Welcome to one of the tastiest coming-of-age books I have ever sampled. A Korean American girl in NYC is one of a dozen high schoolers selected from around the country to demonstrate their culinary skills on the first season of “Burn Off! High School Edition!” a reality TV cooking show. Garnish this competition with Gen Z dialect and you have Patricia Park’s compulsively readable What’s Eating Jackie Oh?
Eponymous Jackie lets us know right off the bat that she’s no longer “one of those AP-everything kids with the turtle backpacks” who go to a hagwǒn, “the school you go to after school because regular school is not enough.” But she hasn’t told her Ivy League-educated workaholic parents yet. Force-fed their great expectations as well as reminders of the disgrace of having an older brother in jail, Jackie retreats to her “mental happy place”— recipe-making. Her physical happy place is Melty’s, a deli in midtown Manhattan operated by her grandparents, first-generation immigrants from Korea. She can be found there as early as 5 a.m. on weekends and after school on weekdays, making a hundred or more sandwiches per shift. Cooking there has become therapeutic refuge for a sensitive girl who cannot digest the seemingly random acts of anti-Asian harassment and violence that plagued NYC during the pandemic. She herself was the target of a man who urinated directly in front of where she sat in a subway car, punctuating the act with a “What are you looking at, Ch—k?”
The “Burn Off!” competition takes place in a hotel restaurant-like set in Hollywood equipped with kitchens in which the contestants do “Homework” (trying out recipes) in preparation for a “Quiz” (a dish assigned them by the three judges) on which they are graded and then either rewarded with Recess or demoted to Detention. The detainees must then compete among themselves, with the lowest performer being Expelled from the program. Only two of the teen cooks, one of them Jackie, will survive to complete the two-part Final Exam, after which one will be crowned Valedictorian.
The heart of the novel consists of the signal acts of reconciliation that Jackie experiences over the course of the program. Jackie has her first ever heart-to-heart talk with her mother, who has accompanied her to Hollywood. Her mother confesses that she dearly misses her incarcerated son, Jackie’s brother, whom she has always upheld as the antithesis of what she expects from her daughter. Jackie is further strengthened by a long text from her brother, who is “mad proud of the first famous person I know lol!” Back in NYC before the Final Exam Jackie meets her best friend from high school, KT, to mend a relationship frayed by Jackie’s obsession with cooking and KT’s fixation on high grades. A revelation here too: In contrast with Jackie’s model-minority parents, KT’s parents are undocumented immigrants. And Stephen Min, who like Jackie helps at Melty’s and whose remarks to her are peppered with snark, confesses to her during a tasting of one of his concoctions, “I like…like you.”
Patricia Park’s ear for dialog, with texting and on-air interviews and voice-overs set in typefaces different from that of the main text, is entrancing. Korean-language dialog echoes that of learners of English as a second language, is seasoned with Hangul (the Korean alphabet) and/or Romanization for certain words and expressions, and is followed by the author’s translation in italics. For example, a comment by Jackie’s grandfather, referring to himself in both first and third person: “First time I see fat person, American GI, Haraboji think, ‘와! 역시 미국이 부자 나라 이구나!’” Wow! Beautiful-Country (AKA America) sure must be a rich country!
What’s Eating Jackie Oh? concludes with a variety of desserts: a fictional blog entitled “Stop AAPU Hate” with a variety of responses; several recipes, including one for Jackie’s grandfather’s Budae Jjigae (Army Stew); and “I’m Done Being Your Model Minority,” a guest essay contributed by Patricia Park to the Opinion section of the March 10, 2022, issue of The New York Times.
Among the wealth of Korean American coming-of-age stories appearing in recent decades it would be difficult to find a more sumptuous work than What’s Eating Jackie Oh? It is timely, heartfelt, and ultimately triumphant.
Bruce Fulton occupies the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, where he serves as a Professor in the Department of Asian Studies. He is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous works of modern Korean fiction, most recently Togani by Gong Ji-young and Chinatown, four stories by Oh Jung-hee (Penguin Modern Classic); co-recipient, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of the first U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for a Korean literary work and the first residency at the Banff International Literature Translation Centre awarded for a translation from any Asian language; and editor of The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories.
