I wrote about kimchi last month, and many readers told me their stories that involved that spicy, fermented cabbage. Today we’ll look into exploding kimchi, trading kimchi for a car, going AWOL for kimchi and the kimchi house discount.
We’ll even probe the depths of “deep kimchi.” Thirty years ago, I found, Donald Trump was knee deep in it. Maybe we’ll even get to the bottom of where the phrase came from.
Exploding kimchi
Sharon Shak added to our exploration of this mighty side dish. “Decades ago my parents and I visited Maui. My relatives and the three of us packed into their car and drove up Haleakala to see the sunrise.
“We also packed musubi and a jar of Joe Kim’s kimchi as a snack. After viewing the sunrise, we hurried back into the warmth of the car to eat.
“We’d forgotten about the altitude, and when we opened the jar, kimchi juice exploded everywhere and the cabbage itself shot up an inch above the rim of the jar!
“It was an unforgettable moment!”
Kimchi for a car
Karina Kehaulani Lok wrote, “My father was born in 1904 in Kahuku, the same year as my mother in Waialua. She was Chinese- Hawaiian-Korean.
“I was born in Honolulu in 1938. Our family moved to the San Francisco area in 1943. As long as I can remember, my mother made kimchi from cabbage, cucumber or daikon. She had her own way of making it. We had a large crock where she would keep it, sometimes buried outside in the yard.
“When I went to college in San Francisco, a Filipino classmate from Hawaii loved my mom’s kimchi. I would give him a jar whenever my mom would make it.
“When he graduated in 1958, he gave me his 1946 four-door Chevrolet in appreciation. I’ll never forget that kindness.”
AWOL for kimchi
Roger Imai in Franklin, Tenn., said, “In ninth grade at Keaau Intermediate School near Hilo around 1963, my homeroom teacher told us that he was stationed in Korea during the Korean War.
“He said he and his Hawaiian buddies would go AWOL (absent without leave) at night to sneak into the Korean village to trade for homemade kimchi. Their native kimchi was worth risking being AWOL.
“Keaau used to have its own ‘Keaau Kimchi’ brand, which was available even in Nashville, Tenn., as late as the early 2000s, but has since disappeared from the refrigeration bins for a poor imitation made in Chicago.
“Keaau Kimchi didn’t skimp on scallions, ginger and garlic, all fresh, and if you ate too much, you’d have BO the next day (the garlic). But it was the best kimchi I’d ever eaten.”
Flying with kimchi
Donivee Laird said, “One year as I was heading back to Penn State after my summer at home, I decided to bring a bottle of Joe Kim’s kimchi with me.
“I put it in my carry-on bag, and somewhere over the Pacific, I opened my bag. The jar’s lid had worked its way open, and kimchi juice was everywhere. Oh my! The kimchi smell!
“I didn’t dare open my bag again until I got to my destination. I wasn’t very popular with my roommate when I finally got to school.
“Because kimchi has become well known as a beneficial aid to gut bacteria, I’m able to find an OK kimchi in the Costco near me here in British Columbia. This is great because I tried making it and it was horrible.”
Kimchi home discount
Could kimchi help you get a house at a discount? Kay Tuttle knew someone who did. “During the 1980s I lived in Detroit, and lo and behold, an old friend, Kathy, from Honolulu ended up there, too. She and her husband were in the market for a house in the suburbs.
“They noticed that one house in particular had been on the market for a very long time. Given how nice the place looked from the outside, they were trying to figure out why the seller had been dropping the price consistently.
“The minute they walked in, Kathy knew why. She recognized the wonderful aroma of kimchi. Other buyers were turned off, but not her. We laughed about how they got a great house for a great price, all due to kimchi.”
Deep kimchi in the military?
This week I was reading the newspaper and came across someone who was in deep kimchi.
The term could be synonymous with being in trouble. I searched the nation’s newspapers and found the term “deep kimchi” appeared over 200 times.
The first time was in 1978, not in Hawaii, as I imagined, but in Washington, D.C. It was used by generals at the Pentagon!
The Christian Science Monitor ran a story about military readiness. George C. Wilson wrote that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a gift in some ways to America.
He quoted an unnamed general who said,”We have an expression in the Pentagon that every time we get into deep kimchi, the Russians do us a favor.”
The details were unclear, but the gist was that America was in deep kimchi on one issue, but that was balanced by Russia’s mistakes in Afghanistan.
The late Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, a former chief of naval operations, said in 1986 that “we would be in deep kimchi” if the United States scrapped its ballistic nuclear weapons and relied on conventional forces.
Locally, the term found its way into print in 1984. State Sen. Mary George said, “Regarding salary inequities between men and women, it seems we’re going to be in deep kimchi if the state doesn’t develop a plan of action to try to achieve equality.”
The Associated Press wrote an article that appeared in papers across the country that said, “While the rest of the nation is booming, Hawaii’s economy, as they say around here, is in deep kimchi. It stinks, just like the popular Korean cabbage dish fermented in the ground.”
Deep kimchi in the classroom
The phrase seems to have spread far and wide. The Press Enterprise in Bloomsburg, Pa., in 1997 carried a story about a teacher who chastised some of his students for bullying.
The teacher said, “I told them that if I ever catch them doing that in my class again, they were going to be in deep kimchi.”
A 1991 article in the Arizona Daily Star quoted University of Arizona football coach Dick Tomey (head coach at the University of Hawaii from 1977 to 1986) as saying, “If we didn’t have those four freshmen defensive linemen, we’d be in deep kimchi.”
Locally, First Interstate Bank used the term in one of its 1984 ads. The headline said that their loans will “get you out of deep kimchi.” Maybe you could use jars of kimchi as collateral for the loan. I don’t know.
Vietnam
So where did the phrase come from? I turned to an online source of word and phrase origins. WordOrigins.org said:
“The slang phrase ‘in deep kimchi’ … arose among U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea. We don’t know exactly when service members started using the expression, but it was probably in the 1960s or early 1970s. There is no record of it from the Korean War era.”
One of the earliest references was Craig Hiler’s 1979 novel about the Vietnam War, “Monkey Mountain,” which included this line, supposedly uttered in 1969:
“If something happens before we can get backups flown in, then we’re in deep kimchi.”
Even Donald Trump found himself in deep kimchi.
The LA Times reported in 1990 about the Trump Shuttle, which operated commuter jets to travel between New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.
“Donald Trump is in deep kimchi with his shuttle. Rich people who have started airlines, have never succeeded,” Scott Hamilton of the Commercial Aviation Report said.
Columnist Frank Cerabino wrote about O.J. Simpson in 1994 in the Palm Beach Post. He said that O.J. was in “what sailors commonly refer to as deep kimchi.”
Compared with that, a guy arrested for the misdemeanor crime of trying to pick up a streetwalker was in “shallow kimchi,” Cerabino wrote.
I could not find any other analytics for measuring the depths of kimchi.
Do you have a kimchi story? Send me an email if you do. I’d love to read it.
Bob Sigall is the author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books. Contact him at Sigall@Yahoo.com or sign up for his free email newsletter at RearviewMirrorInsider.com.
