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Stuff you find in parents’ house during Christmas

My father, like troves of other Koreans, started a fruit and vegetable store a few years after we arrived in New York City from El Paso, TX, where we lived immediately after having moved to the States. (bugged out right?)

Weird thing was that his store wasn’t in Manhattan, where today “Korean deli” is like a recognizable object in the urban commercial landscape. (My only empirical evidence for this is that the phrase appeared in an episode of Seinfeld.) It was on Arthur Ave in the Bronx or as I call it “NYC’s real Little Italy.” In fact his store was next to a cheese shop that specialized in buffalo mozzarella, which my father had spices of for breakfast, which I to this day cannot explain. Koreans don’t have a real fondness for cheese historically because the country didn’t have milking cows for most of it’s history. It’s completely one of those chalk it up to migration and NYC-specific cultural contact.

Anyway, today he did what he usually does and showed us the old NY Post that he was mentioned in for having one of the stores ranked at the top of the state’s inspections list. And yes, the store was named after me.

Posted via email from sam han’s posterous