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30 What I Cook Is Who I Am Edward Lee My grandmother cooked every day. Her entire life. In our tiny windowless Brooklyn kitchen with just a few pots, mismatching lids, a plastic colander or two, and a fake Ginsu knife, she re-created all the Korean dishes she had learned before she immigrated to America. My grandmother never questioned her identity, culinary or otherwise. She was a Korean widow yearning for a homeland that had been destroyed before her eyes. Her daily rituals of cooking and Bible reading were her last links to an agrarian Korea that no longer existed, a place that had risen from its ashes into a megametropolis, a place that did not need her. Her food was indelibly linked to that identity. But this is true for most of us, isn’t it? Can you separate a Bolognese sauce from the Italian arm that stirs the simmering pot? Funny thing about my grandmother, though—she refused to make “American food.” We always had peanut butter and jelly in the cupboard, but if I wanted a PB&J sandwich, I had to make it myself. I’m not sure whether she was offended by it or if she was quietly, in her own grandmotherly way, guiding me to forge a culinary identity of my own, reflective of the life I would lead as a Korean-American kid. Or I could be reading way too much into it. But it’s true that my identity (crisis) would soon enough manifest itself in my language (foulmouthed), my clothes (ripped jeans), my hair (long and messy), and of course, my food, which started with the PB&J but then wove itself all the way to Kentucky. The great thing about Americans is not the identity we’re born with but our reinvention of it. We start with one family and then, magically, we are allowed to reinvent ourselves into whoever we want to be. As a kid, I’d go to my friend Marcus’s house for a meal of Puerto Rican plantains over rice with ketchup and honey. The apartment was loud, the radio always on (we didn’t even own one), 31 what i cook is who i am with people talking over each other. And for that night, I was a Puerto Rican son of a festive family where every meal was a party. Our downstairs neighbors were Jewish, and sometimes they’d watch me when my parents were both working nights. Their food smelled like a hospital, and so did their furniture and their antiseptic gray tabby. But they conveyed love through everything they did. They sat with me and warned me about life, talking to me about being honest and keeping out of trouble. They insisted I read books and learn to play the piano. They were paternal and stern and warm all at the same time. It isn’t their overcooked string beans I remember most, but their words of nourishment . I felt as though if anything ever happened to my parents, they would have taken me in without a second thought. And in an odd way, they kind of did. GRAFFITI WAS MY FIRST CUISINE All the truants in my junior high were into graffiti, but most of us just scribbled in notebooks. None of us had dared to tag a wall yet. But there was this one mysterious kid, forever in the eighth grade, who was rumored to be a wall artist. He had a shadowy past and facial hair like someone ten years older than us. He smoked, he cursed, he cut school, and it was rumored that he lived alone. Eric (let’s call him that) was the coolest kid in a school full of derelicts. We became friends. There are a million reasons kids deface public property: rebellion, for notoriety , as a cry for attention, boredom. I wanted/needed an identity to call my own, and what was cooler at the time than dark hoodies, backpacks full of Krylons, late-night bombs of hopping fences and scaling exteriors? Mostly I was Eric’s lookout, his apprentice. He taught me technique—to use skinny caps for the outline and fat caps to fill in, and to spray without dripping— and he taught me to find my own style, to write without getting caught. I became someone else overnight, with every stroke of the cold nozzle tracking the city walls. I was a lawbreaker; I was a legend in my own mind. I was anything...

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