apples to apples: a love story from seoul to copenhagen

I like to pick a fight with my boyfriend sometimes. I tell him that Korea has better fruit than Denmark. He’ll scoff and tell me I’m wrong.

Jul 29, 2025

PRELUDE

Hello from Copenhagen!

Today, I’m sharing a personal essay I wrote with the theme of “apples”! If you’re interested in reading more of my personal essays and short stories you can check them out here.

WORDS

I like to pick a fight with my boyfriend sometimes. I tell him that Korea has better fruit than Denmark. He’ll scoff and tell me I’m wrong. He’ll remind me of the Jordbærtærtes (light and crisp strawberry tarts that are chocolatey and filled with heavenly vanilla cream inside) and Æblekages (an old-fashioned desert with layers of crunchy cookies or toasted breadcrumbs, stewed apples, and whipped cream) we had in Copenhagen. I’ll remind him of the large juicy Asian pears and Korean apples that line the grocery stores that need no extra sugar–including the award-winning premium green grapes that people from all over Asia will clamor over, especially for the holiday season. When Lunar New Year rolls around, there is a never-ending stream of these fruit gift boxes luxuriously covered in fine silk sold and shipped out all over the country. Comparing apples to apples, we can’t fend off the urge to defend our own countries. But it's in the reflection of moments and meals we’ve shared–introducing him to my mother in Seoul, or me meeting his family in Copenhagen–that the weight of where we come from starts to show.

I often remind him of the plate of apples my mother would gingerly cut up for us after meals. Even if she couldn’t always express herself fully through words–to me or to him–I knew how much she had developed a soft spot for him during his six-week stay with my family in Korea last winter.

My mother, who likes to tout herself as a traditional, conservative, devout Christian woman, is someone I actually consider to be one of the most liberal people in the entire country. She never batted an eye when I came out as queer; she welcomed my Black, non-binary friend to stay with us in Korea (despite what could have been a nightmare scenario in a deeply conservative and transphobic country–my mom learned what pronouns were as a grammar concept, went out of her way to make sure they were having a good time, and constantly showered them with compliments on how beautiful they were); and she accepted my non-Korean boyfriend without much hesitation–even though my grandfather had explicitly told me not to bring one home before I left Korea to attend boarding school in the U.S. Once, she even told me that (although she refused to smoke) she “accidentally” got hot-boxed in a room in Amsterdam with her art school friends from Boston during a grad school trip.

Still, it meant a great deal that she took the time to peel the apples, carve them into perfectly uniform shapes, and plate them just for him. My mother–the artist–has always had an eye and a discipline for aesthetics. The apples were always neatly arranged on a porcelain dish with a dessert fork, placed on a Japanese-style wooden tea tray, and accompanied by a single napkin.

He was incredibly confused the first time she quietly knocked on his door (she had insisted we sleep in separate rooms during our stay in her home) with a plate of fruit. She didn’t say much. She just opened the door just enough to peek her head in, along with her hands and the tray. Where my mom offered quiet gestures of care through sliced apples, his family welcomed me with rounds of snaps and stories that only rang louder with each drink.

The first time I went to Copenhagen to meet his family, we all got wasted. We went out to eat a traditional Danish meal, smørrebrød–an open-face sandwich built on top of buttered sourdough rye bread. Smørrebrød is eaten in rounds. After every slice of rye bread, it’s customary to take a shot of snaps, a Nordic and German liquor that can have an alcohol content as high as 50% ABV. A perfect way to meet the family. The waitress would pour us snaps of all kinds of flavors: elderflower, cucumber, lavender, apple, peppermint, and peach.

I was nervous–not just because I wasn’t a heavy drinker, but because I’d never shared drinks with my partner’s family before. I held up pretty okay (bless my Korean genes) and fell in love with pickled herring during that lunch for some reason, but I didn’t expect my boyfriend’s dad to start tearing up in the middle of lunch.

As the snaps flowed, he raised his glass and made a toast. He began reminiscing about his youth in New York, before he moved to Denmark to start a family. He said we were young, much younger than we realized. There was something wistful in the way he spoke, like he was watching a version of himself across the table. The whole table fell into a kind of soft silence after that. We drank. And then, almost as if on cue, someone cracked a joke about the snaps being too strong, and we were all laughing again.

Dessert came last: Æblekage, layers of stewed apples, soft cream, and crushed biscuits in a small glass. Not quite the store-bought apple pies of my childhood or the homemade American kind I’d become familiar with at boarding school, but something gentler, cooler, and understated like a distant memory retold in another language. I didn’t expect it to move me, but it did–the tartness of the fruit, the quiet sweetness. Maybe I was drunk. It reminded me of home in a way that didn’t shout, only suggested. Like my mother’s apples: a small gesture, quietly understood. It struck me, then, how care can look so different across cultures and yet still land the same way: as love.

In our relationship, food has become a way for us to recount where we have come from, who we want to be, and who we will become–when words and cultural differences fail us every now and then. I wonder if our relationship will always be this way: sharing new recipes, falling in love again and again with familiar flavors, comparing notes and aromas, and ready to embrace what dish comes next.

That’s all for today! See you next week <3

[banchan]

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