light on a cold autumn evening, scrubbing red pepper paste into cabbage leaves. The trick for even distribution is to pick up a clump of julienned radish, spring onion, and mustard greens and, using it like a sponge to gather the spicy paste, paint the cabbage leaf. Then we roll the leaves into little balls and pile them into the jar. By the end of the evening, three glass half-gallon jars of kimchi sit in a row on our counter; over the next two weeks they will marinate until they fizz and bubble, and we will dish them out in glistening ruby piles to grace our kitchen table, riches we consume.
“It will taste even better because you helped,” my mother tells me as we rinse our tingling hands.
KONDABOLU: [With] an explanatory comma, you can’t write a page after a comma and then end the comma and continue the sentence.
Kimchi, a Korean dish of spicy pickled cabbage, or radish, or cucumber, or myriad other vegetables, all of which go by their own names—baechu kimchi for cabbage, oi sobagi for cucumber, kkakduki for radish (though there are other types of radish kimchi, like dongchimi, which isn’t really spicy, but is actually a mild winter kimchi, categorized as such due to the radish’s late fall harvest period, and so is commonly consumed throughout the winter months)—as well as their own tastes and textures, like the bright, crisp notes of baechu kimchi, or the juicy, toothy burst of flavor from oi sobagi, or that sweet, addictive crunch of kkakduki, as though biting into a perfectly ripe apple—but beyond the textures lie the memories, often of family, or mothers, because kimchi and kimjang, the process of making piles of kimchi to last the whole winter, is communal yet intimate—it is the collective acknowledgement of the need for food (because kimchi is very much a household staple due to its preservative qualities that carry throughout the frigid winter months, a source of nutrition and flavor dating back over 4,000 years) but also the close dynamics between mother and child, like how one of my earliest memories of my mother is when she would fill a shallow bowl with water and dip each piece of baechu kimchi into the bowl, rinsing away the red pepper flakes until the cabbage emerged from its baptism clean and pale, mild enough for my child’s palate, repeating this process thoroughly and methodically and moreover she would expertly stab her chopsticks into the ribbing of each cabbage slice, tearing it into small strips I could fit in my child-size mouth, and we would eat like that, me consuming white fermented cabbage strip by strip, my mother hardly eating at all, focused on the parade of cleansed kimchi pieces that ever dwindled on the rim of my plate, and if that’s not love I don’t know what is, or how now, when the holidays are approaching, meaning I will be flying home soon, my mother on the phone will say guess what I have waiting for you, and I will say what, and she will whisper like a secret, dongchimi!, and I will gasp dramatically but also sincerely, because dongchimi is my favorite kimchi, which is of course why she goes through such pains to make it, though she calls me a halmeoni, a grandma, for loving it, because it is supposedly an archaic taste most appreciated by senior citizens, and when she dishes it out, slicing the fat radishes into quartered circles on the cutting board, I will dip the ladle into the jar for the fizzy, electrolyte-rich juice and sip it straight from the ladle, cool and sour on my tongue, and my mother will shake her head at me and call me halmeoni, and I will laugh and she will laugh and that is what kimchi is,
KONDABOLU: I mean, you really have to be brief and it’s going to be minimizing. So, you know, sometimes I wonder, like, should we actually just do a parenthesis after and just make a longer explanation or is a footnote better—in written form, I mean—or is there another way to do it? Because I think sometimes you really have to put time in to define the terms and define the people. And it’s worth it if people get a fuller picture.
Is this essay a parenthesis or a footnote?
In a Korean household, there are commonly two refrigerators. One is your run-of-the-mill refrigerator stocked with everyday groceries and condiments—milk, eggs, fresh produce, ketchup, your favorite brand of hot sauce, maple syrup, leftover couscous. The second one, though it now comes in a generic upright form, was originally conceived as a top-loading cabinet, not dissimilar in appearance to a top-loading washing machine. This refrigerator contains special compartments for holding kimchi while maintaining a frigid 32 degrees Fahrenheit, low air circulation, and high humidity levels to facilitate fermentation and preservation.
If your home is very traditional, your second refrigerator is outside, and it is not a refrigerator at all but an ovoid earthenware pot ranging anywhere from one to 60 liters in size, buried deep in the earth so its mouth is level with the ground. Throughout the winter months, the jars maintain temperatures between 32 and 35 degrees Fahrenheit, their porous walls allowing evaporating salt water to escape, casting flower-like designs on their outer surfaces. These kimchi pots are referred to as onggi, though they also have more specific names based on size: danji for small jars, hangari for medium ones, and dok for the largest.
Our household is neither traditional nor high-tech, so our second refrigerator is a normal kitchen refrigerator that lives in our garage. On first glance, its insides appear gutted and ineffective, shelves spaced far apart and drawers removed or sitting crookedly atop each other, but there is a system and a logic to the arrangement. In summertime, the rickety drawers burst with produce; through the long winter months, each of the two remaining shelves hosts tall glass bottles brimming with spice-freckled napa cabbage, whole radishes stripped of their skins and floating phantasmagorically in golden brine, quartered cucumbers stacked like logs and slowly growing supple while still maintaining a good crunch (Koreans are all about the textures). Kimchi by the gallon—kimchi galore. The layers of pickled vegetables dwindle with each passing day, served out in generous portions to be consumed alongside aromatic chicken soups infused with ginger and jujubes or braised short ribs so tender they fall off the bone, or cooked—into spicy seafood pancakes with golden-batter lace that melts on the tongue or hearty stews that evoke an otherworldly reddish glow. When we have to fish through the jars’ opaque liquid for slips of kimchi, spring is arriving, and soon sunny harvests will fill the refrigerator drawers with raw vegetables to be salted, spiced, and fermented in the newly emptied jars, ready for winter once again.
