Editor’s note: Vacation, business travel, migrant labor, language study, study abroad, international marriage, immigration—many of us have such experiences of crossing national borders, and there are many immigrants living in our country. Ilda examines the emigrant sensibility we will need in order to live equally and peacefully in the age of globalization. This series is supported by the Korea Press Foundation’s Press Promotion Fund.

 

Having Tortillas Everyday with Chati’s Family

 

About a month later, I made a Guatemalan boyfriend. He was an alcoholic who was involved with a lot of women, and who had anorexia. Perhaps feeling sorry for me living with their problematic son, his family invited me for lunch every three days and asked about their son who did not visit them often, not even once a week.

 

▲ Chati’s dining table. The main plate with Tortilla or Tamale, made of corn powder, is a typical Guatemalan meal. ©Luna

Because my Spanish was not very good, I always preferred to help them in kitchen. It was more difficult for me to just sit and smile without talking especially as I wanted to let his mother know that I felt a very deep empathy toward her and her worries. Since his mother, Chati, was a Guatemalan woman who prepared a fine and delicious meal even with little money, I was lucky enough to not only have Guatemalan homemade food every day, but also learn how to cook and participate in their food culture.

 

Guatemalan meal consists of Tortilla or Tamale, which are made of corn power, and a main plate. Tortilla or Tamale, compared to a Korean meal, are the same as rice. They are served without any sauce but with meat, vegetable, beans, rice, etc. with the main plate.

 

Most families in Xela do not make Tortilla or Tamale by themselves but buy them from a local store right before their meal, thus serving them warm covered by a garment in order to prevent the dish to get cold. Due to the fact that they are made only of corn powder not flour, they are easy to digest. Guatemalans find energy and a feeling of being fully satiated from Tortilla just like Koreans do from rice.

 

Having Tortilla with Chati’s family gradually colored the part of my soul with Guatemalan spirit and consciousness. Tortilla became more and more delicious to me and I never tired of having Tortilla.

 

Sophia—the Goddess of Luck whom I met in Xela—was Chati’s eldest daughter’s three year old child. She was the family’s mood maker who shook up the melancholic atmosphere of the house, like a shark in the sea, invigorating and making everybody happy. That pretty girl constantly followed me everywhere and imitated my every gestures including when I was doing the kitchen chores so that all the family members took notice. It seemed that I suddenly appeared as a cast member in their family soap opera during this girl’s important stage of psychological development. Since Sophia always shouted calling out my name “Luna, Lu-Na-!” the other family members gradually showed their hearts to me and opened the hidden parts of their family history.

 

▲ Sophia. I grew up with you there at that time. ©Luna

One day, while having tea after a meal, Chati talked to me in a quiet tone and told me, without shedding a single tear, about her unhappy childhood in her hometown: her sexual molestation by relative, the severe poverty during her early marriage, her husband and son’s lies throughout her life, etc. I felt that her natural grace as a human being, who had experienced such turbulences, difficulties and poverty in her life, was as sad as it was beautiful. 

 

Growth, the Experience of Becoming a Family in a Faraway Place

 

Rosa, whose house is the Spanish institute where I used to study, was a single woman, who also used to often feed me Tortilla for lunch in her kitchen after class. Isabel, her close to seventy-year old mother who had complete authority over the kitchen, once called me and taught me how to make Tortilla in that kitchen. Since that day, I started to call Isabel “mom”, Rosa “sister” and Rosa’s daughter Daniella “niece.”

 

Thanks to the fact that I had Rosa as my sister who was very social and generous, probably because of her small family, I started to get invited to a number of various familial occasions such as birthday parties, weddings, and even community festivals. At any event, I was not only good at eating but also in helping out in the kitchen. I diligently washed dishes (as “a neat Korean”) and prepared very well many fruits and vegetables necessary for large parties. Unable to communicate through my mother tongue, these kinds of duties seemed to make me think less and feel less stressed out.

