Rewind! Reframing Trauma with Chef Sang Kim

We joined writer and chef Sang Kim for a conversation around reframing trauma. We were thrilled to get Sang's perspective as one who has lived life from so many different vantage points — there is so much here in this interview! We touch on the search for "home," crossovers between art forms, cooking as a source of joy, what it takes to be a great improviser, and reframing trauma through daily practice.

Sang Kim is a regular food contributor on CTV's The Social, The Marilyn Denis Show, Your Morning, and Breakfast Television. Season one of his television show Searching with Chef Sang, documenting the intersection of his Korean immigrant experience with the broader Canadian culture, airs on TLN and streams on VivaTV this summer. He currently operates North America’s most popular sushi making school, Sushi Making for the Soul. He has been featured as CNE celebrity Chef and LCBO’s Celebrity Chef Of The Month and served as Chef Ambassador for the United States Department of Agriculture. He was also the recipient in the Best Dish category at the renowned Chengdu International Culinary Competition in 2019.

Links:
Searching with Chef Sang
Sushi Making for the Soul
Follow Sang Kim on Twitter and Instagram

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We love hearing from our listeners! Leave us a voice message, write to the show email, or send us a DM on any of our socials.

If our conversations support you in your own reframing practice, please consider a donation on our Patreon, where you can also hear bonus episodes, or tipping us on Ko-fi. Subscribe to the Reframeables Newsletter. Follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube too.

Transcript

Natalie
Hi Reframables, it’s Nat. 

Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together each week to reframe problems big and small with you. 

Natalie
Today we’re reframing trauma with chef Sang Kim, whose new TV show Searching with Chef Sang comes out this fall. 

Rebecca
Reframing trauma — that sounds big, Nat. 

Natalie
Yeah, we like big, Bec. So in this episode, first we’re going to talk about writing and food. 

Rebecca
Then we dive into Trauma, followed by a short philosophy lesson. 

Natalie
I love that part. And then we spend some time talking about going viral online, which he’s done. And then we end the whole conversation with our speed round. 

Rebecca
It’s notorious, our speed round. Yeah, big. 

Rebecca
Ok, let’s do it. Reframing trauma with Chef Sang. 

Our guest today is Sang Kim. He’s a regular food contributor on CTV’s The Social, the Marilyn Dennis Show, and Your Morning, as well as Breakfast Television, focusing on Korean and Japanese cuisine. His first television show, Searching with Chef Sang season one, documenting the intersection of his Korean immigrant experience with the broader Canadian culture, will be airing primetime on TLN in September 2022. He is an award-winning author of two books. He also does advocacy for food literacy in underserved communities in the GTA. 

Natalie
There is so much here, Sang. We are so inspired by the breadth of your bio, and who better to reframe trauma with but somebody who has seen and lived life from a bunch of different vantage points? So thank you for being with us. 

Sang
Thank you very much for having me, ladies. Really love your podcast. 

Natalie
Aww, thanks, man. 

Rebecca
Aww, thanks. 

Natalie
That means a lot. 

Rebecca
I guess just diving right in (because there is so much here), how do you see the crossover between your art forms, Sang? As a writer, as a chef, as speaker? 

Sang
All of it is accidental. When we look back and go, “Hey, that was the peak of my life and everything’s been downhill since,” — for a very long time, I used the fact that I was a valedictorian of my high school. That was my go to, you know what I mean? I was a valedictorian of my high school, and all of these years passed, but it was during that time. I did very well in school, although I lived a very double life. I grew up in the Jane and Finch projects at a time when crack cocaine was a thing, and so it was a really nasty bit of time in my teenage years. My mother was smart enough to send me to school on the other side of the tracks, by which we referred to as Black Creek, that divided Jane and Finch proper with York University and Keele and all of that — Keele and Finch. And so she sent me to C.W. Jefferys. 

So at Jefferys, I was a very popular student, which invariably means at the end of your high school career that you end up with no friends — real friends. And that’s exactly what happened to me. But I was very popular. I was a jock, but I led this double life. I was a compulsive kleptomaniac, there was a time where I was selling drugs as well, but I did extremely well in school, right, and I didn’t even really have to study. And so when I became valedictorian, it was like that moment — I’d received offers of general scholarships and things like that, and I was destined to become a doctor. Just like exactly the way post-Korean Civil War immigrant / refugee parents viewed my generation of Koreans coming here. You have to be a doctor, and then if you need to be, then maybe a dentist — and then there’s, you know, the accountant and lawyer, all right, but nothing in their minds below that. And so I was destined to be on track to be a doctor. 

