"You want dinner or barbecue?" the host asked us.
"We uh..." I looked at my dad, who shrugged. The two categories didn't seem exclusive to me. Couldn't barbecue also be dinner? But dinner seemed the broader of the two. A safer bet.
"Dinner?" I told the host, who seemed skeptical, handing us menus.
"Okay dinner um..." the host looked off into space as if deciding whether it was worth it to try to communicate across the vast language barrier separating us. Apparently it wasn't. He smiled, and left us to fend for ourselves with a cheerful, second, "Okay!"
I looked at my mom, who was smiling but with her eyebrows raised.
"Yeah," I said, "This is the most-Korean Korean restaurant I've ever attempted to eat at. I don't think people like us come here all that often."
As we looked over the menu I thought about how cryptic it was, and my immediate, helpful thought was they should hire a better translator to make this easier to read. The dishes were described only briefly, and in the halting half-English language common to menus. I'm not always such a busybody, but I study literary translation and love thinking about it, the play and refraction as words travel from language to language. The initial impulse of my thought was almost entrepreneurial, I could design them a better menu that's clearer and simpler and with better copy! A business-owner who might need my skills. A possible gig once the weird political campaign I was helping run ended in ruins in a few weeks. These wheels were always turning.
"I never expected to be ordering Korean food in Montgomery," my dad said.
"Hyundai," I said. "There's a big plant just outside of town. They make all the Elantras here."
And as a result, a critical mass of Korean folks live in the much-faded capital city of Alabama. Where you can't get a cup of coffee downtown to save your life, or any groceries at all, but out by the mall on the east side you can find yourself in a very, very, Korean restaurant on a Sunday night. Trying to figure out what to eat.
As the three of us sat discussing the menu, I thought of the phenomenon of the restaurant. The mysteries of globally fluid capital meant it was lucrative to build Hyundais in Alabama for the American market instead of in Korea. Workers from Korea came to run the plant, and as far as I could tell inhabited the eastern suburbs of Montgomery in a considerable quantity. There were several Korean restaurants nearby, and I had, with my boss and some new friends, frequented the private-room style karaoke bar down Vaughn Road. A grocery store with Korean lettering on the windows was in the same shopping center as karaoke.
In the four months I'd lived in Montgomery so far, diversity was not one of the things I'd mention if I were to list the top three, or even top ten, characteristics of the place. I'd mention the racism, which was both casually pervasive and, simultaneously, profound and surprising. I'd mention the blighted, overgrown, emptiness of the neighborhood I lived in. I'd mention the incongruity of walking past the church where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached just a block from the first white house of the Confederate States of America. Cultural diversity? Not so much.
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Jennifer McCharen writes nonfiction and poetry, including translation. Her video work has appeared on MSNBC, and her writing has appeared in Tiferet, the Tampa Monocle, Elan Magazine, and is forthcoming in the anthology MOTIF-4. She currently serves as Translation Editor for Lunch Ticket, and currently resides in Montgomery, Alabama where she works to fight voter suppression.
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