Blog Post Week 8 Prompt 2

    Throughout the novel, food takes a central role in the lives of the characters. Kyunghee and Sunja spend most of their days cooking or preparing to cook, and they eventually start making kimchi and selling it. While Lee mostly provides vivid descriptions of Korean dishes, she describes udon in the first part of the book and also provides some insight on how the two cultures clash over this particular area. After Sunja starts making large batches of kimchi in their house, Lee writes, "Like all the other Korean children at the local school, Noa was taunted and pushed around, but now that his clean-looking clothes smelled immutably of onions, chili, garlic, and shrimp paste, the teacher himself made Noa sit in the back of the classroom next to the group of Korean children who lived with pigs in their homes. Noa... was called garlic turd" (Lee 165).

    The first thing I want to note is that these smells are labeled as distinctly Korean, as Noa is grouped with all of the other Korean kids as a result of these odors. Secondly, it can be seen that Noa being sent to the back of the classroom is a punishment for the scent, suggesting that Korean cuisine and culture as a whole is seen as a bad thing. Furthermore, Noa is then grouped by ethnicity, which illustrates the divide between the two cultures. Overall, this quote shows the conflict between these two cultures as they struggle to coexist in Japan, as any public expression of Korean culture is looked down on by the Japanese. Reading this, I couldn't help but be reminded of similar intolerance here in the US. I think everyone has seen videos with a "Karen" asking someone of a different race or ethnicity to speak English, which demonstrates a similar demonization of outside cultures.