I celebrated every birthday under my mother’s roof with a bowl of miyeokguk, or seaweed soup. I ate it for breakfast and had the leftovers for dinner the rest of the week. When I was old enough to understand, my mother explained that it was a Korean tradition to eat this soup on one’s birthday. It was also a tradition for women to eat nothing but miyeokguk for several weeks after giving birth. That sounded great to me; I love miyeokguk.
Records of seaweed in Korean cuisine date back to the tenth century. Coastal people of the Goryeo dynasty fed new mothers miyeok (seaweed), having witnessed whales eating it after giving birth. The soup is eaten on birthdays to honor one’s mother and the pain she endured while giving birth.
Today, seaweed is widely known as a “superfood”: low in fat and calories and loaded with crucial nutrients like iron, iodine, and vitamins A, C, and E. Studies have shown it to be good for your heart and blood pressure.
Yet I love the rather mystical origin story of miyeokguk: a mother whale giving birth and then intuitively seeking seaweed in her given environment to nourish herself. The story could serve as a metaphor for Korean cuisine itself, whose traditions arose from a people’s harmonious dependence on their immediate environment for sustenance. But in the United States, where I was born and raised, our relationship to food today seems more distant from our surroundings than ever. We Americans consistently lead the world’s wealthy nations in obesity. Have we forgotten how to nourish ourselves? Where and when did we lose our way?
The co-owner and executive chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber, offers one theory on America’s problem: it doesn’t have a cuisine. “All cuisines evolved out of a negotiation that the peasants were making with the landscape,” Barber explained in an interview. “Now what could the landscape provide? And how could they make it nutritious and delicious in terms of a diet? That’s the genesis of every cuisine.” In other words, a cuisine is not just a style of cooking; it’s “a pattern of eating that supports what the landscape can provide.”
Food in America, however, evolved in the reverse manner. Thanks to the New World’s “freakish soil fertility”—as Barber puts it—the first European settlers were able to impose their fully formed notions of cuisine upon the land. In the northeastern colonies, they planted crops from England, retaining their food traditions and only occasionally replacing familiar ingredients with indigenous foods.
As the nation grew, regional food cultures—New England, soul, Cajun, Creole—did form, developed out of long-established cuisines brought over by early European colonists and African slaves and infused with the immediate environment’s indigenous offerings.
More recently, however, the industrialization of farming and agricultural technology has tamed the land, introducing monocultures of wheat, soy, and corn, whose surpluses are fed to livestock in industrial animal-feeding operations. With the abundance of a few ingredients, food is now more processed and homogenized and less nutritious than ever before. Synthetically produced flavors have replaced nature-made ones. The proliferation of fast food has narrowed our diets, too, by limiting our food choices.
Our modern food system, with all its technologies, has created an ever-growing rift between us and the rich, diverse supply of nutrients that nature provides. But we can repair our relationship to our food and health by creating and eating a cuisine that the seasons, soil, and climate can provide sustainably. Nature can produce all the nutrition that we need. Our bodies have complex systems to perceive and receive that nutrition. And we, too, possess the instinct to nourish ourselves from our surroundings, just as the whale mother knew to eat her seaweed.
Sandra Hong Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Daniel Okator lives on the streets of Athens. Fearful of Boko Haram, he left Nigeria in 2013 and crossed the Mediterranean on a rickety boat. Two of his fellow migrants drowned when the boat capsized.
In recent months, hundreds of migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean and slip into Europe. Even Greece, a country locked in a worsening financial crisis, is now drawing record numbers of desperate travelers from Africa and elsewhere. Once their journey is over, what happens next?
Daniel Okator lives on the streets of Athens. Fearful of Boko Haram, he left Nigeria in 2013 and crossed the Mediterranean on a rickety boat. Two of his fellow migrants drowned when the boat capsized.
Me? No, I have papers!” the man yells when I ask him his name.
He is young, tall, and stout, dressed in a worn black bomber jacket and a pair of baggy corduroys, his hands covered by the scruffy grey gloves he uses to root through garbage bags.
I have run into him in Plato’s Academy, the vicinity of the philosopher’s storied school, now an Athens district filled with working-class flats and African migrants pushing carts full of trash. Probing his pockets to find papers he does not eventually produce, the man tells me only his first name: Blaise. Forty-three, he is an immigrant from Côte d’Ivoire—an illegal immigrant, it seems, given how he protests too much. “Me, Christian! Samaris good! I love Greece! Samaris good!”
I was talking to Blaise right before Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras was booted out of office in January. The national elections brought to power a leftist government, which immediately began demanding a new deal for Greece in repaying its international loans. Since the global financial crisis struck in 2008, Greece has been beset with double-digit unemployment and shriveling industry, a downturn deepened by tough loan terms that have required painful and abrupt economic reforms. The drama has heightened in recent weeks: Greece is currently negotiating with the International Monetary Fund and European creditors over the payment arrangements for its loans, which the new government claims needs to be relaxed in order for Greece to avoid defaulting on those loans and abandoning the Euro for its old drachma currency—an increasingly likely scenario. If this were to happen, rampant inflation and a banking crisis would ensue, experts say.
Throughout the ongoing financial turmoil, however, migrants have continued to come to Greece. Indeed, the EU’s border management agency says that Europe-bound migrants are increasingly choosing to go through Turkey and Greece rather than embarking from various northern African nations, which nowadays are seen as riskier launching points. According to the United Nations, so far this year 48,000 refugees and migrants have entered Greece—almost half of those who have come to Europe—a running total that already far outstrips the national figure for the entire previous year. Over the past several months, record numbers have landed on the shores of the country’s Aegean islands in rubber dinghies and wooden boats: half of the six hundred migrants who now arrive in Greece every day come to the island of Lesvos alone.
While the bulk of Greece’s immigrants in the nineties and aughts came from the Balkans, today they increasingly hail from countries outside Europe. A fifth now come from Africa, and more than half from Asia—mainly from war zones like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. These latest waves of new arrivals have stoked xenophobic attitudes among native Greeks already anxious about the economy. Meanwhile, those migrants lucky to survive the often treacherous overseas journey to Greece find themselves struggling once here. African migrants like Blaise—whose continent is associated with poverty, war, and disease in the minds of many Greeks—encounter an economy and society that continually tells them it doesn’t much care for them.
Compared to some other countries in Europe—for example, Denmark, Switzerland, and Slovakia—Greece is less strict in accepting immigrants and asylum seekers from overseas. But clearly the supply of legal opportunities to move to Europe cannot match the demand, because every year an estimated 55,000 African migrants are smuggled in. Transnational criminal syndicates often get them here, shipping human beings across borders just like they do weapons and drugs.
Smuggling Africans is big business—estimated at $150 million a year—and poor immigrants seeking better economic opportunities or escaping violence or repression at home are willing to pay a great deal for a one-way ticket to Europe. For Blaise, the trip from his Ivorian hometown of Duékoué to Athens cost him 7,000 euros. In his case, the smugglers upheld their end of the bargain; other would-be immigrants wind up as sexual slaves or forced laborers, stealthily shunted through the same global networks by profit-hungry human traffickers.
The journey poses great risks, too. According to a report by the International Organization for Migration, over 22,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2000. Last year set a record for the number of deaths, which exceeded 3,000. This year’s tally will handily surpass it: in just the first four months of 2015, an estimated 1,770 migrants died. In April, at least five boats carrying migrants sank during the Mediterranean crossing, killing 1,200. The shocking death toll prompted a European Union summit later that month, where the continent’s leaders resolved to increase the number of ships patrolling the sea, ramp up law-enforcement efforts to quash human trafficking, and assist developing countries in tightening their borders.
As great as the risks are, the pressures pushing African migrants to cross over to Europe appear to be greater. While countries like China and India build a vibrant new middle class, almost half of Africans continue to live on less than a $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s threshold for extreme poverty. Although the continent possesses a wealth of oil, minerals, and other natural resources, corrupt government officials and unchecked multinational corporations have hoarded that wealth and left the populations of many African countries unemployed and desperate. And even as economic forecasts predict continued economic growth in Africa as a whole in the years ahead, water and food shortages, infectious diseases, climate change, and violent extremism pose existential threats to numerous communities.
