Cultural Differences - Parents of Adult Children

This subject is something I'd not been able to experience much until I had been in a relationship with Harmony for a while. It concerns the topic of how parents treat their adult children. My sample size is very small, one set of Korean parents and one set of American parents, so this might not apply generally.

What I have noticed is that my parents, the Asian ones, tend to treat us/me like we/I are still children. This is not to say that they ground us when we don't do as they please, or make us eat our vegetables before leaving the table (well, the last one maybe still for me sometimes). Rather, when they don't agree with us on something, I get the feeling that they think it's because we are kids who don't know anything. Sort of the "you're young, you don't know what you're doing." True as that may be, we are still adults. I think I have noticed this attitude more from my mom rather than my dad. Not coincidentally, my dad was the first one to come around regarding our decision to get married, indicating to me that he is slightly more willing to view me as an adult.

What I have noticed from my in-laws is that they treat us much more like adults than my parents do. I do not ever recall getting the "you don't know what you're doing vibe," although I'm sure it has been thought before ;) It also helps that our general parenting philosophies are fairly similar.

I have no evidence or data to tell whether or not this is the general trend among Asian and American parents of adult children. But the general feeling I get with each set of parents is that mine still view me/us as children, and my in-laws view us relatively more as adults.

Unfortunately, I cannot recall any concrete examples, so this post remains displeasingly nebulous :p I'll blame it on being out of practice due to the severe blog drought.

Menu Plan Monday: 11/15/2010

What's that you hear? Crickets?

Yes, the blogging has been sparse lately, but the blog is not dead (yet). JunkMale is in the final month of his Masters degree program, he just transferred to a new job, and Pearl is still not sleeping.

In other words, this is a busy time in our lives. :-) Hopefully the blogging will pick back up in the new year.

In the meantime, here is a peek into what we're eating this week. This week is another Korean food week. Since Pearl loves kimchi so much (and she does - I can't remember if I've mentioned this on the blog before, but it's probably her favorite food), and since eating dairy makes for lots of tantrums and a hyper toddler, eating Korean food is just simpler for me these days. This week we will be eating some of our favorites.

Yesterday we ate out at a Chinese restaurant with a couple from church, and we brought home leftovers. Those will be our lunches until they run out.

I made soy sauce cooked potatoes (감자조림) yesterday - a triple batch! - to eat as a side dish for dinners, but it also makes a good lunch for Junkmale every now and then. A supplement to lunches for me and Pearl will hopefully be seaweed soup, if I'm able to motivate myself to make it.

Last night's dinner was kimchi and soft tofu stew with soybean paste (김치 된장 순두부찌개). I'm aiming for the taste of the soybean paste soft tofu stew at a local restaurant, but I'm not quite there yet. I think last night's recipe held promise, but it needs some more work.

Tonight we're going to have spicy mixed noodles (비빔면). It's one of our favorite dishes in our house because it's easy and delicious. Once that runs out (maybe Wednesday or Thursday), I'm going to make Japanese style curry. If I get around to it, I'm going to post my updated recipe for this when I make it.

By the time we run out of curry, I'm hoping it will be the weekend because I'm planning to make either kimchi pancakes or mung bean pancakes to help use up our very old kimchi. These are more labor-intensive than the other recipes, and it will help immensely to have another adult around to watch Pearl - or the food!

Spicy Mixed Noodles (Bibimmyeon)

This sweet and spicy noodle recipe has quickly become a favorite in our house. There are a few ingredients that you might have to get from an Asian grocery, but it's very much worth it. I recommend doubling the recipe!

Spicy Mixed Noodles
비빔면 ("Bee-beem-myeon")

Beef Marinade
1/4 lb beef (any cut that holds up well to stir frying)
4 to 6 white button mushrooms
1 Tbs light soy sauce (or 2 tsp soy sauce + 1 tsp water)
2 tsp finely chopped green onions
1 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp sesame oil
ground black pepper to taste

Chili Pepper Sauce
2 Tbs Korean hot pepper paste
3 Tbs soy sauce
2 Tbs brown sugar
1 Tbs sesame oil

Other Ingredients
1 small cucumber
2 hard-boiled eggs
10 oz somyeon (thin, dried wheat noodles - can substitute angel hair noodles)

1. Prepare the beef marinade, set aside for about 30 minutes.
2. Prepare the chili pepper sauce and set aside.
3. Julianne the cucumber and slice the eggs.
4. Cook the beef and mushroom mixture until the beef is fully cooked. Set aside to cool.
5. Boil the noodles, then drain and rinse.
6. Mix the noodles with the sauce. Add noodles to individual bowls and top with beef mixture, cucumber, and eggs.

