The table is set. A pristine tablecloth is laid—only the faintest of creases as evidence of usual irrelevance, when it sits forgotten and folded in a tiny cabinet high up in the kitchen. Further decorating the table is a feast. A true cornucopia. Filled with meats, carbs, and vegetables. It’s a quintessential image of Thanksgiving, an instantly recognizable picture for anyone familiar with the holiday.
But zoom in closer, and the painting changes. Instead of a turkey, the centerpiece is a platter piled high with galbijjim, a meat dish traditionally prepared for holidays and celebrations. Rather than bowls of mashed potatoes and boats of gravy, there’s bindaetteok and donggeurang ttaeng, lovingly prepared by my grandmother hours earlier. Replacing the bread rolls and buns are mountains of purple rice, a favorite for its protein and fiber content. The talk is the same—a distant uncle espousing dangerously ignorant and inflammatory views about geopolitical conflicts—but it’s in Korean rather than English. This is my Thanksgiving, the only one I have ever known.
Coming home for Thanksgiving is always a strange experience, even though I have done it every year since entering college. The calculus of weighing ticket prices against time spent home—subtracting the more than 12 hours of travel time between Providence and Los Angeles—is often enough to convince me that it’s not worth it to come home for the five or so days Brown allocates for this holiday. Yet when September rolls around and I open the American Airlines website in all its dysfunctional, infuriating glory, I always end up entering my card information to purchase my round-trip flight to the hellhole that is LAX. Even if every calculation comes to the same conclusion—that coming home is a waste of time and money—they all fade away in the face of Thanksgiving, a holiday that brings people together, an unskippable, necessary time for family. So when midterm season gives way to mid-November, I pack my tiny carry-on and begin the journey back, a series of flights and layovers that never fail to bring some new, unexpected discomfort to fruition. Finally, after enduring my neighbors’ ceaseless yapping and the demon-child behind me who never stops crying, I’m home, ready to go back to my tiny childhood bedroom, with the bright teal walls that I stubbornly fought for in the fourth grade.
Being home is often a disturbing experience, as I am filled with the sense that I am a stranger amongst all these objects that are both comforting and alien. Even this house, where I have lived since I was seven years old, surprises me with its unfamiliarity. While I know everything—the fourth step that always creaks when you land on its left side, the wonky light switch in the guest bathroom, the delicately balanced pile of letters and magazines on the coffee table—it’s as if I have read it from a richly descriptive book rather than my own life. A creeping sense of my own awkwardness—as if I’m a clumsy toddler trying to navigate a dollhouse—takes over, making me feel like a stranger in my own home. Falling onto my bed, hearing the familiar creak as I hit the spot where the springs have given way to time, it’s almost as if I’m back in high school, almost as if I’m the same girl I was four years ago. But the photos on my wall—Polaroids of new friends and loved ones—bear witness to the inescapable truth: I am a different person than the sad, lonely high schooler who graduated in a drive-through ceremony, celebrating with friends over Zoom instead of together.
As Thanksgiving approaches, the demands of the kitchen grow more intense. Cooking for an entire family always requires extra hands in the kitchen, and as a college student with seemingly nothing to do, I am the prime candidate to assist with the feast. With the creeping onset of the holiday, the kitchen goes into overdrive, countlessly spitting out steam and gas as every stove, every counter, every appliance is crowded by endless pots and pans of food. As my dad and I grapple with turning the nebulous abstraction of a feast into a reality, the Thanksgiving mania consumes us. No longer is the refrigerator where we store milk and other perishables; it has transformed into a jail cell filled with taunts and expectations, only this time we are the prisoners. Dividing up the dishes, we work in tandem, seamlessly moving from one station to another as we prepare our holiday meal.
After hours of slaving away at the stovetop, the meal is complete; a veritable feast sits on our table, waiting to be devoured by hungry family members. Near the end of the night, when the entire group has finally gathered, we dive in. The traditional Korean dishes—usually painstakingly prepared for birthdays and other milestone celebrations—await on the dinner table. Next to the pièce de résistance, the braised short ribs, there are countless accompanying dishes, banchan. A holdover from traditional royal court cuisine from the Joseon dynasty, banchan are as essential as the main course, not just the side dishes that they are often translated as. Next to the kimchi and japchae, there sits a platter filled with delicious little mung bean pancakes and meatballs, brought over by my grandparents for our feast. Beyond the rice, just past the raw marinated crabs, there even sits a Caesar salad with all the fixings—an equally traditional part of our Thanksgiving meal.
After the meal is consumed and our bellies are full, we all plop down in front of the television, ready to watch football, the sport that has become just as quintessentially “Thanksgiving” as the turkey. Watching the plays progress, with the home team inching towards the other end of the field, I am struck by how traditional my day has been—and how equally untraditional. Like many other Americans, I spend most of that Thursday more or less glued to my television screen, whether it is watching the Macy’s parade or seeing the Detroit Lions lose once again in prime time. Later, my family and I prepare another massive dinner, one that leaves us sluggish and sleepy, still with leftovers to spare. At the end of the day, I too am sick of my family members and their crazy ideas, thankful for the fact that I only see them a few times a year. All these and more are hallmarks of the American Thanksgiving tradition. Yet the drinks warming our hands and stomachs are not the usual wine or cider but rather somaek, a popular drink made from mixing soju and beer. After the football game finally ends, we play Monopoly, but we also pull out yutnori, a traditional Korean board game. When my extended family leaves for the night, accompanying the exchange of hugs and kisses are envelopes stuffed with cash, a mainstay of many Asian American households.
Falling back onto my bed, despite all my earlier misgivings, I am so thankful to have come home once again. Moving beyond the initial awkwardness—which has become a tradition in and of itself—to come home to family, to take part in my own Korean American Thanksgiving is so special. What is a tradition but something we choose? I choose my dinner tables decorated by dishes from multiple cuisines, with chopsticks and traditional silverware sitting next to my plate. I embrace nights soundtracked by Konglish as people pick and choose from both languages. I celebrate my untraditional, traditional Thanksgiving. Who cares if I’ve never had turkey?
