When I was six years old, I had my first bite of kimchi, and I cried. The spicy, fiery-red fermented cabbage made my eyes water and sweat run down my face, as if my body were immediately rejecting it. As I wiped my eyes, the group of Korean college students around me laughed, telling me I’d get used to the spiciness. I was sure that I never would, because I wasn’t like them. On the outside, we looked the same, but on the inside I knew I was white, like my adoptive parents. That was the first moment that I can remember thinking I was a bad Korean, a feeling that I didn't know would follow me around for the next 22 years.

I was adopted from Seoul, South Korea, at seven months old by a family in Binghamton, New York. They liked their food to be...neutral. Dinnertime staples were dry-as-cardboard pork chops coated in Shake ‘N Bake, reconstituted potato flake “mashed potatoes,” and the occasional cheesy casserole or homemade meatloaf with a sweet ketchup glaze. As a kid, I knew something was missing from my food, but I had no idea what it was.

It turns out it was salt. My mother told me that when I was a baby, I got so excited eating Chinese food that I swallowed a piece of cashew chicken whole and nearly choked. She said it was because I was too impatient to chew, but I like to think that I was just trying to get soy sauce into my body faster. Takeout Chinese was my first introduction to any sort of Asian cuisine, but I can’t recall having Korean food until my family took me to Binghamton University’s Korean mentor program—the scene of the crime of my shocking first bite of kimchi.

Rolling gimbap, a Korean version of sushi, is one of the first memories I have of making Korean food. IMAGES COURTESY OF ALYSE WHITNEY

In the mentor program, my brother (also adopted from Korea, three years after me) and I were assigned “big sibs,” college students who taught us about our native culture. My first cooking lesson was for gimbap, seaweed rice rolls that are the Korean equivalent of sushi. After recovering from the spicy kimchi, I remember grabbing a neon yellow vegetable excitedly, enamored by the color, and taking a big bite. I scrunched up my nose at how sour it was and immediately spit it out. “Why do you like this?!” I asked my big sib, who shrugged and replied, “I don’t know—I just grew up with it.” I couldn’t comprehend that. In our home, rice was boiled in a bag and tossed with margarine, not made in a Cuckoo rice cooker and seasoned with the perfect blend of rice vinegar, salt, and sugar.

I had fleeting experiences with Korean food after that. My family went to Camp Friendship, a weeklong Korean adoptees’ retreat that immersed us in the culture and taught us how to make bulgogi. We never tried that recipe at home, opting for burgers and hot dogs on the grill instead. The sole sign of my heritage’s food was the occasional bag of mandu from the only Asian food store in Binghamton, Kim’s Oriental Grocery, that my mom would boil like pasta and serve plain—no soy sauce. Truthfully I’d rather have eaten her savory rice pudding soufflé and salisbury steak instead. I loved my adoptive parents and wanted to feel just like them: white and American.