Serves 4. Diners should mix the toppings with the noodles before enjoying. :-)

Dairy Free

When Pearl turned one year old, we did the standard practice of giving her whole milk (to supplement breast milk, not to replace it). For about a month, it seemed like everything was going well, but the more milk she drank, the more tantrums we seemed to have. We had days on end where it seemed like all she did was cry and whine and destroy things. Eventually we began to notice that she had developed two rashes on her body.

So we finally made the decision to eliminate dairy from my diet and from hers. The first week the rash went away, and by week 3 she was only having 2 or 3 mild tantrums a day instead of day-long tantrums. Then JunkMale, in a sleep-deprived-brain moment, forgot himself and gave Pearl some dairy. The rest of the day was a nightmare. Pearl was hyper, aggressive, whiny, and angry. And if that wasn't enough proof, the rashes came back the next day.

Eating dairy-free for the past month has been an interesting experience for our family. We have eaten a lot more Korean food, because the Korean diet is naturally dairy-free. JunkMale has noticed significantly improved digestive health - whether from eliminating dairy or eating kimchi every day, he is not sure - and Pearl has of course had an improved disposition and less itchy skin. But as for me, I notice no difference except that I long for my dairy.

We have learned that we love almond milk and I have learned some new yummy Korean recipes (spicy mixed noodles/비빔면, crab pancakes/해물전). Korean food is, of course, less expensive than American food, but dairy substitutes like margarine, soy and coconut yogurt, and "ice cream" are much more expensive. Sometimes we are able to stay under budget, but often we have to go over.

I have learned to make my own kimchi, and unlike during our Korean food month, I'm not finding myself craving American food. I am treating myself to expensive coconut ice cream and American junk food treats, so I don't really feel deprived like I did back then. And I also have two extra years' experience both in cooking and in learning to enjoy eating Korean foods.

In subsequent weeks I will be sharing some of the new recipes and also some strategies to eating dairy-free. If you have some strategies to share with me, please leave a comment, and also if you have questions about eating dairy-free let me know and I will try to find the answer.

Easy Kimchi

Kimchi is not easy to make. My first three attempts to make kimchi ended in various states of disaster. But them I found Maangchi's recipe for cut-up kimchi* (막김치). I made it before Pearl's first birthday, and my in-laws enjoyed it so much they took a jar home with them. I have since made the recipe again, and again it has turned out to be quite decent kimchi.

I don't think it's just a matter of getting better with practice, either. Maangchi provides what is severely lacking in Korean cooking: actual recipes (you know, with measurements - wow, concept! ;-), with easy-to-understand directions, and a video to go along with it. I watched the video through about three times, then followed the directions while making the recipe, referring back to the video when I had further questions.

Here are a few notes on how I made the kimchi:

Both times I've only bought one large head of cabbage from the store. I weighed it on our bathroom scale (3.5 lbs the first time, 5 lbs the second) and scaled the recipe accordingly.

For the hot pepper, I stuck with the mildest amount. There were two reasons for this: first, we want to introduce kimchi to Pearl (we think she'll like it) and, second, because the hot pepper we have is extraordinarily hot. JunkMale's mom brought it back from Korea and labeled it "Very Hot Pepper". JunkMale still thinks the kimchi came out very spicy.

And finally, I store the kimchi in pint-sized canning jars. You should always store kimchi in glass, unless you want your plastic to take on a very pungent odor. By storing them in smaller containers, our family is able to stretch out the life of the kimchi much longer than in the very large containers it's usually kept in. To keep the kimchi odor from permeating your fridge, put plastic wrap on top of the glass jar before you put the lid on. And keep some baking soda right next to it. ;-)

You, too, can make kimchi (or any other Korean food), thanks to Maangchi. This week I'm going to be using her recipe for soy sauce beef (장조림, a recipe I've had serious trouble with in the past) and chicken porridge (닭죽). And we'll be eating my homemade kimchi along with it.

*Before anyone asks, I left out the raw squid. Ewwww!

A Few Counterintuitive Korean Customs

Reaching at the table:
In American culture, it is considered rude to reach across the table, and instead you should ask someone to pass the (stuff). In Korean culture, I believe it is considered rude to ask an elder to pass you something, since you are inconveniencing him during a meal. I don't think this would apply to asking younger people or equals to pass you something, since it's okay to inconvenience them. If you have ever eaten at a Korean restaurant, you know that there will be LOTS of little side dishes all over the table, and so there will be lots of reaching with chopsticks.

