Doenjang in the Air: Maangchi and the Mediation of Korean Cultural Authenticity

Abstract

In this article, I explore the ways that women of the Korean diaspora engage in cultural meaning-making through material culture in efforts to redefine what it means for people, things, and ideas to be considered “authentically Korean”. Using the case study of famous internet chef Maangchi, I examine one of her best-selling cookbooks and her digital presence to identify the tactics she uses to exert agency in the meaning-making and community-building process, using Korean food and her role as a maternal figure as vehicles for analysis. Due to her roles as a mother and her positioning as a quintessential immigrant subject in the US context, I argue that Maangchi challenges colonial and Eurocentric models of cultural authenticity as part of a long history of women of color that actively disrupt social perceptions of value, expertise, and knowledge production. By exploring her business ventures, I consider how embedded pieces of knowledge, racialization, perceived expertise, and cultural assumptions are all connected to challenge the historical concepts and applications of authenticity in favor of a more inclusive, radical, and politically potent understanding of what truly makes something “Korean”.

1. Introduction

There is a yangnyeom-tongdak place on every corner in Korea. Each one claims its own secret coating and batter mixture, but generally the chicken all tastes very similar. I love the funny names of some of the fried chicken chains… The dominance of mother-in-law names is a nod to the long tradition of a woman serving chicken to her son-in-law as a sign of respect and celebration. When a son-in-law came to visit his wife’s family in the countryside, they always expressed their appreciation by killing the best chicken and serving it for dinner, usually as chicken soup.

—Maangchi, Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 221)

There is no shortage of chefs on television and no shortage of celebrity cookbooks on the shelves of bookstores. Celebrities of the world offer up their favorite recipes, critiquing and tweaking traditional recipes, traveling and eating, making comical quips to their viewers and readers, and all the while using food as a vehicle to tell some kind of story of a place or a people. One part of the allure is the celebrity, but there is also something deeply personal about cookbooks. Deeply cultural. The other part of the allure of contemporary cookbooks is as much in the recipes as it is the author of them and, most importantly, the tidbits of their lives contained within them. This is not new by any means. Cookbooks have been the study of academics for decades now (Theophano 2002, p. 2). The seemingly mundane elements of daily life potentially gleaned from them are precious windows into peoples’ lives in different eras. As historian Janet Theophano notes, “the themes in cookbooks are timeless: life and death, youth and age, faithfulness and betrayal, memory and forgetfulness… The cookbook, like the diary and journal, evokes a universe inhabited by women both in harmony and in tension with their families, their communities, and the larger social world” (Theophano 2002, p. 6). Cookbooks are spaces that are intimate. Somewhat ironically, however, in today’s time, they are intensely public, making them a handy visually mediated space to perform a racial and gendered analysis of authenticity and its various modes of production.

As Korean food increasingly permeates the global culinary zeitgeist, it is important to consider who becomes the gatekeepers of this rapidly globalizing food brand. Historically, women have been tasked with reproducing cultural practice through foodways, yet as food becomes economically viable, the arbiters of authenticity, best practice, and general cultural gatekeeping tend to become men, despite the playfully common adage that “they learned it all from their (insert maternal figure here)”, why not head straight for the source then? In this article, I interrogate ways that Korean women exert agency in constructing brands that create (and expand) the parameters of authenticity. Examining YouTube star and internet celebrity chef Maangchi1, I explore her first bestselling cookbook, YouTube cooking channel, and her public appearances outside of the confines of her cooking show. I aim to establish the way that Maangchi utilizes the term authenticity and common notions associated with authenticity to give her YouTube channel/cookbook/website credibility. I am also interested in Maangchi herself. What about her makes her attractive/credible to an audience? What makes her followers “consume” her media and buy into her brand of cultural foodmaking and storytelling? Lastly, I juxtapose this contemporary example of branding and declarations of authenticity against a long history of the same gendered and racialized narratives that sprout up in and around foodways.

Women being associated with food preparation and foodways is nothing uniquely Korean, but by establishing a history that intersects gender and race, I discuss how Maangchi both contributes to this history, while also shifting it by employing a renewed sense of agency in the caricature—i.e., the friendly, funny, “everywoman” Korean auntie that she simultaneously reproduces and capitalizes off of. Her cookbooks and her “brand” are not a secret treasure for those who stumble upon it to learn about her life and Korean culture, but something intentionally public. She projects the sweet giggling Korean auntie that invites you into her kitchen to cook with her, while being digitally savvy, contemporary, and “millennial” in her approach to her brand. It is a form of cultural entrepreneurship where authenticity is the product.

Maangchi’s approach to authenticity here implies that credible authenticity can also be constructed through malleable means, a kind of “plastic” authenticity. The caricature she creates, the use of the term “authentic”, and the stories that Maangchi tells when she is cooking are deployed strategically in ways to make not just the food she cooks authentic but her persona as well. Being an avid online gamer prior, Maangchi is no stranger to the creation of avatars, and her “avatar”, Maangchi, is no less authentic than her off-screen persona, Emily Kim, rather it is an exercise in embodying, gatekeeping, and marketing authenticity. In the opening epigraph, she recites both her status as “Korean” or an insider but also invokes a gendered history. The reality is that Korean women were not making “Korean fried chicken” for their sons-in-law in the 16th century (at least not the kind of fried chicken that we consume today), but she expertly weaves the historical importance of chicken itself into the fabric of a gendered Korea, somehow making Korean fried chicken seem innovative, yet derivative, yet authentic, all at once. Brilliantly, she engages this liminal space where making fried chicken makes her hip yet also a devout and good Korean mother to her millions of followers. The chef begets the authenticity of her food, but unlike many celebrity chefs, whose modus is to point out authenticity in the food they are “exploring”, Maangchi is a gatekeeper of cultural authenticity herself, peppering her recipes with stories that make her position as both an expert and an insider, unquestionable. Her popularity, both by her followers and also by news media and “classic” chefs, is a testament to the persuasive power of her “authentic avatar”.

Essentially, plastic authenticity is a conscious act of de-centering. Relocating the historically marginalized at the center of conversations about authenticity and recognizing their subjectivities not necessarily as “truth”, but rather as informed performances, allows us to imagine a more expansive, inclusive, and politically potent understanding of cultural authenticity (Sprague 2022). By crafting a persona that people subsequently register as authentic, her actual products (her cooking) become authentic as well, making her a gatekeeper of Korean American authenticity. In a world of Anthony Bourdains, picking cultures apart to determine what is and what is not authentic for the rest of us, a Korean woman having authority over what is imagined to be authentic Korean food is quite potent.

