Author-illustrator Hyewon Yum’s picture book A Spoonful of the Sea examines the Korean tradition of miyeok-guk, a seaweed soup that’s served to both nursing mothers the month after they give birth, and to children as birthday soup. Yum highlights the role of haenyeo, Korean women divers who for hundreds of years have gathered shellfish, octopus, and seaweed for food. The girl learns that her great-great-grandmother was haenyeo, and that a pregnant haenyeo—who’d witnessed a mother whale eating seaweed alongside her newborn—came up with the idea to make miyeok-guk after she gave birth. Yum, who grew up in Seoul and now lives in Brooklyn, attended the School of Visual Arts, where her graduation project was published in 2009 as her first picture book, Last Night. She’s written and illustrated 12 picture books, and illustrated more than a dozen more by other authors. PW spoke with Yum about her latest book, the mother-child bond, and her own memories of birthday soup.
In the picture books you’ve written and illustrated, this is the second one—after Grandpa Across the Ocean—that leans into your Korean heritage. Why this story above so many other cultural narratives?
This story started with my friend Hana Nakamura, Norton Young Readers’ art director. I didn’t know that this tradition of eating miyeok-guk soup comes from humans watching the whales eating seaweed. Hana told me this story, and it sparked my imagination. And then I sat with it for a very, very long time and I read other books about haenyeo and it all came together. It’s not that I specifically wanted to write about Korean traditions. It’s just that this story came to me.
You depict the child’s first four birthdays with traditional Korean food giving way to Western sweets. Why include the push-pull of cultural assimilation vs. maintaining Korean customs?
That’s how we eat in Korea. The food and habits continue to this day. We have cakes and other foods to celebrate. But the first birthday we celebrate in traditional ways, so we have a special way of setting the table. That’s why it’s different from year to year. I wanted to show that though the culture is different, we all celebrate birthdays and we all do similar things.
At age five, children go to kindergarten, meet kids from other cultures, and make friends. Children discover differences between their home culture and other cultures. That’s why I chose the fifth birthday—at five, children communicate with their moms and learn. It’s a golden age.
And though miyeok-guk comes from our Korean culture, I didn’t want to only focus on Korean culture. We are all human beings, and as a human beings, we learn from nature. We try something new from nature, and then we make it part of our own culture. That’s what I wanted to talk about—learning from nature. So, when Hana told me about the whales eating seaweed, it stuck with me. It’s the point of the book—a pregnant haenyeo learning from nature.
In your illustrations, shapes and borders contain the mother and child’s lives, but when the haenyeo story begins, why do all borders disappear?
That’s how I feel when I see the sea. When I made Grandpa Across the Ocean, I talked about the sea, and that there are no borders. It just connects us from here all the way to Korea.
In this book, there is a border—the sea is contained in the bowl. So the girl can look into it and see Grandma’s house, and the haenyeo, and the whales. Before, I was only writing about my own experiences, my own feelings, my relationships, but this book is different. It’s about Korean culture and lineage, all these things. I’m living far away from my home, but as I grow older, I look more like my mama. And I speak like her, even though I’m far away. I wanted to talk about that relationship—that mother-child love—which is so critical when we are young.
As a child eating birthday soup, what did you think of it, and did you know its origin story?
I didn’t like miyeok-guk at all when I was a kid. Just like the child [in the book], I found it hot and smelly with a very slippery texture. I never thought about why we eat miyeok-guk for our birthdays, or why women eat it after giving birth. It was just something we did, just a natural part of our lives.
I wasn’t interested in the story behind it until after I had a child in the U.S. I gave birth, and they told me to drink ice water right away. That seemed wrong, because water is so cold. And they served me mac and cheese in the hospital. It’s so different that I became curious: how do we have this tradition, and where did it come from?
When I left the hospital, my mom made me miyeok-guk. I ate it for a month while breastfeeding my child, and I came to like it. Afterwards, I searched the internet, found the story and interesting details about haenyeo, and thought, “Yes, that makes sense.”
And now, whenever I cook it, I remember those days with heartfelt joy. I think food brings back those memories. I’m not Proust, but miyeok-guk is my madeleine.
A Spoonful of the Sea by Hyewon Yum. Norton Young Readers, $18.99 Sept. 9 ISBN 978-1-324-05369-9
