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JoongAng Daily
Trail of crumbs leads writer to Korea
June 02, 2008
Waiting for her mother for three days in an Incheon market, a 3-year-old girl felt a piercing hunger. Her mother’s promise to “come back soon” was never kept, and the little girl was taken to an orphanage in November 1973. Later, she was adopted to New Orleans, Louisiana in the United States, where her new parents gave her the name Kim.
Life after adoption for Kim Sunee was a world away from the hunger she experienced in the market, but that acute sense of hunger remained in her heart. This hunger, in both a mental and physical sense, become her life obsession. So it was no surprise for her to choose a profession involving food, as she wanted to “find a way back home through food.” Nowadays, Sunee, 37, is a noted food columnist and editor of the food section of the U.S. lifestyle magazine, Cottage Living.
Earlier this year, she published a memoir that includes recipes which she titled “Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home.” She got the title from the Grimm fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” about a brother and sister who drop pieces of bread to find their way back home after learning of their father and stepmother’s intention to forsake them.
Her book, featured in a full-page spread in the New York Times, was translated into her birth mother’s language this month. To celebrate the release of the Korean-language version of her book, published under the title, “Recipes of a 30-year-old,” Sunee visited Seoul with another important agenda ? to follow her own trail of crumbs.
“I’ve always felt that something’s missing,” Sunee said to the Korean press. “That feeling of loss was what drove me to travel around and write the book.” Sunee, who said she still remembers the pungent smell of kimchi from her childhood, openly wrote her memoirs about travel, food and dining cultures and also her romance with Olivier Baussan, founder of L’Occitane, who happens to be 17 years older. In the book, she mixes personal recollections with her recipes, and naturally, there is a recipe for kimchi. Incidently, kimchi happens to be one of the few Korean words that she knows.
She also paid a special visit to the Sinpo Market in Incheon, where she may have been deserted as a child. “It was like a scavenger hunt and I was like a private detective,” Sunee said, recalling her journey to the market. She also appeared in a TV show in a bid to find her lost family, and ended up with the details of a man who claims to be her brother. More than anything, Sunee wants to find her birth mother, whom she no longer holds a grudge against. She now believes instead that her mother’s abandonment was an “act of love.”
“Nobody has the right to judge other people’s actions. Giving up her own child must have been hard. I guess that it was an act of love, with hope for the child’s survival and future,” she said. “I want to tell her that I am O.K. and I have no resentment. I also want to tell her that I will not invade or disturb her life.”
In the fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel couldn’t find their way back home because animals ate their bread crumbs. Sunee is also aware that she might not find her way back home. “I may not be able to find my family, but that’s O.K. I’ve done everything that I can,” she said. “I learned to have a stronger sense of who I am. If you have a sense of self, you can be at home anywhere.”
On her way back to her Alabama home, she had her digital camera filled with images of Korean food, from various kinds of kimchi to beondaeggi, or boiled silkworm larvae. This trip is to be the source of her second book, she said, which she hopes will be a means to communicate with other adoptees in her position.
“I feel so sorry for the adoptees who feel bitter. I want them to overcome their despair and use it as creative energy in their lives,” she said.
By Chun Su-jin Staff Reporter [ sujiney@joongang.co.kr]
 http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2890558
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