2. Women Cooking Up Culture: Historical and Cultural Perspectives

A useful way of examining the role of women as it relates to food is to consider it through the lens of culinary labor as a means of developing ethnic identity and resistance. In an essay that explores the writings of many women of color, Benay Blend notes that the labor of food production, while something imposed on women for generations, is also used to assert forms of authority and reconstruct/reproduce cultural histories (Blend 2001, p. 156). Regarding the various writers cited, including authors such as Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Debra Castillo, and Pat Mora, she goes further describing the cultural and transformative nature of food work, stating,

The activities of almost all [the authors] underscore the building of a woman’s culture by locating the self within a collective identity and reclaiming the common labors of foremothers as a craft. Their use of an oral tradition to ally with and recuperate a sense of agency for the underclass becomes a metaphor for political and social struggle. Because it destabilizes certain predominant values that support the dominant culture, the culinary metaphor provides women writers with a discourse of resistance in which the self in relation to an ethnic group is powered.

(Blend 2001, p. 164)

These authors are utilizing foodways as a space of empowerment and resistance and using it in conjunction with the act of storytelling as a way to build a “woman’s culture” and to exercise a “sensuous” form of knowledge (Abarca 2001, p. 123). This is a particularly useful way of engaging with the act of food making and foodways, as it balances the labor and the cultural practice of cooking with power and identity while being decidedly woman-centered. Food has been found to be a boundary marker between cultures and to simultaneously bring people within a culture together. Studies have found the women that cook the food derive autonomy and agency from their roles in cultural production, gaining cultural capital, despite the role of food preparation being one typically deemed private or oppressive and being physically strenuous (D’Sylva and Breagan 2011). Thus, while the labor is decidedly gendered, the cultural impact and maintenance of community that food and foodways hold for various groups highlight the critical importance of this work.

This distinct cultural bond over the roles that women play in households and the broader cultural imaginary of their given communities is what drives feminist scholarship to center women of color in analyses and to recognize the radical potential of this labor, where it is critical to note the possibilities and spaces of resistance that can be read. Black feminist scholar and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins indicates, “a dialectical relationship exists between systems of racial oppression designed to strip subordinated groups of a sense of personal identity and a sense of collective peoplehood, and the cultures of resistance extant in various racial-ethnic groups that resist oppression” (Hill Collins 2001, p. 57). In efforts to radicalize and recognize the political potential of this space, it is critical to establish that foodways are meaningful and participatory spaces, where the issues of care and the investments in cultural production are considered radical and feminist acts (Curtin 1992a, p. 15). Therefore, it is crucial to note not only the existence and pervasiveness of motherhood as a signifier for food but also the actual role of mothers working in those spaces to survive as well as maintain cultural ties to heritage.

Positing the experience of eating and community building with food practices, the physical nature of food, or the “authentic presence of food”, as Deane Curtin puts it, layers in the act of eating (temporality) into the discussion of self/community-building, employing the “context” as a critical agent to consider (Curtin 1992b, p. 126). What, and how one eats is a critical conversation, as on the one hand it is a “flexible symbolic vehicle” one can use to express a sense of self-identity, but on the other, the act of eating something, say, culturally specific simultaneously invokes “inflexible cultural stereotypes” that link certain foodstuffs to particular communities (James 2005, p. 375). Thus, the act of eating is as important to consider as the food/foodways themselves (and who is cooking) when entering conversations regarding authenticity and culture. Sense of self and identity are significant factors concerning the employment of community regarding food.

Examinations of specific food spaces and their impact on collective identity and community (as well as the ways they are employed as tropes onto communities) has a long history, and one space that this is particularly salient is in the ways that Black women in the U.S. have been connected with foodways in both an economic sense and as imprinted on the cultural imaginary of the U.S. in general. Material culture scholar, Psyche Williams-Forson, in her book Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Williams-Forson 2006) traces the material history in the U.S. of the impact (both social and economic) that chicken has had on the livelihood, legacy, and image of Black women. Utilizing visual imagery, stories, oral histories, and testimonials, Williams-Forson paints a fuller picture of the cultural impact that chicken has had on a community and the ways that that image travels beyond its association with the controlling image of the “mammy” figure2 that tends to dominate the historical discourse surrounding Black women and their relationship to food in the public realm.

One of the key ways that Williams-Forson outlines the power of stereotypical and racist imagery are the ways they slowly build themselves in the psyche of those represented and the ways that they reinforce and imprint meanings onto material items. Examining a range of reconstruction era postcards, photos, and other widely dispersed cultural ephemera (that ironically created lasting impressions) for the ways that they connect chicken to the African American community, she notes the power that these images hold, beyond simple representation and the reinforcement of stereotypes, noting the following:

Culture here [regarding these images] becomes a code that entrusts its meanings to material objects. The ubiquitous nature of items like chicken makes it a useful, oblique device for representing the various assumptions that were ensconced in the stereotype. Its ubiquity and mundaneness allows these beliefs and ideologies to become part of the natural fabric of everyday life, a point made all the more poignant by the use of photography.

(Williams-Forson 2006, p. 54)

The critical element to consider here is the way that what seems mundane is embedded with meaning and implies more than what is readily apparent. Taking the time period into consideration, the rhetorical strategy in racist imagery intends to normalize a type of stereotype and the expectations of certain behaviors of an entire community. Designed to divide and subjugate, the problematic nature of the images Williams-Forson analyzes are not merely in the images themselves, but what they represent. As she also describes, with the advent and widespread use of photography, these racist depictions were imbued with a sense of “realness”, becoming an effective strategy for those producing them to imply that these were somehow factual or self-evident depictions of the community (Williams-Forson 2006, p. 55). Recognizing the complexities of power in what seems innocuous or mundane is an especially useful framework for challenging the, at times, simplistic analysis of visual media, particularly as it relates to women of color and their agency as subjects.

Regarding Black women and the ways that images reinforce stereotypes as well as gendered divisions of labor, Williams-Forson discusses many instances in which the images of Black women with chicken, or more broadly in roles of cooking, care, and service, reinforced the circulating myths that Black women were/are symbolically associated with not just chicken but the labor and expertise it takes to prepare it (Williams-Forson 2006, p. 88). When paired with traditional notions of gendered labor such as motherwork, care, and the feeding of one’s family, the narrative that travels is that women are not just tasked with the food preparation for families but that history dictates that they are “good” at that labor, in fact, experts (Williams-Forson 2006, p. 89). While on one hand, this promotes the reproduction of racial stereotypes and patriarchy, one of the key takeaways from Williams-Forson’s analysis; however, is that while this history and connection between Black women and chicken is inherently problematic, the economic opportunities and abilities for Black women to preserve culture and tradition position them uniquely as mediators between a community’s sense of self-preservation and the representations proliferated in popular culture. She notes, “in their ability to control the ‘symbolic language of food,’ and to dictate what foods say about their families, women often negotiate the dialectical relationship between the internal identity formation of their families and the externally influenced medium of popular culture. In this way, they protect their families against social and cultural assault as well as assist in the formation and protection of identity” (Williams-Forson 2006, p. 92).