But then I went away. One of the gifts that my extended family put together for me was a trip — an all-inclusive, to a one star resort in the Dominican Republic. One star is being very generous about this place. I went there. I was supposed to go there with my Italian girlfriend, but her parents didn’t want her to go — they’re very conservative Italians. And so I went with her best friend, which was a mutual friend of mine. Everything that was destined to be romantic and all of that, it’s just like, “No.” And in fact, the person I was with is a very sarcastic person, and so she would always poke fun, be sarcastic about people, you know, on the beach and stuff like that. Today, I guess you call it ‘fat shaming’ and things like that. But I got onto that, and I was doing the exact same thing, and so you can imagine what kind of joylessness I experienced there — lying on the beach, poking fun at people that we didn’t know. 

But there was this one particular man. Literally, the only way I could best describe the way he walked was he waddled like a penguin. So imagine an emperor penguin — he was more like a penguin in the shape of a Mr. Potato. It sounds very cruel, and it is, but that’s the only way I could envision him. But anyways, he was also from Toronto, and we knew this because when we landed back, he was in front of us in line to get out. And at the time, terminal three was being built, and so there was all this construction. So there’s this one laneway path through a tunnel, and he fell in front of me. I remember very distinctly his heels — he still had, like, thongs on or something, and his heels hitting the floor like this, and then one of his thongs kind of slipping off. 

I didn’t know what to do, but I was the closest to him. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Screaming, “Is there a doctor? Is there a doctor?” No doctors. The emergency crew finally arrived about 15, 20 minutes later. His daughter and his wife (I presume) were weeping over his body, and he had died, right? The man had died in front of me, and I’d never seen a person die. And when I got home, I remember being in that same kind of mindset I was with my friend in the Dominican. Just called everybody I knew, and made the story even more interesting with every single call. And I would dramatize it, and all of that. You know, “Mr. Potato Head waddling like a penguin, and then he does this.” And I made it more funnier and more interesting as the night grew. 

And then I couldn’t sleep. And in fact, I couldn’t sleep for three days, to the point where my heart was racing so much. My mom saw after the third day, and immediately took me to the hospital near the 400, and they sedated me. My heart rate was so so so high, it was dangerous. I guess 28 hours later, or something like that, I’d woken up and I was a completely different person. You know, I had submitted my speech to Mr. Oakley, my English teacher. It was one of those typical jocular valedictorian addresses, and then my mom brought it to me because commencement was in a couple of weeks, and I just tore it up. I said, “That’s not me, that’s not me.” And then I rewrote it, and it ended up becoming this epic seven page thing that, of course, Mr. Oakley said, “This is just a little too much, so why don’t we just cut it down to one page?” And effectively, that’s what he did. 

That experience had completely unnerved me and changed me. And as a consequence, I remember sitting across the table in our kitchen in our Jane and Finch tenement. Cockroach-infested, rodent-infested place, and I said to my mom, “I can’t be a doctor. That’s impossible. I don’t want to be a doctor. That’s not the route I want to go.” And she feared the worst. My father, who had long left our family, was a journalist, and said, “You don’t want to be a writer.” I said, “Yeah, I want to write. I want to be a writer.” And I remember she completely broke down. Everything she was doing, every will in her body, was to redirect my life away from the path my father took. 

And to be a writer, I don’t look at it as something that was a calling or anything like that. It was just purely accidental. And then, of course, the occupational hazard of being a writer is you end up trying to figure out what’s the best kind of job to support you, and it was in the restaurant business. So that’s how the two come together. And I hated the restaurant business my entire life. Every single moment of it I felt was a waste of my ambitions and my talent. Today, it was just a pure waste of time. It’s not that I regret it, because it’s given me a lot of important things, but I think it’s Annie Dillard who says about time — she says, “Spend all of it. Spend all of it, everywhere, every single moment.” But for me, when people say, “Time is money,” that cliché, I think of it as a half-truth. Time, yeah, it’s not meant to be saved like money often is. It’s meant to be spent. But I feel like there was an inordinate amount of time that I was allowed through my many many years of the restaurant business, but I spent very little of it on my goal to be a real writer. That’s how I think about that relationship becoming, in the end, like a chef. 

