Spice up your Life with Kimchee! Joyce Park Williams, Kimchee Girl

Story by Christina Heintzelman

Kimchee, spelled kimchi or kimuchi in Japanese variants of the Korean name, may not be something that pops into your mind as a year-round breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack dish. It can be a main dish or banchan, the Korean word for a side dish. It is pungent and contains the flavor profiles of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami with a crunchy texture and more probiotics, betacarotene, and other antioxidant compounds than imaginable. It is said that this threethousand-year-old food will boost immune health, help lower cholesterol and blood pressure, reduce inflammation, and word has it that it may also be an anti-aging food. This amazing, healthy, and pungently tasty treat is available right here in South Central PA, both in person at the new Fresh Market at Hershey Towne Square, Hershey, and online through the Kimchee Girl website. It is also available in various stores in the area.

Joyce Park Williams, CEO and Founder of Kimchee Girl, opened her stand at the market on September 1, 2022, the opening day for the Fresh Market at Hershey Towne Square. It is in the beautiful stone building which historically housed the Hershey Abattoir, where livestock was slaughtered, processed, and sold. Later, it was home to the Hershey Post Office.

Park Williams sells three types of kimchee at her stand, Korean radish (daikon) kimchee, Napa Valley cabbage kimchee, and a seasonal cucumber kimchee. All are vegan and gluten free products with no fish additives. She explains that kimchee is a traditional Korean dish made from various salted vegetables, a wide variety of spices including spring onions, garlic, ginger, and gochugaru (Korean chili powder). “My mixture and fermenting time are a family secret that assures a genuine

Korean flavor. This is the original recipe that my mother and father made for years both in Korea and when they immigrated to the U.S. and settled in New Cumberland,” she states.

In addition to the kimchee, there is a varied menu of foods at the market stand: a bonein pork chop meal; Kalbi beef short ribs; Bulgogi, also known as Korean BBQ beef, all served with her signature sticky white rice and a side of kimchee; a kimchee hot dog; and a Korean burrito. A special treat is Kimchee Girl Breakfast, a sunny-side-up egg, toasted artisan bread with kimchee butter and 2 slices of gochujang bacon. Gochujang is a sauce or paste with a spicy, funky, salty, and savory taste that is not quite as hot as sriracha. Other specials are added to the menu on a weekly basis. Many of the specials are fusion foods that are created to satisfy the American palate, such as a Korean hamburger.

Kevin Williams, Park Williams’ husband, assists her in many different aspects of the business and says, “I do whatever Joyce tells me to do.” He added that, although the kimchee is now being made in a shared commercial kitchen located in Camp Hill, a new production site of approximately 2,300 square feet is underway in Mechanicsburg.

Park Williams says that her personal making of her mother’s kimchee happened after she lost her mother to cancer eleven years ago. She realized that the recipe might be lost if she did not get it from her father. “When my family immigrated to this country, they brought all the seeds here so that they could continue to make kimchee from scratch as they had always done in Korea. We were poor so this was important for us. We dug up the garden, planted, cared for it, harvested, and prepared all our vegetables and spices to make hundreds and hundreds of pounds of kimchee.” Both of her parents worked full time jobs in addition to the small farm garden and the making of kimchee. She states, “My father told me that he never got to see the moon or the stars because he worked so many hours.” She adds that, although in Korea it is customary to keep your kimchee buried in a clay container in the back yard, her family wanted to be American and bought a refrigerator just for the storage of their kimchee. Because of the pungency of the kimchee and other Korean foods, the refrigerator was kept in the garage. The story of Park Williams learning how to make kimchee from the instructions of her father will ring true to all of those who were raised in a family where cooking happened with ‘a pinch of this and a dash of that.’ She says, “Even if you have the list of all the ingredients, you may never have the exact measurements, and it really doesn’t help when you are told to ‘just taste it’ to see if it is right.” She goes on to say that she finally asked her eighty-four-year-old father to assist in showing her how to make the exact recipe that was part of her family. “We ended up making hundreds and hundreds of pounds because I had to chase my dad around so that when he freehanded a particular ingredient into the mix I would be following close behind with measuring cups and spoons to try to grab it from him and measure before he put it in the kimchee.” She states that her husband also video-taped the procedure many times over to get an accurate account of the exact steps used in the kimchee production. “We had so much kimchee, even after giving it to friends and family, I had to take all my food out of the refrigerator at home, out of my small beer refrigerator, and my husband had to empty his employee refrigerator at his business; we filled them all with kimchee. Friends started taking photos of this and posting it to social media and before long people wanted to know if I sold my kimchee. I looked at my two-anda-half refrigerators filled with kimchee and said, ’Yes, I guess so.’”