Riding in the backseat:
In American culture, the guest of honor gets the privilege of riding in the front seat, as it is usually more comfortable to do so. In Korean culture, the guest of honor rides in the back, presumably because it feels more like you are being served, whereas presumably riding in the front makes it feel like you are helping with navigation. I say presumably because I had never even heard of this custom until 2005, when my uncle and I were spending a week at an industry convention and picked his Korean company's president from an airport.

Pallbearers:
In American culture (and probably other Western cultures, but I don't know for certain), pallbearers at a funeral are the ones who were closest to the deceased. Recently we converted my paternal grandfather's funeral video (Oct 1982) to a DVD. (He was a high status individual, so someone made a video out of his funeral ceremonies) I had never seen it until last week, and it was interesting to me that none of the family members served as pallbearers. In Korean culture, this task is delegated to third parties who are probably unrelated to the deceased, because it is considered inappropriate to burden the closest mourners with the task of carrying the casket.

Pearl is One!

One year ago today, our dear Pearl entered the world! It has been a sleep-deprived but quite a blessed year. Here are some pictures from today. I will type up a one year performance review sometime very soon.

Korean Grandparents

Some of you might be familiar with the stereotypical Asian parent who is obsessed with grades and school. Long-time readers might remember that in JunkMale's house growing up, B stood for Bad. In other words, the stereotype holds true with JM's family. And apparently it extends to grandchildren.

Pearl is 11 months old. Last night JunkMale's dad asked us if we'd started homeschooling yet.

How to answer that question? I told him that we do a lot of "educational" things in our day, like reading books, singing songs, teaching her the words for various objects, going to library story time (although there are no story times over the summer), etc.

And then he wanted to know when we would start "formal" schooling. I replied with the very diplomatic, "Whenever she is ready to learn to read." That's a pretty accurate picture of what I want to do. I lean very Charlotte Mason, but I know a lot of CM homeschoolers won't start any schooling (even teaching them to read) until the child is 6. That's more than I can stomach. I think that a child should be encouraged to learn anything they want to learn. I certainly don't intend to initiate any school before she is 5 (I have a very light Year 0/Kindergarten planned, which is only a tad bit more ambitious than Ambleside's), but if she wants to learn I'm not going to stifle that.

Plus, I have Korean in-laws. That might mean we need to have "school" time every day starting well before Kindergarten, in order to keep family peace. ;-) But you know what? That's ok with me. School might consist of identifying birds and wildflowers on our after dinner family walk (science! a Korean parent's favorite subject!), a daily read-aloud, and a Bible story. It might include singing folk songs and counting the number of peas in a pod we're shelling. It might include a trip to the Korean store where we can practice speaking Korean. If I have to call these things "school", I'm fine with that. It's not like I wouldn't be doing them otherwise!

Interracial Marriage

Want to marry a Korean man in Korea? The Korean government now requires you to be able to speak Korean.

New Year's Pictures

My parents and sister were in town for New Year's. We dressed up in traditional Korean clothes (hanbok) and took some pictures. Unfortunately any picture that has me in it was not taken on our SLR camera, since I didn't know if my parents would understand how to use it. But the one I included below is good enough.




The blinking timer on the camera was enough to hold Pearl's attention, but not Luna's. We tried to get Luna to look at the camera, but saying "Look!" to Luna usually indicates that someone is here and that she should run to either the front or back door and bark. In the last picture she is on alert looking toward the back door.

Baek-il Pictures

Baek-il

Today is the day. Pearl is 100 days old! Preparations have been going on since about 6 PM yesterday. My parents are on the other side of Atlanta at the big Asian grocery store, picking up rice cakes and other assorted food decorations.

...and baek-il (pronounced more like BEG-il, use the tip of your tongue to pronounce the "L" if you have any idea how to do that) is the smaller of the two traditional baby celebrations. My parents spent quite a while yesterday setting up the tables and the backdrop for pictures. No doubt they will go even crazier for her first birthday (dol). There will be traditional clothes (hanbok) involved for that one too.

Unfortunately, it is a dreary day outside. I had planned on taking pictures at a pretty gazebo in our neighborhood. Normally I like and welcome dreary days, but it seems like every time I want it to be sunny, the weather ends up being like this. I will have to do the best I can in our poorly lit house.

