Roiling Boil

Pictured: raw ramen noodles over broken over white background

Feb 5th, 2021 | By Jason Lee TD ‘22+1

In my mother’s house, buddae-jiggae is always served with a side of spinach. If any meal she made lacked vegetables, the spinach was how she compensated. Most stews come with seaweed or daikon or bean sprouts or long, spindly mushrooms simmering in red broth. In those cases, there is no need for spinach. Buddae-jiggae, however, does not contain anything green. It contains meat, ramen, and kimchi, it is 800-1000 calories a bowl, and it is delicious. Compared to our family’s monstrous serving sizes, the little floral dishes of spinach were more for my mother’s comfort than any real attempt at nutritional balance.

Buddae-jiggae is an unconventional stew. An oxtail or chicken broth is filled first with sliced pork belly, since it takes the longest to cook. Then the kimchi is added, then the ramen. The components that follow—vienna sausages, beef franks, Spam, sometimes even shiny slices of yellow American cheese—are unique to buddae-jiggae. All manner of processed meats and cheeses are stirred into the pork and noodles and left to simmer until soft. My family often adds rice. 

The name means army-base stew, after the primary supplier of its imported ingredients. During the Korean War and the years that followed, impoverished South Korean citizens and refugees from the North stewed and boiled whatever they could find for food. Oftentimes, this included the discarded rations of American soldiers stationed on the peninsula. Koreans lined up to purchase or beg for bags of scraps from the army, and they scrounged leftover Spam, ham, and hotdogs from base dumpsters. These first army-base stews, cooked over streetside fires, were said to contain cigarette butts.

While some restaurants nod to its history through names such as DMZ soup, these days buddae-jiggae is regarded as a wholly Korean dish. [1] It retains some historical elements, namely Spam, but an array of Korean spices and higher quality ingredients, thanks to post-reconstruction wealth,  have mostly erased the collective memory of stewed garbage. It’s a bit of an institution now, and I recommend it on winter days when you have the time for a nap after.

Yet there are those, especially among my grandparents’ generation, who cannot embrace buddae-jiggae as their descendents have. It was a dish they stomached while spooning out dirt and paper from the broth. It was a dish for which their parents begged. They begged in the glare of protected stores called post-exchanges (PX), which sold meat and supplies but were reserved for Americans. Americans, that is, and those close to them. The restrictions on who could buy from a PX engendered a range of dubious relationships between Korean women and American men. Women, once connected to soldiers, could purchase from PX stores for their own families, sell products to wealthier Koreans at a premium, and smuggle imported meats to the populace once Dictator Park outlawed their trade. The necessity of such arrangements remains a smoldering source of resentment among many from that time.

One generation removed, my parents do not feel the same aversion. Nor do I. Time has filtered any fury that used to spill from the stew’s dolorous origin. I am left with a rich, meaty dish which I adore but my elders reject, whose associations for me consist of big bites and self-conscious spinach, but consist of poverty and humiliation for thousands of people in my nation’s history.

How do I engage with an institution that has loved and fulfilled me, yet is built upon a legacy of grief? This surfaces questions not only of time and history, but also of identity, responsibility, and repentance. I can’t ask a bowl of buddae-jiggae, “Who am I?” (at least, I won’t). But then, I am no longer talking about buddae-jiggae. I am talking about the church.

Though it may seem a little stilted to compare the Christian faith to a bowl of pork, my relationships with both are similar. My faith and its community of believers are outlined in great love. My mother conveys her love for me in three ways: in speech, in food, and in prayer. My relationship to God and the universe, to the people I do and do not care for, to my purpose in life (whatever that means)—I have explored in faith, struggled with in faith, severed and reconciled in faith. Whatever maturation and suffering and elation I have experienced in life has been wholly entangled with the church.