It was at this point that the neighborhood was having a yard sale and her friends suggested that she sell her kimchee at the yard sale along with her Korean BBQ, which is one of her specialties. “Who buys kimchee at a yard sale?,” she recalls. “But I realized that I would need to sell my kimchee quickly because, even though it is kept refrigerated, it still ferments and the American palate prefers kimchee that is only a few months old, so I agreed to set up a kimchee and Korean BBQ stand,” she laughingly says. The day of the yard sale, it poured rain and Park Williams needed to move her cars from the garage and use the garage as her booth. “By about 11 a.m. my neighbor came over and said she was so disappointed because she had only made about five dollars, and she was going to close her stand at that point. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had already made six-hundred dollars. My husband said, ‘You’ve got something with this.’ It took us about six months to get everything together with permits and licenses, and the commercial kitchen.” Her business was born! This month, which is also AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islanders) month here in the U.S., See Kimchee Girl on Page 36 she will have been in business for two years, starting first with pop-ups, then her website, and finally building up to a permanent stand at the Fresh Market.

The first of the Park family to come to the U.S. was Park Williams’ aunt. She came to this country as a Korean War bride. The man that Park Williams’ aunt married was an American G.I. from New Cumberland and that is how their Korean family began to settle in this area. “My aunt wrote to my parents in Korea and told them to come here, that life was better and easier, so in 1971 my father who was a farmer in Korea came over and took whatever menial jobs he could find. He worked endlessly and, by 1972, he had saved enough money to buy a house in New Cumberland and send for the family. In 1972, my mother and my siblings came to this country. My mother’s passport shows her and my four siblings surrounding her. I was born later in 1973. I am the only one of the siblings born in this country and born in a hospital - and not delivered by my parents. I am also the only one without a Korean name as my family wanted to ‘be American.’ My family sold everything, including their wedding bands, to have the money to move here,” she states. In later years, the siblings replaced their parents’ wedding bands and her father, by that time, had saved enough money to buy his wife a diamond ring. Their immigration story is one of success that was driven by dawn-to-dusk hard work.

In addition to Park Williams’ mother losing her life to cancer, Park Williams herself is a cancer survivor. “I was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer and struggled for years with my cancer diagnosis and didn’t work because of the various surgical side effects I suffered with. Ultimately, I ended up with a second diagnosis of pre-uterine cancer that was caused by one of my medicines. I was deeply in debt because of this.” But now Park Williams has built a viable business which she says was only possible because of the support of so many people around her. She gives back to the community, donating a percentage of all her sales to cancer victims and their families. Even before Kimchee Girl, she and her husband started a toy drive during the holiday season for children of cancer patients and gift giving to adult cancer patients. “This has been so successful that one year we had to rent a Penske van in order to deliver the gifts.”

Perhaps Park Williams’ kimchee can be viewed as gastrodiplomacy between American culture and South Korean culture, using food as a common denominator, exerting a soft type of diplomacy on our emotional connections to food and the people connected to this food: a ujeong (friendship) and understanding through the eating of food. Thank you, Kimchee Girl, for bringing us closer to cultural understanding of the AAPI community!

For more information about Kimchee Girl, the kimchee purchasing website is https:// kimcheegirl.com; and the website for her menu and other information regarding her stand at Fresh Market is https://kimcheegirlhershey. com. Find her on Facebook at Kimchee Girl Mechanicsburg, and on Instagram @ thekimcheegirl. The Fresh Market is located at 121 Hershey Towne Square Drive and is open Thursday through Saturday.