Pauline Park and Willy Wilkinson: A Conversation about Same-Sex Marriage

In terms of Asian Americans whose reputations have been popularly derided, the concerned parent activist Hak-Shing William Tam perhaps ranks among the top. Tam was a citizen proponent of California's Proposition 8 in 2008 to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage and became a hostile witness for the plaintiffs in the subsequent 2010 lawsuit to overturn the amendment, Perry v. Schwarzenegger. In this paper, I explore Tam's claim to privacy in his understanding of these events, both in terms of his sexualized imagination of liberal civil society and his suffering from what he understood as violations of his own privacy. I argue that Tam tried to operationalize an understanding of society that idealized the "Asian family" as the bulwark of an order composed primarily of secure private spaces, which speaks (I further claim) to longstanding anxieties within Chinese America about how what Gary Okihiro calls the "social formation"–an interlocking institutional network that composes a governing apparatus–subjects Asian Americans to ongoing colonization. In so doing, I hope to show that Tam's concerns do not only speak to concerns in Asian American studies about pervasive evangelical influence in Asian American communities. Instead, they reveal that Asian American conceptions of the private sphere are ideologies that circulate within our communities and should be taken seriously in Asian American studies.

A Children's Rights Perspective Dissent from Obergefell

ABSTRACTAs American and British gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals have made major wins for “pinnacle rights,” such as same-sex marriage, attention has increasingly moved to a previously overshadowed part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community: transgender (trans) people. Alongside more visibility in popular culture, trans people have been the subject of policy debates and proposals in both countries, seeking to both restrict and expand their rights. In this article we examine the extent to which language choice affects public support for policies pertaining to trans people in the United States and United Kingdom. We draw upon two survey experiments conducted in the United States and United Kingdom in July 2016 and find that, in general, different ways of referring to the trans population do not affect policy opinions. This study has implications for both understandings of the effectiveness of framing in increasingly media savvy environments and for the future of trans-related policies in the United States and United Kingdom.

Same-sex marriage is a controversial issue between supporters and opponents, it even causes profound social divisions. The right to marry is considered a sacred right in each life. By this right, a family will be formed and linked with affection and sharing among family members. Therefore, protecting the right to marry of same-sex people will ensure the social value of the law, towards fairness - a noble goal of the law. More and more countries and territories around the world recognize same-sex marriage or other forms of registered coupling. This is a progressive trend that meets the needs and guarantees the rights of homosexuals. Moreover, the recognition of same-sex marriage also has positive effects on the family and society as shown by various scientific studies around the world. Vietnam is one of the countries taking relative late actions to build the rights for gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) people in general and LGBT right to marry in particular. The lack of regulations on the recognition of same-sex marriage has obviously led to many significant difficulties faced by LGBT people. Within the scope of this article, based on the analysis of same-sex marriage from the perspective of human rights, the author indicates the current situation of same-sex marriage in Vietnam, surveys and evaluates the difficulties of recognition of same-sex marriage, and thereby proposes some solutions to recognize and ensure the right to marry of LGBT people in Vietnam.