You know, I grew up on Wonder Bread, like everybody else. Grade two, told my mom, “I cannot take kimchi to school. Mom, do you want me to have any friends? Come on, like, snap out of this.” And so it was, “Ok, so how do you make a sandwich?” Well, there’s this thing called peanut butter. That’s what I heard my friends call it. So I think you just put peanut butter on this bread, and apparently that bread could last forever. It’s not like rice if you cook it. That’s what happened. I ended up growing up with bad food, having to steal a lot of it in key moments — particularly, my mom worked three jobs. She worked really hard. But when my dad, when he left, we were in a real crisis. And often we went hungry, and so I would go and steal food. My friends would steal shoes and stuff, and I would go steal food at Price Chopper. And so I didn’t know anything about it until I was forced to work in a kitchen because some line staff didn’t show up, and my manager said, “You got to work in there.” I always wanted to work in the front because, remember, I was a very popular student at high school. But when I ended up owning my own restaurants, it’s what happens. It’s like, “What? He’s sick?” COVID didn’t even exist. “What do you mean he’s sick? Like, does he really have to spend ten days away?” So you end up running the kitchen line. And then, after eight restaurants, I’m not like a trained chef or anything. I train, like everything else, on the ground. 

Rebecca
Is writing the thing you really… is that your big love? 

Sang
It speaks to my true nature, which is that I’m a profoundly solitary human being. I get very uncomfortable when I’m with two people like you. I feel very claustrophobic. I’m ok if the lights are on me, and there’s a thousand people in the dark out there. I can be eloquent, and I can be funny, and I can be all of that. Or if there’s a camera in front of me where I don’t have to mingle with people. But you put me in, like, our mutual friend’s party, for example — it’s not a mental health issue. I realized that I just want to be in the backyard, staring at the stars, thinking grandiose thoughts that never amount to anything when you’re trying to string sentences along in a book. I’m such a solitary person that it’s in my nature to do something very solitary, like writing. 

I’ll give you an example of the counter thing to this. I have my first show coming out, and when you’re making a show, there’s multiple creative spirits involved. It’s a collaboration, and I’m not used to that. So I’m a host of the show. I interview people, and then I write the VOs for the show. And I’m a writer, and so what writers do is they say, “Actually, can I have some more room? Do you really need only a five second spot? Because I’d really like to go on for like 15 minutes of this 20 minute episode.” And of course, you’re trying to find your voice in the most economical way, and that’s what I love about this process. But it’s very difficult for me, because they’re not going to use my best sentence. They’re going to use that thing where practicality meets some level of artistry, but the artistry always suffers. I’m not a 100 metre runner — I’m like a 5K runner. And so I need that strategy to get me through that first wall in the third K, and that’s when I start being able to sprint. But you’re not given that in a 22 minute episode. 

Natalie
The title of the show is Searching with Chef Sang. So what are you searching for? 

Sang
If there was a verb that we had to choose… we were going through the selection process of, “Is it a verb? Is it a noun? What is it?” And it was definitely a verb. It was a verb that was open-ended, that was about not having answers to the most fundamental questions that I ask about my experience as a human being, here in this particular space. By space, I mean the cultural space, the geographical space. Canada, and Canadians, and what that all means. So the search is a search to find a kind of home — but more important than that, a hearth. A house is you inhabit a brick and mortar space — but a home, it transcends borders, it transcends walls and doors and fences and all of that. And I’ve never in my life living in this great country (because I’ve traveled a lot and I think this is the greatest country in the world), but I’ve never felt like it was my home. 

And so what has that meant? I’ve owned condos and I’ve owned houses in particular communities. That wasn’t it. Here’s the issue. The issue is that I’m a 1.5-genner. And when you look at the stories of 1.5-genners across cultures who immigrate into North America, what you find is very interesting. They’re like ping pong balls going back and forth on the table of their selves. They’re born in their native land, and they come here at a relatively young age, and they try to figure things out. But the gloriousness of their life lay in a place that they can never go back to. 

So it’s very different from, for example, my daughter, who was born here. Although she’s Asian, she’s as Canadian as maple syrup. I’ll give you an example. Yesterday, her mom and I and her, we were at a Vietnamese restaurant. We’re having pho. Asians, when they eat noodles, they have to slurp. That’s just what we do. But also, it’s a way of saying to the person who made the noodle soup, “This is delicious. Thank you very much.” If you don’t slurp at a traditional Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese restaurant, if there are traditional Vietnamese, Chinese, or Korean chefs in there, they’re going to feel bad about themselves. So you slurp your soup. And not only that, it takes on a really important palate quality, because what happens when you slurp is that you breathe air into your palate area and you pick up more sensuousness. 

Anyways, my daughter looked at me and I was like, “What?” She said, “You know, I hate it when you do that.” I said, “Do what?” And she said, “Slurp like that. There’s people in the restaurant, dad.” I was like, “Kiki, hold on a second. First of all, you have never said this to me before. And number two, this is the proper way of having it.” Like, we’re not eating pasta, right? I wouldn’t slurp in an Italian restaurant — but in an Asian restaurant, you do that. This is a noodle soup, man, like what is wrong with you? So that conundrum is as much cultural as it is me feeling, even within my own family, like I just don’t belong. Like, why are you making me homeless in this situation? So Searching with Chef Sang is really about engaging with people and trying, through their own stories, figure out, “What is it exactly that I’m looking for?” And I know that it’s this constantly evasive term, an amorphous term, called home. That’s what I’m searching for. 

