When Amala meets Kimchi

Sarah Bankole had exactly one Korean word in her bag of tricks when she boarded the flight to Seoul. It was annyeonghaseyo, and she had practiced it so many times in the mirror that her cousin Chidinma banned her from saying it at home.

She was going for a three month research fellowship. It had something to do with textile design and traditional dye techniques. She had applied for the program on a whim, right after a very stressful breakup and an even more stressful promotion that never came to her. Her mother cried at the airport. It was not really about sadness. It was the normal Nigerian mother worry that comes with sending a daughter somewhere she cannot personally supervise. Her father just said, "Don't marry anybody there o," and laughed like it was the funniest joke he had ever made. To be fair, it kind of was, because Sarah had not been on a proper date in fourteen months.

She sat in seat 34C, an aisle seat she had picked on purpose, because she liked being able to stand up without disturbing anyone. The man who came to take the seat next to her, 34B, looked sorry the moment he sat down. He was tall, and the plane was small, and his knees clearly did not agree with the arrangement.

"Sorry," he said, folding himself into the seat with real effort. "I know. Long legs, small plane. It's a whole situation."

His English had an accent she could not immediately place. It was careful and a little formal, the way people speak when they are proud of a second language and still respect it.

"You're fine," Sarah said. "I promise I don't bite."

"That is good," he said, very seriously. "I have heard stories about aisle seat people."

She laughed before she could stop herself, the kind of laugh that comes out before you have decided if something is actually funny. He looked pleased with himself, like he did not get that reaction very often.

His name was Minho. Over the next eleven hours, he turned out to be a surprisingly talkative seatmate for someone who had described himself, without being asked, as an introvert. He worked for a company that made kitchen appliances. He was coming back from a work trip to Lagos that had completely overwhelmed him, in a good way. Somewhere in those two weeks, he had developed what he called "a serious problem" with jollof rice.

"It is dangerous," he told her, with total sincerity, over a tray of sad looking airline chicken. "I think about it now. Randomly. In meetings."

"You haven't had proper jollof if you're not thinking about it in meetings," Sarah said. "That's the whole point of jollof. It follows you."

"Like a ghost."

"Like a very delicious ghost."

He told her about kimchi the same way she imagined she talked about jollof to anyone patient enough to listen. He was defensive and a little reverent about it, insisting that his grandmother's kimchi in Busan was scientifically better than anything sold in Seoul. Sarah found the claim ridiculous and completely understandable at the same time, because she felt exactly the same way about her own grandmother's amala.

"Amala," he repeated slowly, testing the word out. "What is amala?"

"You'll find out," she said, and did not explain further. She was enjoying the small power of knowing something he did not know yet.

Somewhere over what she guessed was Central Asia, around hour seven, when the cabin lights had dimmed and most of the plane had gone quiet, he asked her, out of nowhere, what she was running from.

"Excuse me?"

"You said, before, that you took this fellowship suddenly. On a whim, you said. People don't usually do things on a whim unless they're running from something." He said it gently. It did not sound like an accusation. It sounded more like something he had been sitting on for a few hours, working up the nerve to say.

She could have deflected. She almost did. But there was something about the strange privacy of a plane, the fact that in nine hours they would land and probably never see each other again, that made honesty feel cheap and safe at the same time.

"A breakup," she admitted. "And a job that should have been mine and wasn't. Both in the same month, if you can believe it."

"I can believe it," Minho said. "Bad things like company."

"That's a very depressing way to put it."

"I am Korean," he said solemnly. "We are allowed to say sad true things at the same time as funny things. It is a national skill."

She laughed again, and this time she did not bother being surprised by it.

They landed at Incheon a little after five in the morning, both of them stiff and tired in the particular way that only a long flight can make you. At baggage claim, while she watched her suitcase circle twice before she finally pulled it off the belt, Minho appeared next to her with a small paper card, the kind restaurants print for loyalty programs. Except this one had his name and phone number handwritten on the back.

"My family's restaurant," he said. "In case you get tired of not understanding menus. Or in case you want to test the ghost theory. I make very convincing arguments about kimchi."

