5 Questions with Ellie Freeman
Ellie Freeman has had many wildly different jobs in her life; currently she is a social media person who churns out tweets and TikToks. She’s written for SBS, Peril, Pencilled In and Catapult, mostly about her experiences as a Korean-Australian adoptee.
She’s also part of the Korean Adoptees in Australia Network, supporting Korean adoptees in Australia with resources, advocating for adoptee rights and organising social catch-ups over Korean barbecue.
No.1
Tell us more about your creative non-fiction piece, ‘Inauthentic Asian’, published in the second edition of the New Voices on Food anthology. What prompted you to write it?
Instagram drama and over 30 years of seething adoptee anger.
In 2021, an Asian-American chef accused Eric Ehler, a Korean adoptee chef who cooks Chinese food, of ‘adopting a white gaze’ based on an offhand remark he made about Chinese food. Eric is a formally trained Chinese restaurant sous chef. The other chef, who I won’t name, neglected to mention that Eric is not white and in fact Korean, and his lifelong love of Chinese food came from him trying to connect to Asian culture as a child.
I can relate to Eric. My first experience with Asian food was our suburban Chinese restaurant. There wasn’t any Korean restaurants in our area or anywhere nearby, and my family did not know where to get Korean food in Brisbane. It’s not something I had control over. I didn’t try Korean food until I was 15.
The chef misled readers into believing that Eric was white based on his name. Many Korean adoptees are adopted into white families, [which means] we take on our white families’ surnames and are often given a new name reflective of our adoptive country which, again, is not something we have any control over.
I think most adoptees have at some point been interrogated over our names: why do you have a white name but you look Asian? It’s a microaggression. We don’t fit into your idea of what an Asian person is.
Anyway, this chef turned out to have a long history of attacking mixed-race Asians and POC over their cooking. In another attack, he accused someone of not being able to ‘authentically’ cook their Cantonese grandfather’s food because they were ‘not Cantonese enough’. I thought this was such a strange and disturbing mindset—that you’re not allowed to love and cook food based on concepts around blood and cultural purity.
It sparked an online discussion that I mostly saw through the perspective of Korean-American adoptees and mixed-race Asians online. After years of being treated as lesser-than for being an adoptee, I was surprised to see so many POC on Eric’s side.
[So] I was frustrated about the whole thing and started writing a big rant in my Notes app. I angrily wrote down every single memory of Asian food I’d eaten throughout my life. Then I saw the callout for New Voices on Food 2 and decided to turn it into something readable.
No.2
As can be gleaned from the title, your piece interrogates the idea of ‘authenticity’ when it comes to food. You bring up your dad’s spag bol recipe, which he learned from his Italian friends, the suburban Chinese-Australian restaurant food you ate growing up, and how your mother’s kimchi ‘is not like the kimchi I’ve eaten in Korea or Australia’. You later learn that bondegi (silkworm larvae) is unpopular amongst younger people, as older folk in Korea consume it for a taste of nostalgia, ‘who ate it at a time there wasn’t much else to eat’. What do you think informs people’s ideas of ‘authenticity’? Is such a term useful at all?
Authenticity means the original, or staying true to it. Food exactly how it’s made in the original location with the original ingredients, made by someone with intimate knowledge of that food’s culture, unaffected by modern pop culture and trends. And [this is] somehow ‘better’. It’s a little bit true: Korean barbecue in Korea is so much better than in Australia—you get way more banchan, for free!
There are times it’s a useful term, such as when you want to explain that a Korean restaurant in Australia makes food that tastes like something you ate in Korea and has absolutely nailed those flavours. Or when that awful hipster cafe throws random western superfood ingredients into a bowl, doesn’t add gochujang and calls it ‘bibimbap’, and you’re trying to explain to your friends that this bowl of nonsense is not even the slightest bit authentic.
But as I’ve eaten my way around Asia and Australia, I’ve learned that there might not be one original anything and one person’s idea of ‘original’ might just be a particular snapshot in time and space. There’s regional variations of the same dishes across Asia, which have been influenced by colonisation, displaced people and poverty, or simply by the availability of ingredients in a particular area. With that in mind, I don’t think it’s fair to claim that one version of a dish is more ‘authentic’ than another.
‘Fusion’ used to be a dirty word, put in the same category as ‘inauthenticity’. But I’ve always been of the opinion that fusion food is good when you add something to make it better—bad if you remove the fun parts, like chilli.
There are a few great pho and ramen restaurants near me in Melbourne which I love that are Asian-owned and have tweaked their recipes a little bit. Their dishes may not be like the originals back in their home countries, but they’re still delicious and packed with incredible flavours. Creativity, being adventurous and succeeding (in my stomach’s opinion) should be celebrated.
Nowadays I cynically think ‘authenticity’ is used to take advantage of our collective anxiety around cultural identities, white guilt and a belief that authentic means ‘better’ to sell things and exclude competition. I recently saw a banger tweet thread from Young Mi Mayer that I think explains my cynicism perfectly:
No.3
In ‘Inauthentic Asian’, you write, ‘As an adoptee, I often see a particular set of agreed-upon narratives of the Asian diaspora experience that mostly doesn’t include people like me.’ Can you speak more to this?