One of the many significant contributions that this work makes is to trace a history of how images and visual culture are loaded with meaning that can create distorted and perverse narratives of entire communities as they disseminate through popular culture. That said, Williams-Forson extends beyond a cursory analysis of racialized imagery, recognizing that the abilities for women to become gatekeepers of culture, economically sustain families and communities, and become mediators between the public world and the private world of families/communities, must not be ignored and must be examined beyond the scope of the controlling images which circulate in white publics, like the “mammy” caricature. While images may, in some ways, reinforce white supremacy and patriarchy, it is myopic to assume that women are not also mediating those images within their communities or are somehow unaware of the ways they are being represented in popular culture. In many ways, these same principles apply to the analysis of YouTube star Maangchi, and how she is crafted in the public eye. In both Williams-Forson’s analysis and my own, there is a clear focus on agency as it relates to women of color and foodways that acknowledges the (visual) systems of racism and white supremacy they operate within while actively challenging them.

3. Cookbooks as Sites of Cultural Production: The Case of Maangchi

Occasionally my grandmother would come to stay, and I was always excited to find out what snacks, like steamed sweet potatoes and corn, she would have waiting for us after school. I always said, “My grandmother is the best cook in the world!” She was so happy to hear my compliments. One day I came home from school and said, “Grandmother! I will make curry rice for dinner”. “What is it?” she asked. She had never had it before. While she was eating my dish, she kept saying: “Delicious, delicious. My granddaughter is such a good cook!” My grandmother was the best cook I knew, so this meant a lot to me. This recipe is the one I made for her all those years ago.

—Maangchi, Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 43)

Historically, cookbooks have been used as a means of defining the position and role of women in British and American society. During the upswinging trend of cultural production and consumption in the eighteenth century, cookbooks often replaced the simple oral tradition of passing recipes, turning cookbooks into primers of sorts and establishing the “boundaries of the female realm” (Tobias 1998, p. 9). Therefore, cookbooks contain more than recipes and tips for cooking but put into print intimate details of the private sphere. Normalizing behavior and creating cultural standards is a primary function, as now, women across cultural lines now have ways to measure up their domestic skills (Tobias 1998, p. 11). Regarding the social networking potential of cookbooks, Janet Theophano notes that cookbooks are “records of women’s social interactions and exchanges” representing their social networks, kinship networks, and social alliances (Theophano 2002, p. 13). There is a great deal to be gleaned from cookbooks, and, specifically regarding women of color and immigrant communities, these books connect women across generations and national lines as a means to preserve community in the face of social change (Theophano 2002, p. 271). In contemporary times, the widespread sale of cookbooks positions the contents in a decidedly more public role, being produced not simply to map relationships and define cultural parameters but to make money while offering insights into a chef’s life. In an age where one can find dozens of Korean cookbooks from a cursory search in a bookstore or online, the chefs themselves, as well as the supposed “authenticity” of the food contained within is critical to set it apart from the dozens of other cookbooks.

Deeply embedded in gendered and racialized notions of mother work regarding cooking, YouTube persona and cooking show host, Maangchi, crafts a persona that, on the one hand, reinforces gendered divisions of labor while simultaneously allowing Maangchi to reclaim what it means to cook something “authentically Korean”. Utilizing stories and narratives that almost exclusively feature women in all stages of the meal (all the way from butchering to ingredient acquisition) and learning recipes and techniques from other Korean women, Maangchi’s cookbook reinforces a narrative that, on one hand, creates a somewhat problematic “primer for the Korean housewife”, but on the other, is radically woman-centered, reclaiming the rights to the Western vision of Korean food’s authenticity and expertise from the overwhelmingly masculinized field of Korean cooking.

Maangchi, whose Americanized name is Emily Kim, and whose Korean name is Kim Gwang-suk (김광숙), was born in the southernmost province of Korea in Imsil and was raised in Yeosu. Earning a master’s degree in education, Maangchi became a part-time professor before getting married and moving to Columbia, Missouri, where she met a vibrant Korean expat community, sparking her quest to learn the various regional cuisines of Korean cooking (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 2). After a divorce, Maangchi moved to Toronto, Canada, before settling in Manhattan, New York, where she currently resides and films her YouTube videos. Released in 2015, her cookbook, Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking, still remains as a best seller in Amazon.com’s “Korean Cooking, Food, and Wine” section, despite having a newer cookbook also sharing space on the best sellers list (Amazon.com 2023). Maangchi shines brightest on YouTube, however, and in 2015 at only 619,000 subscribers, she had more subscribers than celebrity chefs Martha Stewart, Alton Brown, Ree Drummond, and Ina Garten combined (Moskin 2015). Currently in 2023, Maangchi boasts more than six million subscribers, eclipsing what was reported in 2015, when her cookbook first hit shelves.

The New York Times, in 2015 ran an article dubbing her “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child” (Moskin 2015). This comparison in and of itself is worthy of dissection, but nowhere in the article is this comparison explained. What this alludes to, however, is that much like the way that Julia Child’s legacy has proliferated over the years, celebrity or not, she is a home chef that happens to be really good at what she does. Constantly referring to Maangchi as “Ms. Kim”, the article first explores her marital status and the way that video games (surprisingly) led her to cooking videos. It proceeds to deconstruct her appearance, and how her life events such as divorce led her into online gaming, and at the urging of her children decided to focus her energies into a “more nourishing form of internet expression: cooking videos”, further noting that “although she presents herself as girlish and lighthearted, Ms. Kim is first and foremost a teacher, and a strict one at that” (Moskin 2015).

The rhetorical function of the article, written in the time period around the release of Maangchi’s cookbook in 2015, is to paint a picture of who Maangchi is and why she is here. She is a “home cook”, and these recipes are inextricably tied to her experiences as a mother and a Korean woman. It urges that Maangchi does not cut corners and sticks to tradition. This cookbook is for “authentic” Korean cooking, and if she does not do it correctly, she “will hear about it from the Koreans” (Moskin 2015). The twist is Maangchi’s internet savvy. While gendered around her role as a mother to drive her to cook, utilizing her interest in digital spaces, the article notes her work as a counselor for Korean American families that have suffered from abuse, noting that “to her, building community online was a natural extension of her life” (Moskin 2015). Therefore, despite her moves into territory intensely gendered masculine (gaming and online spaces), this is merely an extension of her femininity and maternal sense of duty.

Her cookbook, then, is a unique rabbit hole into Korean cooking, including the philosophies of Korean food, the history of some dishes, the relevance to Koreans (mothers/homemakers in particular), and even Korean brands of ingredients that she likes to use (Maangchi and Chattman 2015). She also outlines her readers as those all over the world that have “wandered into a Korean restaurant”, traveled to Korea, second-generation Koreans who grew up in America eating “their mothers’ authentic Korean food but never learned how to make it”, and adoptees who “left their homes when they were very little” (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 4).