Fearful of deportation, Blaise, an immigrant from Côte d’Ivoire, hides his face from a camera.
I ask Blaise about what brought him to Greece. Blaise can’t speak much Greek, so we chat in French, and eventually I persuade him to offer up some details about his personal background. Visibly nervous, he tells me he left behind his fourteen-year-old daughter in Côte d’Ivoire. He feels he had no choice. A disputed presidential election in his country sparked a civil war in 2010 pitting the soldiers of Alassane Ouattara, the election’s internationally recognized victor, against those of Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent president. During the conflict, military forces on both sides allegedly killed and raped hundreds of civilians. When we start talking about the violence that brought him to Greece, Blaise becomes increasingly agitated. “Ouattara killed my father and mother!” he finally blurts out, raising his gloved hands to the sky.
The war ended just a year later—with Gbagbo defeated, captured, and brought before the Hague’s International Criminal Court to stand trial for crimes against humanity—but Blaise remains in Greece, hustling to survive on the streets. Like other African migrants, he sells the tin and plastic he picks out of trash cans to scrapyards. He eats at Catholic soup kitchens during the day, sleeping in parks or vacant buildings at night. And he watches, ever vigilantly, for the police. When I pull out a camera to snap his picture, Blaise lowers his cap and poses from behind—no face, please. He can’t take any chances.
Many African migrants are smuggled into Greece from Turkey, crossing the Mediterranean by boat. The thousands of tiny islands sprinkled throughout the waters near the Greek mainland make it easy for smugglers to evade authorities. Their efforts to sneak migrants in by boat greatly intensified in the 1990s. Nowadays, Turkish organized crime runs a brisk business shuttling people across the sea.
Daniel Okator, a twenty-five-year-old Nigerian migrant, made this crossing to Greece in 2013. Tall and gregarious, he chats to me after parking a cart chock full of scrap on the curb. He earns two or three euros a day, he says, scavenging steel from whatever discarded items he can find—TV sets, tables, sewing needles, metal roofing. His line of work has become big business in Greece: a recent documentary reports that half of the country’s annual steel production comes from these sorts of salvaged materials. Scrapyard operators pay scavengers like Daniel for their metal harvest and then drive it to the foundries to be melted down again.
At a nearby chapel, about twenty Catholic nuns—themselves transplants from Switzerland, Rwanda, India, and elsewhere—give the migrants clothes and serve them breakfast and lunch. Daniel typically spends half his day there, helping the nuns with their chores. The nuns have chosen him and several other migrants to serve as guards at the chapel, providing security whenever an occasional fist or knife fight breaks out among the migrants. At midday, however, the chapel closes, and Daniel is left to roam central Athens by himself, pushing his cart down the street in search of scrap metal—or, in the winter, riding buses to keep warm.
Daniel used to be a music student in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, but then Boko Haram struck the city. (Over the last several years, the jihadist group has killed and kidnapped thousands in its drive to establish an Islamic state within Nigeria, whose population is split almost evenly between Muslims and Christians.) In 2011, a suicide bomber drove a car rigged with explosives into a United Nations building in Abuja, killing twenty-three people. Boko Haram claimed responsibility. That brazen attack convinced Daniel—a Muslim himself—to leave the country.
Daniel got in touch with a member of a smuggling network. His connection was a “recruiter,” what law enforcement calls a network’s low-level operatives, who answer to its manager, or “coordinator.” Recruiters usually come from the same country as the people they seek to recruit. They talk up life in Europe to potential migrants, sign them up, and then collect the fees. In Daniel’s case, the price of a one-way covert trip to Greece was 1,800 euros.
The recruiter obtained a visa for Daniel from the local Turkish consulate. (In some African countries, it is easy to find corrupt public officials—border police, immigration officials, consulate employees—who will issue visas in exchange for bribes.) Daniel’s ultimate destination was Greece, but first he flew to Istanbul. He continued by land to Izmir, where he and twenty other migrants boarded a rust-covered boat. The voyage was short, only an hour, but the sea was rough and the boat engines rattled. Near the shores of the Greek island of Chios, the boat tipped over. Most of the passengers managed to swim to the shore. Two did not. “Swim!” the smuggler yelled at the group. No one went back to help the man and woman left behind.
Years later, Daniel still thinks about them. He will picture them in his mind, two human beings drowning slowly in the roiling waters, groping desperately for someone to latch onto.
For the most part, Greece has not welcomed the African masses that have come to its shores, yearning to breathe free. More than half of Africans migrants questioned in a 2013 survey conducted by Harokopio University said that there is widespread racism in Greek society. (Only a third of them, however, said that there is widespread racism within their own neighborhoods.) Stereotypes about immigrants abound here, as in many countries, and African migrants from poor or war-torn lands endure much of the more invidious prejudices. Recent fears about the spread of Ebola—crudely identified with the continent—have not helped matters. But the lousy economy seems to be a key driver of the nativist rage directed at this group. Anti-immigrant parties like Golden Dawn have been doing better at the polls ever since the economic crisis struck.
Landry Mbida is a thirty-six-year-old migrant from Cameroon. He has been in Greece a little over a year. Even though Landry, like most Cameroonians, is a Christian, he feels intensely isolated from Greek society. “When I get on the bus, people turn the other way round,” he says. “Some hold their noses, others change seats.”
Landry is a big man with dreadlocked hair, a broad nose, and a slightly protruding jaw—someone whose fierce facial features might easily intimidate—and it’s not always clear what role his race plays in the way he’s treated from day to day. That said, it is abundantly clear to him that he’s not welcome, for whatever reason, wherever he goes. When he left his home country, he first went to Istanbul. He quickly learned that Turkey was not the country for him. “They wouldn’t give me a job once they learned I am Christian,” he says. So Landry took a boat to Greece. When he reached the shores of the island of Chios, he was arrested and put in a detention center. After a month, he was transferred to another camp in Komotini, where he spent three more months.
Greece’s detention centers are notorious. Migrants are routinely crammed into shipping containers, living among rats and receiving scant medical care while they wait—sometimes for more than a year—to be deported. “I fell sick every day there,” Landry says. “They only gave us bread, lots of bread.” The lack of nourishment gave Landry chronic stomach cramps, and he had to be rushed to an outside hospital three times. “I asked for medicine, but they wouldn’t give it to me.”
Syriza, the left-wing Greek political party that won power in the January election, has started emptying the detention centers. It has promised to speed up the process for deciding asylum requests. And it has called for a new framework for granting legal status to migrants. Even if Syriza is successful in reforming the nation’s immigration policy, however, global problems of poverty and war will continue to lead desperate African migrants to Greece’s shores. And there is little in the way of a plan to deal with those who have been evacuated from the government’s detention centers. (Asked where the released migrants go, Tasia Christodoulopoulou, Syriza’s minister of immigration policy, said nonchalantly that they head to other European countries.)
For his part, Landry applied for asylum six months ago. He dreams of the day he will be able to share a house again with the wife and two young kids he left behind in Cameroon. Right now, he lives in a two-room shack inhabited by ten men. “No, six now,” he says, correcting himself. “Four left for Northern Europe on foot.” They are now in Serbia.
“But I really want a chance here!” Landry exclaims, suddenly perking up. “Not with this …” He points at the pile of scrap he has collected. “This isn’t a job.” At the end of the day he will cart the bounty to his Lebanese buyer, who pays just eighteen cents for a kilo of tin. “Eighteen cents! Eighteen cents!” he says, practically shouting.
The anger passes. Landry glances at his clothes: scruffy jeans and muddy athletic shoes, treasures from a dustbin and handouts from a charity.
“I want to be clean,” he says, smiling sheepishly.
Kevin came to Greece with the hope he could start a business and send money back to his wife and children in Nigeria. Instead, he barely survives on his own, living in a garage and rummaging through trash bins for metal to sell at scrapyards.
A homeless man has to have a code. On the streets, African migrants take turns rummaging through the same garbage cans. Blaise knows the rules. He steps away from his bin when he spots another migrant approaching with a cart. Recognizing the man, Blaise beckons him over.