An Interview with Marge Piercy Bonnie Lyons (bio) Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen books of poetry, most recently The Crooked Inheritance (2006) and Colors Passing through Us (2003), and an equal number of novels, including Sex Wars (2005) and The Third Child (2003). She has also published a volume of her essays, reviews, and interviews—Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (1982)—as part of the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry series, and a memoir, Sleeping with Cats (2002). With her husband, Ira Wood, she has co-authored The Last White Class (1979), a play about a black family in a white neighborhood during the introduction of court-ordered busing in Boston, and a book for aspiring writers, So You Want to Write (2003). Piercy and Wood together run Leapfrog Press, an independent publishing company. Amid all the writing, Piercy has been a political and social activist for decades, protesting the Vietnam War and more recently the war in Iraq, working in the women's movement, and working for social justice and for environmental causes. No wonder The Boston Globe has referred to her as a "cultural touchstone." Piercy was born in Detroit in 1936 and grew up in a working-class neighborhood. Her mother and her maternal grandmother, who was born in a Lithuanian shtetl, were the central figures in her childhood and appear frequently in her poetry. Beginning in her rebellious teenage years, Piercy had a strained relationship with her mother, but in the years before her mother's death in 1981 they once again enjoyed an intimate relationship. Educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, Piercy discontinued [End Page 327] study for a Ph.D. in order to devote herself to her writing. She has continued to write full time throughout her life, supplementing her writing income by giving workshops and readings around the United States and abroad. She has taught, read, and lectured at over four hundred colleges and universities. Piercy's poetry grows out of her own life and the lives of those around her and includes poems about family, relationships with friends, the natural world, feminist concerns, and political problems, including the war in Iraq. Current social issues, such as gay marriage, are themes in poems like "Deadlocked Wedlock" in The Crooked Inheritance. Valuing usefulness highly, Piercy writes poems that are accessible to ordinary readers without sacrificing rich imagery and subtle sound effects. Her poetry embodies her belief in the importance of attention in her precise word choice and acute perception. Tikkun olam, Hebrew for "healing the world," is central to her poetry, which works to awaken her readers' passionate recognition of all that could and should be changed through human effort. Her poems are frequently anthologized, especially in volumes of feminist, political, and Jewish work. In her fiction, Piercy has explored a wide variety of characters, settings, and historical periods. Vida (1980) concerns a former anti-Vietnam activist forced to live underground, while Braided Lives (1982) focuses on an aspiring Detroit writer struggling against gender and class assumptions. He, She and It (1991) is prize-winning cyberfiction; City of Darkness, City of Light (1996) is set during the French revolution; and Gone to Soldiers (1987) is about World War II. Her most recent novel, Sex Wars, is set in New York City in the decades following the Civil War and explores changing attitudes toward women's roles, sexuality, religion, and immigration. The novel explores the life of Freydeh, a fictional young Jewish immigrant woman from Russia, along with real-life feminist figures including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Victoria Hull, as well as fundamentalist crusader Anthony Comstock. Marge Piercy and her husband live on Cape Cod in a house surrounded by lush gardens they themselves have created. During this interview, which took place in September 2006, Piercy's beloved four cats demanded her attention, which she managed to provide [End Page 328] while also answering questions with some of the passion, frankness, and earthy humor that mark all her work. Q. For years you've written and talked about the importance of usefulness. So I'll start by saying that last summer when our daughter got...

Based on a corpus of tweets compiled from November 2022 to February 2023, this article revisits digital anti-gender campaigns in France, 10 years after debates on same-sex marriage and adoption. Through a critical discourse analysis of 70 key tweets, it maps the semiotic community engaged in anti-gender discourse, revealing a heterogeneous group of actors ranging from the conservative right to the identitarian far right. The article identifies two patterns rooted in the “protect our children” rhetoric, which reshape the symbolic boundaries of anti-gender discourse. First, an expansion is at play, marked by the relative inclusion of LGB and feminist activists to reinforce the exclusion of drag-queens and trans people. Second, a blurring of symbolic boundaries between ethnic, religious and cultural factors emerges. This facilitates the articulation of a national-populist discourse that frames “wokism” and Islam as threats to children, to summon support for a white, Christian and heterocisgender political project.

Nanette Gartrell, MD, is a psychiatrist and researcher whose investigations have documented the mental health and psychological well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people over the past four decades. Nanette is the principal investigator of an ongoing longitudinal study of lesbian families in which the children were conceived by donor insemination. Now in its 27th year, this project has been cited internationally in the debates over equality in marriage, foster care, and adoption. Previously on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Francisco, Nanette is currently a Visiting Distinguished Scholar at the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law. In 2013, Nanette received the Association of Women Psychiatrists Presidential Commendation Award for “selfless and enduring vision, leadership, wisdom, and mentorship in the fields of women's mental health, ethics, and gender research.” At the age of 63, Nanette experienced a 3 ½ month period of intractable, incapacitating dizziness for which there was never a clear diagnosis.