Rebecca
But always through food? 

Sang
It was always the original thing that the producers had thought was the way to do this, but once they understood that I have a lot of other interests much more important than food, they thought, “Let’s try and navigate all of this.” Food is that thing that’s going to generate people’s interest, but I’m hoping that the kind of engagements I have, the kind of questions that I ask people, the kind of interactions overall, is about much more than that. Leon Rook, one of my mentors, one day… it was an afternoon like now, and we had drank, I think, two bottles of gin by then. He loves gin. And finally he just grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, I think, and he says to me, “Food is not a metaphor for everything, Sang! It’s not!” And I agreed with him. I said, “I know that.” “So then why are you a chef?” It’s a question that Rebecca and Natalie are going to ask me three years down the road, I promise you, Leon. And that’s what happened. 

Natalie
I posted a TikTok the other day answering the question, “How do I calm down when I’m angry?” My answer was, “I cook.” And it’s not because I’m a trained chef, and it’s not because I have anything more important to offer in a kitchen than anyone else, but it is a space where I can channel my emotions. 

Sang
How do you do that? 

Natalie
For me, I experiment. If I’m feeling frustrated or if I’m feeling tired or if I’m feeling, like, stressed about something other than I have to do, in the kitchen I feel like I can play. I like the challenge, for example, of looking in my fridge and seeing that I only have maybe three or four ingredients, and then having to bring them together. And it lets me not think about the thing I’m actually stressed about, and by the end of having made the thing, I often have the answer to the thing I was actually thinking about. The food ends up being my bridge, or something. 

Sang
Is it a sibling thing? Do you feel the same way, or…? 

Natalie
Yeah Bec, where are you at with that? 

Rebecca
No, I don’t have that experience of cooking. I really enjoy eating delicious cooking, but I think it’s more of a task for me. It’s not a space where I feel really proud of my creativity. It feels more like another task. I wish I felt that way about cooking, that it felt like an exciting place to, you know, stop my brain. 

Sang
I think that level of talent, certainly I don’t have it. I look at a fridge that’s got 17 ingredients and go, “O, boy, I’d better order UberEats.” That’s my natural proclivity. I’ll go shopping for a rotisserie chicken. If anything, it just causes me anxiety to look at ingredients in the fridge. This is not PTSD as a consequence of working in restaurants. This is something that I’ve just always had. I’ll tell you, the same experience that you have cooking and being creative with the ingredients in your fridge that I find an incredibly onerous task, I find that same kind of “free myself from the stresses of the day” by dishwashing. We have a dishwasher, but I never use it, because I needed that time of just soaking my hands and then doing the same repetitive motion, putting it away. When it comes to food, this is the most incredibly ironic thing. 

I was in China about four years ago — this global competition that brought two chefs from each country — I don’t know how many, like 50 countries represented, and there’s awards for different categories. The most prized award, believe it or not, was Best Taste. And I won it, and I thought, “This is the silliest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.” Because here are real qualified chefs — there was a couple that were Michelin star chefs, and they’re doing all these innovative things. And you have to do something that represents your country, at least one ingredient that embodies — so I used maple syrup and Newfoundland salmon. And so I make this dish. I practice for a week, and so I’m eating salmon every single day, and I think, “Why am I…?” Like, just because I want to go and see a panda, because it was in Chengdu, which is panda country. Because I want to see a real panda, you’re doing this. And Martin Yann (you know, Walk with Yan) is one of the judges. He saw what I was doing in the multiple different steps, and I’m thinking, “You know what? I hadn’t eaten anything in the last ten days except this, so I got to be really good at this, obviously.” I just thought it was the most ridiculous… and then there were all these, you know, the ambassador to China was there, taking me out to dinner. It was the most ridiculous thing, and I just think to myself, “This game that I’m playing, and imposter syndrome,” because that’s the thing. I think, “I’m clearly living this thing, right? This imposter syndrome, whatever it is. I am clearly living this thing right now, because I can’t stand the idea of making another dish.” 

Natalie
“If I have to cook more fucking salmon…” 

Rebecca
So is the imposter syndrome that you feel related? Because we’re reframing trauma, so is that part of trauma, you think? Where does imposter syndrome come from? I really feel like you’re not afraid to name things, or say, “I feel like an imposter.” When we were texting about what we wanted to talk about, you said, “Let’s reframe trauma.” That’s how I kind of heard it, and I said to Nat, “He’s ready to reframe trauma,” and she said, “Well, that’s a big one.” Because it’s big, and you don’t seem afraid to just name it and say it and look at it. So that’s something I’m interested in. 

