The first time I remember eating Korean food . . . Was it really airplane bibimbap as a young adult? I keep searching my memories, but I can’t find anything earlier. Where would I have had Korean food? When would I have had Korean food? I don’t recall even knowing any Korean people when I was growing up in Memphis. I don’t recall ever going to a Korean—or Asian—festival, celebrating Chuseok or Seollal, or enjoying a special Korean meal on my arrival day—some of the common ways Korean adoptees encounter Korean culture. It’s not that there weren’t Korean people or Korean restaurants in Memphis. (In fact, the first Koreans settled in Memphis in 1962.) It’s that I wasn’t connected to any of them.

What I missed growing up, I certainly made up for that semester abroad—samgyeopsal, kimbap, japchae, doenjang jjigae, hodugwaja (so much hodugwaja), gilgeori toast. Everything except bondaegi. And I gained more than 10 pounds in the process. I can’t say that any particular dish or flavor revived a memory. But after returning from Korea, I remember taking my dad to Asiana Garden, one of the few Korean restaurants in our area. I wanted to share with him the comfort I found in Korean food—the warmth, familiarity, and sense of belonging I had discovered abroad. But more than that, I wanted to share a part of myself. 

Food is more than taste. It’s a vessel of memory, connection, and belonging. Korean food is deeply intimate to me—just as your grandmother’s chili, no matter how delicious I might find it, won’t stir in me the memories, tenderness, or sense of home that it does in you.

There are certain tastes and flavors that carry emotional weight, that ground us in who we are, that tether us to people, that keep us connected to what was or could have been.

That’s why food travels with immigrants. Why it’s packed into suitcases and tucked into carry-ons. Why ethnic enclaves so often grow around grocery stores and restaurants that recreate a sense of home through scent and spice.

Food anchors us. It gives shape to culture in everyday ways.

It’s also why Korean adoptees often turn to food in our heritage exploration—to feel close to something we were separated from. Some of us obsess over recipes, trying to recreate the perfect kimchi jjigae. Others feel a sense of loss or even shame for not liking national dishes, worried that disliking kimchi might mean we’re somehow “less Korean.”

Food carries culture.

Not just in the ingredients—fermented bean paste, sesame oil, gochugaru—but in preparation techniques passed down over generations.

I find myself standing over a sink of running water. Grains of rice swirl through my fingers. Cold water rushes around my hands. For most people it’s probably just another mindless task. The first time I wash rice—yet again, another practice that I don’t carry out until adulthood—I feel an unexpected sense of connection to the women before me. It’s almost silly, but at that moment the thought arises: “This is something my mother did and her mother and all the mothers and women before me.” Although I had grown up eating rice—a lot of rice, often in stir fries or simply with butter and salt—we never washed our rice. 

I find it especially disheartening when people dismiss the significance of food in an adoptee’s reclamation of culture. As if tasting your birth culture isn’t “enough.” As if it’s superficial, too easy, too pleasurable to be meaningful. As if it has to be hard to learn our heritage, that we have to work for it, for it to be “authentic.” And yet, we invite others—non-Korean, non-Asian people—to food festivals and proudly tell them to “taste our culture,” believing wholeheartedly that food offers something real and authentic.

We’re often taught to look outward for answers—to seek reconnection through language classes, DNA tests, homeland tours, file reviews. 

But what if what I’m looking for has been with me all along—etched into bone, carried in blood, remembered in ways I can’t yet name?

Not just in my DNA, though, yes, I carry the literal imprint of my biological family. What features, what quirks, I do not know. But it’s more than that. Nutritional epigenetics tells us that my current health as an adult may be shaped not only by what my birth mother ate while I was in the womb but by what her mother ate and by what her father ate. My body reflects what I can’t recollect.

Even our emotional memories live differently inside us. The taste of something familiar—savory, spicy, rich—doesn’t wait for logic.

Flavor bypasses the thinking mind, connecting directly into the brain’s emotional core.

Neurogastronomy teaches us that taste is not just physical; it’s deeply personal. The brain doesn’t simply register flavor; it assigns it meaning, ties it to feeling, encodes it as memory. That’s why a single bite can unlock a thousand buried emotions. That’s why we can cry over a taste we’ve never had before. What our conscious minds cannot recall, our senses retain.

Food may not be the whole story. But for many of us, it’s where the story begins.

So maybe it matters that the first time I remember eating Korean food was on a plane, suspended between worlds. That it was bibimbap—colorful, unfamiliar, comforting. That it tasted good. Really good. 

The first time I remember eating Korean food, I didn’t know I was building a memory I would return to again and again—not just of flavor, but of place, of time, of choice.

Because I didn’t choose to come here. I didn’t choose adoption, or immigration, or the way loss was woven into my life before I even knew I could name it.

But I did choose my return.

SunAh Laybourn is the organizer of Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month Memphis and co-founder of The Hungry Tiger Memphis. She’s the author of Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants. She’s a fan of cloudy days, hot coffee, and long naps. @sunahmarieonly

Erin Siao is a freelance illustrator specializing in portraits and local vignettes of place and taste. She works with local and national publications, brands, and individuals to capture stories in her unique style. She has a passion to understand neighborhood faces working to strengthen communities for the better. @erinsiaowork