Culinary Combat
Chef Beverly Kim reflects on her experiences as a contestant on Bravo’s Top Chef: Texas.
by Monica Y. Hong
Chef Beverly Kim used to make dinner for her parents on Valentine’s Day and cook French food for extra credit in junior high—any excuse to get her hands dirty in the kitchen. These days, inspiration comes from Asian flavors and the dedication to her craft shone through on Bravo’s Top Chef, where she competed against 29 other chefs, making it to the top 7.
After the 32-year-old Midwest native was eliminated, she proved herself a warrior when she bested a handful of other castoffs in the “Last Chance Kitchen” web series to get back on the show and ended up finishing in an impressive fourth place. The chef de cuisine at Chicago’s Aria restaurant took time out after a busy lunch rush to chat with KoreAm.
KoreAm Journal: Did you watch the show?
Beverly Kim: Oh, absolutely, I’ve watched all the episodes. It’s been sort of nerve-wracking to watch myself on TV. Even though I know what happens, it’s the first time I see how they’re going to edit it and how it’s going to be portrayed. So my whole body is shaking as it starts and my heart starts racing.
KJ: Do you think it was a fair representation?
BK: I think that it’s hard to capture the totality of anybody in a one-hour show. They portrayed me as a very nice person, a good person, a very open person, and a really hospitable person. Maybe a little bit on the meek side, but I think they tried to play it where my strengths really came out and that I was trying to prove myself through my work and my craft. I think that it was fair to who I am.
KJ: Did you feel like you were the underdog? Continue Reading »
Posted: March 22nd, 2012
Filed Under: Back Issues , BLOG , FEATURED ARTICLE , March 2012
Ray Choi is the best autoharpist in the world. Yes, autoharp.
story by Eugene Yi
photographs by Luke Inki Cho
My fifth-grade classroom, like so many across the country, had an autoharp. It accompanied the patriotic song sung every morning after the Pledge of Allegiance. A different child would play it every morning until everyone had rotated through, at which point we would rotate through again. The player was guided only by a sheet of paper with the lyrics of, say, “This Land is Your Land,” with the letters of chords written over the word where the change should happen. Chords were played by pushing the button that had the letter of the chord engraved on it. Push, strum, push, strum. No one practiced the autoharp. No one needed to. The instrument was, literally, child’s play. Is it any wonder the instrument was once sold door-to-door, for easy use in home parlors by non-musicians? Or that the rise of the phonograph led to its demise?
Perhaps because of its apparent ease of use, the autoharp seems to actively discourage virtuosity. Its 36 strings are arrayed tightly under the buttons for ease of pressing and strumming. Very skilled players can pluck melodies out, but few achieve this level of skill. As the instrument fell into disuse after a brief folk revival in the ’60s, autoharp playing and technique might have stayed the way it was, preserved in amber, until a Southern Californian music store owner named Ray Choi smashed notions of what an autoharp could do. His friend, Bill Meis, a writer and fellow autoharp enthusiast, said, “You can say without exaggeration that this is extremely unique.”
On a recent day in the Orange County suburb of Garden Grove, Calif., Choi demonstrated his innovative autoharp technique in the music shop he’s run since 1991, Grace Music and Violin. String instruments of all sorts hang from the walls, and by the register, Choi hawks a small box of his CDs recorded by his son, David Choi, the YouTube star. But the active areas of the store, the counters and the floors, are lined with autoharps; some for repairs, some being built (he is a luthier), some for sale. Choi is a genial man with a large, friendly face, but when he shakes hands, one is immediately struck by their size. He has small, strong hands, nimble and seemingly a good match for the autoharp’ s unforgiving proportions. Continue Reading »
Loaves of Love
Rev. George Rhee has opened four bakeries in North Korea, feeding thousands of school children daily.
by Kathleen Richards
For George Rhee, hunger is personal. When he was a child, his parents turned him and his twin brother over to the care of a South Korean orphanage, after the father’s land reclamation business failed and the parents couldn’t afford to feed all of their eight children. During their time at the orphanage, Rhee said he and his brother were treated cruelly and often went hungry.
That kind of suffering is something he believes no child should ever have to experience. It’s a conviction that helps explain why Rhee, a London-based pastor, decided to start a charity that feeds children in need. What perhaps makes his philanthropy all the more remarkable is that these children are in North Korea, where Rhee’s late father was born and where his father last saw his two sisters from whom he was separated during the Korean War. Rhee said he has always longed to fulfill his father’s lifetime wish to find his aunts. Short of that, he is trying to help feed those most vulnerable in North Korea, which has long suffered from food shortages—and a famine in the 1990s—since the fall of the Soviet Union, its once closest ally.
Since 2006, Rhee, through his British charity Love the North Korean Children, has opened four bakeries—in Songbong, Pyongyang, Hyangsan and, as of just last month, Sariwon—feeding an estimated 15,000 school children daily. The bakeries produce more than 10,000 pieces of bread each day, six days a week, Rhee said. Continue Reading »
Back to School
Photojournalist Mark Edward Harris visits a Korean school in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, one year after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in the country.
Story and photographs by Mark Edward Harris
There are a number of reasons students change schools, such as a family moving to a different neighborhood, but for the children at Woori Hakkyo (“Our School” in Korean) in Koriyama, in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan, it would be nuclear fallout that spurred their en-masse transfer.
This unlikely scenario became stunning reality soon after a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Pacific coast of Tohoku on March 11, 2011, killing more than 15,000 people, injuring some 6,000, and destroying tens of thousands of buildings.
The earthquake also triggered powerful tsunami waves, reaching upwards of 40 meters, that severely damaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on the coast, located less than 40 miles from the Koriyama Korean school. When the escaping nuclear material created a real and present danger, the students were relocated to a Korean school in neighboring Niigata Prefecture. Students lived in a dormitory while their parents remained in Koriyama, where many had their businesses, according to school principal Goo Yong Tae.
Last December, the school’s 16 students and eight teachers were allowed to return to their original campus, and last month, I had the opportunity to spend the day with them, along with Goo and Shim Ryong Han, the chairman of the school’s board of education. One year after Japan’s strongest earthquake, all appeared resolved to move forward and focus on their educational goals, though ominous reminders of the disaster were ever-present and contrasted starkly with the handmade “welcome back” signs from well-wishers: A government-mandated radiation monitor was installed at the school, and a huge mound of radioactive topsoil—that had been scraped off the school grounds—was piled up on the far side of the school’s soccer field and covered with a tarp. Goo said the government hadn’t decided what to do with the pile yet. Continue Reading »
The Fast and the Fictitious
by Jimmy Lee
Like the characters for which he writes, Greg Pak has multiple identities. But now the filmmaker and writer behind such Marvel Comics titles as The Incredible Hulk is using his powers to write a novel completely via Twitter. Pak took the time to chat with KoreAm about his social media and literary experiment, being played out at @gregsnovel.
So how does one write a Twitter novel? Continue Reading »
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Featured Event
One of the the biggest Asian cinema events to hit Southern California opens on May 10. The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, presented by Visual Communications, features the latest works by established and emerging filmmakers, along with seminars, panel discussions and symposiums on topics relevant to Asian Pacific cinema.
Opening Night features “Shanghai Calling,” directed by Daniel Hsia and starring Korean American Daniel Henney, who plays a Chinese American expat lawyer navigating his way through the mean streets of Shanghai (the picture above also indicates he is a raisin smuggler). But does he take off his shirt? Go watch the movie to find out! read more
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