On the other hand, the church has been wholly entangled in a multitude of violent and oppressive systems. It has directly advocated for the colonization of African, American, and Asian lands. It has annihilated native and indigenous cultures and forcibly converted their populations not out of love, but from arrogance: not with respect for life, but on pain of death. It has served as a passive and active agent in the calcification of white supremacy and as a vehicle for European hegemony.  It was a tool for the enslavement of Black peoples and a justification for their continued servitude. Believers have massacred Jews out of hate and distorted theology and replicate these persecutions against LGBTQ+ communities through conversion camps and social rejection. 

I do not hate my faith. I do not derive any pleasure or status from recounting the depraved aberrations of what is meant to be a divine mission, nor from reducing or concealing the complexity of the church’s involvement with the violence above. We have done good work. Christian abolitionists helmed various efforts across Europe and the US, and isolated Catholics families smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany. Starting in the 1920s (some) missionary work peeled (slowly) away from empire and towards social service, while Black churches have served as both the staging grounds and expressions of liberation. 

However, these accomplishments are irrelevant to my question. I know we’ve done good. I am concerned with how we are meant to engage with our great evils. Yet so often when I ask other fellow Christians, they rehearse the church’s worthy deeds, as if, by some moral arithmetic, these erase the numerous, unqualified acts of Christian wickedness. 

Those who believe that rights expunge wrongs must review their theology. Those who do not I nevertheless cannot entirely blame for their defensiveness. While Korean youth swallow army base stew having forgotten the dish’s demeaning origin, the contemporary church evangelizes and moralizes, having forgotten its predecessors’ grievous sins. In both contexts, subsequent generations have inherited a sanitized history, but for Christianity, the price of this forgetfulness has been the loss of our understanding of collective responsibility.

Biblical figures such as Ezra, Daniel, and Achan represent but a few of many instances in which believers were held accountable for the sins of their forebears. Christians are meant to believe that we are responsible not only for our own conduct, but for those with whom we share a relationship––accountable not only for our own uncleanliness, but for the uncleanliness of those with whom we dwell. Yet we have narrowed our standards of righteousness until each individual conveniently need only concern themselves with themselves. We have forgotten that both our most damning sins and our most sublime joy are collective.

Neglecting the corporate aspect of our existence has left the church speechless as believers and nonbelievers alike come to new consciousness with respect to racial justice, gender equality, climate change, and poverty. Each topic raises genuine questions regarding how people are knit to their communities, to their past, and to each other. Yet many have, in the name of our faith, branded feminism as an excuse for pagan immorality and Black Lives Matter as a violation, rather than an affirmation, of the equality of life before God. They recast attempts at repentance and restitution as liberal seduction and communist propaganda. Throughout it all, the house of God is silent.

In our inarticulacy, we have also abdicated a critical mission. “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” This was the task, among many others. Among many commandments, we were to demonstrate and reify a kingdom where the meek inherit the earth, and where fields and homes are set aside for the impoverished, the immigrant, and the stranger. 

When the church has so abandoned this mission that its primary advocates in modernity are nonbelievers, when the church is so unfamiliar with the character of its mission that it no longer recognizes it under new names, not only have we lost our flock, but we have lost ourselves. The “radical” has become something foreign and corrupting, instead of a prefix to our convictions. The Christ has become a Savior who wills the poor and weak to save themselves—and who excuses his followers for willing the same.

Liberation, vindication, reparation, healing, punishment, and redemption are topics to which our faith has much to offer. However, we have lost the opportunity to lead society in their pursuit. A plurality of the church, in its hostility towards this era’s reinvigorated movements against police brutality and white supremacy, has withered any ethos we may have had.

This does not absolve us of our responsibilities. That is why this article is written here, towards campus, and not solely towards the internal Christian body. We are inexcusably late, as much of the world is, to these racial and social justice movements that are only now entering the public eye despite generations of relentless organizing. But I have hope that this can be an opportunity for the church to recover its collective spirituality, repent of its legacies, and reconcile itself to the good work being done.