"I make more convincing ones about amala," she said, taking the card.

"I look forward to losing that argument," he said. Then, because the moment had gone on a beat too long for either of them to pretend it was casual, he added, "Text me when you land. I mean, you have landed. Text me when you are settled."

She did text him, four days later, mostly because her fellowship apartment was small and quiet in a lonely way, and she had run out of reasons to put it off. He replied within two minutes with a photo of a bowl of kimchi jjigae and the words: this is not a date this is a cultural emergency.

Over the following weeks, it became something that looked like both a date and a cultural emergency at the same time. He took her to his family's restaurant, tucked in a narrow alley near Hongdae. His grandmother, a tiny and slightly terrifying woman, looked Sarah up and down once, said her name slowly, "Sarah," then tried it again, softer, before she gave up and picked something easier for herself. "Ada," she declared, as if she had personally invented the name on the spot, and it stuck. First with the grandmother, then with Minho, and soon with the small circle of people Sarah was slowly collecting around her in Seoul. She did not mind it. It did not feel like losing something. It felt more like being handed a nickname by people who wanted her close enough to need one.

"Ada," Minho said, testing it out the same careful way he had once tested the word amala, "I think I prefer it. It sounds like something my grandmother would approve of."

"Your grandmother already approves of me. She fed me food that wasn't on the menu."

"That is very serious. That is basically a blessing."

His grandmother, satisfied by more than just the name, kept bringing out dishes that were not on any menu. Minho argued passionately, at every single meal, about the correct way to eat things Sarah was pretty sure had no correct way at all. She argued back just as passionately, mostly because she enjoyed watching him get worked up over a plate of banchan.

She, in turn, found a small Nigerian community two subway stops from her apartment, women who had married Korean men or come for work and simply stayed, and who ran an unofficial supper club out of one of their flats. One Saturday, she brought Minho along. She sat him down in front of a mountain of amala, ewedu, and gbegiri, and watched, with the deep satisfaction of someone finally winning a very long argument, as his face moved through confusion, caution, and then, without question, delight.

"Okay," he admitted, mouth still full. "Okay. This is very good. I take back nothing about kimchi, but I take back some things about amala."

"You said you'd never admit defeat."

"I am not admitting defeat. I am admitting the existence of a worthy opponent."

"That's the same thing, Minho."

"It is not the same thing," he said, scooping up more amala with a confidence that suggested he had, in fact, been secretly practicing with a spoon at home. "It is diplomacy."

By the time her three months were almost finished, and the fellowship coordinator asked, almost as an afterthought, whether she would consider staying for a second term, Sarah realized she had stopped thinking of the question as being about the research at all. She thought about it on her walk to the lab. She thought about the alley near Hongdae. She thought about a man who sent her unsolicited photos of soup with captions like this soup thought of you, and about the particular ease of laughing with someone in two languages that neither of them had grown up sharing.

She called her mother that night to talk it through, expecting worry, and instead heard a long, telling silence on the other end before her mother finally said, carefully, "Is this about the appliance boy?"

"He's not a boy, Mama, he's thirty one."

"Sarah. Is it about him."

"Partly," she admitted.

Her mother sighed, the specific sigh of a woman quietly adjusting her expectations for her daughter's life in real time. "Well. Bring him to greet us properly before anything serious happens. And tell him," she added, with the air of someone delivering a final, unbeatable argument, "that Nigerian food is better than Korean food, and if he disagrees, we will have a problem."

"I already told him that, Mama."

"Good girl. What did he say?"

Sarah thought about the last four months. She thought about the arguments over banchan, jollof, and amala that were never really about the food at all. She thought about the easy quiet of sitting across from someone who made ordinary Tuesdays feel like something worth showing up for, and about the text messages that had, somewhere along the way, stopped feeling like a cultural emergency and started feeling like the beginning of something she was in no hurry to run from.

"He said he'd need more evidence," she told her mother, smiling at nothing in particular. "I think I'm going to extend the fellowship. Just to be thorough about it."