What makes this cookbook such a useful space for analysis is how she injects Koreanness into the text. Beyond her recipes being Korean and Maangchi being a Korean woman herself, she outlines many of the recipes with memories of learning the recipes and fond memories of eating the foods with other Korean women and women in her family. For instance, the opening epigraph of this section features a recipe for “Korean-style curry rice”, a meal that was brought to Korea from Japan, brought to Japan from Britain, and brought to Britain from colonizing the Indian peninsula. She couches this decidedly “global” recipe, touched by colonialism and globalization, in memory of her grandmother, creating a sense of ownership over the recipe and turning this global recipe into a decidedly local Korean recipe.

Visually, the cover art for Maangchi’s cookbook reveals numerous details about the ways Maangchi chooses to construct her persona and her ethos as well. In typical cookbook fashion, Maangchi is positioned with a bright smile toward the camera. Interestingly, nothing about her dress/appearance readily gives away the stereotypical image of a Korean “auntie”. Unlike the stereotypical image of the Asian auntie, rendered asexual, usually portrayed with a curly perm, graying hair, and an apron or decorated in some kind of cooking gear, Maangchi’s hair is solidly black, and she has festive makeup and bright lipstick, and a fitted black shirt. The kitchen itself also betrays the trend to feature feminized pastoral or rustic settings, in favor of a modern (and classed) stainless steel kitchen.

Curiously, it is not just in the image of Maangchi herself but in the words surrounding her and the food she holds, which says so much about her positionality. The title implies that her cooking is, in fact, “real” (in comparison to “what” we do not know), and the tagline for her book reads “Authentic Dishes for the Home Cook” (Maangchi and Chattman 2015). Her use of keywords like “real” and “authentic” implies that she has a particular level of cultural knowledge and savvy about Korean food that, in fact, makes her an expert in the cuisine. There is no indication of her expertise as a Korean chef, such as her training, the popular restaurants she’s opened, or even an “as seen on TV spot”. The only information a casual viewer has to go off, who may not have been exposed to her online presence, is the image of Maangchi herself and the food she holds.

The food itself is of critical importance as well. Despite touting authentic dishes and real Korean cooking, Maangchi is pictured holding a plate of fried chicken. While frying chicken with herbs, spices, and flour is a practice that has been around in Korea since the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), fried chicken, as it is pictured on the cover of her cookbook, is a holdover from a cultural exchange with Black American GI’s during the Korean war, where the Korean fried chicken that spans the globe is informed by its flavor roots in Korean royal cuisine, and its contemporary delivery is derived firmly from Black American culinary tradition. Curiously, if she were presenting what would be globally legible as “quintessentially Korean”, then nothing would stand in for Koreanness other than kimchi, which stands as the primary food symbol of Korea and Korean culture (Walraven 2001; Surya and Lee 2022).

Thus, while Korean fried chicken has decidedly become a popular staple of Korean food in the West, much like “Korean-style barbecue”, and it has its own method of preparation that is unique, it is still inherently a “fusion” food that must credit its existence to histories of colonialism, U.S. military imperialism, and Black American culinary tradition. The parsley that adorns the fried chicken is also not even an herb native to Korea! Interestingly, however, Maangchi constructs a dual narrative, one of authenticity and one of a new cosmopolitanism, of which fusion food is a hallmark (Mannur 2010, p. 184). Her youthful dress, her digital savvy, and the food choices she advertises imply that she is a global citizen, yet her use of terms like “authentic”, continued references to Korean housewifery, and her maternal approach to teaching Korean cooking, she also maintains the socio-cultural capital that accompanies being a middle-aged woman in a feminized space like foodways.

Accordingly, with her use of Korean fried chicken in conjunction with an ethos of authenticity, Maangchi attempts to reorient and control how we perceive of authenticity by balancing the expectations of traditional/patriarchal divisions of labor with the expectations of contemporary culinary cosmopolitanism. She engages in a transactional form of authenticity (Heldke 2005), where her ethos as a Korean cook for an imagined audience of non-native Koreans begets authenticity by the nature of her being (and her constant pronouncements of authenticity as well). Thus, the reader/viewer is led to assume that the food is authentic by nature of the way she crafts a kind of culinary mise-en-scène with the environment and her character, while simultaneously being able to sell popular fusion recipes like Korean fried chicken as authentically Korean as well.3 She flexes with the plastic nature of authenticity by implying that she is what makes the food authentic while also sticking to “tradition” in her food, imbuing the process with authenticity. Authenticity is no longer a static entity but a continuous transaction between the viewer/eater and the producer/chef.

Interestingly, as Korean cuisine becomes increasingly more globally recognizable, Korean food in and of itself is grappling with a global visual perception that is, in some capacities, in contention with the gastronostalgic mythos of Korean food’s aesthetic history (Chung et al. 2016). Identifying the “authentic” Korean at all is an aesthetic dance between what are accepted to be flavors, aesthetics, and ingredients that are understood to be “Korean enough”. Whether the vegetable arrangement on the dish is aesthetically similar enough to what Koreans would identify as “bibimbap” or the Korean fried chicken looked similar enough to the now global image of fried chicken, Maangchi must contend with being a recognizably Korean yet cosmopolitan chef. She must also continually balance between making her food visually appear rustic and traditional while appetizing to as wide a range of global palettes as possible. For this reason, the choice to showcase Korean fried chicken is an both act of appearing authentic as a Korean chef while holding food that is familiar globally (fried chicken) as well as a contemporary figure in the globalization of Korean cuisine.

Despite this balancing act, Maangchi also acts in opposition to the position that many Asian American cookbook authors take (as a response to systemic racist imaginations of Asianness), which is to position their Asianness in an inferior position as a means of cultural assimilation, so as not to present their race and ethnicity as a form of excess (Mannur 2010). She overtly and excessively enunciates her identity in a one-two strike, both as a Korean woman and as a mother, in conjunction with the recipes.4 In her recipe for “extra-strong fermented soybean paste” she states, “But there’s no getting around the fact that when the soybeans ferment, they have a very strong smell. I love it, but others call it stinky. I hope you will grow to love it the way we Koreans do, associating the aroma with the soulful fermented soybean paste stew so integral to our cuisine” (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 256). This stands in direct juxtaposition to the Asian assimilationist narrative often found in Asian celebrity cookbooks, as Maangchi makes more overt attempts to recognize a potentially “non-Korean” (or non-native Korean) audience while sticking firmly to tradition, reiterating “realness” and “authenticity”, even “soulfulness”, as driving factors for the way she presents and cooks her food. In the example of “extra-strong” soybean paste, rather than implying an apology on behalf of her Koreanness or even offering up solutions to reduce the smell, she simply implores the reader to learn to love the smell. The (un)intended aftereffect of this refusal to submit and assimilate is a more “authentic” recipe.