Sang
Let’s do away with imposter syndrome right now, because for me, imposter syndrome is convincing other people that you are somebody who you’re actually not. And so I’ve been really good at that most of my life. But the other thing is that for me, consciousness is also a verb. So it’s constantly moving. Consciousness is not a noun. When a person experiences trauma, for example, and names it that, there’s a level of consciousness and openness and expansion that hasn’t happened in this person. And so when it has, then everything becomes an instructional incident. That’s basically what it is, right? Because I don’t believe that you walk through life backwards. So you’re walking backwards, and all you’re staring at is everything that’s happened in your past — which is what trauma is. Trauma does not exist in the present moment, and it does not exist in the future. Trauma, as we name it, exists in the past. But if you’re able to impose specific meanings to that thing… I guess the best way to say it is something happened. So then the question is: what do you name it? And therefore, what is the meaning that you impose on it? 

And of course this is real — you know, people suffer from PTSD, for example. I know that my grandmother’s generation and my parent’s generation did. They came out of a savage, useless war. Not all wars are useless, but that one was. It was a proxy war between the Russians and Chinese and the Americans, and the Koreans, who were brothers, who were just one people, ended up murdering millions of each other. So that ain’t a good thing, what happened — but it’s what happened. So I learned a lot from the effects of it on my grandparents and my parent’s generation. Some people went really off, like my father. My father was a brilliant man, had best selling books, was an incredibly trusted and a truth-to-power-telling journalist. But he was a person who lost his parents early on in his life during the Korean War, separated from his two sisters, lived on the streets, and I saw what it did to him. I saw how ravaged he was psychologically. He was in some ways, a typical alcoholic, and he was a wife beater, and he was all of those things. But he also was an incredibly creative person. He was sensitive, incredibly penetrative when it came to political analysis, and all of that — and love. 

But I see those, and I see a particular lack of consciousness in him. He’s not able to name, and therefore by naming it, be able to name other things that come after that. And so for me, he was an incredibly traumatized 13-year-old, a teenager, during the war — that he was never able to get past. I look at my mom, I guess traumatized in equally the same way, but comes from an incredibly loving family of six sisters — farming family, incredibly beautiful parents. And I see that the way she responded to it was to go in a different direction. And so one looks constantly as they’re moving through time — either backwards and having a defining moment as illuminating all the rest of your life, or one turns around, goes forward, and is cognizant of incidences that have enveloped, affected (often very detrimentally) their lives. This is not a movement forward toward amnesia and a conscious disregard of past experience. It’s the opposite. And so therefore, there’s a particular kind of consciousness in my mind that eliminates trauma altogether. Like, for me, trauma doesn’t exist — it just doesn’t exist. Incidents exist, but incidents are either overcome or they’re not. They’re instructional, or they hold you back and you learn nothing. 

And so when I say, “Let’s reframe trauma,” I mean, “Let’s redefine its parameters, and let’s also figure out different words that we can interchange with it, so that we give it a different meaning.” And it’s not just changing up words, but I’m a huge Nietzschean, and so self-overcoming is a really big thing for me. When Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals talks about ressentiment — French word, but it’s how resentment breeds and feeds a culture that does things to take away from what is potentially great in individuals. And it seems to me we live in a very similar type of culture today that Nietzsche was describing back in the 1880s in Europe. When you think about the great psychologists who are Nietzscheans, particularly the three great early period of Freud and Jung and Adler, it’s Adler who was the one. He was so influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy around resentment and around self-overcoming. He was the one that really classified, in psychological terms, the idea of teleology versus etiology, and he was able to say Freud is just about cause and effect — whereas teleology is, “How do you build things forward?” And so when you look at all of the great motivational speakers and the great motivational books, to the great things that are happening now, they’re all based on the Adlerian thinking that’s based on Nietzschean thinking, of “What is trauma, and how do we redefine it?” How do we reframe that? 

Natalie
Yeah, moving through really is key for how Rebecca and I have talked about reframing on this show a lot, because it isn’t just about dismissing. I think you talked about the great amnesia, right? I mean, that idea of just pretending something didn’t happen — it’s not about that. But I love your use of the language of, “It’s an incident.” It’s very interesting that you’re going Nietzsche with this one. The philosopher for me that really strikes is Derrida, and I’ve just recently written about a topic to do with what’s called ‘hostipitality,’ and I remember the first time I read about it, I was like, “That’s actually a misreading of the word,” like somebody miswrote this word down. So of course, it took some reading to realize, no, there are no mistakes with the way that he frames language and takes it apart. The idea of it being that we have rules when we bring people into our physical spaces, into our homes, right? Like when you’re talking about this really big, deep meaning that underpins, but also overshadows that word of ‘home’ — but we have these rules in terms of the home that is our heart, but the home that is our house, and also the home that is borders in the world. And so who gets to come in, and who doesn’t, and how are they supposed to act when they’re there? That came to mind when you were talking about slurping noodles in a restaurant, and it’s like, “Whose rules win in what space?” 

