Focus on Arts and Ecology

“I have developed more pride in being Korean.” 

Joanne Lee Molinaro, 43, started using social media to share deeply personal stories about her family for one reason: to change the way Americans view immigrants in this country. The child of North Korean parents, Molinaro felt angry and hopeless about the increasingly hostile rhetoric towards immigrants in the U.S. over the past few years. So in 2018, she began posting stories about her family on Instagram, hoping to spark compassion in others. At the time, Molinaro already had a vegan food-based Instagram account with more than 10,000 followers. And she figured if her followers loved her food, they might be open to learning about her experiences as a Korean American. Molinaro steadily gained more fans, but her popularity exploded when she started posting videos that are equal parts story time and cooking tutorial. In one, Molinaro shares the time her grandparents nearly murdered her mom as a baby—all while making s’mores. Now Molinaro has a cookbook, three million TikTok followers, and even more appreciation for Korean food. Below, read Molinaro’s story about how becoming “The Korean Vegan” deepened her relationship with her family and her culture, as told to SELF’s associate health director Melissa Matthews.

I started a relationship with my now husband, Anthony, in 2014. When Anthony decided to go vegan in 2016, I worried I wouldn’t be able to cook for him anymore, which is one way I like to show my love. I wasn’t vegan myself; in fact, I had never heard of a Korean person who was vegan at the time, and I was worried that I would have to cut out the food I grew up eating with my family if I joined him. Korean cuisine has plenty of veggie-centric food, but many dishes include seafood and ingredients like fish sauce.

Ultimately, I decided to give it a try but thought, If I’m going to do this, I have to figure out a way to Koreanize vegan food. At the time, I knew how to cook one or two Korean dishes that my mom taught me, but I never spent a lot of time learning to cook Korean food myself. Now, I had to be proactive if I was going to be able to continue enjoying the traditional foods my family has always eaten while also sticking to being vegan. I started by just learning about Korean food and then thought of ways to make them vegan. I spent a lot of time in my mom’s kitchen asking her, “How do you make this? Why did you use that?” I never felt pressured to make everything taste exactly the same as the original version because I knew it wouldn’t be the same. My goal was to create something that tasted delicious and reminded me a whole heck of a lot of Korean dishes.

One of the first things I veganized was sundubu-jjigae, which is a tofu stew. It was the first dish my mom ever taught me to make back when I was in college and missed eating her food. So that one has a lot of sentimental meaning to me. Miyuk guk, which is seaweed soup, is another special dish for me. Traditionally, Korean moms eat it after giving birth, so seaweed soup is commonly served on a person’s birthday in honor of their mom.

I remember spending a lot of time with my mom, asking things like, “How do you make it taste not fishy?” and “How do you make the seaweed so soft?” Making Korean food was new and exciting, and I learned so many things: The vegan version of kimchi takes longer to ferment compared to the non-vegan version. I remember the first time my mom and I made vegan kimchi, it took a month for it to get where it needed to be. I thought it would never come out, and I was about to throw it all away. I remember dumping it into the garbage and noticing that it looked so beautiful. I tried some and thought, “Oh, now it finally tastes like kimchi.”

In 2018 I got my book deal, and I felt I had to learn so much more about Korean food to be a voice of authority on this cuisine. How do you have pride in something if you don’t actually know it? So I did even more research. I looked up why there are so many kinds of soy sauce, and why some were gluten-free. I read about the process of fermenting soy sauce. These are all things I had to learn in order to write a book that I could feel comfortable with and feel like was full of integrity. I was totally unaware of Korean temple food, which is plant-based and hundreds of years old, until I went vegan.

I wanted to do a deep dive into my family’s history to figure out how much of it, if any, I wanted to include in my book, The Korean Vegan. I told my parents I’d love a written version of their life stories. They both gifted me with beautiful essays of everything that they could remember up to coming to the United States. That act of them writing these essays has forged this openness between me and my parents that allows me to talk to them about their lives, and they are just so excited to share. Now I can pick up the phone and ask them about anything. They feel seen by their own daughter in a way that I never gave to them before. In that way, our relationship is infinitely better than it ever was.

My mom, the women in my family, and I are all closer now. I constantly ask them about their cooking techniques, and they’re very motivated to create vegan food for me that tastes really good. For my birthday a few weeks ago, my aunt made these amazing stuffed tteokgalbi, which is like a Korean rice cake coated with braised short rib meat. My aunt used some kind of meat alternative instead of braised short ribs and it was mind-blowing. I never even heard of anything like that before. It gives my family a chance not to just show off their skills but to also introduce me to new cuisine that I wasn’t familiar with.

I have developed more pride in being Korean while also learning so much more about my culture. Having pride in one’s culture goes hand in glove with being humble and acknowledging what you don’t know, and that’s something that I’ve learned a lot about in the past couple of years. If I had never started The Korean Vegan, and if I had never decided that I was going to use The Korean Vegan to share the stories of the food providers in my family, I never would have bothered to ask my parents what their stories were. I never would have known the history of the Japanese occupation of Korea or the history of the Korean War. I never would have learned what my grandparents went through and their escape from North Korea. My family’s stories would have been lost.