She recalls and connects the sensory element of smell, what Westerners would deem “stinky”, as a critical element of what makes the paste desirable. Anthropologist David E. Sutton refers to smell as a “prototypical symbol”, connecting food to “episodic” (life-history) memories, therefore becoming powerful symbols when imagined in conjunction with foodways (Sutton 2005, p. 310). Maangchi acknowledges the differences and potentially conflicting experiences American readers and cooks may have to the sensory elements of the cooking yet chooses not to offer “alternatives” or fusions to satisfy American senses, instead choosing to reiterate that the smells, textures, and tastes are what make the food authentically Korean.

Despite not being apologetic for the smells evoked when cooking Korean food, Maangchi similarly uses the cookbook space as a way to air her experiences with those that she felt she “offended” with her cooking. In a pointed yet poignant excerpt regarding “Korean Soup Soy Sauce”, she states the following:

When I was young and my neighbors boiled their soy sauce, it used to perfume the whole town! Who said that it’s stinky? I love that smell! But not everyone does, not even all Koreans. I remember boiling my Korean soup soy sauce when I lived in Missouri, and my apartment manager knocked on my door. “What’s that smell? I got a complaint from your neighbor”. I was so embarrassed that I didn’t make soup soy sauce again for a long time, even after I moved to Korea. Now that I live in New York City, I make my own, but when the time comes to boil it, I pack it in my handcart along with a picnic lunch and a portable gas burner and take it out to Spuyten Duyvil Creek, at the base of the Henry Hudson Bridge at the northernmost point of the island of Manhattan. I boil it there, where no one will complain.

(Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 265).

Much like her aside in the soybean paste recipe, she asserts first and foremost that she loves the smell of the boiling soy sauce. She acknowledges that “even Koreans” do not all love the smell; however, in a move that becomes at once deeply personal and pointed, she shares the painful experience of being othered, in her recounting of being told by her apartment manager that her food was smelly and how that revelation scarred her. It is at once an intimate account of her interior emotional response to being called out on her inability to “assimilate” and charged with sensory excess. Her ethnicity is “spatialized through a sensory framework”, and she faced punitive consequences for her excess smells entering another apartment (Mannur 2010, p. 185). Consequently, in a manner befitting assimilationist narratives, she was “disciplined”, choosing not to cook the foods that make up her cultural identity in fears of offending others. What is transgressive, however, is her pointed aside at the end of her statement, which is that she boils her soy sauce by the river, where no one can complain. Interestingly, Maangchi refracts the moment back onto the oppressive structure. While chastised for cooking her food in the private sphere of her home, she makes up for it by cooking it in a public park. She takes what was deemed excess into a space where everyone can and does pass by. Maangchi’s refusal to compromise something so deeply embedded in her cultural tradition is noteworthy.

Maangchi being embarrassed by the smells induced from her cooking demonstrates the ways that immigrants are often “disciplined by the mechanisms of U.S. cultural citizenship” (Mannur 2010, p. 203). In a way, accounting for the smells evoked when cooking Korean food, she qualifies her love of these smells as being deeply embedded in her Korean identity. Rather than taking the approach that contemporary cookbook authors, particularly Asian Americans (Mannur 2010), often take by offering ways to compromise the smells of her cooking, Maangchi instead shifts the lens of responsibility on the viewer/reader, urging them to become more cosmopolitan home chefs, and couching her love of these smells in gastronostalgia. She readily employs a sense of agency in her position as a maternal figure to take charge of the narrative she is creating in her kitchen, softly with a chuckle and smile, checking the viewer in advance at the possibility that the thought crosses their minds.

Discussing “Fermented Sardines”, Maangchi actually uses comparison as a way to sidestep being held responsible for the smells produced by her cooking. Regarding the recipe she notes, “after the long, slow fermentation, the fish becomes pinkish in color and very soft… Its powerful aroma reminds me of aged cheese—assertive in a good way” (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 266). Interestingly, she uses the aging process of cheese, something not traditionally practiced in Korea, but a distinctly Western tradition (in the cultural imaginary at least), as a way to recall a direct comparison. This positions the onus of responsibility for the strong sensory reaction to Western readers themselves, noting that “like their cheese”, the smell of fermenting sardines is joyously assertive. Again, she refuses to be held responsible for and to bear the weight of an entire racial/ethnic group by answering for the smells of her culture by gently nudging that we all make foods that trigger sensory responses, and yet they are all good.

Aside from sensory and affective methods, Maangchi also establishes her ethos as a chef of “authentic Korean food” by reinforcing the modes of domesticity and femininity that have for so long been a hallmark of foodways. Despite her bright and youthful appearance, wearing colorful wigs and bright lipstick, Maangchi buttresses these more colorful displays by establishing her ties to “tradition”. In particular, she reinforces a strong network of women as her teachers and mentors in the cooking and learning process, citing them in a way that nods back to early cookbooks that were not intended for publication but to circulate among groups of women within social circles. She establishes her expertise and ability to construct authentic Korean cuisine as a direct result of the numerous Korean women who have informed this journey into expertise. Likewise, while this is an ostensibly public text, and Maangchi on many occasions demonstrates her abilities to traverse as a global citizen (via her knowledge of fusion foods and the digital nature of her emergence), she firmly reiterates throughout her cookbook how Korean housewifery informs her approach to cooking. By repeatedly asserting that “this is how Korean housewives do it”, she establishes a link to a gendered form of labor long imagined to be central to cultural survival and reproduction. She is performing cultural work as a cosmopolitan citizen while maintaining roots in tradition and gendered labor, creating a particularly robust persona that can exude an adaptive yet traditional form of Korean cultural authenticity (Srinivas 2013). This is a particularly potent approach, as Korean food is currently experiencing the growing pains of globalization and commercialization and is contending with the need to represent the nation while also adhering to a more conservative traditional history (Kim 2021).

In her cookbook, Maangchi references other women regarding her recipes on 33 different occasions. These are mostly her mother and grandmother; however, they also include friends, local businesswomen, and even a home economics teacher from her childhood (Maangchi and Chattman 2015). Likewise, all but one photo (which is not directly food related) feature women doing the food work or being near the food. Similarly, the intent of the mentions shifts between being employed as memories in little asides regarding certain dishes, to actually acknowledging that she learned the particular recipes from the women. In one recipe for “Mixed Rice with Raw Fish”, Maangchi states she learned it from a “real expert” who has prepared the dish “thousands of times” (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 52). She even shows a traditional sense of reverence by referring to the woman as “Mrs” instead of by her first name. Rather than displaying her knowledge of Korean food as omniscient, she defers to what she considers “real experts”, or other women, in a decidedly collectivist act.