And now I’m thinking about it in terms of your own relationship to food and, well, the resentment that can become attached. I think I disagree with your mentor. I think that everything is a food metaphor, personally, because I think you could really play with this. There’s something really wild to me about how everything I’m hearing you say today seems like your relationship to food is less about the food and more about the space that food finds its way into. And those spaces are these bordered spaces — whether it’s your house, your body, your country, your sense of how the world is divided into inequitable chunks of land by the colonizers that created these spaces. I mean, so all of that is powerful to me. I was going to say, “Hey, tell me how your relationship to food has shifted according to now you having created that one really viral blog, How to Open a Restaurant in 30 Days, that seems so not connected to what I’m hearing you talk about.” But if it’s a food metaphor, it probably is. How has your relationship to food evolved, with all of this philosophical underpinning? 

Sang
You could probably say it much better than me — howtoopenarestaurantin30days.com went viral only because there was zero marketing money for the restaurant that I was opening called YakitoriBar. Zero marketing dollars. I thought, “Ok, so we only have 30 days, and then we have to start paying rent. So why don’t I write a blog where every day charts a meaningful progression toward the opening of the restaurant?” And we did end up opening on the 31st day. And it became not only very propulsive and compulsive. I was riddled with sickness through the whole process. I went to the hospital twice, because here you are trying to open a restaurant, train people, take care of everything, and then at 4 o’clock in the morning, I’m pumping out a page of a day. And so howtoopenarestaurantin30days.com was really about all of the different aspects. And food played, of course, a part in it — developing the menu. But it probably didn’t take more than five out of the 30 days because there’s so many things that has to happen when you open a restaurant. And so it was more people who were interested in how to open a restaurant and less chefs took this on. 

During that time, I had a real issue with critics. Critics who, when I opened up Blowfish, they slammed it. You know, it became the longest running successful modern Japanese restaurant in the history of this country, but they slammed it — but then when I opened up Koko Share Bar, same critics came, it was far lesser innovation (and in my mind, just not as interesting food), and the same ones praised it. And I was like, “You know what?” And so, I think when it went viral was when I attacked the critics. I went after them. And that’s when you saw this, where people were really sharing it. I have a problem with critics in general, for anything — the idea that critics exist for the arts. And I’m not saying that restaurant-building and cooking is an art like the way music is, or the way painting or writing is. But the idea that somehow you can take something that cannot be properly shaped into something and criticize that, it’s like saying, “I really love the way you’ve been working out and building the upper part of your chest, Sang, but, you know, your calves, they look like frog’s calves.” What is the point in doing that? 

And when it came to restaurant critics, I remember… I’m not going to mention this famous critic’s name, but she was wondering why there was these small clams in the miso soup, and she really didn’t like that. Miso soup had these small clams in it. Is it worth writing two sentences about it? No. It had clams — just describe it. It had clams. But if you go into where miso soup was invented, which was an island in Asia, there was a hell of a lot of clams around there. There wasn’t a lot of sheep, so we weren’t going to throw sheep in there, but there was a lot of clams. And so they used a lot of clams in their miso soup — particularly if you lived along the coast. And guess what? It’s an entirely coastal country. Critics do that because they want to try to instruct the very things that they’re supposed to learn. That’s what a critic is. You think about a personal critic, somebody who attacks you. When they attack you, it’s because they themselves are supposed to learn something from what they say to you — but they don’t. And the critic’s entire profession is that they have to look in a one-directional way, as though they themselves are not compensating for and projecting the very things that could probably help not only their writing (because they write when they critique), but their person. Anyways, that’s the reason why it went viral. It wasn’t because I was doing anything terribly interesting with food. I never do, except in China. 

Rebecca
Has your relationship to food evolved? 

Sang
There are things that I feel an immense gratitude for. I surround myself with five close friends, who are in so many ways much better than me, and so I have people that I can look up to. Equal to that level of gratitude that I have for the friends that surround me are meal plan dishes that I can order online. I can’t tell you — it’s almost frightening if you go into our recycling bin. You could hear neighbours practically saying, “Who’s ordering all of those food boxes every single day? Like, what is that?” That would be me. So I’m absolutely grateful for that. So has it evolved? I’m so grateful that the pandemic was able to produce so many great different meal plan packages that I can just order and all I have to do is follow these simple instructions. I’m grateful for that, I can’t tell you how much. 

