Baring Fruit
with poems by Arah Ko, Edna St. Vincent Millay & Yours Truly
In Korea, when I was a child, dessert at home was almost always freshly sliced Asian pears, perfectly segmented watermelon or honeydew melon. In season, we ate the sweetest persimmons I have ever had (I’ve tried and failed over the years to find Korean persimmons in the United States, but they simply don’t exist). Sometimes, my grandmother would cut up strawberries and roll them in a bowl of sugar. She did this while sitting on ondol (heated) floors, cross-legged, on a small wooden desk where she would also eat dinner sometimes, watching the news, when my grandfather worked late. She would watch me eat those strawberries with so much joy that it was palatable.
My grandmother, like many other grandmothers, delighted in feeding me. But the reasons were multi-faceted—from age 7-9, for various reasons, my anxiety made it increasingly difficult for me to eat anything at all. She watched me grow extremely thin with much vigilance and concern and would send away for my favorite foods—one of which was abalone from Busan, the third largest city in Korea and the city where my family took refuge during the Korean War (as far away from the DMZ as they could get). One of my most vivid memories from childhood is watching my grandmother and my mother wash and cut fruit in the tiny kitchen of my grandparents’ house.
The poems we will read today are poems that center around food and familial relationships. How do specific foods shape our memories and our perspectives? How might we use our food memories to shape our writing about family?
Okay! Ready to write?!
