[Lee Jong-gil's Movie Reading] Digging Naengi and Picking Wildflowers... Mom, I Will Set the Table for You

Director Park Hyeryung's Documentary Film 'Bapjeong'

Mr. Lim Ji-ho is an advocate of wild greens. Every time he meets grandmothers, he explains the characteristics and benefits of each vegetable. "The closer you are to nature, the more you can eat."
[Photo by Et9]

A Meal Dedicated to the Two Mothers Who Gave Birth to and Raised Me, and to All Mothers in the World

A Wandering Foodie Who Stayed Up All Night Preparing a Memorial Table in an Empty House After Hearing of His Grandmother’s Passing... A Rice Coffin Filled with Gratitude, Not a Flower Coffin

※ This article contains many spoilers for the film.

The first dining table one encounters in life is a mother’s embrace. The journey of taste begins with the light yet rich flavor of breast milk. One learns various flavors one by one and eventually understands the taste of life itself. Im Ji-ho (64), a natural cooking researcher, faithfully follows this natural order. In his book “The Heart is the Bowl, Heaven and Earth are Rice”, he wrote, “I realized that the taste a mother gives with her body is truly a taste given with the heart, and I came to long for it.”

For Im, cooking is a process of trying to resemble a mother’s heart. He learns the earth’s embracing power from all mothers in the world. The food he makes is like deep and profound love. It does not go against the cosmic order and embodies the noble will of the divine.

He has two mothers: his birth mother and his adoptive mother. His birth mother died in a traffic accident on her way back after taking three-year-old Im to his biological father. Im learned this fact when he was twenty. He immediately ran to the main road where the accident happened but could do nothing but sit against a tree stump and cry.

“After crying like that, my birth mother, whom I had never seen even once, began to feel like a living person. She started to feel like a mother with whom I had exchanged enough love in my childhood, a warm mother and child. (...) When I think about it, I regained another mother only when I was twenty.”

In director Park Hye-ryeong’s documentary film “Bapjeong”, Im cooks rice for grandmothers. He approaches with a friendly face, helps with chores, and gathers ingredients from the surroundings. Shepherd’s purse, Korean daisy, Chinese thoroughwax, mugwort, wild chives, wild garlic, stonecrop... The cooking is swift and decisive. After heating the stove and a few cuts with the knife, new dishes appear as if by magic. The grandmothers gather one by one, pick up their spoons, and enjoy.

“The taste is really good.” “The seasoning is just right and delicious.” “You cook well.” “Earlier, I said I couldn’t eat it (laughs), but I ate it deliciously.”

The grandmothers pat Im’s back with their wrinkled hands. To Im, they are all mothers. The longing is great, and there are so many mothers to remember. Even now, he closely examines whether his birth mother looked like this or that. He laughs faintly, saying he is happy to be able to think of them as mothers.

The adoptive mother who lovingly raised Im passed away while he was serving in the military. It is a grief that pierces his heart. He has no memory of having made anything good for her. The promises he made at eleven years old?to come back driving a nice car and to let her eat delicious food without restraint?turned to dust. His mother suffered for six years after a stroke before answering heaven’s call. At the corner of the funeral hall, he wrote with a pen. It was a love letter to his mother.

“The sound of the sky collapsing / The pitch-dark night / In the long days when I couldn’t keep any promises / To my mother returning as a handful of dust / The grave covering the heart-wrenching sorrow with earth / That image, that scent / The wisdom of that noble life is covered together / Mother, you stayed up countless long nights for me with sorrowful tears / Just looking up at the sky and praying to God / That the path I walk is filled with bright light.”

He sets the table. It is for his mother. The grandmother who smiled at the foot of Jirisan Mountain has passed away. He enters the silent house and spends the night preparing a feast. Steamed croaker, steamed sea bream, steamed pollack, jokpyeon (jelly made from pig’s feet), chicken meatballs, steamed chicken, boiled octopus, fish pancakes, cabbage pancakes, muk (acorn jelly), soybean rice cake, clear soup... Im places the first offering (초헌, choheon) beside a mound of rice with a spoon stuck in it. He bows prostrate on the dew-soaked floor. Mourning the grandmother’s death... longing for his mother...

Some may find it hard to understand preparing a memorial table for a grandmother with whom he shares no blood. But if you look into the small wisdom Im gained through his journey of taste, you will nod in agreement.

“No one in the world stands alone by their own strength. A calf, after birth, is licked by its mother’s tongue to remove the placenta, and then it begins practicing standing and starts walking within a few hours, but humans cannot do that. Humans, who think they are the most excellent, forget even the care that raised them and believe they achieved everything on their own. In foolishness, no creature seems to surpass humans. I, too, only truly realized after my mother, who struggled through life, passed away that the reason I am who I am today is because of my mother’s devotion. When I think about it, half of what we experience in the world is making things to regret, and the other half is tasting regret and bitterness. But one thing! Without that tender love, I would have had no loneliness, no repentance.”

The root of Im’s cooking is ultimately his mother. He discovered the universe’s embrace in all mothers of the world. The son who was torn from that heart now offers his cooking, telling the heavy burden of life and death to be laid down. It is a rice coffin more beautiful than a flower coffin. The desperate longing that cannot be shared between this world and the next thus endlessly departs.

“Every step was longing. Every encounter was a mother. All the mothers in the world who filled someone’s cold hunger...”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.