She offered kimchi as a balm for their dislocations because she understood that the everyday acts of eating and cooking preserved a connection to the people and places that one left behind. By inserting herself into the scene of induction, my mother also gave presence to the Korean kinship ties that had been lost or erased. And thus, in another, more subtle way, she ruptured the discourse that the American family/nation was our savior, to whom we owed everything.
