Minor Transliteration

Abstract This article invites a shift in the hermeneutic foci in reading Korean diasporic women's culinary labor beyond the translational circuit between the Korean transliteration go-saeng and its English translation “suffering,” both of which are doubly present in Min Jin Lee's novel Pachinko (2017). Previously, the novel has been understood primarily through the language of precarity and misfortune, emphasizing the collective victimhood of the Korean diasporic characters. To articulate the aspects of gender hierarchy and its unique formation of the Korean diasporic women's experience missing in the current scholarship, this article examines how gastronomic caretaking is a recurring condition for both Korean and Korean diasporic women under the intertwined systems of Confucianist patriarchy and Japanese colonialism. This article further highlights the embodied, agential, and productive relationship between Korean diasporic women and their culinary labor through what the article calls a “narrative of culinary persistence.” Interweaving historical and formalistic approaches to the novel, this article explores Korean women's cooking as a resistive site where anticolonial and feminist desires emerge, intersect, and transform in the face of Japanese imperialism, Confucian patriarchy, and wartime crisis.