This draws from a long tradition of recipe sharing and community building among women. Janet Theophano notes, “As women worked side by side in kitchens in varied relationships… they passed recipes from one family to another, their cooperative labor and exchange of culinary lore leaving as traces these imprints of social interaction… as we taste one woman’s interpretation of a culinary creation, we remember that it is the result of many minds and many hands” (Theophano 2002, p. 48). Sometimes the memories posted do not have anything to do with cooking the food, but more broadly the sense of community built from procuring the ingredients, such as her reflections of a New Year ritual, where women would gather to have their rice ground and steamed into rice cakes for New Year rice cake soup. She reflects on the ways that friends would chat waiting for the mill to grind their rice flour (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 73). As important as the recipes themselves, how women found themselves in community among other women is a critical element that Maangchi recognizes. In a form of experiential authenticity, by having the memories and experiences of making rice cakes “many years ago”, she at once established a sense of credibility in how she learned to cook but also in the community of women she cooked among.

Maangchi even extends this sense of community outside of Korean women, reasserting that food preparation and procurement is a woman’s space. In a squash porridge recipe, she recalls not being able to find the native Korean kind of winter squash, yet finding the help of a farmer at a farmers market who shared with her how she cooked her squash with brown sugar and cinnamon, leading Maangchi to realize she had found an American alternative (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 81). Similarly, she has small asides in some recipes that she calls “Maangchi and Friends”, where she quotes interactions she has had with friends and subscribers. In one particularly poignant entry, subscriber “ChaMee” notes that she cried when she saw the recipe for sweet pancakes with brown sugar syrup, as it reminded her of walking through the markets in Seoul with her mother before she was adopted into the United States, to which Maangchi responded “ChaMee, I’m so touched by your story that it makes me cry now! Your mom would be proud of you if she knew you were making your own hotteok and thinking about her” (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 207). Fitting within the narrative of keeping the recipes woman-oriented, she also makes direct contact with fans and includes their reflections about the recipes with their networks of women as well. Maangchi is reproducing a sense of community while simultaneously redefining it to be inclusive of her readers as well. It renders the public nature of her cookbook into a very intimate and collaborative space.

Along with centering her narratives and recipe acquisition around women, Maangchi also consistently makes direct invocations of Korean homemakers. While Maangchi grounds her cooking and recipes in authenticity and tradition, she also moderates certain performances of womanhood throughout the cookbook as well, asserting her knowledge of “what housewives do”. More than a dozen references to Korean housewives and the customs they perform and the values they reproduce are critical elements in establishing Maangchi’s own sense of credibility. Aside from the fact that she herself identified as a housewife through much of her children’s lives, for Koreans, and East Asians more broadly, the act of mothering is also an act of reproducing ideological state apparatuses. Cultural anthropologist Anne Allison employs Louis Althusser’s concept of the Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser 1971)5 in order to assert that the intense labor that goes into mothering and, in particular, food work, “aestheticizes a certain social order” that is distinctive to a given culture (Allison 2013, p. 168). Maangchi’s act of recognizing the role and significance that Korean homemakers play, then, is not merely a nod to food, but also acknowledging the deeply rooted social and socializing culture of Korea.

Most of her references to housewives are relatively short, often not having much to do with the cooking or even the philosophy of a given dish. Such examples include sentences like “Most Korean housewives keep anchovy stock on hand so they can make a satisfying meal of noodles at a moments notice” (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 64), or “In the old days, every Korean housewife made her own hot pepper paste, and today many still do” (Maangchi and Chattman 2015, p. 259). In this way, she is able to demonstrate a form of insider knowledge, which lends to her overall sense of expertise with the cuisine, but also the culture. She is not instructing people how to become better Korean housewives, as that is not even her intended audience, but she is further demonstrating how this becomes a space where she is an expert. She becomes that much more authentic of a vehicle to learn about Koreanness if she is also aware of the cultural impact that Korean women have on Korean foodways.

Interestingly, while not her intention, these iterations of Korean culture and womanhood in conjunction with the recipes also put her in a different category of chef than her masculine counterparts. With many chefs being able to boast classic training or even watching women relatives to learn their style, Maangchi asserts that the domestic roles/labor associated with motherhood are critical fixtures in what constitutes the authenticity of Korean cooking. As food scholar and historian Anne L. Bower, in her work regarding African American cookbooks and their capacity to narrate history as well as culture, notes The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro was a deeply collective endeavor that offered Black women an opportunity to contribute to history and “narrate that history in a way that includes food, customs, and figures well known or less recognized” (Bower 2007, p. 161). In a similar fashion, Maangchi is reframing what Korean food means in a global cultural landscape, ensuring that her work and her contributions are deeply woman-centered while simultaneously reorienting our notions of authenticity and the ideological elements of gendered labor for Korean women.

4. Doing Race “Right”: Maangchi’s Digital Presence

… one cannot fully understand cultural practices unless ‘culture,’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is brought back into ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense, and the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavours of food… The manner in which culture has been acquired lives on in the manner of using it: the importance attached to manners can be understood once it is seen that it is these imponderables of practice which distinguish the different—and ranked—modes of culture acquisition, early or late, domestic or scholastic, and the classes of individuals which they characterize.

—Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions (Bourdieu 1984, p. xxv)

Maangchi’s success is not just luck. Part of her ability to “sell” authenticity is to embody it and “demonstrate” her expertise. The critical element, however, is that her popularity is almost entirely dependent on her audience buying into her performances of Koreanness. As Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the products that Maangchi produces are only authentic if her consumers can make those distinctions and can recognize the authenticity she is selling. While she is not necessarily peddling a particularly classed “lifestyle”, per se, Maangchi is working within a classed framework that allows for her iterations of Korean housewifery and motherhood to dictate how she is received as a chef. Presenting first as a good mother, second as a great cook, and lastly as an internet savvy global citizen is inevitably wrapped up in her ability and privilege to perform these duties and embody this symbolic Korean mother figure. Anne L. Bower (2007) warns us against hierarchizing authenticity regarding food in reference to Black American foodways, however, noting the danger in deeming anything other than “soul food” as somehow less authentic of a Black American experience. Maangchi, then, is forced to operate from both sides of the spectrum. Her performances of race and the food she cooks must be read as somehow mythically Korean, which involves her adhering to a particular social script with particular kinds of recipes and cooking methods, while her continued success depends on her ability to deviate from that script, introducing “fusion” food and somehow managing to suture that food into her “traditional” narrative of authenticity. Again, her audience must buy this performance. As important as the food she cooks, Maangchi must herself be constructed into the paragon of Korean womanhood.

