“I Eat, Therefore I Am”: Kim Sunee’s Memoir Woven by Food Experience

초록

Kim Sunee’s memoir, Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home (2008), is indicative of how many current writers experiment with mixing different literary genres, mostly in an attempt to comprehend their complex subjectivities. By combining different narratives, such as travel writings, ethnographies, coming-of-age narratives, adoption stories, and food memoirs, among others, Sunee tries to recall her mobile subjectivity as an overseas Korean adoptee who has wandered many countries looking for her imagined place called home. In particular, food works as a powerful tool to relate her fragmented experiences in different countries as she employs specific culinary issues to look back on her displacement. That is, she employs gastronomical language to redesign her painful experiences into a meaningful whole. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Levinas’s jouissance can be an effective literary trope to understand the ways in which Sunee constructs her subjectivity through food.