Acorns Aren’t the Only Thing Korean and Ohlone Elders Have in Common

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n a crisp Friday afternoon in November, an intimate group of community elders gathered at Cafe Ohlone for a multi-course outdoor feast made with ingredients native to Northern California: acorn flour and fernbrake, pickleweed and sweet huckleberries. Founders Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino greeted the group in the Ohlone Chochenyo language, and as the dappled Berkeley sunlight gave way to evening, they spoke of how important it was for colonized peoples to keep their cultures alive.

In many ways, it was a typical dinner service at the Bay Area’s only dedicated Ohlone restaurant, except for one notable difference: Nearly all of the diners in attendance were Korean elders, many of them monolingual. They had come to Cafe Ohlone to break bread with Ohlone neighbors they had met for the first time that day — to savor both the Korean and Ohlone ways of preparing shared cultural ingredients such as acorn, and to hear and share stories that showed the many points of commonality between their two communities.

“We both value respect for our elders, making sure that they’re taken care of and loved, and that their wisdom is carried on into the future,” Medina said in his introductory remarks. “Our peoples have also survived hard times, and so we always keep our cultures close.”

The “story sharing supper” was a collaboration between Cafe Ohlone and a Korean American community organization called Ssi Ya Gi (pronounced “shee-ya-ghee,” meaning “Seed Story” in Korean), whose members are based in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. It was the second in-person event of its kind — and the first in the Bay Area — for a group born out of the heightened sense of isolation that many homebound, elderly Korean immigrants experienced during the pandemic.

Hannah Pae, a Los Angeles-based landscape designer who co-founded Ssi Ya Gi in 2021, recalls how her own grandmother was living at a nursing home when the first wave of COVID hit the United States. “During lockdown, when my family could not visit her, her health deteriorated. She wasn’t eating Korean food; people in the nursing home couldn’t speak Korean,” Pae says. “It was just heartbreaking to feel so helpless and see her health decline so rapidly because of the isolation.”

Pae’s grandmother wound up passing away not long after the start of the pandemic. Driven by that painful experience, Pae started talking to Hyunch Sung, a landscape design colleague based in the East Bay, about putting together a project that would allow young Korean Americans to forge a “human-to-human connection” with seniors in their community to help alleviate some of that isolation. Eventually, the two of them teamed up a handful of other like-minded folks: plant designer Ginny Hwang, Yoon Ju Ellie Lee of the diasporic Korean arts collective GYOPO, and community nonprofit consultant Grace Jiyun Lee, who’d spent those early months of the pandemic organizing hot meal deliveries for Korean elders through San Francisco’s Korean American Community Foundation.

“We knew we wanted to connect over food and plants,” Lee says. “We wanted to do this for our seniors but also for ourselves — as a learning for us and also [to share] information that would otherwise be lost with other interested community members.”

The Power of a Zine

What they came up with was a sort of cultural memory program that checked all of those boxes. First, Ssi Ya Gi volunteers would conduct extensive interviews with Korean elders about their food memories, as well as their lives at large. The interviews themselves — the act of really listening to an elder’s story — helped provide some of the human connection that so many homebound seniors were missing during the pandemic. And because food is such an integral part of Korean culture, Ssi Yagi’s founders all agreed that it would make the perfect interview topic, providing a way to bridge language barriers and intergenerational barriers.

“We were thinking a lot about plants and food sustenance and the fact that historically, before the Industrial Revolution, Korea was a very agrarian country,” Lee explains. “So our seniors would have interesting stories about foods that they had in their childhood that couldn’t be found here — plants they would forage or grow in their home gardens.”

After the interviews, Ssi Ya Gi would collaborate with artists to create gorgeously illustrated zines based on each of the seniors’ food stories, both in English and translated back into Korean. The zines served a dual purpose: They made for lovely, personalized gifts to give back to those elders who had shared their stories. They also document a kind of oral history that’s too often lost to time and make those stories accessible to a whole new generation — starting with the zine-collecting folks in their 20s and 30s who make up the majority of Ssi Ya Gi’s social media followers.

For Pae, who wrote and illustrated four of the zines herself, the interview process was at times quite challenging, requiring a lot of “gentle digging” to get these older immigrants to open up about their past lives. “Some of our seniors, we found it to be a little bit difficult to ask them about their favorite food memory because there was so little food at that time,” she explains. For Korean immigrants who came of age during Japanese occupation, the Korean War and the war’s aftermath, the hardships were what dominated their memories of those times. In some cases, the stories they eventually shared with Ssi Ya Gi’s interviewers were things they’d never even discussed with their own family members.

