REVIEW 'What's Eating Jackie Oh?' explores food, family and identity

Welcome to one of the most compelling coming-of-age books I have ever sampled. A Korean American girl in New York is one of a dozen high schoolers selected from around the U.S. to demonstrate their culinary skills on the first season of reality TV cooking show “Burn Off! High School Edition!” Garnish this competition with Gen Z dialogue and you have Patricia Park’s compulsively readable "What’s Eating Jackie Oh?"

The eponymous Jackie lets us know right off the bat that she’s no longer “one of those AP-everything kids with the turtle backpacks” who attend a hagwon, “the school you go to after school because regular school is not enough.”

But she hasn’t told her Ivy League-educated workaholic parents yet. Force-fed their great expectations as well as reminders of the disgrace of having an older brother in jail, Jackie retreats to her “mental happy place” — recipe-making.

Her physical happy place is Melty’s, a deli in midtown Manhattan operated by her grandparents, first-generation immigrants from Korea. She can be found there as early as 5 a.m. on weekends and after school on weekdays, making a hundred or more sandwiches per shift. Cooking there has become therapeutic refuge for a sensitive girl who cannot digest the seemingly random acts of anti-Asian harassment and violence that plagued New York during the pandemic. She herself was the target of a man who urinated directly in front of where she sat in a subway car, punctuating the act with a “What are you looking at, Ch—k?”

The “Burn Off!” competition takes place in a hotel restaurant-like TV set in Hollywood. The contestants are given “Homework” (trying out recipes) in preparation for a “Quiz” (a dish assigned to them by the three judges), on which they are graded and then either rewarded with recess or demoted to detention. Those sent to detention must then compete among themselves, with the lowest performer being expelled from the program. Only two of the teen cooks, one of them Jackie, will survive to complete the two-part final exam, after which one will be crowned valedictorian.

The heart of the novel are the acts of reconciliation that Jackie experiences over the course of the competition. Jackie has her first-ever heart-to-heart talk with her mother, who has accompanied her to Hollywood. Her mother confesses that she dearly misses her incarcerated son, who she has always seen as the antithesis of what she expects from her daughter. Jackie is further strengthened by a long text from her brother, who is “mad proud of the first famous person I know lol!” Back in New York before the final exam, Jackie meets her best friend from high school, KT, to mend a relationship frayed by Jackie’s obsession with cooking and KT’s fixation on high grades.

A revelation emerges here, too: In contrast with Jackie’s model-minority parents, KT’s parents are undocumented immigrants. And Stephen Min, who, like Jackie, helps at Melty’s and whose remarks to her are peppered with snark, confesses his feelings to her during a tasting of one of his concoctions.

Park's ear for dialogue, with texting and on-air interviews and voice-overs set in typefaces different from that of the main text, is entrancing. Korean-language dialogue echoes that of learners of English as a second language, is seasoned with Hangeul (the Korean alphabet) and romanization for certain words and expressions, followed by the author’s translation in italics. For example, a comment by Jackie’s grandfather, referring to himself in both first and third person: “First time I see fat person, American GI, Haraboji think" ... "Wow! Beautiful-Country (aka America) sure must be a rich country!"

"What’s Eating Jackie Oh?" concludes in a way that highlights the complex reality of Asian Americans — a fictional online post flagging a hate crime incident against Jackie's grandfather, whose budae jjigae (army stew) recipe was among several others written on succeeding pages; and “I’m Done Being Your Model Minority,” a guest essay contributed by Park to the opinion section of the March 10, 2022 issue of The New York Times.

Among the wealth of Korean American coming-of-age stories appearing in recent decades, it would be difficult to find a more memorable work than "What’s Eating Jackie Oh?" It is timely, heartfelt and ultimately triumphant.

Bruce Fulton is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, most recently the novels "One Left" by Kim Soom (2020) and "Togani" by Gong Ji-young (2023), and editor of "The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories" (2023), the first volume of modern Korean literature among Penguin UK’s 3500-plus World Classics.