I will be taking lots of pictures today, of which you will get to see some. Those of you lucky enough to have access to our Picasa album will probably see a few more ;)

Dak Galbi (닭 갈비)

Dinner tonight was delicious: spicy without being painful, and a delicious combination of two of our favorite dishes. The dish was dak galbi/닭 갈비, which literally means "chicken ribs". I have no idea how the dish got this name, because there are no chicken ribs to be seen. It must be something like those nebulous "chicken fingers." Actually, it turns out the origin of the name comes from the fact that it was as popular as galbi, but cheap - commoner's galbi!

Dak Galbi
yields about 7 or 8 servings

3 chicken breasts
1 Tbs 고추가루 (Korean red pepper powder)
1/4 cup 고추장 (Korean red pepper paste)
1 tsp curry powder
2 Tbs minced garlic
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 Tbs sugar
1/4 cup rice wine
1 tsp fresh ginger
1 small head of cabbage, sliced
(preferably a baby napa cabbage, but American cabbages are fine, too)
2 onions, sliced
1 to 2 sweet potatoes, cubed
1 bunch of green onions, sliced
1 package of rice cakes à la ddeokbokki (optional, but oh-so-good)
2 green peppers, sliced
3/4 cups water
olive oil
sesame oil

1. Cube the chicken. Set aside.
2. Combine ingredients from red pepper powder to the fresh ginger. Mix well, then spoon some onto the chicken and allow the chicken to marinate while you prepare the other ingredients.
3. Heat oils in a large pot over med-high heat, then add everything. Cook until the chicken is cooked through, the rice cakes are soft, and the vegetables are at your preferred doneness. Serve over rice.

*Feel free to add more spice, up to double the amount shown here.
**The curry powder does add something to the dish, but I added too much (1 Tbs). I have adjusted this recipe accordingly.
***You can also add sesame leaves (깻잎), sliced thinly. JunkMale doesn't like these and they're hard to find outside of Asian markets. But they have a delightful bite to them, very herby.
****You might as well add other veggies in there, too. Carrots would be nice, I think.

Heirloom-to-be Maternity Dress?

Here's my mom wearing a maternity dress that her mom made for her.


Here's Harmony wearing it 26 years later at 37 weeks. (She says she was about to sneeze in this picture) Apparently it was MUCH more comfortable than the restrictive maternity jeans she was wearing.


Perhaps one day our little Pearl will be in a position to be wearing this dress.

A Modern Korean Wedding

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, my parents were recently in Korea for the wedding of one of my cousins. My dad took a bunch of video footage on their digital camera and transferred it to my computer while they were here. Then I made it into a video, and here it is - a modern Korean wedding.

One of the things I noticed is that even the Western style portion of the ceremony is very different from what we Westerners do. For one thing, in Korea there are dedicated wedding halls. You reserve a portion of time and you better get it done in that portion of time, because the wedding hall is tightly scheduled. I hear that someone else who got married at this same wedding hall that same day only had 30 minutes to get everything done! That's quite a feat, considering that over the course of the whole wedding, the couple-of-the-day wears three different outfits.

People are not seated in pews - they are seated at round tables and where they are seated during the ceremony is where they eat. If you watch the video, you will see this. It gives a very informal feel to the ceremony. There are speeches during the ceremony, no wedding party, and the groom was singing a song as the bride was being walked down the aisle. Of course, there are no laws as to how one can conduct ceremonies in the West, but if you did those sorts of things here, people would notice that something was very very different.

Learning Korean through Bible study

One of the ways my in-laws have encouraged me to learn Korean has been by giving me small items like calendars or pictures that have Bible verses written in Korean on them. I can always understand a handful of the words, but because the Bible is written in a more formal style of Korean I've always struggled to understand the full meaning without a translation. Luckily, most of them have English translations written below the verses, which makes it a fabulous teaching tool. I can place some of the words and deduce the meaning of the others based on the translation below. But now they've found a brand new teaching tool, and one that I don't even need a translation for: a baby Bible.

The book has some short re-tellings of Old Testament stories. The title is 하나님과 나/"God and I" (there is a sequel that has New Testament stories called "Jesus and I", but we don't have that book yet). The writing is really simple, so even someone as bad at Korean as I am can figure out what it means. You can see a big picture of the first page of the book by clicking on the photo at the bottom of the linked page. Here is what it says (in English):

God made this world. The heaven and the sun and the moon, the earth and the animals and the plants, everything was made by God. God has made everything for me.

Easy, right? At least, it is much easier than "Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart" which is the verse on our calendar this month. ;-) Anyone who knows a bit of Korean can read that verse in Korean here. Yeah... not exactly beginner's material, is it?

Loot from Korea

My parents went to Korea for the wedding of one of my cousins. They spent two weeks there, and came back with some loot for us...

