When I spent four months living in Seoul in 2022, I was so desperate for Trader Joe’s fall products that my mom ended up shipping me a care package with pumpkin pancake mix and the pumpkin spiced teeny tiny pretzels. Though the leaves in Seoul were changing color, I was missing the comfort of an American autumn. On the phone with my mom, I lamented my absence during the season of Trader Joe’s butternut squash mac & cheese. So when the mail carrier called me asking for my building code, I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
I stumbled through the conversation in broken Korean and eagerly ran out to receive my package. Once I had it safely in my studio I unpacked it with a smile– pumpkin covered pretzels, pancake mix, tea (in bags, as opposed to the jars of yuja tea found in most Korean grocery stores), and oatmeal. I tore open the pretzels, ready for the taste of home– until I remembered that it was Yom Kippur. The pretzels would have to wait until sundown.
With this in mind, I can’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for those who have had their Everything Bagel Seasoning confiscated at customs. If you’re tuned in to the food-loving parts of the internet, you may have seen the outpouring of articles reporting on the Everything Bagel Seasoning ban in South Korea. The original story was run on South Korea’s MBC News, and has since been picked up by everyone from The Guardian to Today to the New York Times. What makes Everything Bagel Seasoning illegal? The Jewish-coded seasoning blend contains poppy seeds, classified as a narcotic in Korea. While the seeds themselves do not contain opiates, contamination is possible from the harvesting process.
I always knew I wanted to study abroad in Korea while in undergrad. I am Korean on my mom’s side and Ashkenazi Jewish on my dad’s side. The community I grew up in had a strong Jewish presence, but most Korean community-building existed within churches, meaning I didn’t feel a strong connection to my maternal heritage until I got to college. But it wasn’t until I got to Seoul that I realized just how different it would be. Korea has a very small Jewish population, estimated by one of the country’s two rabbis to be around 1,000 people as of 2022, as reported by the US State Department. Most of the Jewish population in Korea are expatriates as well. Suddenly, I went from a strong Jewish community and a weaker connection with Korea to a strong sense of my Korean heritage, and a loss of the Jewish circles I was so accustomed to.
I learned very quickly that community is precious, and was so excited when I met Jewish students from across the world who were also studying abroad in Seoul. And throughout my experience abroad, I was able to find Jewish communities online. My time in Seoul coincided with my participation in the Hey Alma College Writing Fellowship, where I got to explore my own mixed identity and published a recipe for kimchi latkes, tangibly bringing together my Jewish and Korean heritage. After the essay was published, I found even more Jewish communities in Korea that I hadn’t known about, like a small Hillel community in Seoul and other mixed heritage families. They reached out to me, connected on social media, and shared my essay within their own circles.
There is also joy in being a representative of your culture somewhere new. When I was approached by a pastor of a local church looking for new members, he was fascinated when I told him I was Jewish. Instead of being treated as a challenge, as someone to try to convert, I sat outside with the pastor for 10 minutes, answering questions he had about Judaism. He wanted to know what synagogue was like and if we had different sects of Judaism just like there were different sects of Christianity. Could I read Hebrew? (Not anymore. Sorry, Hebrew school teachers.) What were the differences in our religions? How did I end up in Korea? I walked away from that conversation feeling refreshed and proud of my mixed heritage.
My time living in Korea let me experience my Jewishness as my foreign heritage after a lifetime of my Koreanness being the foreign part. For the first time, I really felt connected to my maternal heritage. I got the chance to visit the home where my grandfather was born and the neighborhoods my grandparents lived in with my mom and aunt. I took classes at the same university where my grandfather studied and met family members I didn’t know existed. And just as I had longed for a connection to Korea when I was home in the U.S., I became aware of just how valuable my Jewish connection is too.
As someone whose family immigrated from Korea in the 1970s, the crackdown on poppy seeds feels like a lingering of the painful legacy the opium trade left in East Asia. So while I feel for those who weren’t able to bring back the deliciousness that is Everything Bagel Seasoning, the policy doesn’t come as a total shock. Besides, as I’ve experienced, there are certainly more ways to connect to Jewishness than a handful of seeds and spices.
While living in Korea, my Judaism took on a new form. I celebrated the high holidays by myself. Yom Kippur was spent alone in my apartment rather than at a service. I didn’t have it in me to make a break fast feast for one, so I ordered Indian food from the shop down the street (in addition to the Trader Joe’s goodies, of course). On Rosh Hashanah, I asked a family member about using the oven in her apartment to bake my usual loaf of apple honey challah, but learned that even when Korean kitchens do have ovens, they are so seldom used that people aren’t familiar with the mechanics. I did, however, find a honey and apple flavor of a popular Korean chip brand while wandering the shelves at my nearest 7-Eleven. Fancy boxes of fruit are popular gifts in Korea, so when my grandparents’ friends gifted me a box of shiny apples, I was able to enjoy them with honey and fresh tteok, Korean rice cakes.
On Hanukkah, I purchased tea lights from Daiso and arranged them like a hanukkiah, lighting them each night. My family came to spend the holidays together in Seoul– my mom’s first time in her birth country in 20 years, and my siblings’ first time ever. We lit the makeshift hanukkiah together on the folding table in my studio apartment. I made us kimchi latkes. And I felt more at home in my Korean Jewishness than I ever have.
