ABSTRACT
When Korean guest workers started arriving in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, their suitcases were mainly filled with Korean food staples (such as chili pepper powder and sesame seeds), as if they had a premonition that preparing Korean food in Germany would pose a difficult challenge. Coming from a country with a cuisine that is so distinctly flavorful to one where the food is rather bland in comparison (salt and pepper being the primary spices), many Korean guest workers struggled to adapt to German food. By cooking and sharing their familiar spicy dishes, these first-generation Korean migrants shared their need for belonging and homesickness and their sense of Koreanness in a world that seemed very foreign to them. For the second generation, eating Korean food was not needed to cure homesickness, but it created a sense of home with the knowledge that their Korean recipes had been passed on for generations. This chapter analyzes autobiographical Korean-German migrant narratives by the first and second generations. They provide detailed insight into how food preferences were shaped by culture shock and acculturation and how the act of preparing native foods functioned as integral processes of community building and identity shaping.