Kevin—who refuses to give his full name for fear of deportation—is a Nigerian migrant in his early forties. Short and compact, he has a warm smile and, unlike Blaise, an apparent affinity for cameras. In the winter chill, he wears a flimsy beige jacket over a bright blue T-shirt, along with a pair of woolen gloves. They are gifts, he says, from “my Catholic sisters”—the nuns at the nearby chapel.
Three years ago, when he was living in Nigeria, Kevin came up with a business idea: buy clothes at a low price in Europe and resell them in his home country. The overseas venture meant that Kevin had to leave behind his wife and two children. Nevertheless, his father gave Kevin his blessing to go. The family needed money.
Soon after he made it to Europe, Kevin’s dream fell apart. He had hoped to get to Italy, where he has relatives, but his recruiter sent him to Greece. (Recruiters will often not tell migrants the route that they will take, or the country where they will land.) Today, Kevin lives in a dilapidated garage. He makes his living not by reselling clothes, but by scavenging for scrap. It’s a tough way to survive, and yet some native Greeks, he says, won’t even give him credit for his hard work.
“Why do Nigerians sell drugs?” a police officer once asked him.
“I don’t sell drugs,” Kevin replied, offended. “All fingers are not the same.”
It is usually the older Greeks who will insult migrants on the street; according to Kevin, the young tend to be more “relaxed.” (That said, Kevin’s fellow scavenger Daniel claims to have received five stitches to his leg after a gang of young men—interestingly, second-generation Albanian immigrants—harassed him and then set their dog on him.)
Kevin holds up a picture of one of the nuns at the nearby chapel, one of the few sources of assistance the migrants trust.
From Kevin’s point of view, the only people who actually go out of their way to help migrants like him are the nuns. When there isn’t enough scrap to fill their carts, he and his fellow scavengers turn to the nuns for food, water, clothes, and even cell-phone charging (on the street, finding an electrical outlet they can use is a special challenge). “If it weren’t for the Catholic sisters, we would have died,” says Kevin, a Catholic. Government-run food banks will offer them food, and hospitals will treat them for emergencies, but the migrants I spoke to felt closest to the nuns, who knew them personally.
The mother superior, who will only identify herself as “Sister Maria,” is a native of Switzerland. She is devoted to her work in the community, to the point that she becomes anxious when migrants (Algerian drug addicts, in one case) go without socks. People in Europe cannot understand what these people have been through, she says. She cringes when she describes the overcrowded conditions at the Amygdaleza detention center, which she and the other nuns visit every week. (Under the new government’s orders, Amygdaleza was recently evacuated.) The nuns bring the migrants not only food and sweets but also markers and notebooks. Some of them are so depressed by their confinement, she says, that they need a chance to work with their hands and find a creative outlet for their stress.
Of all his countrymen and women who have left their homeland in recent years, Kevin is one of the lucky ones. Hundreds have died at sea, but he survived. Many have traded poverty in Africa for poverty elsewhere, but he made it to Europe, a land of peace and prosperity. Nonetheless, things have not gone the way Kevin once hoped they would. These days, his bitterness threatens to overwhelm his good nature.
“Stay where you are,” he says when asked to give a word of advice to his fellow Africans on the other end of the ocean. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. You’re going to suffer.”
Postscript: A few months later, I learned that Kevin had been arrested and taken to the Petrou Ralli detention center. The nuns have visited him several times. As of April, he was still there.
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Best of In The Fray 2015. We had come to the Syrian border to help refugees from Kobani, a Kurdish city besieged by the Islamic State. In this corner of the country's unending civil war, another kind of conflict was being waged—for a city, a people, and a young democratic movement.
A camp in Suruç for refugees fleeing Kobani, a nearby Kurdish city under assault from the Islamic State.
We stand on an empty highway in South Turkey, twenty kilometers from the Syrian border. The dusty road leads to the city of Suruç. My husband and I are hitchhiking into a war zone, or at least the fringes of one. My heart thumps in my chest.
A yellow truck appears like a mirage in the distance. I stick out my thumb and the driver stops abruptly, kicking up a cloud of grey dust.
“Suruç?” he asks.
“Evet—yes,” I agree.
“Yardım?—to help?”
“Evet.”
The driver hands me his business card. He is none other than Suruç’s mayor, driving aid and supplies into the city himself. This is the first of many clues: everyone here is involved in the war effort.
It’s December 26, Boxing Day. Activists and volunteers have descended on Suruç to support Kurdish forces across the border in their fight against the Islamic State, a Sunni extremist group also known as ISIS. In the parts of Syria and Iraq that it now controls, ISIS has persecuted and displaced minorities. The victims of its highly publicized atrocities—rapes, forced marriages, beheadings, crucifixions—have included the Yezidis, a Kurdish religious group.
Through the truck window, a compound with rows of identical green-grey semicircle tents comes into view. “Çadır kent—tent city,” the Mayor tells me, pointing. We pass a second camp shortly afterward. A sign announces our arrival: “Suruç: Population 101,000.”
The population is now more than twice what it says on the sign. An estimated 150,000 people—mostly Kurds—have fled to Suruç from Kobani, another Kurdish city that is inside Syria. ISIS has taken over part of Kobani, trapping those civilians who remain between its militants and the closed Turkish border.
The Mayor asks where we want to go. I have scribbled instructions from a friend of a friend I met in Diyarbakir. It says we should report to Suruç’s city hall.
In the aftermath of World War I, the French and British divvied up a large swath of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, splitting up the Kurdish people across the region’s redrawn national boundaries. Since then, the Kurds have found themselves unwelcome throughout the Middle East, the targets of massacres, chemical attacks, and state-perpetrated “disappearances,” along with political repression and discrimination.
The ongoing rebellion against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, however, has loosened the hold that Damascus had on the country’s Kurdish minority. In 2012, the Kurdish inhabitants of northern Syria took advantage of Assad’s retreating forces, declaring their region autonomous and naming it Rojava—Kurdish for “western.” (Rojava is the western part of what many Kurds consider to be Kurdistan, a culturally defined region that also includes large parts of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, and northern Iraq.)
The war has also brought the Kurds unprecedented news coverage. After the Islamic State began its siege of Kobani, the media called attention to not only the waves of Kurdish refugees but also the strength of Kurdish fighters—especially the women fighters—and the progressive stances that Kurdish political parties have taken on issues such as feminism and minority rights.
A few of the more astute commentators also mentioned the innovative system of governance—democratic self-management—being tested in Rojava. Equal rights are enshrined in the Rojava system. There are three official languages. Every canton is administered by three leaders—in theory, a Kurd, an Arab, and a Christian—with at least one of the three a woman. In practice, of course, most of these ideas have not filtered all the way down. Many Kurds still fight for a country of their own. But many others just want to coexist peacefully with other Syrians.
It strikes me how very normal Suruç looks, despite the war being only ten kilometers away. Shops, restaurants, and teahouses are open. People bustle about the streets. Men wearing red and white kaffiyeh on their heads loiter around the main square, chatting, smoking, and haggling with the merchants.
We saunter into the city hall shouldering our huge backpacks, tired and smelly after days spent hitchhiking around the frozen edges of Anatolia. The few men who stroll past us in the narrow corridors greet us formally despite our disheveled appearance.
I explain to one of them that we have come to help. Some of our friends have been here before, and they advised us to come to the city hall when we arrived, I say.
A man with a characteristically Turkish mustache points to some benches in the hallway. We sit. Soon tea arrives. Another man ushers us into a small office, where I repeat the same halting explanation to yet another man behind a desk. He nods politely, thanks us for coming, and directs us to the city’s cultural center, now a base of operations for the constant stream of activists and volunteers coming through the town. There, a girl who speaks good English points us to the distribution center down the road. She says they need help there now.
The distribution center is a converted wedding salon, filled with stacks of aid packages from around the globe. Groups of volunteers scoop the contents of big sacks into small clear bags, which are then flung onto growing mountains of red lentils, rice, sugar, and chickpeas.
At Suruç’s distribution center, volunteers prepare packages of food for the Kobani refugees.