 

“Luna, Are you busy? We are going to make traditional beverages for next week’s religious festival and we need people to help us prepare, so would you please come and work from ten o’clock this Friday morning. You can have lunch with us.”

 

When Isabel put me in the kitchen with a pile of a hundred mangos, I felt like I became a Cinderella in a fairy tale. After peeling all of the mangos, the skin on my right fingers became paralyzed for one month. However, I liked to be needed, and in this way I was proud of myself becoming part of their family.

 

▲ Rosa’s family. Her mother, Isabel, passed away on the morning of January 1, 2012, at the age of seventy. ©Luna

Of course, becoming part of their family also brought on responsibilities and the experience of heartbreaking moments, and even at a one time, during a psychological crisis, I needed to cry in secret with my guilty feelings. Living through a lot of experiences with this family, it was impossible for me to compare this to my life in South Korea. How was it able for me, who used to criticize paternalism, to learn about family again on this faraway soil? It’s probably because my language skills were so rudimentary that I was accepted in their family and also because I did not possess any things. And it would have been possible for me because I was physically apart from my biological family.

 

After cooking in a number of kitchens in Guatemala, I became good at grocery shopping. After augustly shopping throughout an entire market place, even bargaining like a native person did, the vitality of various fruits and vegetables seemed to vigorously overtake my entire being.

 

I began to volunteer for a native woman’s association creating Guatemalan traditional handmade crafts. I also started a small business providing sandwiches which I made early in the morning to a local café, participated in many different meetings, and created strong relationships with people by inviting a number of them and treating them to my homemade food. My identity and potentiality began to draw a new growth curve as if standing at point zero.

 

People’s Passion during Festivals and Parades

 

For Koreans, the importance of big ceremonial holidays such as Chu-seok (Korean Thanksgiving Holiday) or Seol-nal (Korean New Year’s Day) is to rest; for Guatemalan people, Semana Santa is literally a holy period of festival. In order to see the religious parade from a good viewing point, people wait in a spot for three or four hours by stationing a chair, on which family members can sit taking turns to keep that particular spot. 

 

This parade takes place every year and it is always the exact same type and in the exact same order. Nevertheless, the people are passionate in seeing this same parade on a yearly basis. Nothing can truly explain this except that it is something more than religious fervor.

 

▲ The Semana Santa festival parade. ©Luna

Another large scale street parade takes place on Independence Day. It also follows the exact same order every year. Kindergarten kids march on the exact same day each year and the elementary school, middle school, and high school students all march in the exact same place each year, and all the people can see the same students as the previous year. And the same thing will happen next year. There is no doubt that every parade watcher is able to memorize the entire schedule of the parade. All people, from children to the middle-aged and the elderly, feel honored for participating in their parade, and talk about the heroic moments of the parades even many decades later.

 

After a few years of living in Xela, I felt that the Guatemalan people’s passion for their festivals and parades was like a tree devotedly repeating the process in which buds appear, produce leaves, blossom into flowers, and bear fruits in due time every year.

 

During another Guatemalan people’s holiday, “The Day of the Dead,” people exchange bread and chocolate as presents, make a food called “Fiambre” by paying with their own money and happily so, and enjoy it together. People also place bouquets of colorful flowers on every grave, and children have fun flying kites. On Christmas, they make “Paches,” which is made of rice powder, and present this to one another as a gift. If a person gets many “Paches,” he or she is very happy because they can share them with their neighbors—as I did.

 

People are not reluctant in their repetition of labor and devotion, and in no way feel bored about these yearly activities which never have anything new. Rather, they seem to be even happier in repeating the same thing again. This code of peaceful happiness has rippled through my heart that comes from the nation called South Korea, living and working everyday at the fastest speed in the world, being competitive in always creating a new item. [Translated by Jieun Lee] 

 

*Original Article: http://ildaro.com/7265 Published: October 20, 2015

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