California Kimchi Day Fest

“The date is not an accident: eleven main ingredients, twenty-two…”

Your grandmother's recipe is not written down anywhere and you have been meaning to learn it for about nine years now. That is the ache this one presses on. California is the only state that put kimchi on its official calendar, and the festival that grew out of that law is not a trade show, it is a few hours in a botanic garden in Arcadia where people make, taste, argue about and hand down a fermented cabbage carrying an entire diaspora's memory inside it. Ten in the morning until two in the afternoon, which makes it a daytime thing you can bring a parent to, and you should bring a parent to it. The setting does real work: the Arboretum's lawns mean this happens under trees rather than fluorescent lights, and the smell travels. Two crowds arrive and discover they overlap, Korean families treating it as a homecoming and SoCal food people who will drive anywhere for something made properly. Arrive hungry. Ask somebody older than you how they do it.