Half my life ago, in September 1995, I spent a long weekend on Ulleung Island, a remote island of about 12,000 people in South Korea, known to Koreans for its squid, pumpkin candy, and dramatic volcanic landscape. It was one of my last trips of the analogue era.
Only a few photos from that trip remain. In one, dozens of rows of squid strung on a clothesline dry in the sun. A hunched ancient man in a white hanbok and plastic slippers sweeps the ground with a broom of twigs, an ox fenced in just behind him. In another, my husband and I, twinned in loose pants and long-sleeve shirts, hug the end of the island’s road, which does not yet join one side to the other, overlooking the ragged cliffs above the sea. Even thirty years later, I can still summon the slightly sweet, salty smell of drying squid, clotting the humid air and clinging to our skin as we hugged that precipice. There was no going back to the only world I’d known.
It was Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving holiday, and we had a long weekend off from the language institute where we’d been teaching English for only a month. Having quit our jobs in Washington, DC, we crossed an ocean and a continent to fulfil our dream of living abroad. We considered ourselves as explorers, adventurers, open-minded Americans who were curious about the world outside the bubble of our lived experience. We did not, as I do now, consider that for all of our good intentions, we were also colonising grifters.
On the four-hour ferry from Busan, South Korea, to Ulleung Island, a college student named Jung Woo befriended my husband and me, inviting us to stay with him on his family’s farm on the island. Worried that his family would not be thrilled with this invitation, we declined his offer. Jung Woo gave us his phone number and told us to call him if we changed our minds.
As we disembarked, weathered Korean women greeted us in a rapid island dialect we had no chance of understanding, peddling dried squid, homemade pumpkin candy, and offering lodging in their homes. Once we realised that our plan of camping with the other English teachers was not feasible—rocky terrain offered no workable sites—we called Jung Woo from a pay phone, who assured us his family had co-signed on his offer.
We stayed with Jung Woo and his parents that long weekend, sleeping on thick padded blankets in a traditional one-level “hanok” home with several rooms portioned by sliding doors that opened and closed to make the spaces feel smaller or larger. Sitting at a low table in the common room, legs crossed on cushions placed on the linoleum floor, we ate small fish, fried whole, soybean and kimchi soups, and rice, along with side dishes of radish and cucumber kimchi and seaweed three times a day. In exchange for his family’s hospitality, Jung Woo practised his English with us native speakers, something his parents believed would help their son get ahead on the mainland.
Each afternoon, in a pagoda-like structure on the farm, over cups of barley tea and strips of dried squid dipped in red pepper paste, Jung Woo would quiz us about American culture and customs. We answered with an authority we did not have.
But our time was not just tranquil conversations about Korean and American culture. Once, Jung Woo got us lost for hours on a treacherous hike. Tired, I almost fell off the side of the cliff, but my husband grabbed my arm right before I fell. Another time, a very drunk Korean man drove us recklessly around the island, cutting corners and swerving on a single-lane road that teetered on the island’s edge for much of the ride. And a culinary highlight: Jung Woo took us to a small hut we never would have discovered on our own, where we ate delicious local black goat stew.
Before we left the island, Jung Woo, perhaps believing we were missing Western food, took us to a restaurant that served fried chicken and beer. As we washed down the pieces of fried chicken with icy Korean beer that tasted like watered-down Budweiser, I didn’t question why this Western-style restaurant existed on this remote island. But this fried chicken restaurant was just another sign that even this island, without a completed road, a bank, or an ATM, could not keep globalisation at bay. In 1995, Korean chicken restaurants were on most street corners on the mainland, featuring American-style fried chicken and the equally popular Korean “Yangnyeom” or seasoned fried chicken, considered a Korean comfort food.
Given the U.S’s military presence in the country, it’s not surprising that Korean’s love of fried chicken can be traced to the American soldiers who introduced their love of fried chicken to South Koreans during World War II and the Korean War. One of those soldiers was my father, born during the Great Depression on a small farm without plumbing or electricity in Possum Valley, Arkansas. Because he’d always wanted to see the world and couldn’t afford college, my father enlisted in the Navy in 1948 at the age of 17.
The 1945 Cookbook of the United States Navy includes a recipe for fried chicken and gravy for 100 people, one of the many filling meals my father probably had on the regular while he was on his ship, the USS Stickell. For my father, fried chicken would have been a treat. Growing up, it was offered only on Sundays after church, a welcome departure from his family’s standard fare of peas, greens, biscuits, eggs, molasses, and cornbread. Before the Civil War, my dad’s grandfather would have eaten fried chicken prepared by enslaved cooks who had modified the Scot’s recipe to resemble the fried chicken we know today. But it would be many years before I connected my past to that moment at the fried chicken restaurant with my husband and Jung Woo.
