Photo by Eugene Yi

Through her cookbooks, Cecilia Lee has been tirelessly spreading her love of Korean food for more than a decade.

by Eugene Yi

“Have you ever seen this much chili powder in your life?” asked the fortuitously named Jennie Cook, host of a kimchi-making workshop on an overcast Los Angeles Sunday at her catering kitchen.

“And we’re using the small jars!” said Cecilia Lee, cookbook author, Korean food evangelist and the after- noon’s teacher. Each student would leave the class with as many 32-ounce jars of kimchi they could make. The nine students (seven women, two men) smiled politely and readied their kitchenware.

“We’re going to start with mincing garlic. That’s basically how I grew up. Mincemincemince,” she said, laughing.

Lee, 41, graduated from the University of California, San Diego, studying art and biochemistry (she had been on the pre-med path). She ultimately chose aprons over scrubs, and looked for writing gigs to allow a flexible schedule. She noticed the Los Angeles Times’ food section hadn’t covered kimchi, and before long, she was the paper’s go-to writer for Korean food.

Lee also writes Frommer’s South Korea guidebook. Her editor recommended that she try writing cookbooks. She’s since published three, the most recent one about Mexican cuisine.

“[People] look at me and say, ‘You’re not Latina,” she said. “I never claimed I was Latina. I just said I could make salsa.” Her parents bought a Mexican grocery store when she was a teenager, and Lee often asked customers about ingredients unfamiliar to her, like nopales (prickly pear cactus). Continue Reading »

A self-portrait by Derek Kirk Kim.

An exploration of why there seems to be a glut of Asian American graphic novel superstars.

by Oliver Saria

For those interested in seeing a window into the arcane world of Asian American graphic novelists, but who are too lazy to actually read their books even with all the pictures, it’d be worth your time to check out Mythomania, the live-action Web series written and directed by award-winning graphic novelist and budding filmmaker Derek Kirk Kim. (Full disclosure: I know a thing or two about Mythomania because Kim is one of my housemates and he shot it in our condo.)

In the second episode, a group of cartoonists gathers for a dose of actual human contact in what is otherwise a very lonely, arduous endeavor—writing, drawing, lettering, stapling and selling a self-published mini-comic. The Web series is based partly on Kim’s real-life experiences from about a decade ago when he was a fledgling cartoonist living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he would regularly meet with other fledgling cartoonists for Art Night. Gatherings of visual artists are not uncommon in cities like Chicago, New York and Portland, Ore.—places generally in close proximity to an art school or anywhere artists happen to coalesce. Other Art Nights across the country may go by less generic names, but few have reached the kind of semi-legendary status associated with Kim and his cohorts, who have produced some of the most acclaimed graphic novels of the past decade.

Kim went on to achieve the rare feat of winning the comic industry’s “triple crown” of awards—the Ignatz, the Harvey, as well as the “Oscar” of comics, the Eisner—for his groundbreaking graphic novel Same Difference and Other Stories (First Second Books).

Gene Yang, who actually proposed the first Art Night, was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2006 for American Born Chinese (First Second Books), the first graphic novel to ever be considered for the prestigious prize. In 2007, the book won the Eisner Award for best new graphic album and the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature. Lark Pien, another Art Night alum, won the Harvey Award for her color work on American Born Chinese. Kim and Yang both won their second Eisners in 2010 for their collaboration, The Eternal Smile, a collection of short stories. Other notable alums include: Jason Shiga, another Eisner winner for his mind-boggling work of genius, Meanwhile, a choose-your-own-adventure story on steroids; and Korean American Hellen Jo’s coming of age mini-comic Jin and Jam #1 (Sparkplug) was nominated for an Ignatz in 2009.

Jo, an art school dropout who now works as an assistant story board revisionist for The Regular Show on Cartoon Network, states unequivocally, “I definitely learned more at Art Night than art school. I kind of developed my stylistic choices there.” Continue Reading »

Photo by John Park

Only two Asian films have won the best foreign language Academy Award in the entire history of the prize. Korean director Jang Hun’s The Front Line is South Korea’s entry for the 2012 award. Does it stand a chance?

by Eugene Yi

It’s been a rite for half a century. As the days shorten, the Korean Film Council will choose a film as its selection for the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language category. The Academy will announce its nominations in January. The South Korean film will not be on the list.

So this year, on an early November evening in Los Angeles, the ever-optimistic Korean Film Council (KOFIC) hosted a screening of its latest selection: Jang Hun’s The Front Line. Such screenings are an opportunity for Academy members to view the film on the big screen. Such attendees, if they were there, were not of the celebrity variety, so were difficult to spot.