All of this lends itself to the expectation that authenticity can be necessarily dangerous or particularly tricky (Heldke 2005); however, when viewed through the lens of gendered and raced performance as well as active resistance, plastic forms of authenticity can emerge. Regarding the ways that performance turns history into spectacle in Ottoman restaurant spaces, Defne Karaosmanoglu asserts that racial and cultural performance renders the past into an “exciting spectacle”, meaning that history is continuously reframed as new and exciting out of necessity (Karaosmanoglu 2009, p. 355). Translating a cultural past for a contemporary audience, then, is in and of itself an act of being a global citizen. The inherent danger in rendering history as a spectacle, of course, is the possibility that that very history will become exoticized or othered (Karaosmanoglu 2009, p. 355); however, Maangchi’s nods to cultural history and “tradition”, and her performances of a pastiche(ish) form of Koreanness for a digital audience are still legitimate expressions of Korean authenticity. Where Karaosmanoglu questions who gets to decide what is “new” or authentic (Karaosmanoglu 2009, p. 342), Maangchi serves as this gatekeeper, reorienting how we conceive of “authenticity” as flexible, or plastic, which is critical, as authenticity is powerful. Foodways are a particularly salient space to observe this plastic form of authenticity as well, as for many immigrant communities, it is through food that a community can negotiate the tensions about “home”, citizenship, and authenticity (Mannur 2010, p. 185).

While not pretending to be an insider in a community she does not belong to, Maangchi is actively capitalizing on the (often problematic) tropes of the “immigrant Korean woman”6 to pursue a larger goal of spreading awareness and appreciation for Korean cuisine. Where Korean cooking channels are a dime a dozen (any cooking channels for that matter), Maangchi has struck a chord with users. The foods she makes stick as close to “tradition” as possible, without significant deviations from what are considered “authentic” recipes, but her bubbly personality and position as the “happy smiling immigrant” enable a certain amount of freedom and flexibility on her part, as she can deliver an unassuming sense of multiculturalism without rattling any racial cages (Ahmed 2017). Through her racialized affectations and the use of mise-en-scène Maangchi constructs a cultural gatekeeping ethos.

Authenticity, then, becomes a radical act of decentering, and for marginalized groups participating as global citizens in a global market (like Maangchi and the internet), it offers opportunities to push up against the very performances that supposedly define them. In an interview with “Talks at Google”, regarding finding a job when she moved to North America, Maangchi notes, “My resume is not useful, because graduate school? Who cares? Immigrant. My English is not perfect” (Talks at Google 2015). She immediately recognized upon job searching outside of Korea that her position as an immigrant would limit the scope of opportunities afforded to her. Likewise, she says, “This is a very fascinating story. People ask me where are you from? And then, I know what it means. They see my face, right? So, even though I’m legally Canadian, I say, I’m Korean. So, legally Canadian, but waiting for my green card in America”7 (Talks at Google 2015). She continues to narrate why she got into cooking on YouTube and releasing a cookbook. Digital spaces are inherently participatory, and Maangchi is not ignorant of the benefits of a platform like YouTube8. While she narrates issues of being rendered a foreigner in the material world, digital spaces are ones where her ethnicity will not bar her from participation.9 Having been an online gamer prior to releasing her videos, Maangchi is well aware of the mechanisms of digital community building. Her performances in her videos, then, are not blind performances but carefully crafted yet authentic representations of certain truths of herself. By employing effect and editing that capitalizes on the “otherness” that she has already stated she is aware of, “the happy immigrant”, she is able to build a fanbase and, subsequently, become a gatekeeper of what it actually means to be Korean, and more specifically a Korean mother. She is retroactively using traditionally deemed authentic modes of Korean motherhood to forge new terrain.

Regarding the trope of the happy immigrant, feminist and postcolonialist scholar Sara Ahmed examines the way that happiness operates to mitigate the feelings of discomfort of white people from what she terms “melancholic migrants” (Ahmed 2017). The melancholic migrant is an immigrant who just cannot seem to “let go” of their homeland and never ceases to hold onto what makes them different. Multiculturalism only works when those who are deemed outsiders are happy, and happiness is coded in terms of integration and assimilation into the dominant (white) culture.

For Maangchi, she actively employs affective cues and signs to her viewers and readers that read as particularly happy. This is not to say that she is not naturally a cheerful person, as it is beside the point. Maangchi’s sunny disposition and performances of difference are happy performances of differences, able to be sutured cleanly into a narrative of multiculturalism. From the outset, Maangchi has a thick Korean accent, which she does not hide, but unlike the popular media representation of the angry (melancholic) Korean auntie in the liquor store, Maangchi presents as the opposite of this, at times in outlandish ways. Her opening bumper played in all her videos is a close-up of her hands chopping an onion, which pans to her smiling, holding a fish and a knife, with a happy tune whistled in the background, closing with a wink from Maangchi at the camera. Similarly, the official banner for her YouTube page is a cartoon version of this same image, with Maangchi holding a butcher knife and a fish against a lime green background (Maangchi 2007). She is wearing decorative makeup, including bright lipstick, highlighting her open smile. Reminiscent of material culture scholar Psyche Williams-Forson’s analysis regarding a similarly staged image for Snowdrift Shortening (Williams-Forson 2006) that featured a racialized caricature of a Black woman, also holding a knife and raw meat, Maangchi “looks the part”. She is happy, smiling, and with hair adorned with bright bows. Yet, despite her polished appearance, she is still brandishing a large knife and a large fish, leaving the image open for interpretation. It is an almost dystopian satirical play on her position as the happy immigrant, juxtaposing a very classed image of a butcher with a happy aesthetic, all the way down to the coy wink to the viewer at the end. Do not worry about the knife, though, she is safe!

Regarding her physical presentation, in a video for “Korean Twisted Doughnuts”, she wears a large, curly, pastel purple wig with a giant pink bow made out of hair as she cooks (Maangchi 2015). She vacillates between dressing in colorful and youthful wigs and accessories and wearing her hair simply in a bun with an apron. Even in an apron, however, she makes sure to highlight her appearance, with comments like “Fashion show! How do you like my apron?”, before proceeding to tell a story about buying it in an airport (Maangchi 2016b). All her outfit choices, while not stereotypical, position her in the following two ways: as a hip auntie and as a mother. She utilizes this space in-between to physically project both a sense of fun and “comfort” to her fans by proxy of her appearance. It is not every day that one sees a middle-aged Korean mother wearing bright purple wigs, but in each instance, Maangchi’s outfits are positioned to buttress her fun and happy personality. It is harder to pin feelings of racism and xenophobia on a body that is performing multiculturalism as a “happy object” (Ahmed 2017).