We are warmly greeted by people who speak to us in Turkish, English, and German. Someone hands me a melting plastic cup of tea. “Parti mi?” a girl asks in Turkish. She wants to know if I’m here with a “party,” meaning any of the Kurdish political parties. “No,” I tell her, “just with my husband. You?”
“Evet, parti,” she nods, smiling. She demonstrates how one of us should hold the bags open while the other shovels lentils from the big sack into the smaller one—“not too much, like this, see?”—and then ties it and tosses it onto the stack.
This food, I am told, will go to refugees from Kobane who are living in residential buildings around the city.
The activity here is both methodical and chaotic. Nothing seems to run on a timetable, and people work when they feel like it. Nobody is visibly keeping track of who’s doing what or when. But somehow, everything just gets done.
Every ten minutes, someone asks if I want tea. One man in particular seems very concerned that I drink enough of it. He brings a steaming thermos and small stack of plastic cups around regularly.
Around 7 p.m. a bell rings. We follow the people wandering outside to a van that has just arrived. Two men in the back scoop lentil stew from an enormous metal pot onto flimsy plastic plates.
That night we drive out to Mahser, the last village before the Syrian border—and the raging war beyond it.
A sign says “Çaykara.” The village’s local name is Mahser, but officially it is Çaykara—like all Kurdish settlements in Turkey, it had its name changed during the previous century as part of the government-enforced Turkification process.
We are now a mere kilometer from Syria. In the village, I spot a friend. She is perched on a block of concrete where someone has painted the word “Kobani” in the Kurdish colors of green, red, and yellow. My friend, like myself, is something of a nomad. She has a long-held interest in Kurdistan and the wider Middle East, and has been writing a blog about the region for some years under the pseudonym “Iris.”
Iris is watching the Kobani skyline, just visible in the distance. “We always meet in interesting places,” I tell her, just as a fiery mushroom cloud sprouts from the horizon, accompanied by a mighty boom. My heart drops through the floor.
When they hear us speaking English, a crowd of men gather and begin firing questions. Iris speaks Turkish more or less fluently and has a working knowledge of Kurdish. I let her do the talking.
We’re invited to drink tea by some of the men. We follow them through the village and enter a small room where about fifteen men sit on the floor. They each stand to greet us, and motion for us to sit.
“Parti mi?” Iris asks.
All the men around us nod slowly. Iris points to a sign on the wall advertising the HDP—the Peoples’ Democratic Party, a Kurdish left-wing political party in Turkey. “HDP?”
The man closest to us looks at her. “Actually, we are all PKK,” he says.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is a notorious Kurdish political organization. From 1984 to 1999, the party fought an armed struggle to establish an independent Kurdistan within Turkish territory. Since the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, and his subsequent shift in political views, the organization has moved away from its Marxist-Leninist roots and recast itself as a nonhierarchical social movement working on behalf of autonomy and rights for all minorities. Despite its more moderate approach in recent years, the PKK remains on the Turkish, EU, and US terrorist lists.
Iris decides this is a fantastic time to quiz the men about Ocalan, who is still the party’s leader—and still inside a Turkish island prison somewhere in the Sea of Marmara. In recent years Ocalan has come out in favor of environmental protection, gender equality, and rights for LGBT and ethnic minorities. So what explains the discrepancy, Iris asks, between those progressive views and what she’s seeing on the ground—nonrecyclable plastic dishes, women doing most of the housework, entrenched patriarchal views?
The man nearest us nods slowly, politely considering this criticism. “You know,” he says, “these things take time.”
It’s 10 a.m. sharp. Men, women, and children gather by the line of red tape that separates the village from a field—the only thing between them and the Kalashnikov fire echoing in the distance.
A semicircle forms and quickly expands. This is the daily demonstration, a show of solidarity with the PKK and YPG (Syrian Kurdish militia) forces fighting right across the border. “Freedom to Kurdistan! Freedom to Kobani!” the crowd shouts in unison. “We are PKK, PKK is us! We are YPG, YPG is us!”
In Mahser, a crowd gathers near Turkey’s border with Syria, rallying in support of Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State a short distance away.
The crowd goes on to recite a string of other well-rehearsed slogans that I can neither understand nor follow. After they’ve run out of chants, they extend their well-wishes to the fighters and, at the very end, to Apo—their affectionate nickname for Ocalan.
I hear gunfire ricochet through the streets beyond the field. What can it be like over there? I’ve heard that around 7,000 civilians chose to stay in the city when the Islamic State began its assault.
I meet a woman just before leaving Mahser. She’s from Kobani and doesn’t speak Turkish, but somehow we’re able to communicate through basic words and gestures. The woman tells me she has three sons fighting in Kobani. Her eyes remain fixed on the hazy outline of the city, as if she hopes to catch sight of them.
While I watched the war from across the field, Italian journalist Francesca Borri was trying to escape it.
Several days earlier, Francesca had been smuggled over the Syrian border into Kobani. She had left after coming under mortar fire from the Islamic State. “The point is not getting in, as usual,” Francesca tells me when we meet up in Suruç. “The point is getting out.” She says she was refused reentry into Turkey by Turkish border guards, who told her, “No, no, you went to Kobani. You have Kurdish friends, stay with them!”
I ask her about the civilians inside the city she just left. So far, they’re doing alright, she says: the Kurdish fighters look after them, and they are staying in their own homes on one side of the city. Around half are children. “I mean, of course, it’s a war,” Francesca says. “Kobani isn’t Paris. But I would say that compared to other wars, it’s a good situation for civilians.”
Francesca describes three levels of fighting inside Kobani—Kalashnikov fire exchanged on the frontline, heavy artillery shells lobbed into the city by the Peshmerga (Kurdish Iraqi forces who have entered Syria to assist in the fight against the Islamic State), and aerial bombardment by the US-led coalition. “The battle is mortar fire and rocket fire from one extreme to the other of the city, so you just stay in the middle—and if you’re lucky, nothing is dropped on your head.”
Francesca is a seasoned war correspondent, having spent much of the last two and a half years reporting on Syria. To her, the war raging in Kobani is “a war within a war”—a war for the future Kurdistan wedged into the sprawling and endless conflict in Syria.
In Mahser, the sound of gunfire was constant. Back in Suruç, I feel safe and far from the fighting. Inside the cultural center, people sit in small groups and converse in a mélange of languages: Kurmanji, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, English. Many are Kurds from other parts of Turkey. Some are members of the diaspora who grew up in European countries such as Germany or Switzerland.
Then there is Darlene. Originally from Ireland, Darlene O’Carroll is currently studying in Copenhagen. She has come to Suruç for her Christmas holiday.
Darlene tells me she decided to make the trip after watching news footage of the devastation in Kobani. “When I should have been working, I was looking at all the images. There were a few that just kind of pulled at my heartstrings.”
On Darlene’s first day in the city, a Kurdish man from Iran showed her around. “This was my first shock,” she says. “He’s Mormon. His family were executed by the Iranian government. His uncle sent him to India to study IT, and when he came back, he worked for a cable company, and he had his own store….” Darlene pauses for a moment. “His plan is to finish up here … and then go to Kobani to fight. I asked him, ‘How long are you staying?’ And he just said, ‘Until I die.’ It was like … ‘Until I finish this cup of tea …’” Darlene shakes her head. “It probably won’t hit me fully until I go back to Denmark.”
Since she arrived, Darlene has been helping with wiring electricity in the camps. She also works with a Kurdish theater group from Istanbul that gives refugee children here a creative outlet to express themselves through improvisation and roleplaying.
Today, Darlene has been invited to join a daf workshop in a camp at the edge of the city. (A daf is a large frame drum, popular throughout the Middle East.) I tag along.
A group of children, mostly young teenage and preteen girls, fill one of the tents. The walls are decorated with pictures of Kurdish musicians, drawings of animals, and the word “Kobani” drawn neatly in pastel colors.
One of the youngest girls can say a few words of English. When we answer her questions, the other children’s eyes grow wide. They prod her to ask us more.
Initially camera shy, the children slowly get used to our presence. One of the two boys is a master daf player and models for my camera. Before long, some of the younger girls are posing too and taking pictures of each other.
A daf drum workshop at a refugee camp in Suruç.