Has it evolved in terms of the way I think about it narratively, and as I think about it from a point of view of being a host on a show, or the TV shows that I do? It’s no secret that I don’t take anybody seriously in the TV shows that I do when they call me a chef as though that’s some honorific. You know, somebody said to me, a really really great marketing professional said to me, “You know what, Sang? Your Twitter handle @koreanjohnsmith, you’re not going to get a lot of followers.” I said, so what should I call myself? “Why don’t you just call yourself @chefsangkim?” “You think I’ll get more followers?” — at a time when I thought followers was something important, the early period. I was like, “Yeah, I’ll switch it to @chefsangkim,” and then suddenly I got all these followers. But producers that I love, particularly at CTV — I’m there to create laughs. I’m there to entertain. And I know a lot about food. I know a lot about its cultural context, I know a lot about its history — not all food, I mean particularly Japanese and Korean. And I’m able to spin interesting stories through that, and also make it funny and fun. 

But you put me on one of those shows… I was actually on a local Iron Chef, when Iron Chef was something here, and I made it to the regional quarter finals. And the person that I trained beat me — the person that I trained to be a chef at Ki Modern Japanese beat me. Because I’m not like Becs — like, if you show me these ingredients, I’m like, “Ok, onion, garlic…” 

Rebecca
Nat — yeah, that’s Nat. That’s definitely Nat. 

Sang
Oh, that’s Nat! 

Rebecca
That’s Nat, yeah. She’s the genius. 

Sang
So if you do that to me… “Oh, and there’s chicken stock,” I’d be like, “Ok, I lose. I’m sorry.” It’s not only terribly uninteresting to me, I can’t do that. And so whenever I’ve been on those kinds of competitions, I’ll never join a competition that doesn’t tell me what the ingredients are. Because if I don’t research this stuff, if I don’t follow somebody else’s recipe, this ain’t going to happen. And we all know in Iron Chef that they already know what’s in there. But at the beginning, it wasn’t like that. It was like you didn’t know. 

Rebecca
Except it’s so interesting, because in the kitchen you’re saying you’re not an improviser, but I hear you being that in your life — very much, “What’s the piece that’s coming my way?” And even how you’re saying ‘reframing trauma.’ “I’m just like, I’m gathering and I’m reacting, and I’m adjusting.” 

Sang
I really really love your word, because I think now it’s finally I’m able to interchange ‘improviser’ with ‘imposter.’ I never thought about it that way before, because I am that. You know, one of the things that the producers in anything that I do now basically know is: don’t script me. I’m really bad when I’m scripted, because I’m going to go off on a tangent anyway, right? So it’s better if the guideposts are really far away. 

Natalie
That’s lovely. 

Sang
Because they’ve learned this: that Sang is going to start here at point A, but he’s going to come back. The whole point is answering point A, but I’m going to come back in a big circle — not a tiny little one. So I’m a very very improvisational person when it comes to two of three things: one, speaking; two, just going about my day-to-day life; but not three, cooking. I’m just not — I can’t. I have to follow a recipe, and I often forget even stuff that I do over and over and over again. It’s making me sound like I don’t cook. I cook all the time. But when my daughter says, “Do you always need to make the same gochujang and butter marinade for everything, dad? Like, everything?” I said, “Well, it tastes good on everything!” “But, like, everything? Do you have to do…?” I said, “Well, then why don’t you just do your like Yumiko?” Yumiko and I are, she’s my very best friend, soulmate, and we produced a beautiful child, but we’re not romantically linked. You know, we go on vacations together, the three of us, and all of that, and I drive her to work every single morning. But Kiki, in her teenage years (she’s 17), has lived with me, because she was very unruly and very much like me and her teenage years. But prior to turning 12, she lived with her mom, and we lived very close to each other. But her mom is the real chef. 

Natalie
We have that mutual friend… well, actually, it seems like we have a few mutual friends, and one of them guided us to ask about your tattoo, which says ‘amor fati’ — because we did some digging and learned that it’s a Latin phrase. So what’s that all about? 

Sang
There’s two Latin phrases that really, if I could say (because I know no Latin), but if I could say, there’s two Latin phrases that really bookend the way I think about life. One is ‘amor fati,’ and then the other is ‘memento mori,’ and in some ways they’re janus-faced coins. “Remember your death” and “love your fate.” So amor fati is, of course, “Love your fate.” Amor fati and trauma, or the concept of it, is inextricably tied together, and this is where Nietzsche comes in, because Nietzsche really explores this. He not merely explores it in his writing, but he lives it. He lives amor fati. This idea that everything is purposeful, everything is meaningful, and everything is great — that’s why you say ‘yes.’ It’s not that you say ‘no’ to everything. That’s a nihilist. 

