Sizzle Me This

Under the Sneeze Guard

I have anger and dread fatigue.

I need a break from the reports on the contagion of anti-Asian hate crimes sweeping across this nation. In case I thought it was any better closer to home, there is the fresh hell that is Sery Kim, riffing off the American Dream into a terrifying fusion of Korean nationalism, white evangelical Christianity, and NRA terrorism. The call is coming from inside the house!

Dual citizenship in South Korea is sounding very appealing about now. But I won’t qualify until I’m 65 to legally relocate back to my country of birth. If I do, won’t the bigots telling people like me to “go back to where you came from” win? Anyway, Korea isn’t my home anymore.

My home is here in Los Angeles.

I want to talk about the pleasures of being a Korean immigrant in LA, maybe to remind myself why I live here, maybe to help me step outside into the streets once I’m fully vaccinated with a sense of belonging rather than fear.

I came to LA from the East Coast in the late ‘80s for film school, not intending to stay, but when I moved back to New York, I was surprised to feel LA tugging at me. I had no family here, and my filmmaking ambitions were wildly out of step — evidently about 30 years out of step — with the industry; one producer was candid: “there just isn’t any kind of audience for an all-Asian cast movie. Never gonna happen.” So why did I come back? Why am I still here?

Sizzler. Sizzler and Koreatown.

Not the Sizzler in Koreatown featured in a politically astute episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown where LA artist David Choe initiates the late chef to the Korean obsession with the OG All-You-Can-Eat (AYCE) buffet. There used to be another Sizzler on Wilshire Boulevard near UCLA Film School, and that Sizzler was the first restaurant I pulled up to after a five-day road trip across the country with a friend in my family’s old Honda Accord.

It seems an odd choice. After all, this was LA, a city with Korean food, and some would argue, better Korean food than you could get in Seoul. Why didn’t I go straight to Ktown for my first meal, considering the extraordinary lengths I’ve gone to chase down Korean food wherever I happen to be?

Before coming to LA, I had lived on the East Coast and traveled to Europe, South America, and Africa. Except for a few blocks of Korean restaurants near the Empire State Building, I hadn’t been able to get Korean food in any of these places. As a twenty-something living in New York, I remember feeling as desperate as a junkie as I made my way uptown, salivating the whole way from my (then) gritty East Village neighborhood to Wonjo or Hanbat — and when visiting relatives treated — Woo Lae Oak.

Until I left home for college, I had eaten Korean food almost every day of my life. The weepy depression I mistook for homesickness was actually intense withdrawal from my mother’s food. A generic stir-fry was the only Asian food on offer in my college dining hall in the early ’80s, and Korean food not at all. I got so desperate, I took advantage of a Korean upperclassman who had a crush on me, hanging out in his dorm room just so I could gobble the Sapporo Ichiban ramen, kimchee, and banchan in his mini-fridge. When that got dicey, I sniffed out the nearest Korean church to the campus, paid an ungodly sum for a cab ride there, and fidgeted through an interminable sermon (I am an atheist) just to eat the Korean potluck.

I’ll admit, my moral compass has always pointed to my appetite.

So why did I pull up to a Sizzler for my first meal in Los Angeles rather than making a beeline to Koreatown that day?

It has everything to do with my parents.

For them and many other immigrants, eating at Sizzler is a rite of passage into the Bounty of America. The All-You-Can-Eat buffet seems too good to be true for people who’ve survived war and hunger, the limitless choices creating a delicious state of anxiety about how to squeeze as much value into one’s gullet as humanly possible. My parents coached us on the game plan: skip eating before the Sizzler roundup, load up on steak and seafood, shamelessly revisit the salad bar, and do not, repeat do not, waste good money filling up on cheap bread and pasta. My family faced down the AYCE challenge with Olympic level discipline and focus — collars up — leaving everything — empty lobster shells, shrimp tails, and whistle-clean T-bones — on the table.

The awe of encountering this particularly American plenitude never quite fades away.

For my parents, the cornucopia of the all-you-can-eat buffet stretching door to door under the sneeze guards of their local Sizzler could make, at least for the feast’s duration, the difficulties of immigrant life disappear, even worth it.

I think I stopped at the Sizzler on my first day in Los Angeles to take a moment and pause, sweet with anticipation and relief, to have finally arrived at the feast I had been chasing ever since I left home.

To the east, sizzling under the California sun, awaited the delicious sprawl of Koreatown.