Bi Bim

by Antonio Aiello
Alimentum

They’re cuddling on the couch and getting their daily dose of televised Valium. Henry, who’s four, is draped in a way that covers most of the cushions. Hazel, who’s almost two, lounges on top of him. These are my kids, who I adopted from South Korea, and this moment is close to perfect. Hazel’s not grabbing anything, and Henry’s not hitting her. And I’m half-tempted to let them continue on in bliss, but…

“Time to turn off the TV,” I say.

Henry growls.

“Beast,” I say.

He picks up the remote and turns off the TV. Then he points it at me.

“Click,” he says. “You’re not my best friend.”

He dumps Hazel on the floor and she starts crying. He pushes past me and heads to his music box where he takes out the loudest most obnoxious instrument he can find—a Korean lollipop drum he’s not allowed to play with drumsticks. He picks up a wooden spoon—technically not a drumstick—and bangs a furious beat.

“Your’renotmybestfreindyour’renotmybestfriend.”

And so begins the night’s rush to get both kids fed and in bed by 7:30 without toxic tears and meltdowns. Henry trails me into the kitchen, pounding his drum, with Hazel in tow who’s now banging a tin tea pot. It’s cute—not really—in that freeze-frame moment before worlds end. But they’re giggling now and singing about diggers and bulldozers.

In the kitchen, I have spinach, whole carrots, broccoli, and a massive mitaki mushroom piled on the counter.

“Bim bim bap!” Henry screams. He takes my hand and kisses it. “You are my best friend,” he says.

“Wanna help?” I say.

“Nope.”

He heads off for another lap through the dining room banging his drum.

“Help. Help. Help,” Hazel says.

We call her Pest.

She drops her teapot and picks up the stepstool. She carries it to the prep counter where here eyes are level with the cutting board. She hands me a carrot, then the salt, then the cat comb. When Henry comes back in, I break up a skirmish over who gets the step stool. Not interested in sharing, Hazel heads for the BAR stool that’s even taller.

While I chop mushrooms, Henry and Hazel start breaking broccoli into little pieces, and with the repetitious tap-tap-tap of my knife on wood, a calm settles over the kitchen.

Ragu

My parents divorced when I was two and I split my time between two parents and two kitchens. With varnished maple counter tops—chopping prohibited—rubber Pirelli floors that had to be tooth-brush cleaned once a month, and an island counter big enough to seat a family of five, my mom’s kitchen was designed more for entertaining than cooking. She had a twenty-five foot phone cord that reached the stove, the oven and the wet bar. There was always a warm pot of coffee and at least one cigarette smoldering in an ashtray, even when she wasn’t there. NORAD: that’s what her friends called our kitchen. Only a kinder, gentler NORAD where woman could freely shit-talk the men they controlled while sipping box wine. As my mom breaded pork chops, Carlton Menthol 100 smoldering in one hand, pork chop in the other, she’d tell stories to whoever was in the kitchen—or on the phone. Like about the gorgeous pair of red heels she had to buy that were on sale at Montaldo’s, or how while she was having drinks at McFann’s, two of her boyfriends showed up. “What did I do? I introduced them.” Big sizzle as she dropped the pork chop into the cast iron skillet.

At my dad’s house, I was commonly referred to as Little Shit. Little Shit won’t eat tomatoes. Little Shit picked out all the onions. Little Shit made us wait half an hour for a plain Happy Meal hamburger. I really was a simple kid who was easy to please. If my food wasn’t sugar-coated, pan-fried, served with ketchup or ranch dressing, and contained no vegetables except maybe iceberg lettuce, carrots, and celery, it had to come from a can, consist of noodles and powdered cheese, or be mixed with ground beef. It wasn’t complicated. But he refused to play. I’d ask for fish sticks and French fries and he’d make blackened catfish with roasted sweet potatoes. His kitchen was no fun. He didn’t smoke or gossip or tell stories. I hated his kitchen and the food he made. And he resented me for hating it.

I remember the weekend that started to change. I was around ten years old and alone at my dad’s for the weekend. No Kathy or Tiahiti or Gloria or any of the other girlfriends who hung out at my dad’s on weekends. No brother. No sister. No friends spending the night. Just the two of us and we had already exhausted our one conversation over pizza the night before: how’s your mother? he asked. Fine, I said.

Saturday morning, in between Thundercats and GI Joe, I was rummaging through bran cereals looking for anything sugar-coated when my dad shuffled in carrying a couple pounds of frozen meat.

“Want to help make Grandma’s spaghetti sauce?” he said.

We had an awkward moment while I tried to think up a good lie.