Later, I will read that there are 1.7 million Syrian refugees and asylum-seekers in Turkey—half of them children.
Later that night, Iris and I are walking the dark and dusty streets of Suruç when we hear the murmurs of a thumping rhythm carried on the wind. Iris knows exactly what it is—”A wedding!”
We follow the beat, which soon becomes a cacophony of drums and whoops. We turn a corner and find a hundred people dancing in a winding circle across the street. Young boys dash between legs. A man fires a shotgun repeatedly into the air, while another holds fireworks in his bare hands and shoots them into the sky. A small circle within the larger circle of dancers carries a man aloft on a chair. It is the groom. His shirt is in disarray, his face smeared with paint. He wears an exhausted grin—Kurdish weddings last three days and nights.
We stand and watch the spectacle until we are noticed. A man who speaks English brings two chairs and sits down to chat with us. A woman serves us tea. Some of the young girls shyly sneak glances at the two foreigners.
I tell Darlene about our adventure later that night. She smiles. “They love seeing people from other countries here—I can really feel that. In the camps, they invite you in for dinner, and they say to you in the shops, ‘You know, if you don’t have a bed to sleep in tonight, you can stay here with us.’ There’s always somebody handing you food, there’s always someone handing you a cup of tea. At nighttime, if you’re cold, they’re always pulling blankets up over you. They really try and look after you.”
It’s our final night in Suruç. My husband and I lie in our tent in a small garden behind the cultural center. It’s the weekend, and dozens of new volunteers have arrived. Both of the center’s visitor rooms and the two heated tents behind us are full, and a group of young Kurdish men are sleeping in the main room.
The ground shakes every so often throughout the night, as the US-led coalition forces drop bombs on Islamic State targets in Kobani. The blasts are not so loud from here, and they would be indistinguishable from the growl of truck motors on the road outside were it not for the quaking earth.
A rumor, reportedly from one of the YPG fighters, says Kobani will be freed in the next two or three days. The prediction turns out to be wrong—about the date, that is. A few weeks later, a man I met in the distribution center sends me pictures of the liberation of Kobani. They show a Kurdish red, green, and yellow flag being raised over a hill overlooking the city, replacing the black Islamic State flag that previously flew there.
Today, the residents of Kobani are slowly beginning to return to their homes. Much of the city remains uninhabitable after months of fighting and destruction. The long rebuilding process is now underway.
Meanwhile, Kurdish forces continue to fight in neighboring areas. Many other communities across Syria and Iraq are still occupied by ISIS.
But Kobani is free. When I saw the photos of its liberation, I imagined the celebrations in the cultural center, and the wild all-night dancing around fires in Mahser. I wish I could have stayed to see it, and I wonder what the future will bring.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Here is a short piece I wrote recently for a Zócalo Public Square discussion on the question “Is Rising Inequality Slowly Poisoning Our Democracy?” The discussion included experts from the Brennan Center for Justice, Cato Institute, Economic Policy Institute, and Georgetown University Center on Poverty and Inequality.
When Michael Young coined the term “meritocracy” half a century ago, he meant it to be an insult, not an ideal. In his view, a society where only the best and brightest can advance would soon become a nightmare. Young predicted that democracy would self-destruct as the talented took power and the inferior accepted their deserved place at the bottom.
Of course, the world we live in today is still no meritocracy. If most Americans are expected to go it alone, without the help of government or unions, elites continue to block competitors and manipulate the rules—as Wall Street did in spectacular fashion in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
Celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty argues that even when—or especially when—the market operates efficiently, inherited wealth becomes an ever more potent force within the economy, slowly strangling the opportunities for ordinary individuals to advance.
Nevertheless, the myth of meritocracy tells us that the rich are rich because they—like Young’s talented ruling class—are smarter and better. They worked their way up. They are the “makers” growing the economy. Anyone who can’t do it on his or her “own” is just a “taker,” suckling on the government’s teat.
I found hints of this viewpoint when I interviewed the long-term unemployed for my book. Some felt enormous shame and blamed themselves for their inability to land another job. Often, the sense of failure had a negative impact on their personal relationships and their belief that they had something at all to contribute to society.
Preserving our democracy will require forceful government regulation and strong unions. Such approaches have their own flaws, but there is no other way to restore balance to an economy and society increasingly under the sway of an elite class.
Beyond that, we need to tackle head-on the culture of judgment, materialism, and ruthless advancement used to justify extreme inequality—and temper it with a measure of grace.
“Seasons Greetings, from Ferguson,” November 29, 2014. Mike Tigas, via Flickr
Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute says we need to remember the big picture of race relations in Baltimore:
The police behavior is something that should be remedied. It’s a terrible criminal operation on the part of the police departments. But it doesn’t start with police departments. When you have a low-income population concentrated in the area, little hope, unemployment rates in places like inner city of Baltimore … two and three times the rate for whites, well, you get behavior in those kind of communities that reinforces police hostility. It becomes a cycle of misbehavior and police aggression, and it’s attributable to the concentration of disadvantaged families in very crowded inner-city communities.
When an unarmed black man dies after a confrontation with police, there is a natural tendency to focus on racist police officers or racist police departments. We saw this after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and we saw it, too, after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Walter Scott in North Charleston. Without a doubt, there are plenty of bigoted bad apples to be found, as seen in the shockingly racist emails unearthed in the Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson’s police department. But we also need to consider that big picture, or what sociologists call social structure: institutions like the economy and political system and the roles that people take up within them. After all, the modern-day factors pushing down poor African American communities—and pulling them into hostile encounters with police—involve more than just racial discrimination (or at least discrimination of the plain-vanilla variety).
Here is a handy chart that illustrates what I mean, using the examples of Ferguson and North Charleston—two cities with a few striking similarities.
As Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson points out, systematic racial discrimination was what originally put African Americans in their place—stuck in segregated neighborhoods and blocked from educational and job opportunities (disclosure: Wilson was my advisor in graduate school). That past has lingered on today. In the latter half of the last century, the sorts of racially motivated housing policies that Rothstein discusses worsened the plight of the people left behind in cities like Baltimore.
On the other hand, Ferguson gives us an example of policies that were not explicitly racial, but that nonetheless helped trap many African Americans in poor, crime-ridden, aggressively policed neighborhoods. Beginning in the 1950s, decisions to situate new highway extensions and other infrastructure projects within low-income neighborhoods resulted in the razing of once-vibrant communities. Again, African Americans were hit the hardest. In the St. Louis metro area, the expansion of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport in the eighties all but destroyed the black community of Kinloch, located near Ferguson. “Many of the residents displaced by this wasteful construction project,” Jeff Smith writes, “have ended up in Ferguson—specifically, in Canfield Green, the apartment complex on whose grounds Michael Brown tragically died.”
More generally, policies about where to build airports and route highways may have racial motivations behind them. (“We might ask,” Wilson writes, “whether such freeways would have also been constructed through wealthier white neighborhoods.”) But larger structural changes that have had little or nothing to do with race have also harmed African Americans disproportionately. Beginning in the eighties, cities across the country were devastated by downsizing. Corporations shipped jobs overseas in droves, and the federal government sharply cut direct aid to cities and trimmed industries that once sustained many cities—in North Charleston’s case, closing Charleston Naval Base, once the largest employer in the state. As Wilson notes, African Americans have not been the only ones affected by these seismic economic shifts. But they have been particularly vulnerable because of their low levels of skill and education relative to whites, a gap that has made it more difficult to find good jobs to replace the ones their communities lost. Few jobs and high poverty, in turn, lead to more crime, which leads to more potentially violent confrontations with police.
Beyond their need to clamp down on crime, however, the police have other, more unseemly incentives nowadays to get in the faces of the citizens they are sworn to protect. A lackluster local economy has pushed many cities to become creative about generating revenue. In Ferguson, the city’s various streams of cash have dwindled in recent years—except for fines and forfeitures. Traffic tickets and the like, it turns out, have made up for Ferguson’s budget shortfalls in recent years. As the Department of Justice report made clear, however, the push by city officials to “ramp up” ticket writing has worsened racial tensions: “Many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”
The kinds of structural changes that have hammered cities like North Charleston and Ferguson and Baltimore—and cities across the country, for that matter—have made the situation on the streets all the more toxic and volatile. Body cameras and DOJ investigations are a good first start, but the problem, as usual, goes much deeper.