Perhaps most noteworthy in her outward performances of race is the way she personifies her thick accent. She levies this would-be detriment by toying with her often-unique encounters with the language. During close-up cooking shots in her videos, Maangchi regularly posts captions on the videos with little phrases about the food, or onomatopoeias while the food is cooking. In a video for “Omurice”, she says, “Next, it’s my secret ingredient”, and a caption pops up in the corner of the screen reading “‘Uh-oh! Secret?’:)” (Maangchi 2017). In the same video, she adds butter to a pan, and the caption reads “Yep, yep! Dance, dance!” and further along as she melts cheese into the dish, the caption reads “‘Maangchi, we are melting from your love!’♥♥♥” (Maangchi 2017). In a video for traditional kimchi, while chopping water dropwort, a caption reads “chopee, chopee, chopee!” and while chopping scallions, the onomatopoeia “choop, choop, choop!” is displayed (Maangchi 2014).

In her work regarding “gastroporn” and the performances of race in food television, Ariane Cruz (2013) dissects the performances of the cooking show Down Home with the Neely’s, examining the ways that despite the professional nature of the show, the Neely’s are positioned as “racial counterfeits”, performing a neo-minstrel archetype of “southern blackness” that is inviting and safe for white audiences. They employ the term “branded blackness” as a way to configure this type of authenticity that gets peddled across popular culture (Cruz 2013, p. 327). The Neely’s become commodified signifiers of a “safe” and inviting form of “authentic” Blackness. While the core construction of Cruz’ term “branded blackness” is applicable to Maangchi as well, given that she is positioned in the same manner, as a safe, happy, inviting, Korean housewife, the medium of YouTube and the internet more broadly, offer a sense of agency over her representation that corporate networks do not. She is not censored in the same fashion or constructed by a network of producers; rather, she constructs this image as a way to simultaneously critique the very system of representations that she is entangled.

Her affectations, then, will often be positioned directly at the viewer themselves as well. For instance, in a video for “Spicy Beef and Vegetable Soup (Yukgaejang: 육개장)”, she says, “Are you guys hungry? I’m so hungry!” with a caption reading “Hungry bungry!:)” (Maangchi 2016d). Indirectly inviting the viewer to participate, she asks, while cooking potato pancakes, “’Who’s potato’s best friend?’:) ‘Onion!’ clap clap!:)” (Maangchi 2016c). Her continual use of emoticons reinforces a cheerful, distinguishably “foreign”, yet unassuming auntie figure. In a study regarding the ways that representations of Black women present success as it is paired with food, Fabio Parasecoli, analyzing Tiana’s character in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, states, “Her representation as food provider, manual worker, as well as nurturer—all familiar roles for black women in American culture—assuages any potential anxiety in mainstream audiences about her professional success and her change of social status” (Parasecoli 2010, p. 466). In a similar manner, Maangchi’s immense success is in part in her ability to maintain a connection to a form of gendered labor, and her unassuming and endearing word choices highlight that she does not pose a threat to viewers. Her consistent attention to playing the part due to the happy immigrant reinforces her safety in a space (online) where unfettered racism, sexism, and xenophobia can and do often disproportionately affect marginalized individuals.

While these are performances that undoubtedly recall racist and xenophobic imaginations of cultural assimilation and multiculturalism, this is not to say that Maangchi is unaware of what these performances do, nor is it implying that she is not at once always actively resisting assimilation and colonialism. For instance, the sensory and affective nature of smell is critical for creating and maintaining imagined community through memory. In her video “How to make Korean fermented soybean paste (Doenjang: 된장) & soy sauce (Guk-ganjang: 국간장)”, she takes the viewer through the yearlong process of making Korean doenjang, which is a cornerstone of nearly all Korean cooking (akin to high-fructose corn syrup in the US). Regarding the smell of the fermenting blocks of soybeans, she states, “I love this smell… It makes my living room really, you can say stinky, I can say pungent, delicious smell”. Later in the video, regarding the boiling of the stock to make soup soy sauce, she states, “In my house, I cannot boil. Because if I boil… smell, smells, the house is full of smells. All of the neighbors, I’m living right in the middle of Manhattan the city, and probably I may get arrested” (Maangchi 2016a). Maangchi is well aware of how smell functions, and for someone in a marginalized position like herself, her joking persona espoused in the videos allows her to make a coded social commentary on xenophobia and racism, as a result of the fact that she has constructed herself as fundamentally “harmless”.

5. Conclusions

Maangchi serves as a useful model for understanding a plastic form of authenticity that is committed to radically decentering traditional notions of cultural gatekeeping. Whereas authenticity is a hotly contested and disputed term (Appadurai 1986; Bendix 1992; Heldke 2005; Jackson 2005; Ku 2014), the inherent agency and cultural power that authenticity wields is particularly transformative for those in the margins. As traditional forms of authenticity rely on truths espoused by “experts” (who in contemporary foodways typically means white masculine outsiders of a given community) (Weiss 2011) by centering those from the margins in narratives about authenticity and creating a space that allows for flexible performances of race, gender, and global citizenship, authenticity can move from an act of exclusion to one of inclusion. The benefits of such are manifold. For instance, when cultural artifacts like cookbooks became considered worthy objects of study, significantly more nuanced images of daily life and society in different times and spaces emerged, and women’s words became powerful tools to tell and construct cultural histories (Theophano 2002). Much in the same way, authenticity precipitates authority, and recognition and authority over one’s culture and communities are critical for the maintenance and reproduction of cultural tradition.

However, this is not to say that authenticity does not have its limitations. Being that authenticity is directly correlated with power, the ability to determine the boundaries for what constitutes the “real” is inherently problematic and risks exploiting and appropriating the very communities it seeks to empower (Jackson 2005). It also runs the risk of reifying stereotypes and commodifying certain performances of race and ethnicity in ways that are not beneficial to the communities represented (Cruz 2013). For these critical reasons, the “plastic” framework of authenticity allows for subjectivity, trust in potential “fictions”, and for cultural narratives and histories often pushed to the margins to be regarded with as much authority as those from the outside looking in.

YouTube chef and self-professed “Korean housewife”, Maangchi performs her cultural identity in ways that assert authority over her imagination of what constitutes real Korean motherhood. Toying with the trope of the happy immigrant, Maangchi deploys her image in ways that subvert and transgress these tropes, enabling her to subtly and (un)consciously critique systems of racism and xenophobia. In many ways, resulting from the nature of her emergence in digital spaces, and without overhead authority controlling the image she projects, she is uniquely positioned to assert her own cultural authority over what she deems “authentically Korean” food. Now working herself into various formats (YouTube, cookbooks, a web portal Maangchi.com, Instagram, and TikTok), she is not merely a gatekeeper for what is considered authentic but is also able to participate as a global citizen in an increasingly networked world. By balancing her adherence to traditions in her cooking tutorials and narrations of Korean motherhood but being transgressive and contemporary in her dissemination of messages, she has redefined what it means to be authentically Korean. Maangchi sets a precedent for understanding the ways that women of color can exert agency and control over cultural meaning-making and radically deconstruct traditional methods of defining and applying cultural authenticity.