This chapter provides new empirical insights on the ways in which multilevel governance in Spain has shaped gender equality reforms and policies recognizing LGBTI rights. In exploring the gendered implications of systemic tendencies and opportunities for mobilization afforded by the State of Autonomies, we also take into account relevant variables like the party system and the socio-economic environment in which the state structure is nested, as well as the influence of the European Union. Several policies pertaining to the global agenda of the women’s and LGBTI movements are surveyed, including the development of state feminism, gender quotas, policies addressing gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive rights, prostitution, same-sex civil unions, marriage equality and transgender people’s rights. Attention is also paid to some welfare policies with strong impact on gender equality. The chapter reflects on the extent to which the Spanish devolution process has contributed to transforming the gender regime.

After twenty-one years in the making, the film version of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 labor report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, has been televised as Bill Moyers's special report "The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black Amerca."' The television documentary bears little stylistic resemblance to its predecessor, but the message in these two works is strikingly similar. The Moynihan report and the Moyers documentary both contend that growing numbers of African-Americans no longer ascribe to certain fundamental American values and therefore exhibit behaviors that

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America, by Corinne T. Field. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiii, 243 pp. $32.95 US (paper). To the discussion of belonging and exclusion in the United States, Corinne Field brings a new perspective that considers childhood as a construct deployed by adults for social and political purposes. Using an intellectual history approach that relies on the published writings of leading figures, she argues that women's and black rights activists in the antebellum North found in the idea of adulthood--the equal recognition of all people at age twenty-one as mature adults--the foundation for a broad range of reforms in public and private life and an effective, if temporary, basis for cross-racial and cross-class cooperation. Joined by their shared categorization as children and exclusion from full citizenship at the hands of white men, a diverse group of women and black men used equal adulthood to claim the political rights, economic independence, marital equality, familial authority, and sexual autonomy that white men claimed for themselves. As revolutionary-era political leaders made white male maturation, predicated on the perpetual immaturity and dependence of women and African Americans, the basis of republican citizenship, Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women were capable of individual maturation and adult citizenship. Antebellum activists echoed and developed their ideas, as suffrage for white males at age twenty-one made full citizenship a normative life stage, which made chronological age and individual maturation central to discussions of political belonging. As evangelical reformers postulated spheres of activity for women, radical activists such as Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton defined womanhood temporally rather than spatially, arguing that female maturation required rejecting separate spheres, understanding motherhood as a life stage preparatory to public power, and replacing fear of middle and old age with a pursuit of ongoing development. Frederick Douglass, meanwhile, brought a sharp age consciousness to his autobiography, observing that slaveowners kept slaves ignorant of their ages to avoid empowering them with notions of individual development, and honing in on twenty-one as a decisive transition to manhood and freedom for white boys and--through the timing of his escape--for himself. Unlike Nancy Isenberg in Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1998), Field does not directly interrogate abolitionism's impact on antebellum feminism, but she contributes to that inquiry by arguing that Stanton incorporated Douglass' emphasis on the political significance of age twenty-one and worked with him to build a coalition to define equal citizenship. From a different standpoint highlighting protections rather than rights, Harriet Jacobs used chronological age to delineate and defend the sexual purity of girlhood and gamer northern sympathy for female slaves. The unifying power of such tactics was evident in the women's rights conventions of the 1840s and 1850s as activists with disparate goals--political participation, higher education, meaningful work, higher wages, and married women's property rights--claimed in common that all Americans should be equally free at age twenty-one to pursue their ambitions. …

While public opinion is typically stable over time, support for same-sex marriage increased from 35% to 61% between 2006 and 2016. It wasn’t just that older, more conservative people were dying and being replaced in the population by younger, more progressive people; people were changing their minds. Was this due to leadership from elites like President Barack Obama? To advocacy campaigns pushing for equal rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people? How does individual-level identity come into play? Given this uncharacteristic rate of attitudinal change, this book examines the relationship between social group identity and support for LGBT rights. Between 2011 and 2014, the authors conducted public opinion experiments across the country, testing their new Theory of Dissonant Identity Priming. Drawing from political communication, psychology, and identity literature, the theory suggests that people will be more supportive of LGBT rights when they hear that others within a shared identity group are also supporters, particularly if they find that support surprising. The experiments primed identities in four major social groups: sports fans, religion, ethnorace (Black or Latino identity), and partisanship. Overall, the results provide considerable support for the theory. Fans of the Green Bay Packers football team were more likely to say they support same-sex marriage when told that Packers Hall-of-Famer Leroy Butler was supportive. African Americans were more likely to support same-sex marriage when told that President Obama was supportive. Political communication that primes a social identity can change attitudes.

