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21 de Febrero, 2008
Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home
Categorized under Comida , Corazón , Cultura , Literatura , Parenting | Tags: Adoption, Authors, Comida, Kim Sunée
WHAT A BEAUTIFUL STORY, full of poignant struggle, sensuality, sorrow, happiness, and food.
In 1973, when she was 3, her mother abandoned her in a crowded South Korean market swirling in gray mist and banana flowers. “Although memories are distorted,” she writes, “there are true sensations one doesn’t forget, like fear and hunger, deep rumblings echoing in a cavernous heart and belly.” Three days later, policemen found her clutching a fistful of crumbs and repeating her mother’s unkept promise to return.Adopted by a middle-class family in New Orleans, Ms. Sunée grew up in comfortable circumstances but with a growing sense of dislocation and restlessness. (Her surname, pronounced soo-NAY, is based on the name of a younger sister, also adopted, and was given to them by their adoptive parents.) Her parents, especially her mother, seemed distracted and brittle to her. Since the book was published in January, Ms. Sunée said, she and her mother have not spoken.
Her earliest memories have always been of hunger and food, especially her beloved grandfather’s gumbo, mirliton casserole studded with lump crab meat, and spicy crayfish bisque floating with stuffed crayfish heads. “He wasn’t a fancy cook,” she said of her grandfather, who used to feed homeless people at his table and occasionally don her great-aunt’s wig to do Julia Child imitations in falsetto. “But he was generous of heart.”
What I love about food writing (to use a very bland and inept phrase) is how it is a metaphor for everything else in life. Food is not just our fuel, it is the growing hand that holds us to the planet fast. Food connects our musclemeat to the ethereal air, weaves our hands like moving roots the soil, sews our bellies to the swollen fruit of the earth, mixes our blood with the water and the boulders of the earth to our bones. So food and the stories told can be about joy and pain and emptiness and sex and stomach and self and fulfillment and feeling and the movement of life through us and through every part of us, body, mind, and soul.
Somehow unhappiness crept in. Dreams of her shadowy birth mother continued to haunt her, and the French scenario felt, in the end, like somebody else’s life. She felt insubstantial, especially compared with Mr. Baussan, so successful and “so rooted in Provence that he smelled like citrus and sandalwood.” After five years, she left him.As if Ms. Sunée were some overly convincing soap opera star, readers regularly write to urge her to get back together with Mr. Baussan. She also receives copious e-mail from Korean orphans who identify with her lack of identity and seem to understand better why she left him.
“If you don’t have a sense of who you are, nobody can give you that, no matter how beautiful, wrapped up, perfect and idyllic,” she said. “For some people, the idyll would be enough. But not having any strong sense of self, I had no foundation to accept anything, especially such an abundance of love.”—Life as a Repast, Not Yet Complete
gracias a RC
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Comentarios (4)
Jaime dijo:
mmm, your musings about "food writing" are sublime. very poetic. very true. i think i'm going to go eat the orange in my desk drawer, now.
Palabras por Jaime spat forth on el 21 de Febrero, 2008 at 11:47 AM
nezua
dijo:
good call! thanks jaime.
Palabras por nezua
spat forth on el 21 de Febrero, 2008 at 02:20 PM
RC dijo:
What I like about food writing is that it usually leads to food eating, Nez.
And this person {I read the whole article} REALLY can pack away the grub. I would love to go on a food tour with her.
Palabras por RC spat forth on el 21 de Febrero, 2008 at 03:15 PM
nezua
dijo:
well said. tho even when not a prelude to another experience (eating), just good writing about the joys of food preparation and appreciation and ingestion...its an amazing act and experience in and of itself.
i agree on your thoughts about the subject, the writer, kim sunée.
i like how many different elements come together even in this piece.
Palabras por nezua
spat forth on el 21 de Febrero, 2008 at 03:20 PM