A podaegi, a traditional Korean baby carrier.


Matching hanbok for mom and daughter. The girl's hanbok goes up to 3 year old size. I have a hanbok too, but we'll see that much later some time.


Well, they couldn't leave Luna out...

Swaddling - Then and Now

In our final childbirth class, one of the topics we learned about was swaddling and how to do it. Afterward, I began to have a suspicion that I was swaddled as a baby. The reason is because I often like to sleep on my stomach, with my arms folded underneath me in some fashion.

Sure enough, a couple of days later I was talking to my mom and she did confirm that she swaddled me. Apparently this is quite the common practice in Korea. My cousin who was born in February 2008 was swaddled as well, and I believe we will be inheriting or borrowing the swaddling blanket that he used.

And yes, you are allowed to think that that baby looks like me. I thought it did too.

What Grades Really Meant to My Parents

Anyone with Korean parents will probably tell you the same. But any flavor of hard-chargin' parents will probably have the same definitions for grades. Here's a table with the grade, the meaning of the grade in the education system, and the Korean meaning of the grade. The first letter of the Korean description matches the letter grade, in case you don't notice.

Grade	System meaning	Korean meaning
A	Excellent	Acceptable
B	Above Average	BAD
C	Average	Cut off your head
D	Poor	DEATH
F	Failing	Find another place to live

Where I went to school, the grades seemed to be shifted a bit. B was an average grade, C was slightly below average, D stood for dumb, and F meant..well...F.

I am lucky to have never tested what would happen if I brought home a D or an F. One time in 4th grade, I got a C in math. My parents made me think that the fate of the universe might hang on that C. Nope, none of this "do your best and that's okay" nonsense here ;) More like "do your best or face the fires of Hades."

The only time that my parents were ho-hum about a C was when I switched schools in February in 6th grade. February is not exactly the beginning of the year, and one of the 6th grade subjects at my new school was Latin. So everyone else had about a 6 month head start, and I somehow ended up getting a C.

Soybean paste stew

Back before JunkMale and I were married, I posted a recipe for Soybean paste stew (된장찌개 "dwen-jang jji-gae"). It was one of my first try at making the dish, and it did turn out okay. But I must admit that I liked the version I made tonight a lot better. That could be because I used beef this time (I left it out the first time) and I kept the recipe a lot simpler.

So what exactly is dwenjang? As I understand it, as soybeans are fermented they separate into the liquids (made into soy sauce) and the solids (made into pastes like dwenjang or miso). So although fermented soybean paste sounds really disgusting (to me at least), just think of it as solid soy sauce. Of course, this comparison only works if you eat real soy sauce and not the caramel colored salt water my parents have in their refrigerator. (Mom and Dad, I would like you to know that I bought you some real soy sauce earlier this week, which you can have the next time we see you. Caramel color is nowhere to be found, and salt is only the third ingredient. The first ingredient is 탈지대두 - defatted soybean.)

Dwenjang and miso are both supposedly healthy for you. They are full of antioxidants and all the good fats that were in the soybeans. They also have probiotics, but I imagine most of them get destroyed by the boiling water. Of course, they also have high levels of umame, the non-essential (but still useful) amino acid, glutamic acid, responsible for the savory taste associated with MSG.

My dad might recognize this as being a much less spicy version of the tofu stew he had on Sunday. My mom would be happy to know that by simply avoiding the hot peppers, this dish is not at all spicy. The recipe says it feeds 2, but we only ate half of the soup for one meal because we had a lot of side dishes to go along with it. So here's the new recipe, shamelessly taken from here:

Dwenjang Jjigae (Soybean Paste Stew) for 2
(adjust recipe size up to feed your family)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup beef, sliced thin*
2 cups water
1/4 of a large onion (1/2 of a small), sliced
1 1/2 Tbs fermented soybean paste**
1/4 of a zucchini OR 1/2 cup of daikon or Korean radish, sliced
4 mushrooms, sliced
1 tsp garlic, minced
1/4 of a jalapeño, sliced
1/4 package soft tofu, chopped into good-sized cubes

Directions:
1. Bring beef and onions to a boil in the water. Cook for 5 minutes.
2. Add the soybean paste and stir until combined.
3. Add everything else except the tofu and boil for another 5 minutes.
4. Mix in the tofu, boil for an additional 2 minutes and serve.

*The beef is much easier to slice thin if it is partially or fully frozen.
**I wrote in another post a while back about using miso as a substitute for Korean soybean paste. Use a darker miso if it is available in your store. However, even regular miso should provide an adequate substitute.