“It’s Basically Asian Pizza!”

Ian Watanabe ’23

Now, that gets our kid excited. He wasn’t exactly jazzed about pajeon, a weird disc woven with long green onions and chunks of purple, dried squid. Any kid will eat pizza though. He leans in and grabs a slice of the oily, golden-brown pancake. As the oil runs down his fist, I remind him that it’s not “finger food.” He struggles to warp his small fingers back around the chopsticks in the proper form. He gives up and skewers the slice, eager to get it back into his mouth. My wife smiles at him, and then at me, pleased that she got our picky kid to try “my people’s” food. A wave of golden hair covers her eyebrows, so it’s hard to tell if the smile is genuine.

My kid stabs his second slice, lifting it into the air and toward his mouth. The pajeon slides off the stick and into a dish of shoyu because that’s not how you use chopsticks. As I wipe the splashed sauce off my white shirt, I contemplate making him switch to the right way. In my head, I sound like my mother. I have a rough idea of how she’d yell at him in Korean for not knowing chopsticks, and then yell at me for not teaching him. Let’s just say I’m glad my wife and son never picked up the “mother-tongue,” despite listening to so much BTS in the car. We don’t visit that side of the family much.

My wife keeps up her possibly fake smile, as our kid lines up for a third. She chose this restaurant because we “don’t connect with our heritage nearly enough.” I agreed because it’s close to home and has private dining areas separated by a thick sliding door. I hear it open slowly, as our server lurks into the room. Through a Spanish (I think?) accent, she informs us that one of our courses has been delayed. My wife brushes her flowing blonde hair aside and confidently educates our server that it’s pronounced Bulgogi (Bull-Goh-Gee). As our server exits, my wife smiles again, though this time I can tell it’s real.

I remember on our first date, how she pronounced pretty much everything incorrectly. She apologized desperately after, but I didn’t care then. I was just thrilled that she was into someone like me. Her family wasn’t thrilled though. Not her mother, and certainly not her father. No pitchforks and torches or anything, don’t get me wrong. There’s just some weighted apprehension in the air. Slightly agitated glances that tell us that we don’t belong. We don’t visit that side of the family much either.

We let our kid polish the rest of the Asian pizza off. He’s a bit messy, but that’s to be expected. Boys his age eat like horses. We shouldn’t interrupt him with such little things. In fact, we all just want to enjoy a normal family dinner. It would be nice to have a quiet night out, for once.