• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“When you start?” says Kay, who doesn’t seem perturbed in the slightest.

“I have to be interviewed first. The job hasn’t been offered yet.”

“I have to start cooking,” Kay says, already planning a feast in her head to celebrate Gab’s new job. “What you want me to make?”

“Wait,” I say, interrupting. “Am I really the only one here who thinks this is a bad idea? The store is in crisis. How are we going to get by without Gab?” I look at Kay. “Aren’t you worried?”

“Worried?” she replies blankly, as if it’s a strange question. “Worried because why? I have you. And now Emo coming.”

“WHAT?” Gab and I both gasp. Emo is Kay’s older sister and lives in Los Angeles. She used to live with Kay; however, the last time we saw her was two years ago, when she and Kay got in an argument and Emo moved out.

“When?” I exclaim.

“She be here Friday. I talk to her yesterday. You go pick her up at airport,” she says, before disappearing into the laundry room with the food she’d brought down. As Gab and I stand there, now both struck dumb, I can hear her filling up the refrigerator and singing softly.

THE AROMA STARTS invading our bedroom an hour later. Kay had been to Hanyang, a Korean supermarket in Flushing, and brought home some of the family’s favorite dishes: pickled young radishes, salted squid, seasoned cuttlefish and vats of bean paste. When I first moved into the Paks’ house, I admit, I had a hard time with the food. Korean cuisine, which largely consists of vegetables like cucumbers and seaweed, with large components of fish and rice, is almost ridiculously healthy and flavorful, and Koreans tend to eat every meal as if a fast just ended, piling their plates with a wildly colorful assortment of food and stuffing themselves till no one can stand up straight. However, one occasionally has the suspicion that in order to protect their cuisine from being overexposed and watered down, Koreans decided to mask it behind some extremely challenging smells, like minced garlic and fermented soybean paste. Now, my enthusiasm for food that is exotic, flavorful and hopefully spicy enough to give you breath that can peel paint runs second to no one, but the tastes and smells of Korean cuisine are so powerful that they seem to permeate everything around them—like milk, if you store it in a refrigerator with Korean food, or me, if you store me in a basement near dried anchovies and pickled cabbage.

Eventually, though, I stopped noticing what Kay’s house or, occasionally, my own hair smelled like. Not only did I get used to it; it seemed as if my tendency to scrutinize and judge had gone on a much-needed hiatus. Korean daytime TV, for instance, looks no less dim-witted than the American version, but for some reason watching Ten Thousand Wons of Happiness, a popular game show, doesn’t depress me the way an hour of Pyramid does. Korean junk food looks plenty junky, but Choco Pies, one of Gab’s favorite snacks, don’t set off the snob siren the way an equivalent American snack like MoonPies (“Oh my God, you’re really going to eat that?”) would.

Koreans also have a different perspective on what Americans take to be the all-time classic symptom of loserdom: living with one’s parents. In America, what Gab and I are doing is considered unspeakably embarrassing. However, every time I watch Korean TV with Gab and Kay, I seem to see a sitcom or a drama featuring a domestic situation that looks scarily like our own, with a multigenerational household living too close together and tearing one another apart over some drama like a shared business. There’s no stigma. It’s just normal. Kay says that modernization has started to dilute the practice of multigenerational cohabitation somewhat, and of course coming to America introduces all kinds of challenges to traditional living arrangements. However, even after emigrating, Korean-American families tend to go on living the way we do because of the need to enlist family members in labor-intensive businesses like a deli. It’s not just that relatives make good auxiliary workers / indentured servants / child