I grew up in Michigan and Kansas, eating Korean food every day.  When I was very young, my family didn’t have a lot of money so eating out was a rare luxury.  My mother spent the vast majority of her time cooking for our family, making everything from scratch, back when grocery stores didn’t have huge prepared food sections.  At every meal, we would have rice, several different kinds of kimchi—which my mother had made herself—and other homemade banchan, as well as a soup or a fish, meat, or noodle dish to round things out.  As anyone who is familiar with Korean cuisine knows, the Korean dinner table is a jigsaw puzzle of small plates and bowls of differing sizes all competing for space with your own rice bowl.  There is no place mat to delineate your own territory, reserved for your own plate, your own water glass, and your own utensils.

If cuisines could have a political philosophy, I think Korean meals would be a form of egalitarianism.  All the banchan are shared equally, everyone’s chopsticks reaching for the same kimchi or bean sprouts or red pepper paste.  If there’s a stew, it’s placed in something like a stone crock in the middle of the table, and everyone spoons out some for herself.  People will sometimes share the same teacup or soju glass, always pouring for others, never for yourself.  There is no hierarchy among the meals either; what’s good for dinner is equally good for breakfast or lunch.  This goes beyond just having last night’s cold pizza for breakfast.  The summer after I graduated from college, I lived with my father’s youngest sister and her family in Seoul.  One of our favorite meals, whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner, was to have fresh, warm rice, lots of kimchi and banchan, and LOTS of red pepper paste.  My two cousins and I would dump our bowls of rice into my uncle’s mixing bowl.  He would add kimchi, banchan, sesame oil, and red pepper paste, and mix it all together.  Once everything was a uniform bright red, we would all dig in, shoving huge spoonfuls of bibimbap into our mouths from the same mixing bowl.

Two clichés summarize my attitudes to Korean food.  The first is “Familiarity breeds contempt.”  Growing up in Kansas usually means that the spiciest thing your neighbors eat is barbeque sauce and their smelliest food is anchovy pizza.  Our house smelled of not only the pungent spice of kimchi but also the acrid bitterness of tea made from real ginseng, the earthy tang of fermented soybeans, and the smoky sweetness of grilled dried squid.  Kansas, where the exact center of the continental United States is located, is also the center of meat-and potatoes country.  When my school friends came over to my house, they’d look warily at the jars of kimchi and the rice cooker sitting on our kitchen counter and politely avert their eyes, not wanting to embarrass me by staring.  And I’d avert my eyes too.  It wasn’t that I was embarrassed of the way that my house smelled; it’s just that, for me, exotic food was the fish fillet sandwich from McDonald’s.  Honestly, I was quite blown away by McDonald’s tartar sauce, its cool blandness, and the muted taste of the fish and the bun.  Once American friends got a taste for Korean food at our house, they often wondered why our family wasn’t hugely overweight if we ate such large, delicious meals every day.  To me, though, all that variety was repetitive and boring.

The second cliché that represents my attitude to Korean food is “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”  When I went off to college and had to live off of college dining food, I found myself going through withdrawal.  Like an addict suffering through detox, I would feverishly roam the campus dining halls looking for anything that would give me my spice fix.  Back in the pre-Sriracha era, I craved anything that was spicy and fermented, but really couldn’t find anything.  My father, a doctor, used to carry around a travel-size bottle of Tobasco Sauce in his pocket when he went to work so that he could spice up the Midwestern food at the hospital cafeteria whenever he wanted.  I used to think that was silly, but then I started doing that at college.  When it was time for me to go home during winter breaks or spring breaks, I would plan out all our family meals ahead of time with my mother, requesting kimchi jjigae for my first night home, ddukboki for my second night home, and on and on.  For lunch, I wanted kimbap constantly, always with the same egg, spinach, pickled radish, and cucumber combination inside that my mother had made while I was growing up.  I vowed, à la Scarlett O’Hara, as God is my witness, I’ll never be without kimchi again.

As can only happen in America, when I grew up, I fell in love with and married a man whose spice tolerance, on a scale of 0 to 10, is -1.  He grew up in Ohio, with food that was quite reminiscent of Kansas.  While we were dating, he bravely tried kimchi a couple times but then decided I had to accept his gastrointestinal tract for what it was.  The humble kimbap and a few of the other milder dishes were the perfect cultural bridge for us because they offer a lot of variety—full of different flavors, textures, and even colors—but is not in the least bit spicy.  We could share the kimbap and I could have all the spicy banchan and he could have the not spicy banchan.