So amor fati is the opposite of nihilism. People who don’t understand Nietzsche will accuse him of all kinds of things, but the one thing that he wasn’t was he wasn’t a nihilist. He was the complete opposite of that. His embracing of amor fati embodies that ‘yes.’ It’s ‘yes.’ You don’t cherry-pick your experiences. You don’t cherry-pick the incidences that happen in your life and decide that one you’re going to call a trauma, and the other you’re going to call an instructional incident. You call it all the same thing. Well, in today’s culture, everyone who’s got a grievance wants to call it a trauma. And for Nietzsche, it’s an incident, and you say ‘yes’ to it, because if you say ‘no’ to it, it becomes a trauma. That’s amor fati — love your fate, don’t cherry-pick. 

Rebecca
I like that. So that would really be your daily practice. We wanted to end on what your daily practice would be for having a good day, really — for continuing to reframe trauma, which we’ve sort of heard that you wouldn’t even use that word. But it’s saying ‘yes.’ 

Sang
My daily ritual (and it’s not necessarily defined by the idea of amor fati) is move. Whether it’s meditation that I would do at 4 o’clock in the morning where I’m moving brain cells in my head, or if I’m running 5K — just move. And something incredible happens to consciousness when you do that. Consciousness is always about movement. It’s not static. It doesn’t stay in one place, and this is why everything is plastic. That’s why you can reshape your brain, that’s why you can reshape your body. This is how you can reshape your emotions. How you get over first love. We all remember how impossible it appeared that we were going to get over the first great love of our lives. Now think about it. How did that happen? Well, it didn’t happen with you just lying there underneath your covers. It never happens like that. You got to move. You got to go to the grocery store. You got to go do that laundry. Just move. You got to move the cells of your body as you’re meditating and in a still space. Just move. That’s what I say: just move. Live your life like a verb. Live everything like a verb. 

Natalie
So we gave you ‘improviser.’ 

Sang
I love that, thank you. I’m no longer an imposter. 

Natalie
And you’ve given us this gift. So we’re going to move and embrace our fates, and that’s going to reframe a whole lot of trauma in all of its various incapacitating capacities. 

Rebecca
I like that, yeah. I think I’m going to add a verb to my office surroundings. ‘Move.’ Sang, we like to do a speed round right at the end. 

Sang
Ok. 

Rebecca
That we didn’t tell you about. We’re just going to fire some questions at you. I feel you could handle this. 

Sang
I’m a great improviser, according to you. 

Natalie
Ok. What was the last new skill you learned? 

Sang
How to aim my laser on my gout knee at that specific place to give me a better feeling at the end of it. So, for example, this is my laser. I used to hold it at the wrong angle, and because I have a gout knee (because I suffer from gout, because I drink a lot of this, too), but I used to hold it at the wrong angle, and I’m sure it wasn’t hitting my cells, I guess, in a certain way — or my muscles in a certain way. So I learned that angle. 

Rebecca
What’s a common myth or something people misunderstand about your profession? You can choose which profession. 

Sang
Cooking: that it’s an art. Writing: that people do it in one way — in other words, people want to believe that writing is you just start, and then you go. I’m the opposite. I cannot start a story, for example, unless I know exactly what that last sentence is. So I think the myth is that writers are just kind of storytellers, and they can just go — and I guess a lot of novelists do that, but they’re not very good novelists. For me, I just simply cannot start a story, and I can only write stories. I will never be able to write a novel. I don’t know how people do that without that last sentence in place first. 

Natalie
Ok, what’s the most fun thing you’ve done today? 

Sang
Talk to you guys, of course. It’s the only fun thing I would do today. 

Rebecca
How would your siblings or close friends describe you? 

Sang
I have a younger brother and sister, and they would probably describe me very differently. I think my youngest brother thinks that I’m too harsh about everything, and on him. My younger sister, the middle one, would probably say I make things too complicated. My friends (for example, our mutual friend) would probably say, “He’s a really kindhearted person who gives a lot and always feels like he’s accomplished nothing in his life.” 

Natalie
Ok Sang, this is the question you’ve been dreading: what’s for dinner tonight? 

Sang
Whatever you’re making! Just send me your address. You guys are wonderful spirits to spend time with, and I’ve been spending some time with you guys outside of just this, listening to you, and I’m absolutely grateful. You guys got something really special here. I would recommend (it’s just my opinion, but it’s a damn good one), but I would highly recommend you look at the longer picture, because you guys are going to do really really well. You are doing great, but you’re going to be great great. Watch. 

Natalie
Thank you. 

Rebecca
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