Hand Flavor

When have you failed? What did you learn from it?

Koreans embraces the concept of son-mat, which means a cook’s soul is infused in the food. Only the hands of skilled cooks are able to work a miracle with simple ingredients to create a masterpiece.

The first week of my stay in America was a nightmare as waves of homesickness washed over me. The Kraft mac-and-cheese that initially greeted me was artificially bright, fiercely salty, and so sticky that it coated my taste buds. It mocked the Korean dishes I craved. Given the nickname gae-ko (dog nose), because of my increased sense of smell, it made the experience even more shocking. While my Korean home gave me the warmth of minced garlic and my mother’s lavender diffuser, the Champaign apartment smelled of fresh paint and distant manure.

I had to regain the memories of my home through the scent of tteokbokki, sticky rice cakes that swim in a sauce made of gochuchang and gochugaru, the sweet heat transports me back to Seoul’s bustling street corners.

My eighth-grade self treated cooking like a chemistry experiment. I channeled grandmother’s precision: just four tablespoons of gochujang, leveled using a chopstick; measured portions of gochugaru, soy sauce, sugar, and oyster sauce in perfect sequence. I even made sure to turn the pepper grinder twenty times silently. However, something was still missing. The flavors were hollow, missing that indefinable thing that made my grandma’s version sing.

I tinkered around with it, and though each time I would get a little closer, the spirit of the dish was still not there.

The revelation came in the form of a phone call with Grandma. In her typical straightforward manner, she explained her secret: just as the street vendors keep their tteokbokki simmering for ages in broad pans made of stainless steel, the only thing missing was the virtue of patience. “Simply let it cook on low heat for a reasonable time,” she affirmed, her voice carrying the weight of decades of intuitive cooking skills.

For my next go, I decided to forget about my measuring spoons and rely on my gut. I allowed the dish to cook gently—I was just trusting the process instead of controlling it. After tasting it, I was flooded with a sense of familiarity. The sauce was now smooth like velvet; it was sweeter and the green onions gave it the perfect accent. I found my very own son-mat.

My quest for the perfect tteokbokki taught me about balance: cooking is a fine dance between calculated precision and intuitive trust. That lesson has now become a part of the way I live life’s ups and downs.

In Champaign, where the paint still seems to talk from the walls and the cars are passing only once an hour, I have learned to accept slowness after living Seoul’s fast pace for a lifetime, where same-day delivery was always expected and people were stabbing elevator buttons to save seconds. Now I allow both sides to be in harmony with each other. My fast self is the one that drives me to do mathematical research with a lot of concentration, whereas my reflective self finds the peace that comes from the unknown and the natural environment.

My intellectual life is also ruled by the same equilibrium. Mathematics is the one that gives me logical precision for my mind, and on the other hand, the satisfaction of my artistic endeavors comes from a deeper place: the core instinctual-emotional that first son-mat taught me to believe in.

Tteokbokki was no longer just a kind of comfort food; it was now a teacher that taught me that the most profound ingredients of life are not going to come from strict observance of the recipes but from the bravery of trusting your hands, your intuition, and the knowledge that you receive when you let them simmer for a while in your own time.