Free The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong Page B

repercussions,” he said. “Some Koreans still see it as a negative.
Some of the parents of girls I dated in the past thought I wasn’t a whole person,” he said.
    Yet even with all those impediments, Gray says he feels Korean. “I feel more comfortable here,” he said. Now he is a successful businessman in Seoul, has relearned Korean, and is
about to marry a Korean woman. He plans to take his birth mother to Delaware to meet his adoptive parents. “She said it was a dream of hers, to thank them.”
    Daniel’s story makes it obvious how fortunate it is that some aspects of Confucianism have disappeared. Other aspects have eroded more subtly: I’ve noticed that young people no
longer have the universal, automatic reflex of offering their seat to an elderly person. In my day (yes, I know how crotchety that sounds), kids would literally grab the hand of an old person, even
a total stranger, and escort them to the seat they were yielding.
    I’ve also begun to see young people yell at older people, including a strange thirty-something woman in the Seoul subway who was wearing a green cellophane sun visor and a lot of makeup.
She was screaming shrilly that my parents were monopolizing the station manager with a question. I can say with complete confidence that I never witnessed any such incident when I was growing up in
Seoul.
    These might seem like harsh descriptions of the Korean character. But they are also responsible for what is best about the culture. Perhaps a good metaphor for all these Korean
traits—wrath, Confucian principles, and nature fetishism—is its famously pungent cuisine. Or, as one Korean American chef described his food, “aggressive.”

5
KIMCHI AND THE CABBAGE INFERIORITY COMPLEX
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    THERE ARE NOW SEVERAL MICHELIN STAR KOREAN restaurants in the United States. This may come as a shock to diasporic Koreans; many of us still bear the
childhood scars brought on by our non-Korean friends opening our fridge for a snack and being repulsed by the smell of Korea’s national dish, the fermented spicy cabbage called kimchi.
    And it’s not a shame restricted to children; a Korean doctor I know who worked at a prominent Boston hospital early in his career was told by his boss that the nurses were complaining of
his breath. His wife changed her kimchi recipe to include less garlic.
    Being Korean in America when I was a child was like being a smoker now. We were pariahs with filthy smelly habits that made our friends not want to come over to play.
    Bobby Kwak, a successful entrepreneur based in New York, is all too familiar with this scenario. Today, he is a posterboy for Korean American cool. He is a hip restaurateur, inventor of the
prize-winning
bibimbap
(marinated beef barbecue, vegetables, and a fried egg burger), and owner of Circle—one of New York’s hottest nightclubs, catering to high-rolling
Koreans. But he recalls that not long ago being Korean was not cool in America. In his swank midtown Manhattan office, I asked him about what it was like growing up as a Korean American in northern
New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. “It was embarrassing,” he said, shielding his face with his hands.
    He recalls that a large part of the shame came from the food. “One time when I was in third grade, my mom packed
jja jang myun
”—noodles with black bean
sauce—“and
kkakdugi
”—pickled radish—“and put it in a thermos. My teacher made me dump it because the kids were all like, “ ‘Who
farted?’ ” So I had to tie it up in a plastic bag and take it outside. I was the only Asian American in my school at the time.”
    I hated Korean food as a child. My nanny was an American of Hungarian descent; she raised me on spaghetti and meatballs, mac and cheese, and stuffed cabbage. When my family moved to Korea, one
of the biggest shocks for me was having to eat Korean food every day. The food was too spicy, and there  were too many