The Ghosts We Know & The Ones We Don’t

Coming to grips with my cultural background—and the place it holds in my life—was first a practice in learning how to be haunted. I am a mixed daughter of the AAPI diaspora, and therefore I am the daughter of many. These histories I belong to are so shrouded in shadows that I never knew where to start looking. I certainly never knew where to shine a light. My search for answers, a quest that began around middle school when I was turned into the perpetual Other (dubbed ‘not Asian enough’ yet also decidedly ‘too dark’ to be white by my white peers), led me to incomplete archives buried in silences that seemed older than time. There was no paper trail to lead me back to my inherited histories, mostly there were only photographs of faces I couldn’t name. Perhaps the greatest challenge was the language barrier, a struggle I’m sure many of my fellow mixed kids and diaspora members can relate to. How do you ask questions when you don’t have the words? How do you know whether or not the answer is right in front of you if you can’t understand what you’re reading? My Korean and Hawaiian heritages have been filled with ghosts for so long, I used to look upon the dead in trepidation. All I could see of my lineage was a funeral march. Purposefully confronting the hard truths of my histories was just as much about learning to live with these ghosts as it was about discovering who I was.

Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart, a heartbreaking, but joyous piece of writing on food, culture, grief, and the love shared between a mother and daughter, was pivotal in the solidification of my cultural identity. I’d been listening to Japanese Breakfast—Michelle Zauner’s band—for a couple years and I was intrigued by Zauner, a biracial Korean American from Oregon. I wanted to know more about her and her experience growing up in the same state as me—I wanted to see if I wasn’t quite as alone as I thought. I remember when I first read Zauner’s original piece of the same title published in The New Yorker. I was still in high school and hungry for an answer to the question; what are you? It was a question posed to me many times throughout my life, mostly by white classmates with no sense of boundaries, and one I struggled to answer. As a mixed kid, was I ever enough of anything to say this is who I am? 

The first time I read the essay version of “Crying in H Mart” my heart jumped to my throat as my eyes traced the words, “Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, ‘Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?’ …when I go to H Mart… I’m searching for their memory. I’m collecting evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn’t die when they did.” Was I even Korean if I had never met my grandmother? Was I even Korean if I couldn't even call her Halmeoni? I found a sense of catharsis in Zauner’s writing, one that I didn’t know I could feel. I spent much of my school years feeling ostracized from the Asian and Pacific Islander communities, worried that I would be too mixed to be accepted by my peers, knowing that I had already been deemed ‘too dark’ to be accepted as white by my schoolmates. I believed that if I could reconnect to this part of my cultural heritage, I could somehow repeal my family’s assimilation, and prove that I belonged in AAPI spaces. 

But there was a reckoning to be had—the reckoning that we cannot separate ourselves from our histories, and this includes our history of assimilation. Within the U.S., a shared experience of diaspora groups is assimilation; the pressure to conform to the ruling culture while aspects of our own cultures are appropriated to be digested in a way that is deemed palatable to the already accepted society. It is a loss of culture, language, and traditions that was never our choice. Evenso, this assimilation—this forced mode of survival—does not mean we relinquish the right to find our way back to our roots. 

All of high school, and the majority of college, saw me chasing after the ghost of my grandma Myo Jin, who passed away a year before the birth of my older sister. It was after reading the article “Crying in H Mart” that I began my journey of finding identity—finding my way back to my cultural roots—in food. Food can act as a physical representation of identity, especially for the children of the diaspora, and as I tried to make sense of my mixed identity, food became that physical tether. And as food began to tie me to my cultural identity, it also became a way to hold space with the dead.

There are ghosts in my kitchen at any given moment. Cooking Korean food was often the only time, for a long time, my dad would tell us memories of his mother. Our first time making bulgogi, he told us the story of how Grandma Myo Jin used to always weave the thinly sliced beef onto skewers to grill. He called it ‘stick meat’ and would have to be chased away from the marinating meat; “I would eat it raw, it tasted so good. Mom would shoo me away from the grill so I wouldn’t eat it all before she cooked it.” Everything he shared with my siblings and I were words I tried to sear into my memory, unwilling to lose a single piece of Grandma. Her ghost was resurrected over sizzling pans and boiling pots, even if just for a moment. When I cook on my own I often wonder, who is there with me as I stand over the stove? What long-forgotten ancestor is standing with me in the kitchen, their shadow tied to mine? It’s been theorized that taste can be inherited, and I wonder if that is another form of being haunted. Our ancestors still hungering from beyond the grave, still wanting to feed their children.

 I was lucky enough to know my grandfathers, but I am still pained by the fact I missed ever getting to meet Grandma Myo Jin by three years. I remember in 2014 when my family and I went to California for Grandpa Orville’s funeral where he was to be laid to rest beside his wife. Her tombstone read mother and wife, but not grandmother. It wasn’t food that began my journey towards finding my grandmother, it was the death of Grandpa Orville. When my dad told my siblings and I he was dead, I couldn’t shake the fact that I would never get to know my grandfather anymore than what I already knew of him. I would never speak to him again, I would never get to ask him all the questions I didn’t yet know to ask. At thirteen, I suddenly understood what it was to mourn something you never had, and what it was to wish for moments that will never come to pass. Memory and history are fickle gods to whose altars I tend daily, trying to resuscitate a remembrance I’m not sure I possess. Nevertheless, I will sit with the ghosts I know and the ghosts I don’t, honoring them the best I can.

Around February 2023, I created a small altar on the corner of my low-standing dresser, a dresser that previously belonged to my late Grandpa Orville. On the humble altar sits sea shells and dried flowers, cinnamon sticks and candles, and photographs of now-dead grandparents; my Grandpa Jack, Grandpa Orville, and Grandma Myo Jin. It is here that I sit most often with the dead, offering a cup of coffee to go with the lit candle. I don’t fear the dead anymore. On the contrary, I’ve found acceptance in the questions and nameless faces that continue to haunt me. I’ve learned to not rely so much on how the past would’ve defined me as a member of the AAPI diaspora, and have instead found footing in the present. I know who I am; I am a mixed daughter, loved by her family, with a passion for food and cooking, and a hunger for home. So many of our diaspora stories are told through our tragedies, and while it is important to acknowledge and reckon with the hardships and forms of oppression we have faced, it is just as important to acknowledge our joy. This AAPI Heritage Month, as I try to do every month, I choose to celebrate this place we carved out for ourselves here in this land that may not be our Motherland, but is home nonetheless, and the love and community we found here. In all likelihood, I will never be able to recover the names and stories of my ancestors. I’ll never truly know Korea or Hawai’i. But look at me, my siblings, my father. Look at the life that was built for us and the lives we’ve built for ourselves; ones where we are allowed to feel joy and sorrow in equal measures, cook feasts and feed our loved ones til they are full, to say I love you every day. My grandmother fell in love in a war-torn Korea, and she used her hands to build a life full of future for herself and for her son, and for grandkids she would never know. She planted her own garden from which we all grew. I’ll never know my grandmother, but I know han; an old inheritance pervading centuries of bloodlines, bleeding out into flower beds & home gardens & places that dance in wind—and outlast the razing of the land. In this wide and wild world, we may be haunted, but make no mistake, we are alive—vivid and thriving—and so, so loved.