(00:07):
Yeah, so my name is Ariel. I've also been going by my Korean name, which is the name that my grandmother, my haelmonee gave to me when I was younger, which is Jung-a, and so I don't have a preference, but you could call me both. And where do I come from? Originally I'm from Connecticut and came out to Montana in 2015.
(00:46):
The name of my business is Jung-a's, again, the name that my grandmother gave to me. And we're a kimchi business. I say we because I wear all the hats in my business. Yeah. And through that, I will be making very small batches of kimchi with my own hands and offering that to people, community at the farmer's market. And then down the road, I'd like to do home deliveries. So you could have kimchi delivered to your door. There are so many different kinds of kimchi, but when you think of kimchi, you think of the Napa cabbage kind. And so that's what we're starting with and it's what I'm wearing, so I'll be also offering those. And I offer a lot of workshops around town. For most of my life, I've been working with kids and I really have loved that work. And it's taught me a lot.
(02:07):
And it has been very challenging at times. And sometimes I've questioned, is this what I really am meant to be doing? And so for some time I had wanted to take a break from working with kids, and I decided that this is the time. And I would joke with one of my friends, Mayo, oh, someday at the farmer's market, we should have a cart, a food cart together you make onigiri, and I'll make kimchi or other Korean things. And she would usually chuckle at the idea. I knew it probably wasn't as much of a possibility for her as it could be for me. And so I took that idea and started. It started becoming very real. I was telling people I'm going to have my own kimchi business. During the pandemic, I was working with a group of kids from various families in a learning pod, and I wanted to share with them the process of making kimchi and a little bit about fermentation. And so we made a batch together, but this was very early on when I was just learning how to make kimchi and the batch didn't come out very well.
(03:38):
And then I asked my mom, what do I do? And then she referred me to, my mom doesn't really actually know how to make Korean food, which is also part of the story. I have to find my own way. And so my aunt, my emo told me about this person who goes by Maangchi on the internet. So my emo, my aunt told me, oh, you should make kimchi chie out of the kimchi you made. And so I found a recipe, the Kimchi jjigae, which is a kimchi stew on Maangchi's website, and just fell in love. I started making a lot of different Korean foods that I had grown up eating, and I was sharing it with my house at that time. And it just helped me to feel closer to who I am and what it means to be Korean. Actually with the same friend. We were taking a road trip together from Hot Springs, Montana and coming back to Missoula and we were playing some really nice music and just the landscape, it was really beautiful.
(05:08):
And so I felt really inspired. And there's a seed planted of like, what is something that you really love and what is something that you want to share with people? I believe that everybody has a gift to share. And I was thinking about what my gift is, and I just really love dancing and I love the feeling of it. I like being witnessed, not all the time, but certain times. And also throughout my life, I have been figuring out how to be stronger, my voice. And so what better way to do that than to have my own solo performance. And it wasn't just me. I invited a lot of friends to be a part of it. So it felt very community held and supported.
(06:20):
But yeah, it was like a statement of this process that I think has been happening for a long time of knowing that I have to, in the end, be a mother to myself and because I love dancing. So those things started to come together. I didn't know that at the beginning of creating Drip, they were just like, even the name Drip Baby Drip came when I was collaging with a friend, and I saw the words and then I was like, yes, that feels, I just go a lot with my intuition. And it felt right. It's a multimedia dance theater performance that started off with a lot of little ideas. And then I found this children's book called Moon Pops by Heena Baek. And I just really loved it. It's such a beautiful story.
(07:33):
It comes from this legend that's in a lot of different Asian traditions and something my mom used to tell me how there's a rabbit in the moon making rice patties so this, so moon pops draws from that. And so there are rabbits in the moon, and it's so hot that the moon melts and the rabbits lose their home. And then there's this granny wolf who has this idea to collect the moon's drippings. She makes moon pops out of them, hands them out to the whole community. They're all wolves. And then the rabbits come knocking on her door. And because they've lost their home, they ask, where's our home? And so she has this idea to use the last of the moon's, droppings, drippings, and pour it into a plant. And there's a light that grows from the plant, and that light slowly turns back into the moon. And the moon started to become a metaphor for mother. And I also had this idea of making kimchi on stage because I just think there's something beautiful about the simple things, the daily things that we do like cooking.
(09:20):
And so I brought a cabbage on stage and water and salt and started the beginning process of making kimchi. And through the process of this creating this performance, fermentation started to become a metaphor for personally fermenting for my own transformation, my own process of becoming my own mother. And so there are echoes and remnants of that into Jung-a's. Yeah, what does kimchi mean to me? Seems like a simple question, but it's actually a really big one. It means a lot to me. I go, the other day, I was picking up some groceries, and even though I didn't have to get cabbage, I always liked to go and look at the cabbage and the butts were facing out. And so I wanted to turn them around and take a picture because I think, no, I like seeing how they are kind of like a flower opening up.