A note inscribed in the margin of an ancient book connected me, across an ocean and a century, to a fateful decision.
Peter M. Nardi
The Church of S. Giovanni Battista in Tiedoli.
The musty aroma of mushrooms was everywhere. It was the Fiera del Fungo, a festival of porcini mushrooms held every year in the northern mountain town of Borgo Val di Taro, Italy, and I was here sightseeing with two colleagues of mine. What had lured us was the mushrooms, creatively incorporated into dishes of all kinds—from soup to gelato. But what that smell evoked in me was memories from an ocean away, of my childhood in the Bronx and the times when my grandparents, immigrants from Italy, would excitedly open a package of funghi from the “old country.”
That was my real reason for visiting Italy. I wanted to see the part of the country where my grandparents used to live. The college where I teach happens to have a study-abroad program in the nearby city of Parma, and in 2005, I flew out there and met up with two of the program’s directors. One morning, we drove out to the festival in Borgo Val di Taro, taking a few hours to indulge in the town’s more famous dishes. Then we decided to head into Tiedoli.
My grandfather Pietro had grown up there. A small village nestled on the edge of the Apennines mountains, Tiedoli was not even on our Google map. We drove up a winding road until we came across a tiny, barely legible sign that reassured us we were headed in the right direction. As we drove into Tiedoli, I could make out the double steeples of a church—by far the largest building among the village’s smattering of houses and farms.
I wondered if the church had any records of my grandfather. We walked over to the building, an imposing stone structure topped by a statue of John the Baptist. A priest emerged from the front doors just as we arrived. I asked him if there were documents dating back to the 1880s. He laughed. Their records went back to the 1700s, he said.
The priest quickly found a book with baptismal notices from 1886, the year my grandfather was born. He slowly turned the pages, folio-sized sheets filled with handwritten paragraphs of names, dates, and family information. All of a sudden my grandfather’s name jumped out. There it was, in a baptismal announcement in Latin.
The priest confessed he could not read Latin—“O tempora! O mores!” I wanted to exclaim—but I assured him that between his Italian and my four years of high school Latin, we could probably stumble through the paragraph.
Although we have different middle names, my grandfather, my father, and I share the first name Peter, or Pietro. The name, which means “rock,” goes back to the founding of the Roman church. My grandfather would sometimes remind me that June 29 was our name day—the feast of St. Peter.
Standing in front of a house in Tiedoli and a sign with the village’s name.
I have always admired my grandfather. He left Tiedoli to join the carabinieri at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when members of the national police force looked not unlike the figure stamped on the old Galliano liqueur bottle. He was stationed in Rome, and there he learned about the cosmopolitan world outside the farm country where he had grown up.
When he was in his mid-twenties, Pietro left Italy to seek a new life in America. Many decades later, he told me stories from those early years. After passing through Ellis Island, he looked for work in New York. Signs in store windows told Italians not to bother applying for jobs. But my grandfather would not be discouraged. His first gig was sweeping up in a burlesque house, where the pay amounted to whatever coins had been tossed at the dancing girls and left on the floor. Eventually, he worked his way up to becoming the chief room-service waiter at the prestigious Hotel St. Regis, where he served Winston Churchill, Orson Welles, and the silent film star Nita Naldi.
Pietro met my grandmother Celestina in New York’s ethnic neighborhood for northern Italians—what is now the Murray Hill section of Manhattan. As it turned out, she had grown up in a small hill town just twenty miles from Tiedoli. They were married for fifty-two years before she died. He lived to the age of eighty-nine, remaining to the end a smart, self-educated man who loved to read the newspapers.
When my grandfather died in 1975, I was in my late twenties. I realized then how fortunate I’d been to be able to ask him some of the questions I wished I had brought up with my other grandparents before they died.
My grandfather’s baptismal notice.
According to my grandfather’s August 10 entry in the church’s baptismal records, he had been born the day before, on August 9. The names of his parents—my great-grandparents—were also listed. The entry noted that his father was an orphan with no parents identified. (Back then, these words could have meant that the parents had died, or that the child had been abandoned for being illegitimate.) My grandfather had once told me that it would be difficult to trace our family tree because of his father’s unknown lineage. He often joked about being a possible descendant of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was born about fifty miles away, near Busseto, around the same time as my great-grandfather was.
As we were about to close the folio, I noticed a note in the margin next to my grandfather’s entry. The words were written in a different handwriting and ink, and in Italian, not Latin. Went to America 1913, it read.
That’s when the operatic tears started to flow. In those four words lay a major decision in my grandfather’s life. The path he had chosen had taken me, almost a century later, down the road to this village, this church, and this baptismal notice. It had taken my family to another country and another way of life.
In that overwhelming moment, a half-sentence note in the margin connected me to something much larger than myself.
Peter Nardi is a professor emeritus of sociology at Pitzer College. He previously wrote a column for Pacific Standard on critical thinking and has written numerous academic publications on the role of friendship in men’s lives.Site
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | March-April 2015: Free Speech
The massacre of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo provoked outrage around the globe. Street demonstrators and world leaders alike denounced religious extremism and defended the principle of free speech. While they decried the violent acts, however, some prominent voices reacted to the attack by speaking out against the opposite evil—anti-religious extremism—which they saw in Charlie Hebdo‘s deliberately offensive portrayals of organized religion. “One cannot insult other people’s faith,” Pope Francis said in an interview—drawing a fierce rebuttal from critics, who likened his view to, among other things, a wife-beater’s defense.
In The Fray magazine is looking for essays, reportage, and photo essays that have something to say about free speech—its importance and its limits, its necessity and its consequences. When does cultural sensitivity become excessive political correctness and censorship? To what extent does free speech make a democracy more vibrant, and to what extent does it make a culture more hateful?
Please review our submissions guidelines at inthefray.org/submit and send a one-paragraph pitch to the appropriate section editor NO LATER THAN APRIL 30, 2015. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.
We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.
We look forward to hearing from you. Please distribute this call widely across your social networks, or let us know how we can spread the word.
When I was growing up in suburban Maryland, every fall would bring a familiar sound. Thud, thud, thud!—chestnuts falling in their hardy armor. My mom and I would gather them up and roast them. I loved peeling away the smooth veneer and eating the sweet, still-warm fruit nestled inside, like nature’s Ferrero Rocher.
I was not, however, so fond of the way in which we procured our chestnuts.
My mom hunted for them on suburban lawns. This was during the nineties—before foraging was a way of life, before it entered the lexicon of popular (now mainstream) “foodie” movements, before bearded chefs in Brooklyn were cooking local and seasonal. My mom and I wandered into people’s yards, into patches of wooded private land, and picked up chestnuts by the plastic shopping bagful.
“Mom, this is probably illegal,” I would tell her, hoping my protests would get me out of the chore. What if someone I knew from school saw us? Would they think we were poor, that we couldn’t afford food from a store?
But my mom would press on gleefully, giddy at the thought of collecting her favorite seasonal treats.
Chestnuts are well protected by their shells. When she came across one of them, my mom would pry it open on the spot. She would place the ball and big toe of her left foot on one side of the split husk, then carefully do the same with her right foot—as though she were in a balancing act at the circus. The husk would give in to her weight and split open to yield its shiny brown nut. If she were in a hurry, the whole spiky thing would just be thrown into the bag—to be shucked later by my child labor.
I recently discovered that my stepmother is also an avid forager. She pulls her car over whenever she spots a good patch of wild dandelion greens or perilla leaves. She has brought home the thinnest twigs of a mulberry tree to dry roast in the oven for a nutty, golden-amber tea. Mulberry is good for diabetics, she has told me. Some years she picks up pounds and pounds of acorns that have fallen in yards or parks to make acorn starch. In Korean, she has described to me the painstaking, multiday process. She starts by soaking and rinsing the acorns multiple times to leach out their bitter and toxic tannins. Then she removes their little stemmed caps and thoroughly dries the nuts until no moisture remains. Finally, she grinds them up into a fine brown powder.
