Zoë Kim in Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?) Photo: Emma Zordan
Simply having emerged from a childhood like Zoë Kim’s with enough self-awareness, critical distance, and fortitude to make a theater piece with any nuance at all is an accomplishment that makes anything I have to say about Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?) feel trivial: the show functions as a testament to survival and the assertion of self-worth just by existing. But it does more than that artistically as well. It can be overly literal in its messaging, but I was struck by the way Kim, director Chris Yejin, and choreographer Iris McCloughan use movement as the architecture of the piece, and the way Kim uses her two languages, Korean and English.
Kim was the only child of parents who might, together or separately, have been unfit to raise any child–but certainly to raise a kind-hearted, imaginative daughter, when what they really wanted was the dutiful son who, in their Korean families, was demanded to carry on the family legacy. (One of the piece’s many horrifying stories describes how her paternal grandfather, her Harabeoji, the only son after twelve daughters, was given every resource his family had as his sisters starved and froze.) Kim’s mother, who never wanted children and was forced by her father to drop out of her science PhD to get married, treats love like Lucy in Peanuts treats the football: a promise held out to tease a trusting soul by ripping it away at the last minute. Her father–no doubt stunted emotionally by his own upbringing and channeling his own fears and disappointments into rage–beats Zoë, berates her, abandons the family for a younger wife in hopes of that elusive son, and finally threatens to kill her and her mother, all in the name of love. And still, Zoë maintains a relationship with her mother and, after many years of absence, seriously considers whether she’s willing to forgive her dying father.
Self-supporting from the age of sixteen, sent thousands of miles away from her family to boarding school in America and then cut off financially, Kim has straddled her two cultures and fought her way to a life filled with love and success: a husband who adores her, a dog who’s the light of her life, a career developing new work for the Public alongside her work as a writer and actor. So why excavate this material now? Why bare these incredibly painful experiences to an audience of strangers? To tell a gentle and quietly inspiring story of love, of course. Delivered to a glowing white orb standing in for her younger self, Kim narrates to the orb a future that for a long time seems nothing bleak, but we know she’s telling it from the other side, that simply by virtue of the show’s existence, she makes it through.
The language is unadorned, pulling no punches in her descriptions of abuse and telling her story cleanly and chronologically. As a writer, Kim can overexplain; the very beginning of the show almost feels like a syllabus for the lessons to come: “You will try to make sense of you and how you love…Why does safety feel like violence?” The concept of “love languages,” which she uses as a shorthand to define specific relationships–with her mother, her beloved grandmother, herself–also threatens to collapse into cliche. The entire framework of “love languages” comes from an explicitly Christian religious context, for one thing, but also it becomes a little bit of a copout, a way to toss off an explanation rather than digging into it. “You’re not a liar; that’s not your love language,” she writes at one point. There’s an insight there: Zoë isn’t a person who’s able to lie to her mother to protect her mother’s feelings even when she senses that’s expected. But the “love language” trope doesn’t sustain the emotions it’s meant to carry.
Contrast this with the gorgeous way she uses physical gestures as shorthand for the physicality of the family members she portrays. Yejin and McCloughan work as a strong team here–Yejin to help Kim define the characters through posture and gesture; McCloughan to build a movement vocabulary that works like an exoskeleton. We see narrative patterns through gestural ones, and there’s a formality to the physicality that helps keep the storytelling formal as well, helps Kim sustain forward momentum rather than being sucked into the deep and raw emotions of the events she relays.
Tanya Orellana’s set provides a handful of clean, framed spaces and surfaces for Minjoo Kim’s saturated lighting and Yee Eun Nam’s elaborate projections; the latter can be a bit too intricate, but Minjoo Kim’s use of rich color and moody shadow helps to set the tone.
“I cry in Korean but laugh in English,” Kim says–and while there’s not a lot of levity in the piece, she uses the contrast between the two languages to help build its world: English for narration, Korean for dialogue; English for present storytelling, Korean for memory; English for plain emotional truths, Korean for sentences with coded meaning, sentences left unspoken.
By the end of Did You Eat?, we can recognize that in telling this story mostly in English, she’s coming down on the side of laughter; it’s one of those autobiographical shows that’s as much an exorcism for the artist as it is crafted for the audience. The message of love–in all its perversions and incapacities–may be for us, but the journey of telling the story is also for Zoë Kim.