I come from a family of nomads and immigrants, which means we’re all pretty damn good at packing.
If I were to explain my heritage, this would be more autobiography than essay. All you need to know is this: although I currently live in the US, I was born and raised in Colombia, my mom is Panamanian, and my grandfather from that side of the family is South Korean. I carry the act of leaving in my veins as much as the uncontrollable yearning for a return. When not a single living generation in my family shares the same birthplace as the one before, the one thread that unites us is the inability to stay in one place, to feel of a place. That is, besides food. Latin American and East Asian food were served alongside each other on my dinner table, the only plane where they were ever equal in my childhood, and it made for one hell of a meal.
The problem with being from everywhere, however, is that you never have all of your favorite foods in one place. You can’t. There’s only so much you can carry, so much you can buy in a store. I always knew as an elemental truth that there were certain meals I could only eat in certain cities, certain houses, that I would have to wait all year for a bite of. That was never more present than during Christmas, when my grandmother would pack at least five tamales, often more than that, in her suitcase. Airport security questioned her every time without fail—squared bundles enveloped in banana leaves on the X-ray scan evoked the dark side of Colombia’s fame, prompting associations with cocaine before maize. My grandma got away with it every time. This was not only due to the fact that she was telling the truth or because she was an unassuming middle-aged lady, but also a direct result of how she would justify her cheeky food smuggling. Lo traigo pa’ mi hijo, él extraña los tamales Colombianos—I’m bringing them for my son, he misses Colombian tamales. There was nothing more to it. The young officers knew exactly what she meant, understood the love of a mother. But most importantly, they knew, deeply and inherently, how tamales are prepared completely different in each country, in each region. Unlike us, these tamales are seldom found outside of their place of origin. They are specifically made out of the ingredients of the land around them, prepared with knowledge passed down through generations of people who stayed put. They are unmistakably of somewhere and are, therefore, rare, precious.
Similarly, my grandfather, who lived between Panama City and Bogotá my entire childhood, used to pack dim sum in Tupperware containers, waking up early to order a whole meal on a Saturday morning before flying out. We would enjoy it together as a family, reheated but nevertheless tasty, the following Sunday. My love for Chinese food came from a local restaurant—a restaurant where my grandparents celebrated their wedding and every anniversary after that, a restaurant local to another country, a country with a vibrant East Asian population that made me feel less alone, less foreign in my mixed identity. Years later, when a Colombian friend told me she had never tried dim sum before, I was confused. Horrified, even. It took me a few minutes to realize there were indeed no proper dim sum restaurants in our city growing up, not that most people knew of at least. My ability to enjoy siu mai dumplings and sweet pork buns was only possible because of my grandfather’s sneaking. What an extraordinary way to show love, how precious.
Discussing this with my friend, who is also an immigrant herself, suspends my wonder. It is normal for her, common, to fly with a suitcase full of perishables. Not cans or plastic-covered sweets or exotic packets of chips, but cheese and cooked rice and soy-seasoned eggs in a Ziploc bag. My other friend tells me her family, away from Spain for only one year, packed an entire leg of jamón ibérico with them, bone and all. But I choose to remark on this practice, this sacred ritual, because I don’t think everyone does it. Not everyone has to.
This past weekend, my mom came back home from another country carrying my grandmother’s fresh arepas and my great aunt’s bindaetteok. I eat them immediately, eagerly, because I know they will not last and I am grateful they have traveled this far. In every grain of salt and flaky edge I taste the son-mat of the women in my family. Son-mat is a Korean word my grandfather taught me: sabor de mano he translates for me: hand taste. The term is both wonderfully literal and metaphorically nostalgic, referring to the way a meal tastes uniquely of the hands who made it, unable to be replicated by someone else. It is a two-syllable love letter to the unreplaceable prowess of home cooking, but to me it also sounds like a lament of the fact that once we lose someone, we lose their hands as well—we can no longer hold them, let alone taste their food, ever again.
Leaving is, to me, a little loss, a slight death. When we move away, emigrate, we not only leave behind the hands that make our food, but the people who sing while lighting the stove, the freshness of the home-grown herbs picked by their callused fingers. We give up the soil that hosts our fruit, the roots that keep the mango trees tall, the rain that blesses the yucas and plátanos in the fields. I suspect the act of bringing fresh food on a stale airplane is our attempt at capturing the hand taste of those we miss. And more so, it is a way immigrants have of recreating, far away, something akin to a land’s taste, sabor de pueblo. Home.
There are dozens of other instances like these where my family members and friends and I have all gone out of our way to take a piece of a place with us, wrapped in scarves and wrinkled shirts. Writing about it demonstrates what I love most about this quirky tradition, this dissent against perpetual displacement. Unlike a magnet or a straw hat, more so than a photo album or a childhood toy, food is alive. It spoils quickly, turns sour with its microbes, stales as it interacts with air. It carries with it skin particles, native nutrients, silent stories. Food like this—the tamales and dumplings and mung bean pancakes—begs to be eaten fresh. You cannot display it on the shelf, you cannot store it forever nor preserve it past its natural expiration date. Packing home in a Tupperware, in a suitcase, reminds us home is intrinsically temporal and therefore temporary, elusive. Home is hands and hugs and grandmas. It is a taste you forget after you take the last bite. It is the hunger you get right afterwards.
Miyin Delgado Karl is a Colombian writer, screenwriter, and poet currently based in Southern California. Her work centers around themes of immigration, dual identity, queerness, and Latin American folklore. Miyin currently works in film production and writes stories with equal measures of silliness and trauma.
Featured image by Tai’s Captures on unsplash.