Why would my stepmother spend days to make acorn starch when she could so easily buy it at the local Korean market? Foraging, she tells me, lets her step out of her car and leave behind the grocery store and her factory job. She can breathe the crisp fall air and focus on the task at hand. She knows the exact source of her ingredients, having made good use of the bounty that the land right outside her doorstep has to offer. Seeing the process from beginning to end also gives her a sense of satisfaction, she says—much in the way that a chef takes pride in her quality control.
I suspect that foraging is also a way for both my mom and stepmother to make a foreign land a familiar one. It thrills them to recognize an ingredient—a wild plant, nut, or mushroom—and transform it into a dish that can transport them back to their childhood and their place of birth. With this ritual, they create a sense of home.
Sandra Hong Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
In search of Lunchables. Eddie Huang (Hudson Yang) and his mom Jessica (Constance Wu) journey to the supermarket.
“Ugh, what is that? Gross!”
About seven minutes into the pilot episode of ABC’s new comedy series Fresh Off the Boat, eleven-year-old Eddie, the new kid in school, is invited to sit at the cool kids’ table during lunchtime. He’s conscious of making friends, especially the right kind who will ease his entrance into the local social structure. But Eddie quickly blows his first impression when he pulls out a Tupperware container of homemade noodles.
“It’s Chinese food. My mom makes it,” Eddie explains.
“Get it out of here!” the table’s alpha boy yells. “Oh my god, Ying Ming is eating worms! Dude, that smells nasty!”
Fresh Off the Boat adapts the memoir of Eddie Huang, chef and owner of Baohaus, a Taiwanese restaurant in New York. Though his recollections were turned into “a cornstarch sitcom,” as Huang claims in an angry Vulture op-ed about his own show, Fresh still highlights an experience that hasn’t been visited on network television in decades: life as an Asian American. Huang spoke with comedian Margaret Cho—whose All-American Girl twenty years ago was the last sitcom to depict an Asian American family—about his doubts whether Hollywood would do justice to his story. “I believe in you,” she told him, “and to be honest, we need this.”
Indeed we do. But I hadn’t realized how much “we” needed this cathartic mainstream exposure until I started watching the show. The scene brought back surprisingly vivid memories of elementary school, its lunchroom hierarchy, and my mom’s cooking. I had accepted these memories as amusing anecdotes, dinner-party fodder. But Huang’s show elevated to comedy an important experience all-too-familiar to many Asian American (and other) kids: the search for a seat in the cafeteria.
My own search began as a fifth-grader in suburban Maryland. As in many school cafeterias, the cool kids sat together. They always seemed to bring brown paper bags with ham or turkey sandwiches on thin, crustless Wonder Bread. They drank out of juice boxes. They snacked on Doritos, Fritos, or treats like Gushers or Fruit by the Foot. The most envied kids had boxes of Lunchables and Mondos (artificially flavored drinks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup), the ultimate beverage of choice.
I found my place lower down the totem pole with a more marginalized and diverse crowd. My best friend Julia, a Jewish girl, had in her packed lunch healthy items like fruit, Yoplait yogurt, pita, hummus, and Ziploc bags of carrot or celery sticks. Rachel usually either brought a lunch in a recycled paper bag or bought from the cafeteria a tray of chocolate milk, soggy canned green beans, tater tots, and chicken nuggets. Another Jewish girl, Aviva, ate latkes and other foods unrecognizable to me. And Shobi’s mom made her incredible pocket sandwiches stuffed with a deliciously aromatic mixture of soft spiced potatoes, onions, and peas. Like a grilled cheese sandwich, these were gently fried with a nice brown crust. I would later learn they were samosas.
One day, my mom packed a doshirak (Korean for a compartmentalized lunchbox) of rice, bulgogi (marinated beef), and kimchi (spicy fermented cabbage) in an insulated cooler with a mottled neon green-and-orange pattern. The aroma of the kimchi assaulted the noses of my dining companions as soon as I unzipped my lunchbox.
“Ugh, what is that?!”
“It’s Korean food,” I said apologetically.
Mortified, I confronted my mother as soon as I arrived home after school.
“Why did you pack kimchi in my lunch, Mom?” I cried.
“Because I was out of other banchan,” she replied nonchalantly, as though the lack of other Korean side dishes served with every meal was sufficient explanation for her egregious error.
“Why can’t you pack me a normal lunch like the other kids’?”
I was angry with my mother’s lack of understanding. All I wanted was one of those brown paper bags or a box of Lunchables. Not a cooler box of pungent foreign food.
And I wanted better clothes. As in the opening scene of Fresh, my mother also rejected my sartorial choices. Her final judgment: too expensive. I went to school every day in no-brand T-shirts and ill-fitting Mom Jeans, while the most popular girls—Kristen, Ashleigh, and Julie —had closets filled with Limited Too, the preferred retailer of ten-year-old girls. What I would have given to sit with the cool kids in a new Limited Too outfit and laugh while flicking my shiny ponytail.
In retrospect, I wanted to be popular as much as I wanted to belong.
The day after his humiliation in the cafeteria, Eddie dumps his homemade lunch in the trash. When his mother finds out she is upset and baffled. “But you love my food!”
Eddie attempts to articulate the gravity of the situation in a monologue far more effective than my childhood protests. “I need white people lunch!” he tells his mom. “That gets me a seat at the table. And then, you get to change the rules. Represent. Like Nas says . . . I got big plans. First, get a seat at the table. Second, meet Shaq. Third, change the game. Possibly with the help of Shaq.”
In its inaugural episode, Fresh hit the nail on the end: Eddie does love his mother’s food. That is a part of who he is, his heritage. But he is also mindful of where he is going and who he is expected to be. Despite the difference in details, I related to Eddie’s balancing act and his constant negotiation between how much of his culture to bring to his evolving identity and how much to leave behind.
When I was ten, I didn’t realize that this experience would add to the richness of two of the many ways I identify myself—Asian and American. I didn’t think about how lucky I was to experience the cultural complexity of American society, laid out on the table every lunchtime in our virtual ethnic-food fair, where I tasted my first samosa thanks to Shobi’s mom. And I didn’t know how fortunate I was to have eaten fresh homemade meals without artificial, processed ingredients.
My mom’s love came packed every day, in a brightly colored cooler.
Sandra Hong Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
If you like original stories like these—stories that further our understanding of other people and encourage empathy and compassion—please make a tax-deductible donation to our nonprofit magazine before the end of the year.
From all of us at In The Fray, best wishes for the new year.
Each year I go through the motions of Christmas, rarely ever feeling fully present. I spend the days leading up to the holiday cooking for my family and baking for my neighbors. I send out Christmas cards. I purchase whatever gifts I can afford. I spend the nights sipping bourbon, wrapping presents, and wondering why the holiday doesn’t fill me with the kind of joy and lightheartedness we see in movies. Then the day arrives and I remember why: my family can be intolerable.
I realize you’re not supposed to say that. To be clear, I don’t mean “intolerable” in a cute, bickering, loud kind of way. I mean that since my mom died, I’m the lone woman in a family populated by troubled white and brown men—white and brown men who seem to only be capable of bonding over one thing: antiblack racism.
There are two kinds of antiblackness prevalent in my family: the openly hateful and hostile racism that is easily recognizable, and something else that is more challenging to articulate, though painfully common. I have family members who ravenously consume black culture, who worship black athletes like Kobe Bryant, who solely listen to hip hop, but who also say the n-word, who believe “thugs” like Mike Brown got what they had coming to them, and who call President Obama every name in the book, giving a ten-minute spiel about how he hates Mexicans—evidenced, apparently, by his immigration policies. “Typical,” they say. “Blacks hate Mexicans.”
Conveniently, the people in my family can see racism when they believe they are the ones experiencing prejudice. Yes, this means that white family members believe in reverse racism, and that brown family members believe that because we have a black president, antiblackness is somehow a thing of the past and black Americans now have the upper hand. They express these sentiments while throwing around the n-word and dismissing the fact black men and women are being gunned down by police officers as if it’s open season. They don’t see the irony. This level of ignorance is alarming and dangerous, and it has always been this way in my family.
