Ghost in the Kitchen: Multiracial Korean Americans (Re)Defining Cultural Authenticity

Abstract

This scholarly essay explores some techniques that multiracial Korean Americans employ to trouble traditional notions of cultural authenticity as markers for racial/ethnic identity construction. I position multiracial individuals as foils to the common assumptions that cultural authenticity requires “native” lived experience, “full bloodedness”, or a particular level of linguistic competency, in favor of cultural competency, analyzing the web community, HalfKorean.com. The site is a U.S.-based community of multiracial Korean Americans, where narrations of food and Korean motherwork play roles in many elements of the site, and in different ways work to reinforce new and adaptable forms of authenticity. Paying particular attention to the ways that cultural knowledge on the individual level becomes a marker for shaping community, I position Korean motherwork and household practices as vehicles of analysis. These embodied cultural practices inform community building practices, becoming critical variables for multiracial Korean Americans to exert cultural knowledge and expertise, authenticating flexible racial/cultural identities, which is an act of embodying what I term “plastic authenticity”. Multiracial bodies are inherently perceived as racially in-authentic; however, plastic authenticity is a framework that allows for expressions of identity and memory that resist this notion, grounded in their proximity to Korean women/motherhood.

Doenjang in the Air: Maangchi and the Mediation of Korean Cultural Authenticity

“…Essentially, plastic authenticity is a conscious act of de-centering. Relocating the historically marginalized at the center of conversations about authenticity and recognizing their subjectivities not necessarily as "truth", but rather as informed performances, allows us to imagine a more expansive, inclusive, and politically potent understanding of cultural authenticity (Sprague 2022). By crafting a persona that people subsequently register as authentic, her actual products (her cooking) become authentic as well, making her a gatekeeper of Korean American authenticity.…”