Human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) people have frequently been decided via popular vote. Australia conducted one such vote on the topic of marriage equality in 2017. Research has tended to focus on the negative experiences reported by LGBTQ people during such votes, with little attention paid to any positive experiences identified. This paper seeks to redress that imbalance, reporting the findings of two qualitative studies asking LGBTQ Australians about positive experiences during the marriage equality vote. The first study analyzed 673 typed responses collected during the two-month voting period, while the second analyzed interview data from 19 LGBTQ Australians collected two-and-a-half years after the vote. Both were analyzed using template analysis. Results identified sources of support, types of support, empowerment through activism, changes in general and LGBTQ communities, and positive personal changes. As public votes continue to be used to determine LGBTQ human rights, the findings may guide interventions to help LGBTQ people and their allies cope with such campaigns.

Data from the National Cancer Database indicates prostate cancer (CPa) prevalence in the Pacific Islander (PI) community to be nearly 1.6 times higher than the national standard. Recent data suggests that prostate cancer rates seen in United States PI men are comparable to that of African American men, the community with the longstanding recognition as having the highest rates of the disease in the US. PIs are defined as those originating from or being indigenous to the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia including the US governed Hawaiian islands, Guam, Northern Marianas Islands, and American Samoa. PIs make up a grossly underrepresented minority group, often being overshadowed by their mainland Asian counterparts when aggregated together as a group defined as “AANHPI” in sociological and epidemiological data sets and studies. In addition, Pacific Islanders, at least in the mainland US, are considered a “new” minority population, and with the exception of those indigenous to US territories, the vast majority of the population are post 1970 first or second generation immigrants. Research into health disparities in the PI community is thus unsurprisingly sparse, and there is great work to be done to explore these alarming trends. The purposes of this study are threefold: further explore the data pertaining to prostate cancer prevalence in the pacific islander community; disaggregate the data between ethnic lines; and provide a foundation for future research that can further elucidate the causes and outcomes of this disease in the Pacific Islander community. Data was taken from the 2014 Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander National Health Interview Survey (NHPI NHIS). The NHPI NHIS is a national survey administered by the CDC-NCHS to collect disease data including health condition and characteristics, health care access and service utilization but specific to the national NHPI population. Among 2588 participants, 4% indicated ever having been diagnosed with cancer among which prostate cancer was the second most commonly diagnosed. This study relies heavily on large-scale national questionnaires, thus future research should incorporate additional qualitative exploratory research, including targeted and ethnicity-specific canvassing and interviews in order to better understand the real life manifestations of the disease. The preliminary findings highlight an ever growing concern for the health outcomes of this community, and provide compelling evidence in support for both disaggregation of the community from Asian Americans, as well as interethnic disaggregation in data sets. A common thread of distancing between PI communities and the healthcare system was particularly evident, raising the concern that PIs are not being screened early enough and are not seeking life saving medical attention until advanced disease progression. A hopeful outcome of this study is a recognition that more outreach and community work must be done to bridge the gap between PIs and the Western healthcare system in order to mitigate the observed disparities. Citation Format: Nicholas A. Sowizral. Disparities in occurrence and outcome of male reproductive cancers in the United States Pacific Islander community [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 16th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2023 Sep 29-Oct 2;Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2023;32(12 Suppl):Abstract nr C007.