When I was a little girl, my father taught me to proudly proclaim, “Soy Mexicana.” It did not matter that I was biracial, my mother blonde-haired and blue-eyed. It did not matter that I was Americanized and spoke broken Spanish and had few connections to my father’s family, the bulk of whom stayed behind in Mexico when my father made the perilous journey to the States. I was Mexicana and it was something to celebrate and embrace. It was who I was, through and through.
As a child, antiblack racism thrived on both the brown and white sides of my family, but so strong was it on my father’s side that I began to think that hating black people was a prerequisite for being Mexican. I was led to believe that part of being brown was being antiblack.
For whatever reason—and I attribute it to nothing more than semi-decent critical thinking skills and luck (because hatred is very effectively taught)—I didn’t buy into this messaging the way other family members did. Not only did I know it was ridiculous to hate an entire group of people based on the color of their skin, but it didn’t make any sense to me. It seemed that the brown men in my family shared many similarities with the black men they hated and almost always failed to understand that black people were a part of our community, both literally in terms of location and figuratively in the form of Afro Latinos.
In the predominantly Latino city of Los Angeles where I was born and raised, Latino men are gunned down by police officers alongside black men in astonishing numbers. Latinos are also funneled into prisons and sentenced harshly for minor offenses. Low-income Latinos and black Angelenos are primarily impacted by gentrification, making affordable housing for their families and adequate schooling for their children a near pipe dream. My father and my brothers have all been pulled over by cops who had their guns drawn, guilty of nothing but driving while brown. Any sudden movement and there would have been the very real possibility that we’d be spending Christmas with an empty seat at the table and a hole in our hearts.
Still, I can’t convince my family that they should care about black lives. Writers like Aura Bogado have delved into how antiblackness is deeply instilled in Latino families. Black and brown solidarity is often discussed in progressive and radical circles, but personally, I’ve never seen it.
To be clear: this isn’t about the experiences of Latinos. This isn’t an “all lives matter” conversation. It is not my goal to decenter black people. I’ve simply felt the most reasonable approach to getting through to the brown men in my family is to make them understand how closely their struggles are tied to the struggles of the black community. I try, and I fail.
This isn’t specific to my family. Earlier this year, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 18 percent of Latinos surveyed were following the case of Mike Brown. Few Latinos seem to be following the aftermath. The movement born in Ferguson has been so powerful that it has spiraled out into cities across the country, where marches, protests, and die-ins demand that we remember the names of black men and children recently murdered by police, including Eric Garner and, more recently, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. As I write this, details are emerging about the December 23 murder of eighteen-year-old Antonio Martin, shot and killed by a Berkeley, Missouri, police officer just a few miles outside of Ferguson.
Needless to say, the murders of black cisgender and transgender women rarely get any attention. Black women have been leading the charge in these marches. It has also been black women who have kept the names of murdered black women alive.
The broader message behind this growing movement is that black lives matter. The message is deceptively simple, but for us white and nonblack people of color, asserting that black lives matter comes with the requirement that we continuously center black people. A working knowledge of white supremacy and how it benefits us—and why it must be dismantled—doesn’t hurt either.
It is a tall task that won’t be achieved overnight, but there are small, impactful ways you can push back against antiblack racism every day. Today, on Christmas, I am thinking of the families of recently slain black men and women, those who are facing that empty chair at the table and that hole in their heart. I can think of nothing more disrespectful than allowing the people at my dinner table to speak poorly of those who have lost their lives as a direct result of white supremacy and police brutality—and I won’t allow it.
When I was younger, standing up against antiblack racism in my family was read as being mouthy and disrespectful, resulting in punishment. I am older now and it is easier and safer for me to push back, so I will. In many of our families, every day is filled with antiblack racism, but it seems the holidays amplify it, whether because of alcohol or the “safe” setting family gatherings enable, allowing many to feel free to share the racist commentary they usually keep to themselves.
If you are a white or nonblack person of color who believes that black lives matter, you must behave as if they do when there are no black people present. It is harder than sending out a series of tweets or writing an article the bulk of your family won’t read. (I speak from personal experience.) Pushing back against your family’s antiblack racism is uncomfortable. Pushing back can be contentious. Pushing back can sometimes feel useless, but it is necessary.
I was once told by an artist I interviewed that the most important and transformative work we do is in our own family. I am committed to doing that work. Today, as many of us spend time with our families, I hope we can show up for black people. When our fathers or our mothers or our cousins or siblings assert that Mike Brown was a “thug” or that “police are just doing their job,” I hope we tell them black lives matter, and that they always have, and always will.
I had no friend quite like Ed. We also hated each other.
He was with me all the time. He knew all my secrets. When I was in high school, all I wanted was to be perfect. At 5:30 a.m. I would run six miles. Then, after school, I would study until 10 p.m., breaking only for dinner. I always had to get an A. He understood why I would wrap my hips and abdomen in duct tape to keep it all in, so that my tight pants would fit perfectly and no amount of fat could bubble over the top.
When we had meals together, he would reassure me that it was okay to eat only fruits and vegetables. He would agree when I would say, “I’m fat, I need to lose weight.” He saw what I saw in the mirror.
He didn’t mind that I didn’t make much of an effort to get to know him. He understood that I was wrapped up in my own troubles.
I came home from college for winter break, and my parents said I had lost too much weight. They wanted to know what was happening. I lied. I told them I was fine, just busy. Ed and I laughed about it later.
When I returned to school after a Christmas spent eating only cranberries, frozen fruit, and broccoli, I went to a dietician. She told me that I was sick and needed to gain weight. I said I would try. Ed and I walked home from the appointment. “Great job,” he told me. We made fun of her stupid meal plan and her naïveté in believing me. I repeated the lie to my parents, too.
But after several months, my body broke down. My doctor told me that I couldn’t physically exert myself in any way, lest I have a heart attack. The news didn’t faze Ed. He smiled and said, “Let’s go for a run. You’re looking a little heavy.”
“Ed,” I said, “I really don’t think I can run.”
I agreed to go into outpatient treatment. Ever the loyal friend, Ed came with me. “These other girls are sicker than you,” he said. “You don’t belong here.” I looked around the room. Some had tubes in their noses. Others were drinking protein shakes because they had refused lunch. Ed and I laughed at these pitiful creatures. We thought up ways I could outsmart the staff. “Exercise when you get home at night,” he told me as we sat in the waiting room. “Don’t pay attention during the activities.”
I did what he said. I had entered treatment in June, but a month later, I still hadn’t gained any weight. I was told I would need to receive inpatient treatment and defer school for a semester.
That’s when I turned my back on Ed. I still liked how I looked at seventy-five pounds. But what would it matter if I were cooped up in a treatment facility, isolated from everyone I knew, living among ghosts? I started to realize that I might become like the people around me: pale, emotionless, wheelchair-bound—barely able to move a muscle.
I began seeing a therapist. She told me I needed to get Ed out of my life. “Tell him ‘No,’” she said. “Every time you sit down to a meal, every time you want to run six miles, don’t do what he’s telling you to do. It will get easier each time. Trust me.”
I did trust her. She became a new friend, and with time I learned to listen to her instead of Ed.
It took about a year to get myself over 100 pounds and regain the trust of my parents after promising them repeatedly that I would try to get better.
Ed never stopped hectoring me. On my wedding day, he told me my dress didn’t fit properly. When I thought about having kids, Ed warned that I would gain too much weight and turn ugly.
But by then I had found a true best friend, my husband. He told me he loved how I looked in my wedding dress. Later, we decided to have children.
In the seven years since I had my falling out with Ed, I’ve learned to tune out diet fads, step away from the mirror, and divert myself from self-destructive thinking.
Ed, my eating disorder, is still around. He never does go away for good, I’ve learned. Sometimes he joins me during meals or exercise. But it’s not the same as it was. He and I aren’t friends anymore.
We use cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the site. Cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser, as they are essential for the working of the site’s basic functionality. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this site. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent, and you have the option to opt out of using them.
Necessary cookies are essential for the basic functionality and security features of this website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that are not necessary for the website to function and are used to collect user personal data via analytics or other embedded content are termed non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to using these cookies.
