On My Mom, Fermenting Community, and (Un)settling Asian American History
Photographer: My Dad, Elson Park
As we near the close of #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth, I'd like to share the above photo of my Mom.
According to her, the photo was taken around 1975, several years before I was born. She's sitting on the tiled floor of our family's backyard in Irvine, California. Her smile radiates as warmly as the Orange County sun that shines down on the jars of doenjang, or fermented soybean paste, hugging the ground. At the time, my Mom said there weren't any Korean stores nearby--Garden Grove, home to the oldest Koreatown in OC, was still emerging as post-1965 Asian immigrants like my Mom were just starting to establish a presence. So she made her own doenjang from soybeans mailed to her from Korea. She also gave extra jars to other Koreans in the area.
Doenjang, as some know, is the life-force of Korean cuisine. It's also incredibly labor intensive. As described by the Korean internet celebrity chef Maangchi, doenjang is made by grinding soybeans into a thick paste and forming it into blocks that are dried & fermented for months before being soaked in brine for a few more months. The solids then become doenjang.
In some of my workshops for Maum Consulting, LLC, I like to open with this photo as a way to show--and complicate--the place and process of Asian American history. On one hand, this photo shows how immigrant Asian women like my Mom labored to sustain Korean American families and communities. It's the kind of labor that often doesn't get included in what counts as "History" with a capital "H," and yet, we wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be here, teaching Asian American history, without this invisibilized gendered labor. And she did it through fermentation--a process of creating life from death. It's bacterial alchemy, manipulating matter so that it can live in a different form, and thus, allow us to live--with delicious joy. It says so much about our resilience, our resourcefulness, and our abundance in a country that only wanted us for our cheap labor & militarized gratitude. In a way, my Mom's doenjang *is* Asian American history, if we understand it as a narrative of "new life," the name given to the operation that, in the same year of this photo, brought thousands of Vietnamese refugees to several US military bases, many of whom would eventually resettle in Orange County.¹
And yet, can we call the ground that my Mom and jars sit on, and that nourished so many of us, as ours? How can we claim our rightful place on a land that's stolen? So, I also show this photo to acknowledge that my family settled on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Acjachemen & Tongva peoples.² How does this complicate the narrative of Asian American history as "new life"? How is our own presence a process of fermentation--of Asian American life from Native American death? How can white supremacy itself be broken down so that Asian Americans, Native Americans, and others might live--in a different form altogether? What fermented futures await?
¹ For more on Operation New Life, US military empire, and Vietnamese refugee settlers, I recommend the work of my friend/colleague, Dr. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi: https://asianam.ucla.edu/person/evyn-le-espiritu-gandhi/
² “The land that is now Irvine was seized from the Acjachemen and Tongva first by the Spanish military and the Catholic Church, then sold to Californios Don Jose Andres Sepulveda, and then purchased in 1865 by an Irish immigrant named James Irvine, along with his two business partners, Flint and Bixby.” Source: Toxic Legacies of War: the Irvine Case (walkshop on October 26, 2019) Statement prepared by Jennifer Terry, Convener and Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, UC Irvine.