In many ways, intellectual traditions such as critical theory and the vast array of intersectional studies have become both a refuge and an indispensable tool for what should have been a pursuit of justice shared between believers and nonbelievers. They have expressed certain truths to which our faith also attests. For one, the reality of structural racism substantiates our belief that the world is fallen. It refers to how present and historic decisions have accumulated to invent race and subsequently privilege white culture, language, aesthetics, and values. It affirms that the discriminatory outcomes have proliferated throughout all of society. Christianity goes so far as to say all of our relationships, and all of our systems are, without exception, cut off spiritually, ecologically, economically, and socially from an equitable, just existence. It should not come as a surprise to Christians that racism pervades all aspects of our fallen world. It should spark not rebuttal but grief and righteous anger that creation’s many, splendorous colors have been twisted into a vile hierarchy. 

It is all the more disappointing, therefore, that the most unified clarion from our church has been for protestors to muzzle their rage, to be patient, to be courteous. It is one thing to pray that victims find peace. It is another to ask that they bury their conscience for our comfort. Christians believe that sin—brokenness, if you will—must be actively combatted, in ourselves and in our world. Only an unfaithful reading could interpret the command to turn the other cheek as a command to suppress the widow and the orphan.

To be anti-racist, not merely non-racist. To heal brokenness, not merely disavow it. Believers and nonbelievers alike are called to an active pursuit of justice. What can be unclear, especially to those who are just now coming to this awareness, is what we can do as individuals to contribute to the work. While I urge you to consult the vast repository of wisdom compiled by the many organizers in the field for specific actionables, the Christain faith’s concept of tzedakah can, I believe, provide the necessary posture. 

Though it is a rather billowing concept, a fundamental aspect of tzedakah is being right with God. It is relationally defined, because being right with God means being right with ourselves, our strangers, our ancestors, and our offspring. Much more than merely interpersonal, this means just verdicts, dignified living, and reorganizing systems to cultivate grace in a broken world. Thus, our posture is one in which we are urgently setting right relationships between people and the world around us—so urgently that it is one of few instances where God tells us to leave the church and go.

I recognize that there are many who have suffered because of my church, my faith––suffered and lost enough that we are, in their eyes, unredeemable. Reader, if you are one such person, yet have stayed, you have expressed a grace that we can only hope to emulate. I am not asking you to forgive us. In the end, I am still answering my own question—how do I reconcile the potential for love that I see in my faith with its many horrors? Buddae-jiggae will always be a soup born of shame. Yet my mother and its other inheritors have refired it to be an expression of greasy triumph. The church cannot be severed from its murderous ancestry. Yet I and its other inheritors can still serve—not in some impossible notion of redemption by works, but out of an ethic of radical love.

I say radical, because we must go beyond what is expected. Both Christianity and a secular pursuit of justice can be allied in their effort against the oppressions of the world. Both hosts––by demolishing the systems that crush the human soul, by breaking the fangs of the wicked and plucking their victims from their teeth—are reclaiming space. Space for the full expression of human beauty, for more fulfilling ways of being and systems of governing. Space borne of radical freedom, radical liberation, and radical hope. 

Yet Christianity has tzedakah. Tzedakah, which is righteousness, spiritual unity, interpersonal integrity, virtuous society, justice-as-love, all interdependent and codefined. It is in tzedakah where I think the Christian faith begins to leap ahead of a secular pursuit of justice, and where we can begin to offer more-than-overdue backline support. The role faith can play is one of vision. Freedom and liberation founded on unconditional love, mercy, and forgiveness. Identity that is universally accepted yet as varied as the million faces of the divine. Dignity wrought into our most basic construction as images of God. 

Perhaps that is the answer that I am looking for. My faith’s potential for love can be made manifest, not in spite of, but in comparison to our history, by showing that there is more to be had. That even now, all of us are aiming too low. That the steam from this roiling boil rises to a place beyond the horizon, beyond human imagination, beyond the radical, into something transcendent.

Notes

[1] DMZ referring to the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea.

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