Easy Tangy Coleslaw

I taught kimchi at the adoptee cooking session. Eighteen people in the community center kitchen, eighteen Korean adoptees, thirty-six hands that have never salted napa cabbage, never spread gochugaru paste on cold leaves, never felt the sting of chili on bare skin. I taught them the way I learned: from the beginning. Salt the cabbage. Wait. Rinse. Make the paste: gochugaru, fish sauce, garlic, ginger, sugar, salted shrimp. Spread it. Pack it. Wait. Ferment. Trust.

The teaching was emotional in ways I didn't anticipate. Watching eighteen Korean adoptees — people like me, people with the same wound, the same gap, the same hunger — put their hands into kimchi paste for the first time and come out red-stained and changed. Claire cried. Not dramatically — just quiet tears while she worked the paste into the leaves. She said, "My hands are Korean." Yes. Your hands are Korean. They always were. The gochugaru just makes it visible.

Hyunwoo, who rarely speaks, made the most beautiful kimchi in the class — the leaves evenly coated, the paste distributed with precision, each leaf folded and packed with care. He said, afterward, quietly: "My birth mother made kimchi. The agency told me that. She worked at a kimchi factory." His birth mother made kimchi. And now Hyunwoo makes kimchi. And the factory and the community center kitchen are separated by an ocean and a lifetime and an adoption that severed a thread, and the kimchi sews it back, one leaf at a time, one red-stained hand at a time. I have never been more sure that the cooking matters. The cooking is the thread. The cooking is the sewing. The cooking is the thing that connects us — all of us, every Korean adoptee with red-stained hands in a community center kitchen in Seattle — to the mothers we lost and the culture we're reclaiming and the identity we're building, one head of napa cabbage at a time.

Everyone took their kimchi home in jars. Eighteen jars of fermenting kimchi, distributed across Seattle, each one a small Korean universe in a glass container, each one a mirror for a Korean person who was raised without mirrors. The jars will ferment. The kimchi will change. The people will eat it and it will nourish them in ways that are physical and spiritual and cultural, and the nourishment started here, in this kitchen, taught by a woman who learned from YouTube and is now teaching in person, and the circle of kimchi is complete: from Korea to YouTube to Capitol Hill to the community center, from one pair of stained hands to eighteen pairs, from one kitchen to eighteen kitchens, from me to us.

Saturday: Bellevue. I was emotionally spent from the kimchi class — the good kind of spent, the spent of having given everything. Karen made her shepherd's pie. I brought nothing. Karen said, "No food?" I said, "I gave it all away today." She smiled. "That's the best reason not to bring food." She's right. Giving it away is better than bringing it. Teaching it is better than making it. Sharing the kimchi — the actual kimchi and the metaphorical kimchi, the knowledge and the skill and the identity — is the culmination of three years of work. The work continues. But this week, the giving was the work. And the work was good.

After a day of standing over napa cabbage with eighteen people whose hands came out red and changed, I couldn’t stop thinking about what cabbage does — how it holds salt, how it yields, how it becomes something entirely different from what it started as. I didn’t have the energy to make kimchi again, but I needed to be near that vegetable one more time, in a quieter way. This Easy Tangy Coleslaw is nothing like kimchi — it doesn’t ferment, it doesn’t sting, it doesn’t carry eighteen lifetimes of longing — but it starts in the same place: with cabbage, with salt, with the simple faith that something humble can become something worth sharing.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 0 min | Total Time: 15 min (plus 1 hour chilling) | Servings: 8

Ingredients

6 cups shredded green cabbage (about 1 small head)
1 cup shredded carrots (about 2 medium carrots)
1/4 cup thinly sliced green onions
1/3 cup white wine vinegar
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon celery seed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard

Instructions

Prepare the vegetables. Shred the cabbage finely and place it in a large mixing bowl. Add the shredded carrots and sliced green onions. Toss to combine.
Make the dressing. In a small saucepan over medium heat, whisk together the white wine vinegar, sugar, olive oil, celery seed, salt, pepper, and dry mustard. Stir until the sugar dissolves completely, about 2–3 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool for 5 minutes.
Dress and toss. Pour the warm dressing over the cabbage mixture and toss thoroughly to coat every strand. The cabbage will begin to soften slightly as it absorbs the dressing.
Chill and rest. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least 1 hour before serving, tossing once or twice during that time. The coleslaw is best after the cabbage has had time to absorb the tangy dressing fully.
Serve. Taste and adjust salt or sugar before serving. Serve cold as a side dish or alongside grilled proteins, sandwiches, or as a topping for tacos.

Nutrition (per serving)

Easy Tangy Coleslaw — When Cabbage Becomes a Bridge Back to Yourself