One senior in Los Angeles’ Koreatown talked about how, as a single mother of five, she had supported her family by working as a dairy farmer. Another recalled the shop in her coastal hometown that specialized in all different cuts of boiled whale meat. (“It tasted similar to pork belly.”) Yet another reveled in the memory of eating freshly harvested rice from his family’s rice farm. “Shiny and greasy,” as the elder described it, Korea’s original rice was, in his memory, so much more delicious than the high-yield, modern-day rice strain that was introduced in the 1970s.

In total, Ssi Ya Gi has published 10 zines to date — all available for purchase as a way to support the organization’s ongoing community work with Korean elders in both Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

An Acorn Story

The zines featured prominently at Ssi Ya Gi’s Cafe Ohlone dinner. Several elders whose stories had been memorialized in a zine were in attendance, and at one point, Myung Kwang Shik, the Los Angeles-based senior who’d shared the story of his family’s rice farm, stood up and proudly read a short excerpt from his zine. Mostly, Lee says, the dinner was one more way for the Ssi Ya Gi team to show their appreciation to these Korean elders who had entrusted them with their food memories.

It was also a part of the group’s plan to expand its work with elders to beyond just the Korean immigrant community. Ssi Ya Gi had hosted an earlier event at a community garden run by CultivaLA, an urban agriculture nonprofit focused on providing healthy food access for the local Latinx community. The idea was to provide a forum for intercultural connection — to allow Latino and Korean elders to listen to each other’s stories.

The dinner at Cafe Ohlone was a strong point of evidence for the Ssi Ya Gi story-sharing model’s power for cross-cultural communication. The collaboration came about because Terremoto, the landscape design firm where Pae and fellow Ssi Ya Gi co-founder Hyunch Sung first met, had helped design Cafe Ohlone’s new space at UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

Having established a relationship with Medina and Trevino, Pae and Sung were struck by how many similarities there were between the Korean and Ohlone cultures. In addition to their mutual respect for elders and having both experienced the long-lasting effects of being colonized, Koreans and Ohlones also had a surprising number of food staples in common.

“There are so few cultures around the world who eat acorn,” Pae says. “We share acorn; we share fernbrake; we share buckwheat and mugwort. And we thought that this could be an incredible way to bridge our cultures.”

To showcase those similarities, Cafe Ohlone and Ssi Ya Gi put together a feast cooked by local Korean chefs and the Cafe Ohlone team. The meal began with two different preparations of acorn: There was cold, velvety Ohlone black oak acorn soup, mild and refreshing. And then there were savory Korean acorn jellies, molded into the shape of actual acorns and topped with soy sauce, green onions and sesame seeds.

A procession of similarly abundant dishes followed. A spread of variously pickled and fermented Korean banchan to be eaten with steamed rice. A colorful Ohlone salad of watercress, pickleweed, roasted hazelnuts and at least three different kinds of berries, luxuriously dressed in walnut oil and blackberry-bay laurel coulis. And, courtesy of Oakland’s Seoul Gom Tang, bowls of hot, soul-warming yukgaejang, a Korean spicy beef soup made with fernbrake — also a typical Ohlone ingredient — cooked until impossibly tender and delicious.

At one point, Cafe Ohlone’s Trevino demonstrated the traditional Ohlone method for removing the skin from acorns using a 100-year-old wooden basket, gently rocking it back and forth in order to toss the peeled acorns up into the air and catch them again. Though most of the Korean elders couldn’t understand what Trevino was saying until after the translator spoke, they watched with rapt attention, completely engrossed in what he was doing. Several of the older Korean ladies imitated his sifting motion, chattering excitedly among themselves.

Finally, one of them stood up and said, “We have that.” As it turns out, the traditional Korean method for winnowing acorns is almost entirely the same.

How many people could say they’ve shared in common an experience as specific as that?

Ssi Ya Gi’s founders say that’s precisely the kind of intercultural connection that they hope to foster. As Lee puts it, “Even though all of us in the collective are Korean American and our focus has been on interviewing Korean seniors, the themes are universal — and the desire to create community and retain cultural memories.”

In September, Ssi Ya Gi will continue that work by hosting a similar “listening supper” to celebrate Chuseok, the Korean harvest festival, in collaboration with the AAPI grassroots nonprofit Cut Fruit Collective. Held in Oakland Chinatown, the event will bring together two different communities of elders — Korean and Chinese. Later this winter, the group will also host another event in Los Angeles to showcase oral histories that they’re collecting from both Korean and Latinx elders centered on the gochu, or chili pepper. The focus, once again, will be on cross-cultural exchange.

Back in Berkeley, the landmark Korean-Ohlone dinner wound down with laughter and embraces, as the Korean seniors thanked their Ohlone hosts for the delicious, one-of-a-kind meal.

“Come visit us again,” Cafe Ohlone’s Medina said as he leaned over to give one elderly Korean woman a hug. “We share so much in common.”

For updates on Ssi Ya Gi’s upcoming events in both Los Angeles and the Bay Area (specific dates TBD), following them on Instagram.