From my perspective, I find that people in the Asian diaspora share stories and socialise with each other based on common family and childhood experiences in an Asian immigrant household. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I still enjoy stories and art by Asian creators. But an overwhelming number of Korean adoptees are adopted in white families who often have no knowledge of our birth cultures, so we can’t relate. There is a vast swathe of cultural customs, childhood nostalgia, memories and cultural knowledge associated with being Asian that we simply do not have. Because of that, we often don’t fit into Asian spaces or white Western spaces. I’m too Asian to be Aussie, yet I’ve been called a ‘fake Asian’ and told I’m not really Asian. Even though I’ve now met my biological parents and they are both definitely Korean.
I didn’t connect with my Korean family and culture until my mid-20s. My Korean parents are Korean people in Korea. They are not immigrants. So while I do have an Asian family, most Asian people can’t relate to that either. It can feel quite alienating, having to learn from a young age that being different makes other people uncomfortable, and unfortunately that sometimes includes people in my own community.
This all sounds very negative, so I want to add that I also have some incredible Asian-Australian and Asian-American friends in my life who may not be adopted, but have made an effort to understand me, make me feel valid as an Asian person and have supported me as I’ve come to terms with who I am as an adopted Asian-Australian.
No.4
You mention cooking your own version of kimchi jiggae, which uses fish sauce instead of anchovy stock because you dislike anchovies. What other so-called “inauthentic” foods are you proud of preparing?
I’ve recently gotten onto dongeurami kimbap. Kimbap is my favourite Korean snack ever—it’s a seaweed roll with cooked veggies, rolled omelette and cheap meat such as processed ham seasoned with sesame oil. You can buy it everywhere in Korea for just a few dollars. It’s usually made by mums with incredibly strong arm muscles who can roll an ungodly amount of fillings into a sushi-sized seaweed roll. It tastes wholesome and comforting.
Unfortunately I’m rubbish at rolling kimbap and my rolls tend to fall apart. But then I saw dongeurami kimbap on Tiktok which came from the popular K-drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Dongeurami kimbap is made by folding kimbap ingredients into a square. It’s so much easier. Then I add the tangy mustard sauce that you usually eat with mayak kimbap, which is the ‘mini’ traditional market version.
No.5
As k-culture becomes more visible in the western world, do you think Korean adoptee experiences will enter the mainstream? What are some misconceptions you’d like to address?
The Korean international adoptee began in the 50s after the Korean War. It still continues today. Many adoptees around my age who were adopted in the 80s have grown up in an era of online media, an interconnected, globalised world and a hunger for diverse stories. We are adults now and ready to tell our stories, but most of them are independently-produced.
The first adoptee-made piece of art I ever saw was Approved for Adoption, an animated film about a Belgian adoptee’s life and his search for birth family. I watched it at the Korean Film Festival in Brisbane, just a few months before I met my own birth family. In the last decade we’ve seen the documentaries Twinsters and a.k.a. Dan, which are about adoptees separated from their twins. There’s also a great indie movie called Seoul Searching, about Koreans who come back to Korea in the 80s, and which includes an adoptee character.
There’s a small handful of adoptee-authored books like Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know. Melbourne-based adoptee Ra Chapman’s play K-Box finally launched its season at Malthouse Theatre this year after COVID-19 delays. A group of us adoptees went together to see our lives on stage. If you’ve seen the play you might understand how intense that was for us. Later on that night we saw live readings by academic and writer Ryan Gustafsson, and comics artist Meg O’Shea. I’m attempting to write a book about my own search for my birth family.
There are hundreds of blogs, videos and social media content by adoptees wanting to tell their stories. But we are also protective. We’re very aware of how non-adoptees want to exploit our trauma and push certain narratives, [which are generally] informed by politics and money. I’ve seen a very small number of adoptee characters on TV shows made by people who are not adopted. The representation is usually not great.
There are many misconceptions about adoptees. We are not a monolith. We are scattered across mostly Western countries—the US, Australia, the UK, Europe. Not everybody wants to find their birth families, visit Korea or connect with their culture, while some of us do and move to Korea permanently.
It is very difficult for adoptees to find birth family. Adoption agencies often choose not to share information about our origins and birth families, or refuse to help us search. Not all of us have been orphaned as well, and some find that our adoption files contain false information or that we were adopted without our birth families’ consent. Some of us have been adopted into loving adoptive families, while others have been adopted into abusive families. Our birth parents aren’t unloving monsters; there are so many political and cultural factors that have influenced our adoptions.
I’ve recently been working with the Australian and U.S Korean Rights Group, a group made up of Korean adoptees, to appeal to the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission as part of an investigation into adoption agency practices and the suspicious circumstances around adoption [see more info here]. Adoptees are not cute little orphaned babies. We are empowered and informed adults who have been through some shit and just want to live life knowing who we are.
Find out more
The second anthology of works celebrating the diversity of voices to be found within the Australian food landscape. Edited once again by the inimitable Lee Tran Lam and following on from the success of 2020’s initial volume, this second anthology is a little book on food and identity that, we believe, simply cannot be missed.
Featuring a fresh selection of new and emerging voices from a wide variety of under-represented backgrounds and tied around a theme of ‘Past, Present and Future’, it promises to open your mind to new perspectives, foods and ways of thinking. A reminder that food can be a powerful time-travel machine—a symbol of 65,000 years of knowledge, as well as a representation of a possible, hopeful future—the contributors’ stories will send you through through different timelines, perspectives and offer one-of-a-kind ways to be moved by food.
Get it from Somekind Press here.