Fermenting a friendship

The long arc of kimchi, as it should be

Irreverent badgers

We met on 19th August 2020, on the corner of Columbia Road and Ravenscroft Street. It was raining; I remember, because our umbrellas serendipitously enforced the 2 metre rule that many of us were still observing.

She was Songsoo, a Korean chef transplanted to London, and had messaged me on Instagram to meet up. Songsoo had enjoyed reading an article I’d written. Something about dumplings. She wanted to say thank you and really would love me to try her kimchi.

We were shy, somewhat polite. Our formality was offset by what she handed me: an angry-sunset hued beetroot kimchi in a clear vacuum pack, enclosed with handwritten prose.

Chi or qi is energy flow and this kimchi is made with badger flame beets. And badgers if you know “don’t give a fuck!”

— from Songsoo’s beet-chi

Well, anyone who equates energy flow with irreverent badgers has my attention. The kimchi was delicious and indeed full with vital energy.

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Over the course of the last few years, Songsoo and I have become friends over shared meals and community events. I watched Songsoo thrive in her job; becoming celebrated in the London food world for her passion for fermentation, ingredient sourcing and farming. I never asked her to teach me how to make kimchi — partly because there were other things for us to bond over — though mostly because I’m conscious of the plight of my Korean friends, and the audacious way that people expect them to be walking, talking kimchi ambassadors who share their knowledge freely.

It is a dynamic that we as diaspora working with food must negotiate. One in which the public see in us the desirable aspects of our culture that they can extract. For me, it looks like constant requests from strangers and friends alike: Where can I find good Chinese food? or Can you teach me to make dumplings? Kimchi, in particular, is a staunchly nationalistic emblem, its global identity inextricable from the South Korean government’s gastrodiplomacy programme. I would never meet a Korean for the first time and immediately start telling them how much I looove your food. It’s a very reductive thing to do.

And yet, that happens to us all the fucking time.

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Three months ago I finally asked Songsoo to share her knowledge with me.

Let me go back a bit. A year previously, I’d had the fortune of meeting the ecological research artist Youngsook Choi. Youngsook told me her vision of coordinating a kimjang of defiant Asian women, revelling in the defiantly stinky nature of communal kimchi-making — typically the realm of seasoned, gnarly ajummas in Korea. Imagine a lot of squatting and chatting. Envisage also the studious choreography of gloved hands, bright red with chilli paste. These are — I suppose — also hands that would know the redness of blood; be it menstrual or obstetric. The kind of blood that society deems unclean and shameful, with none of the glamour of [male] blood, shed on oversized cinema screens in the name of war epics.

Taken by Youngsook’s vision of theatrical rebellion, I decided to orchestrate a kimjang. It was to be a christening of my new home with the indelible stench of fish sauce and cabbage. I gathered eight women I knew — including Songsoo and Youngsook — women, who I knew needed sisterhood at that point in time. Women who had recently revealed tenderness to me; like the soft heart of Chinese cabbage after bathing overnight in salted water.

Soft hearts

Songsoo sends me a shopping list, along with several YouTube instructional videos in Korean to watch. I rip the cabbages from the bottom up, specifically at her request. Twice I have to go out to buy more salt. In the olden days we stood at grandmother’s knee to learn such mystic methods; today we have WhatsApp voicenotes from friends. A culture orally handed — not so much ‘down’ — as sideways.

My girlfriends arrive.

The real test of whether I have brined obediently; Songsoo squeezes the tough heart of the cabbage so hard that I’m terrified it will break. “Oh,” my soft heart leaps into my mouth. Of course, it does not break. The hard heart is more pliable than I thought. “It’s OK,” she nods, curt but warm. I glow. As complimentary as it gets — I’ll take it, I think to myself.

“You have a Magimix!” she says, excitedly. We offload freshly steamed rice, chopped pears, garlic, onion, fish sauce, saeu-jeot and gochugaru into the contraption. Marvelling as the pungent confetti churns into a bright blushing sludge. We joke that with such technology, humans are made redundant. But of course, a machine cannot judge when a cabbage heart is soft enough.

We make kimchi together in my back garden, swaddled in fleeces and plastic aprons, huddled closely to brace against the inhospitable chill. The sky starts to spit, just as Julie lights a huge wood fire in my fire pit, into which we toss handwritten dreams, fears or lovesick notes. Too quickly, the already-grey February light dims, and we hurry inside to snack and chat; the conversation bursts with unbridled, raucous gossip that is occasionally injected with heartfelt confessions. We eight women wear our hearts on our sleeves and, proudly rolling them up, reveal a lifetime of battle scars.

That day, we discover there are more divorcees among us than we thought.

Fermenting a friendship

Later on in the WhatsApp group chat, Songsoo patiently troubleshoots our kimchi queries. Yes, separation is normal. Yes, you can store it outside if it’s cold. She sends a photo of a three-year-old sour mustard green that has been kept outdoors. It strikes me that this mustard green is almost as old as our friendship; the latter having fermented long enough for me to ask for her wisdom without it feeling extractive in doing so.

The three-year-old mustard green looks gnarled, shrivelled, desaturated. It is the antithesis of how Big (White) Kimchi is sold to you by everyone from Waitrose to Tim Spector: the over saturated, over spiced and fizzy miracle gut cure. Big Kimchi sets off a peccadillo of mine; that despite the global diversity in vegetable fermentation methods, the mainstream food world’s curiosity stops at kimchi. It’s a small yet significant observation that points to the need for Other People’s Weird Foods to be just the right kind of exotic and spicy in order for it to be palatable.

I think, it’s funny how some preserved vegetables are less desirable, never make it onto Instagram tablescapes or magazine editorial spreads. It’s always those vegetables that are overripe and ugly, like the laborious hands or labia of ajummas and ayis. Truth be told, I much prefer eating those over kimchi, like the suān cài I make twice a year in hulking great batches, or the mui choy my great uncle used to preserve on his farm.

I have always thought there is something pure and precious in refusing to share with outsiders, without succumbing to any pressure to commodify your knowledge. That afternoon, we made kimchi as a gesture of sisterhood, not as cultural proselytism. Perhaps it was because the eight of us — all a bit tired and burnt and heartbroken — were on the brink of forgotten-ness, that we tacitly agreed this was just for us. Women past a certain point no longer fizz like miracle kimchi, and so no one thinks to give us their full attention. But while people assume we are toughened up, like the hardy leaves of a winter cabbage, they don’t know how soft our hearts really are.

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Thanks for reading. It’s been a few months since I posted on Substack, so here’s an update for those who want to catch up on my other news:

• I have new monthly column called ‘Off The Plate’ for South China Morning Post. Read it online (behind a paywall) or in print.

• My satirical piece on the pitfalls of DE&I kicked off Vittles Magazine’s new season, as part of its regular Hater column.

• Catch me at the British Library (26th May) as part of its annual Food Season. I’ll be chairing my own panel Classical/Non Classical and joining another on How Food Crosses Continents.

• I am organising two community events in London: a zongzi workshop (1st June) and the annual Friends Of Halkevi fundraiser (5th June).

• The 2nd edition of London Feeds Itself, to which I contributed a chapter, is now available to buy.

• For Horniman Museum’s 茶, चाय, Tea (Chá, Chai, Tea) exhibition, I led intimate sessions with the ESEA community that resulted in this co-written poem.

• Pre-order my debut book An A-Z Of Chinese Food (Recipes Not Included), out January 2025.