Dog

by Bo Yu

I have a weakness for hot dogs. I like them with mustard, ketchup, relish, minced onions, and, sometimes, chili and cheese. But what I never admitted to anyone before was that I also like them with nothing at all, just sliced and eaten with my white rice and kimchi.

Once, in my senior year of college, I went to a barbecue at my boyfriend’s brother’s house in North Carolina. His wife, Jennifer, is a descendant of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, but no one would know it from her freckled face and her strong southern accent, though there is a hint of Asia in her eyes. Noticing their new grill, I innocently said, “You could fit a large dog in there.” They joked back, “Ha, Maria wants to eat dog.” They all laughed. I did, too. It was funny. Why hadn’t I made the connection? Sometimes, looking out at my Caucasian friends, Jennifer included, I forgot that I didn’t look like them, and that when they saw me, they saw an Oriental girl, a cute little doll with straight black hair in bangs and dark, slanted eyes—not just a hint, I was all Asian.

At the time, I went by the name of Maria, which was given to me when I was six years old when my family moved from Korea to the United States. It didn’t seem odd to anyone else that I lived the first six years of my life as Bokyung (or Bo) and then suddenly should start answering to a Hispanic name, but it bothered me. In high school and college, I’d sometimes introduced myself as Maria from Korea with diarrhea and gonorrhea. It was better than hearing people would break out with: “I just met a girl named Maria” or “What do we do with a problem like Maria?”

Actually, I was a problem when I was born. In postwar Korea, at two months, I was left on the doorstep of a childless couple who didn’t want me. I was passed from person to person until an unmarried woman took me in. She became my mother and recently admitted that she fed me sugar water; she boiled down rice into a glutinous, watery drink loaded with sugar and fed it to me until I could eat solid food. Now I know why, to this day, I can barely eat anything with sugar in it.

I can eat just about anything with garlic in it, an essential ingredient in most Korean foods, especially the most famous, kimchi, which is basically cabbage pickled and then flavored with garlic, red pepper, ginger, sugar, anchovy, and shrimp sauce. You either like it or hate it.

My American stepfather, a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, a soldier my mother married because he adored both her and me, didn’t love anything about kimchi; I never once saw him eat one bite. He’d tell me when I was little enough to believe anything that, if I ate kimchi, my eyes would get more slanty. Really, I thought. Is that why my eyes were different?

That question, even when I got a little older and wiser, never really changed. I didn’t know what it meant to be Korean, growing up in a suburban, mainly white, community in northeast Florida. Even the hyphenate, which became popular in the eighties, Korean-American, was confusing. What part was what?

Most people never saw any part of Korea in me. I was either Japanese or Chinese. No one knew about Korea, even after the Korean “Incident” and M*A*S*H. How is it, I kept thinking, that the Japanese, who attacked the U.S., should be admired for their culture, their arts, their sushi, their this and that, while Korea, with similar cultural roots and having risen just as quickly if not quicker economically, was known as the land of the garlic eaters.

And then, in 1988, before the Seoul Olympics, Koreans became known as the dog eaters, thanks to people like Brigitte Bardot, the French actress turned animal rights activist, who campaigned to boycott the Olympics and Korean products if they didn’t stop eating dogs.

Suddenly, my life and every Korean’s life changed. To this day, if you go online and search “dog eating,” you pretty much get information about Koreans eating dogs—people defending it and people denouncing it. Most don’t seem to get the fact that many people throughout history have eaten dog, and dog is still eaten in southeast and east Asia. In China, host of the 2008 Olympics, dog eating is and has always been legal and quite popular. In Korea, where at most 10 percent of the population eats dog, it has been illegal since, er, well, 1988.

Why do I care? It’s because the way the world views Korea is the way the world views me. It is embarrassing. How would Americans feel if they were only known for eating Rocky Mountain oysters (bull testicles)?

I finally had the opportunity to understand it all, how America, Korea, dog eating, and me fit together, in 1995, when I lived in Taegu, the third largest city in Korea, and taught at Keimyung Daehakyo (university), which, coincidentally, students jokingly called “dog university” because the first part, Kei (pronounced Gay), is pronounced like the word for dog, gae.

To the Korean-Koreans I was also viewed in terms of food. A professor told me I was a banana—yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

As long as I didn’t open my mouth, no one could see the white inside. I started wandering around alone, for the first time blending into the unfamiliar—and wonderful— anonymity of faces similar to mine....

Bo Yu lives in Portland. This is her second essay in print. E-mail: mbokyung at hotmail dot com