This chapter examines Jerry Craft’s 2019 published graphic novel New Kid by applying Critical Race Theory (CRT). New Kid is based on autobiographic experiences of being African American at an American, mainly white, (elite) school, and can therefore be read as a “counter-story”. It is written out of the perspective of 12- year-old black boy, Jordan Banks, who is a “New Kid” at the private Riverdale Academy. The book has caused a nationwide debate in the US, being accused of preaching Critical Race Theory (CRT). Craft meanwhile claims that he did not write it with any political intentions. The article takes this debate as point of departure to first explain the main tenets of CRT and to explore in what way New Kid can be read as a counter-story in the sense of CRT. The analysis shows that New Kid reflects structural racism towards African Americans (e.g., microaggressions, othering and deficit orientation) in an educational context and reveals the negative consequences of racism for students’ self-perception.
 In the second part, the article investigates possibilities to teach New Kid in a European setting, taking the new Norwegian curriculum (Kunnskapsløftet) as an example. New Kid is identified as an appropriate medium to discuss race in Norwegian schools. This is particularly because of the sophisticated way New Kid approaches racism. At the same time New Kid itself can be examined for racism towards other marginalized groups, namely Asian Americans.

This book explores the global movement and transformation of Korean food that the author has encountered in various cities in the United States since the late 1990s. In particular, it focuses on four specific examples of such Korean food: cold noodles (naengmyeon), pancakes (jeon), grilled meat, including ribs (galbi), and rice bowls with vegetables and meat (bibimbap). The four main chapters discuss each of these dishes by situating them in broader historical, political, and cultural contexts. In order to bring these case studies together with thematic coherence, Ryang engages with the notion of authenticity in the consumption of these dishes. She follows the transnational trajectories of the cold noodles she ate in Koreatown, Los Angeles; the pancakes she encountered in a huge Korean supermarket located in the Baltimore area; the grilled meat dishes that are selectively present and absent in diverse locations in Hawai‘i; and the rice bowls popular among college students in Iowa City.Beginning with her own personal memories of eating these dishes over three decades in multiple locations spanning the Korean Peninsula, Japan, and the United States as well as Australia (albeit tangentially), Ryang presents the checkered histories and current conditions of consuming these dishes. Following her peripatetic discussion, readers learn how these seemingly mundane dishes have undergone dramatic alterations as they traveled long distances both culturally and geographically, losing certain meanings and features and gaining new ones. For example, jeon, small pancakes made of battered vegetables, seafood, and meat, used to be the ritual food reserved for ancestor commemoration rite in the Korean Peninsula and Korean communities in Japan. Yet this symbolic meaning has been lost in their transnational travel to Korean supermarkets in the United States, and the global capital invested in food industry has reinvented jeon as portable and convenient food to be eaten anytime. In the case of galbi, distinctive Korean recipes for marinating meat include pear juice and garlic. Yet these ingredients have been lost in its diasporic journey; Koreans living in Japan known for their grilled meat (yakiniku), especially organ meat, have stopped using them for economic and other pragmatic reasons.I would situate this book in the growing body of critical food studies written from a transnational perspective. These studies explore the larger political and social histories of food production, circulation/distribution, and consumption that highlight uneven power relations among individuals, social groups, and political communities. They also pay close attention to persistent and shifting hierarchies and inequalities in the contemporary world shaped by uneven global histories. Unlike culinary studies that focus narrowly on ingredients, recipes, cooking techniques, and presentations, critical food studies approach food as a medium through which unequal power relations are illuminated and analyzed, rather than being obscured by culinary pleasure and enjoyment. As Ryang herself points out, Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History was a seminal work in this body of literature. Since this work, many more studies have been published, including Erica Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World and Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. While these are more in-depth and extensive studies focusing on a single food item and its global variations over centuries, Ryang’s book, as she herself is well aware, is a rather impressionistic exploration of the complex trajectories of the four Korean dishes. (For a comparable work on Chinese food, see Tan’s Chinese Food and Foodways in Southeast Asia and Beyond.) This relative lightness, coupled with the popularity of these four dishes among the millennial generation of college students exposed to Korean food, can work very effectively in facilitating these students to see, think, and experience these mundane dishes from a critical and broader perspective.The main chapters of this book together convey the important historical shift from colonization and war to accelerated global capitalism as the central force behind transnational flows of food. In the past, food circulated as a byproduct of colonial expansions as well as