“You don’t have to,” he finally said

“No, I will,” I said.

“Maybe you’ll try it when we’re done.”

“Sure,” I said.

We both smiled, and our smiles said we both knew there was no way in hell I was going to try it.

As he prepped, I asked questions. Do you really need onion? Can we make meatballs with the hamburger?

“You get one more question,” he finally said.

“Can I cut something?”

He hesitated then handed me his chef’s knife with the worn wooden handle that fit the grooves of his hand.

As the meat sizzled in the pan, he showed me how to dice onions by slicing them in a grid. Then used the flat side of his knife to smash the garlic from its skin. We barely spoke; we didn’t have to. In a large pot, he drizzled olive oil and sautéed the onion, then the garlic. He added the cooked meat with pinches of parsley and basil, salt and pepper. Next came the tomatoes, then the tomato paste, the sugar, and last, the wine. With each step the sauce became thicker, the aroma in the kitchen heavier. My dad ladled sauce into a small bowl.

“Try it,” he said.

I checked it for chunks.

“You want eat it,” he said, “or wear it?”

The list of foods I had worn was already too long, so I scooped up a decent spoonful and shoved it in my mouth.

“Better than that bottled crap your mother gives you?” he said.

The meat was tender, and the chunks were bigger than Ragu. It didn’t taste like cat food or smell like ketchup. It wasn’t sweet or watery. It was good, but in a way I’d never imagined.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s alright. I guess.”

“Little Shit,” he said. But this time it was a good thing.

A door had cracked. I had eaten tomatoes and onions and garlic. And over the next couple of years, as my dad and I spent more Saturdays cooking together, that door flew open. We made our way through his mother’s recipes—braciola, lasagna, chicken cacciatore, pasta e fagioli—and then moved on to new ones he picked up on his trips to Italy: white clam sauce, a simple marinara, Carbonara. My first jobs were in restaurants—Italian—always in the kitchen and always cooking. And when I graduated from high school, I lived abroad in Italy for a year. All of this had a cumulative effect on me. I came to define myself by the food I cooked and the stories I told in the kitchen. And I was proud to be Italian.

Perfect Parents

Henry is bipolar in the kitchen. Not officially; he’s only four. But he’s either enthusiastic or writhing on the kitchen floor. Tonight, we’re lucky. He’s peeling carrots and pounding garlic with the back of a wooden spoon. My wife, Alison is in the kitchen now and Hazel is helping her with a bulgogi marinade.

Hazel hands her the cat comb.

“Thank you Hazel.”

As broccoli sautés in a mixture of olive and sesame oils, I chop the mitakis, julienne the carrots, and mince garlic for Alison’s marinade. When the broccoli is slightly crispy and deep green, I take it out and then individually sauté the rest of the vegetables keeping each one separate in stacked metal bowls. While Alison fries the bulgogi, I crack two eggs in a bowl, whisk, and start a paper-thin omelet.

When Alison and I decided to adopt from South Korea, we had a basic understanding of Korean culture. Hyundai was Korean. And Koreans liked Karaoke, as evidenced by the Seoul Kitchen karaoke bar and waterbed lounge I regularly frequented in college; I knew Raman was Korean, kind of, but it was also Japanese and they seemed to take it more seriously; and I knew Koreans made barbeque. No, we weren’t operating on a diplomatic level of knowledge, but it was more than other families in our adoption group knew and we felt we had an edge.

As part of the adoption process, we had four cross-cultural parenting workshops that covered issues like racism, cultural heritage, and dealing with the odd things our friends and family and strangers might say when they saw a nice white couple toting around an Asian baby. Like: look at that perfect little china doll; or god bless you for saving that child; or weren’t there any white babies?

In the fourth workshop, we spent the entire class with a family who, fifteen years ago, adopted two girls from South Korea. The mother was a director of something, probably a non-profit, and dressed in stylish shades of gray that matched her graying hair. She was Jewish and in her fifties. When she adopted her first daughter, she redecorated their Manhattan townhouse with Korean antiques and fabric and artwork; they fermented their own kimchi—they had a kimchi refrigerator!—they’d taken Korean language classes for years; they had interesting Koreans friends who mentored their children in art and culture; and they celebrated Confucius holidays. And their two girls—they were well-adjusted teenagers who knew they were Korean and proud of it. They were complete anomalies to the confused and bitter adoptees we had met, raised by the love-is-all-we-need generation of parents who taught their adopted children how be Italian and Irish and Jewish, and who all talked about that ah-ha moment when they looked in the mirror and realized for the first time they were completely different from their parents—skin tone and eyes and that flat nose—and oh-my-god they were Asian!