After we returned from Ulleungdo, slowly and then all at once, letters to my friends and family gave way to email and then online conversations. Analogue cameras were replaced by digital cameras, which then disappeared with smartphones. When we travelled to new places, witnessing vanished empires, we no longer tucked a dog-eared Lonely Planet in our backpacks; online travel websites gave us the up-to-date information we needed. Although we kept in touch with Jung Woo, we never made it back to Ulleung Island. The last time I saw Jung Woo was at his wedding in Daegu in 2002, just as I was in the middle of a divorce from my husband, now living in Japan. After the divorce, I remained in Korea, where I met my second husband, a South African, before moving back to the States in 2007 when my father was dying.
Back in the States, living in Tennessee, I learned that my ancestors had owned not one, not two, but at least three plantations (i.e. labour camps) from the 1700s until the Civil War. Over a few years, I visited those sites in Georgia and Florida, trying to understand the world they’d lived in, a world where they used their God to justify enslaving others. Those we enslaved were forced as chattel into ships, not as explorers or colonisers like my ancestors, but as enslaved persons whose sole purpose was to enrich my family’s temporary material and societal conditions. Despite all this, they brought and fought to keep their languages, their stories, their food, and their culture. And even as my ancestors tried to erase their humanity, the enslaved did everything in their power to keep it.
Twenty-six years after my trip to Ulleung Island, I first read about Paschal’s restaurant in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois. In the novel, two students at a fictional Historically Black College and University near Atlanta in the 1950s take a trip to Paschal’s restaurant to eat its famous fried chicken. The Paschal brothers, Robert and James, started a sandwich shop in 1947, the year my father graduated high school. In the 1960s, their restaurant became a meeting place for civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. Coretta Scott King said once said, “Paschal’s is as important a historical site for the American Civil Rights Movement as Boston’s Faneuil Hall is to the American Revolution.” During that time, the brothers opened a jazz club, attracting national performers such as Dizzy Gillespie and Aretha Franklin. In order to provide convenient lodging for its Black performers during segregation, the brothers opened a hotel connected to its restaurant and bar. Not surprisingly, Paschal’s was one of Atlanta’s restaurants in The Green Book, a travel book that listed establishments that welcomed Blacks during the Jim Crow era.
It was encountering the Paschal name that gave me pause. My paternal great-grandfather, the one I imagined eating fried chicken prepared by enslaved cooks, was Joseph Paschal Baker. His middle name was from his maternal grandfather, John Paschal, a plantation owner in Morgan County, Georgia, about an hour away from Thomson, where the Black Paschal brothers were born. The writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s own matrilineal line traces back to a plantation owned by William Paschal, John’s brother, in Putnam County, also not far from Thomson County. I wondered if the Black Paschal brothers, who were children of sharecroppers, were descendants of the enslaved persons connected to the Paschals —my family’s —plantations. In 2022, I decided to go to the restaurant, hoping to find an answer.
When I arrived for a late lunch on a Sunday in February 2022, the restaurant was humming with post-church groups of friends and families enjoying its famous fried chicken and other traditional Southern cuisine. While the large airy building built in 2002 was modern and open, the service and atmosphere felt rooted in the traditions of the older restaurant, which opened in 1959.
When I asked one of the hostesses about the building, she introduced me to the “resident historian”, Mr Slack, who sat with us as we waited for and ate our meal. Mr Slack, in his early eighties, started working for the Paschal brothers when he was in high school. He gave a brief history of the restaurant and the brothers, as well as his own experience working with them. While I was familiar with the stories about the brothers and the restaurant’s history, Mr Slack brought the stories of a history he witnessed to life.
Mr Slack said that Robert Paschal learned to make fried chicken from his mother, and it was that fried chicken that made their restaurant popular, the recipe the restaurant still uses to this day. When I asked him if the Paschal brothers might have ancestors from one of the Paschal plantations, he said he didn’t know about that. But as I devoured my fried chicken, greens, black-eyed peas and cornbread, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Paschal’s secret recipe was carried down from the fried chicken made by the enslaved people on the Paschal plantations.
Perhaps it didn’t matter if I had proof that the Paschal brothers were descendants of people my family had enslaved. As a white descendant of enslavers, I was connected, like my father, to the food traditions passed down from the enslaved, just as I was connected to that fried chicken in a restaurant on a small South Korean island introduced by the wars my country helped fight in on their land.
On that ferry back to Busan, I certainly didn’t understand that my eating fried chicken on Ulleung island was possible only because of boats crossing bodies of water: the ship that brought my Puritan ancestors on the Mary and John in 1630, the boats that carried my ancestors from the north to the south where they established plantations, the slave ships that transported the stolen Africans my ancestors enslaved, the Navy ship that took my father to the Asia Pacific and the Korean War, and that final ferry to Ulleung island.
We crossed oceans, my Puritan ancestors, my father, and I, out of a desire born from optimism and hubris for a different life. We departed old worlds, too small and narrow for us, without considering the consequences of our arrivals. Now, thirty years later after what I consider my last analog journey, as the digital age ends and the AI era begins, knowing what I do now, would I go back to that moment before my young ancestor boards the Mary and John, before the inevitable grief and loss, before there is blood on our hands, before we all get on the boat, would I ask him—ask us—if this is really what we want?
For once we leave the old world, there is no turning back.