Jang, however, was very visible.  Only 37, all three of the director’s films have been hits, and all three were shown at the CGV theater that day in a “retrospective” of his work. A bit generous, perhaps, for a still-young filmmaker, but in that spirit, I asked him whether he thought he’d hit upon a style to call his own, and he described himself thusly:

1) His films are all action films.

2) He focuses on the relationships between male frenemies, to the point that he is sometimes chided by the South Korean press for seeming to dislike actresses.

True to form, The Front Line explores the disillusionment among the rank-and-file during the last days of the Korean War. Ragged units of the North and South fight over a hill called Aero K, which has changed hands so many times that the soldiers have lost count.  (Read the name of the hill backwards to find its allegorical meaning.) Jang had reservations about making a war film, thinking it’d be too physically grueling, but “within two hours of reading the script, I decided to make the film,” he said. Continue Reading »

Frances (left) and Ginger Park at their store, Chocolate Chocolate, in Washington, D.C. Frances is holding the sisters’ co-authored memoir, released earlier this year.

Home Sweet Home

A family tragedy bonded sisters Frances and Ginger Park in a lifelong partnership that has led to several children’s books, a new memoir and a very special chocolate store that offers customers more than just treats.

story by Helin Jung
photographs by Jeanne M. Modderman

The Park sisters have always known the allure of chocolate—because, they say, it was in their blood.

Chocolate is a food so ancient and universal, with powers so overwhelming and complex, that it seems to escape only a rare few, and Frances and Ginger never stood a chance.

It began decades ago, in a place that doesn’t exist anymore.  The sisters’ now 81-year-old mother, Heisook Park, was the first to fall in love with the elixir, spoiled as a child by the cocoa sweets that her older brothers would bring to their home in Sinuiju, in what is now North Korea, from faraway, exotic places. Chocolate equaled mystique, love, happiness.  And then everything changed—except for the one thing that didn’t. While still a teenager, Heisook fled persecution in the north and ended up in Seoul at the start of the Korean War. Her mother left behind, a brother dead, she coped by buying Hershey chocolate bars on the black market.

As bombs fell outside and windows shattered, the Park sisters say in their frequent re-tellings of this story, their mother huddled under a burlap sack and nibbled on those precious bars.

If I die, I’m going to die with chocolate on my lips, she told herself then.

The Park sisters didn’t stand a chance.

For the past 27 years, Frances and Ginger—and in that order because Frances is older by seven years—have been the proprietors of a shop in Washington, D.C., called Chocolate Chocolate. They are also writers of novels and children’s books, and have most recently co-authored a memoir called Chocolate Chocolate: A True Story of Two Sisters, Tons of Treats, and the Little Shop That Could. Youthful in appearance and spirit, they have spent their lives doing most things together, and the book, written in first-person plural, is a collection of we’s and us’s that speaks to their near-total unison.

Though Frances and Ginger had always been close, the impetus for going into business together was tragedy: Their father, Sei-Young Park, a Harvard-educated senior economist for the World Bank, was traveling through Hawaii in 1979 and bound for Korea when he suffered a fatal stroke. He was 56 years old, and Ginger was two days short of her 17th birthday. Continue Reading »

Unorthodox Rabbi

As a child, Angela Buchdahl stood out as the lone Asian face in the synagogue and at Jewish camps. Today, she holds the distinction of being the nation’s first Asian American rabbi and is helping to redefine what it means to be Jewish.

by Rebecca U. Cho

On Friday nights at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, a crowd of 600 gathers for service, voices unifying in centuries-old songs of worship. Leading the attendees in fluent Hebrew, her passion-laden voice soaring to the tops of the temple, is Korean American Angela Buchdahl.

A decade ago, Buchdahl shook up the ranks of Jewish leadership in the U.S. by becoming the country’s first Asian American rabbi. She is “emblematic of the changing face of Judaism,” declared an article in Newsweek, which named the biracial 39-year-old to its 2011 list of 50 Most Influential Rabbis. Not only is she helping to redefine what it means to be Jewish, she is at the forefront of a movement among Reform Jews to inspire social change and push for greater involvement in community organizing.

Her leadership and vision seem to have connected with Jews around the world. Since her arrival five years ago to the prominent New York synagogue as cantor, or song leader, attendance on Friday nights has doubled. Thousands more worldwide recently listened in on a live web stream of services for the High Holy Days. Continue Reading »

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Video Roundup: Jeremy Lin Rap, Hoekstra Ad Parodied, Daniel Radcliffe Speaks Korean http://t.co/oZy9okXn

Believing the Unbelievable: Why Kim Jong Un Death Rumors Won't Die - The Atlantic http://t.co/u3ZxS2bK via @AddThis

Three S. Korean women kidnapped in Egypt's Sinai - Yahoo! News http://t.co/BbJgk4tJ via @YahooNews