That last workshop left us terrified. And Alison and I made a pact to be perfect parents aware of our children’s heritage. Buying that five-for-a-dollar Raman special at the MET wasn’t going to cut it.

So, while we waited for our first adoption, we took Korean cooking classes in K-town. We bought Korean art. We decided our children would keep their Korean names as their middle names. Lying in bed at night, we imagined the interesting Korean people—artists and architects and writers—we would meet and convince to be role models for our unknown children. Months before we even had our first child, we were well on our way to being perfect parents.

And we were still perfect parents sitting in our Seoul hotel room eating kimchi Raman with quail eggs as we waited for the call to meet Henry. We were still perfect parents sitting on the floor in Henry’s foster parents apartment, sipping barely tea and chewing and chewing and chewing and finally swallowing hole pieces of dok, Korean rice cakes. The moment we stopped being perfect was when we walked out the door with him, when blowing on his feet didn’t get him to stop crying, and a cleaning woman at the airport showed us how to wipe the lint from the folds under his chin.

Coming home, we settled into an imperfect life of sleepless nights and speech delays and playgroups and play dates and psychotic mommies who breast fed their three year olds. Surviving and “attaching” and sleeping and hitting basic milestones is where we focused our energy, not culture. Not heritage. Not food or mentors or language.

Later, we told ourselves, later. And we beat ourselves up for saying it.

We still had dinners in K-town. We served mondu, bulgogi and jap chae at Henry’s first birthday party and we dressed him up in a full hambok to the perform tol, the Korean tradition of foretelling your future by choosing one item from a group of many. Henry chose a whisk. Or did he think it was a drum stick?

We stopped worshipping at the altar of perfect parenthood. Fuck you, we said when we thought of that perfect family with their perfect townhouse and perfect friends and perfect daughters. Screw you and your kimchi refrigerator, because we were good parents: Henry was attached to both of us; he slept through the night; he was finally hitting milestones; and he loved eating… Italian food.

Like homemade gnocchi with a butter-tomato sauce, tagliatelli with bolognaise, linguini with white clam sauce, or his favorite: wild mushroom risotto. The more Italian food we made, the more he ate and the more we stressed about Korean culture. It was just a matter of time before Henry was off to a Jesuit college where he would try to join Alpha Phi Delta and realize—ohmygod—I’m not a wap?

When we were out one night for bi bim bap in Flushing, we had an-aha moment of our own. As Henry munched on salted sardines and threw his milk on the floor in a semi-psychotic dance of repetition with the nice waitress who kept picking it up, we realized he was absorbing a little Korean culture. It wasn’t much, but he was comfortable eating bi bim bap and bulgogi and mandu and jap chae. He could spend hours obsessing about the Korean drums hanging on the walls. And he was the only one-year old we knew who ate both wild mushroom risotto and dried sardines. He was absorbing a mixed culture created by our own family. Maybe we could loosen up and take cues from our son. Instead of having his culture and ours, we could emphasize a family culture that encompassed both and was based on things we all loved. Food, food could be our corner stone.

Mixing It All Up

I slide the omelet out of the pan and onto the cutting board. As I roll it up and slice it into ribbons, Henry sets the table with placemats, chopsticks and the hand-hammered spoons we bought in Insa Dong when we traveled to Seoul to get Hazel. He places the atlas placemat in front of his chair.

“Beast,” I say, “Where’s Korea?”

He points to the pink peninsula above China.

“Who’s from Korea?”

“Duh,” he says. “I am. And so is Hazel and bulgogi and bi bim bap and chongo drums and…”

Arranged on our counter are bowls of lightly sautéed vegetables and pan-fried bulgogi. Henry climbs up on the step stool and peeks into the bowls. I want this and this and this, he says pointing to mushrooms, carrots, spinach, and broccoli.

Bi bim is a nonsense word meaning mix-mix in Korean. Bap means rice. Bi bim bap is the pasta with tomato sauce of Korea; it’s the dish that every family makes and makes their own way. Our version isn’t completely authentic. Our bulgogi marinade is a mix of several recipes, one of which is from the back of Linda Sue Park’s book Bee-bim Bop—she’s a family friend. And tonight we’re missing the kim chi. But it’s our own version, adapted for our family.

Alison pours wine and I pour milk for the kids. Henry and Hazel are in their seats at the dining room table and as Alison and I settle into our seats, Henry says, “Buon Appetito.”

“Tito,” Hazel screams.

“Bi bim,” Alison says.

And we mix up our rice and dig in.