(10:35):
Kimchi has taken on a whole it its own life. It's in a way I feel like I'm the mother to the kimchi and the kimchi is the mother to me. I have been learning so much from the process of fermentation, and it's helping me to delve deeper into my own cultural heritage as a half Korean American. Does how close my business feels to me, sometimes seem like too much or is that challenging. In a really good way. And it's actually what really helps to push me to keep doing it when there are some other challenges. And I do worry that because it's so close to me that in the future how that maybe it could hurt in some way. But I also feel like going back to that because it is, I'm sharing something that is beyond me, that kimchi is a tradition that has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years, and that my ancestors have been making kimchi for a very long time.
(12:36):
So that's what I mean by it goes beyond me that I feel their support. I literally as things are moving along and are coming together, I feel that they're there and my mom literally is there supporting me, and I wouldn't be able to do this really without her. I also wanted to share that it's not just about me making kimchi. I would love to have a community of people making together. And so the way in which I have been able to make that happen is through offering workshops. It feels really important to share this with people. Like anyone can make kimchi, and there are so many different kinds of varieties. You don't have to make it with cabbage. Well, I think I've heard that this happens for a lot of business owners that you sometimes just want to give up. And there's a little piece of that when, because like I said, I wear all the hats and I have to not only make the kimchi and I am the one who has to develop my own website to put stuff out on social media, to create the label, to do all my marketing and advertising, to do all my fundraising and work with the health department.
(14:42):
And so it sometimes seems overwhelming. How am I supposed to do all this? Because kimchi is a fermented product. You have to get something what's called a HACCP, which I don't know exactly what it stands for, but something like hazard analysis. So basically it is a hazard analysis plan in which you have to show all the potential risks and hazards in your process, and then how are you going to address them and reduce those risks. And so it just seemed really almost impossible to do because it's like this really large science paper basically. And I had started working on it on my own and was really stressed about it because a lot of, I needed to get this done in order to be able to sell kimchi. But in the end I realized that, realized that I can't do everything and there are certain things that I will have even that I'll have to hire out.
(16:08):
And so I ended up hiring someone to write that, and that relieved a lot of stress. I have a wonderful business mentor, Marguerite through the Rocky Woman's Business center, and she shared this website, I won't remember the name of it, but it's the government website for authorities on various processes. So obviously I'm looking into the food specialists and more so the people who know about fermentation. And so I found a whole list across the nation of all these people who know, who have had experience with writing HACCPs and know that process. So I called a bunch of different people also, I was trying to gauge what I found through that process, what their understanding of kimchi is. And obviously there are so many different fermented products and not everybody knows or has made every fermented product. I found Vanessa, who ended up writing my HACCP, and she's in Arizona, and the first time we spoke, she was driving and she went stopped on the side of the road to take my call for 30 to 40 minutes. And so I really just appreciated, I was cold calling people. I just appreciated her taking that time to some of my questions. And also it was after a call that was really hard. So it was nice to hear her say, yeah, it's basically you're writing a big science paper. It's not impossible to do.
(18:03):
But yeah, I can see why it would feel challenging if it's your first one. And so her validating that meant a lot. I think something important to share is I how important hands have been becoming to me. So there's something in Korean called sohnmat, which literally means hand taste. And when you say someone has good sohnmat, it's one of the highest compliments you can give to someone's cooking. And sohnmat often refers to your mother's cooking and that it holds certain memories when you eat something, you're like, you can remember the time when you ate that dish somewhere else. And it also, is about intuitively knowing how to make food, and it's all through your hands. I want to develop my own sohnmat more and more. Also because our hands have a specific microbiome that is linked to our family that sohnmat travels from generation to ration.
(19:59):
And because my mom doesn't cook and nobody actually really knows my grandmother's recipe for kimchi, that it feels like there's been some kind of cut in connection. And all I really have are my hands. And so I like to think that I have my grandmother's hands in some way, or I wonder if the kimchi that I make is anything like the kimchi that she's made. Even though I'm probably using a different recipe, I've combined a lot of things together to make the kind of kimchi that I make to this day. Also, each patch is different because the lactic acid bacteria is different each time you make a batch. The lactic acid bacteria is what are the bacteria that live on all the vegetables. And the funny thing is my middle name or my mom's, it's my mom's maiden name, Sohn. And it's become like a slogan for my business. I say Sohn made kimchi because it's through my family line, the Sohn. And also playing with handmade, because it's all about making things with my hands, including the earrings that I make or anything that I offer is made with my hands. So yeah, that feels important to share.