military conquests and occupations. As people were mobilized as agents and subjects of colonial empires and military powers, their food moved along with them and was transformed in such processes. In the present, the transnational movement of food occurs primarily through the leisure and entertainment industry as it identifies and even manufactures market niches and promotes certain “ethnic” or “national” dishes. This book also aptly highlights ongoing class divisions among Korean Americans and other Asian Americans. Small restaurants and grocery stores owned by Korean immigrant families have disappeared as gigantic Korean food companies open large supermarkets that cater not only to Koreans and Asians but also to other American consumers. While the growing number of children of wealthy Chinese families come to the United States as international students and consume those Korean dishes in major university towns, refugees from Southeast Asia continue to toil in the restaurant and meatpacking industries.This book, however, is somewhat uneven in discussing complex and often multilayered trajectories of the four Korean dishes. The second chapter, on jeon, is the strongest, whereas the first chapter, on naengmyeon, contains a digressive discussion of noodle varieties and spicy calamari. The underlying logic of this chapter makes readers expect more substantive elaboration on the noodles’ global transformation, but this discussion stops rather abruptly (31). The third chapter delivers a comparative discussion of the Japanese colonization of Korea, the US annexation of Hawai‘i, and the contemporary movement of global capital invested in the tourism industry, which has shaped the particular presence and absence of grilled meat consumed in various locations in Hawai’i. The subtitle, “Grilling Galbi,” may puzzle readers because the chapter does not focus on ribs in particular but discusses a wide range of meat consumption across national boundaries of South Korea, Japan, and Hawai’i. The fourth chapter highlights the impact of educational globalization on food consumption among Asian students, including international students, in Iowa City, a quintessential midwestern city that is still primarily white. All of these chapters could benefit from more ethnographic research on people whom the author encountered and observed as consumers and producers of the four Korean dishes. This limitation also influences the discussion of authenticity, which I will discuss below.The thematic focus on authenticity is well taken, because this notion is central to the consumption of food in our globalized world. Critical food studies tend to approach authenticity from a dual angle. It has become salient precisely because certain food has left its place of origin, and this decoupling works in conjunction with the enduring power of status distinction measured in terms of cosmopolitan sophistication in various societies.1 The authenticity of deterritorialized food in motion gains symbolic currency as a meaningful source of sophistication and worldliness among the masses. The ability to identify “authentic” dishes and consume them signifies both economic and cultural capital, which enhances such consumers’ prestige and honor, leading to higher social status. Critical food studies also recognize the relational and fluid nature of authenticity as opposed to fixed and immutable attributes and qualities. Ryang’s discussion of authenticity captures this relational nature but not its symbolic role as a marker of status distinction in the age of accelerated mass consumption. There is a curious absence of engagement with existing critical food studies published by Korean American scholars on this issue as examined in Korean America and South Korea.2 Instead, this book engages with purely theoretical discussions of authenticity by engaging with European social thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Marx. This discussion is valuable, yielding deeper insights and questions about authenticity in food consumption in the age of consumer capitalism. Yet the thematic discussion of authenticity in this book could benefit from the expansion of ethnographic research beyond the author’s own observation and personal experience and into the lives of people she encountered and observed while following the four Korean dishes. Logically, the discussion of authenticity raises the following empirical questions: Which of these consumers, retailers, and producers of the Korean dishes talk about authenticity? What does it mean to them and why do they care about it? What other qualities do they find important and why? Delving into these related questions would enrich and deepen the discussion beyond theoretical argument.Critical food studies deserve both scholarly and pedagogic attention in our globalized world for at least two reasons. First, as global and local economies in industrialized world have moved toward information technology, brand marketing, and service industry, we can easily become oblivious to the corporeality of human existence; food and eating bring us back to such material foundation of our collective existence that reminds us of our vulnerability and finiteness and our inseparable connection to the environment that has been severely destroyed by our fossil fuel–based civilization. Second, eating is an activity shared by all human beings, and through it we can make connections between everyday routines and uneven power dynamics. Ryang’s book makes a valuable contribution to this double endeavor. The book is lucidly written with an inviting first-person narrative and will be suitable for undergraduate courses on critical food studies, global or transnational Korean studies and Asian studies, and comparative studies dealing with material culture.