I've recently had a realization about myself living in Chicago, far away from my home of Los Angeles: I'm finding and am having stronger urges to find ways to connect with my family heritage and my culture. Leaving a hub of Asian culture like Los Angeles and coming to a diverse, but the significantly smaller presence of Asian culture has been far from easy. It's been actually really bad recently.

Every chance I get, I am eating Asian food, particularly Japanese and Korean, regardless of whether that means spending a good chunk of money at a restaurant. Since I was a kid, eating as well as cooking (although that was more of a job for my mother and grandmother than myself) was a big part of my life growing up. My mom would make Japanese pickled vegetables with fermented rice bran taken from what my grandma also uses back in Japan, or she would make kimchi, Korean pickled napa cabbage, with a recipe that goes back to my great-grandmother from Korea.

A meal was one of the most important things of the day. My family would sit down to eat the food together as well as the conversation that we would have with one another. Because my family is now miles away, now, I often go with friends to Chinatown, H-Mart, Mitsuwa and off the Argyle stop on the Chicago Red Line stop to soothe my soul. This past weekend, I went out for dinner to an Asian restaurant every night with different friends. Was it worth it? Of course: my soul is full and happy.

I have also been making time to watch Japanese variety shows. Although this is not to the extent of my Asian food obsession, or as bad as it used to be in high school, I have my mom send me some CDs as well as find recent episodes of my favorite show on YouTube. Watching these shows help to remind me of the drastically different Japanese humor that I love so much. And of course, I get to see the landscape of places across Japan that I have and have not been, which I love and miss so much.

These are just the few ways that I use to help alleviate the pain of wanting to be closer to my familiar culture and although, it's hard to not be surrounded with everything that I grew up with, I am glad that I'm finding these different ways to connect with my culture that I love so much. This has taught me that cliche saying, "You never know what you have until it's taken away from you."