A fascinating thing has been happening to kimbap lately.  Even though it is a simple, unpretentious dish, mainly invented for picnics and quick lunches, the lowly kimbap has been getting a makeover.  I’ve seen kimbap with tuna fish inside.  I’ve seen kimbap with a hot dog inside—the Korean version of pigs-in-a-blanket.  I’ve seen kimbap with kimchi inside.  The let’s-try-something-different attitude has swept Korean cuisine as with so many other national cuisines, coming up with some wonderful creations, like kimchi pizza, hamburgers with ramen noodle buns, bulgogi wraps, kimchi Bloody Marys, and even, finally, cheese bap (bibimbap with a dollop of melted cheese, in case the name wasn’t obvious enough).

I am old enough to remember that one of the most loaded words when talk turned to diversity and culture was “assimilation,” conjuring up images of the puce color that resulted when you smooshed all the different colors of Play Doh together, or the total erasure of individuality like with the cyborg conglomerate from the “Star Trek” series.  Recently, however, the word “assimilation” has had a renaissance, especially when trying to understand and mitigate the violence of extreme Muslims.  Many people have claimed that the way to un-alienate alienated Muslims is to have them assimilate into the Western societies in which they live, or, by implication, become more Westernized.  Sometimes, it seems to me that the discussion is framed more like a choice: us or them.

I’ve just been reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s memoir Infidel.  She writes so eloquently about the brutal cruelty of her childhood and the violence that was perpetrated on her and other women in the name of Islam.  She describes with grace and passion her journey as she begins to question some of the fundamental beliefs of Islam, some of the sayings in the Quran, and her ultimate realization that she can no longer abide by the tenets of Islam.  I admire her moral and intellectual courage to question as she does, to decide for herself what her religious beliefs will or won’t be.  I became a little anxious, however, when I read, “Dutch society was churning with discussion over how best to integrate Muslims, and Muslims in Holland also seemed largely aware now that they needed to choose between Western values and the old ways.”  This dichotomy, Western or Islam, seemed to me to be extreme itself.

I volunteer at a non-profit agency that works with refugees who have been resettled in Ohio.  These refugees come from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.  They have fled their home countries because of ethnic cleansing or religious persecution.  I work with the school-aged kids, tutoring them in an after-school program.  Many of these kids are Muslim, and their religion is a very important part of the heritage they are trying to keep alive in the face of threatened cultural erasure.  These kids and their extended families that have fled with them are engaged in a delicately balanced, tightly nuanced dance of figuring out who they are, how much to stay that way and what is up for revision.  In other words, they are immigrants, facing all the same heart-wrenching questions of identity that all immigrants face.  Yet, because they are also Muslims, they sometimes face an extra stigma.  And to ask them to assimilate to Western ideals, implying that we know better than they what they should be, seems to me to say that they have escaped religious persecution only to be rescued by religious persecution.

For this reason, I am deeply suspicious of the word “assimilation”.  That’s why I cleave to that term popularized by physics and reimagined by gastronomy, “fusion,” since it can be used for food, for music, and for cultural or ethnic identity as well.  My children, for example, are partly Korean from me.  Their father’s forebears came from various western European countries, from Norway to Italy, with a stop off in the British Isles.  But really, our children and so many of their generation are a whole new entity—full of surprising, unexpected combinations that you’d never consider until they were actually in front of you and then you see how much sense it really makes.  Yet my children cannot not be Korean, even if they wanted to.  To ask them to choose to be either Korean—because some white people are incredibly violent and murderous—or Caucasian—because some Koreans are incredibly violent and murderous—seems nonsensical.  In the same way, people can’t excise out the part of them that is Muslim or Catholic or Buddhist or Jewish, even if they’ve decided they don’t believe anymore.  Global data show that Muslims will outnumber all other religious groups by the next century.  How will the West feel about the word “assimilation” if it is asked of them?

Fusion cuisine succeeds and fails because people try, not because they deny.  How can we encourage questioning, evolution, give and take for all groups?  My husband may be violently opposed to spicy peppers but I will never deny my need for them and he would never deny my need for them.  Can we take the same approach to religious disagreements? And in the meantime, why not combine Persian food with Chinese rice wine, Chinese desserts with French wines, French hors d’oeurvres with American whiskey, and American meat and potatoes with Korean soju?