You don't always need the perfect words

A chat with Cat Sarsfield on heritage, language, family, food, and love.

Welcome to my very first Being Where You Are conversation! These will be coming out every other week (or so) from now on as an extra treat between my normal stories and essays. Enjoy :)

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Cat and I orbited around each other for a while before we actually met. We had worked for the same brand at different times, followed each other on Instagram, and I read and loved her newsletter, Since No One Asked. But we didn’t actually meet until earlier this year when I decided it was time to say a proper hello. We went to the Alice Neel exhibition at the Barbican and then sat in the sun talking about writing and food and the freelance life. She actually helped me come up with the name of my newsletter (this one right here!), which I started writing not long after our first little date.

Self-portrait of Alice Neel from said exhibition. A print of which Cat has in her bathroom.

When I decided to start including these chats in my send-outs, there was a certain symmetry to starting with Cat. Cat who writes like none other about a good roast chicken, about culture and love and friendship and life. In a recent newsletter, she wrote about a trip to South Korea — her mother’s home country — that she took with her parents in October. I was so touched by it that it made me a little teary, actually, so for this conversation, I wanted to delve into it a bit.

We met at her flat on the other side of town, Lottie the dog and a bag of pastel de nata in tow, and we settled on the sofa for a good long chat about her British-Korean heritage, her sense of belonging in both places, seeing her mother in a new light, and learning to communicate without leaning so heavily on words.

The transcribed version that you’ll find below has been edited for clarity and length, but if you would like to listen to the unedited version — and like low-fi production value — then here it is!

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and thank you Cat for a conversation so peppered with wisdom.

I think the easiest place to start is to introduce yourself — Can you tell me who you are and what you do?

I'm Cat Sarsfield. I guess I would call myself a writer, but I generally work with small businesses and help them communicate their stories — I do that through the lens of content strategy and editorial writing. I live in De Beauvoir in a very lovely flat on the council estate, which is wonderful. I've lived here for about four and a half years. And that's me in a nutshell.

And you also have your newsletter!

And I have a newsletter, yeah. It's called Since No One Asked and I started it in April 2020. Literally, like everyone else, a month into the pandemic, I started writing a newsletter.

There she is!

One of your latest newsletters was about a recent trip to South Korea, your mother's home country — I actually got quite emotional reading it! Just the way that you were talking about love between people and family and language. And I just wondered if you could talk a bit about your own sense of belonging within your family.

Yeah, for sure. So my mum is South Korean and my dad is from Lancashire. So I guess I've always kind of had this half-in-half-out mentality where I'm not quite Asian enough, but I'm also not quite white enough and I grew up in a very sort of middle-class suburb. I think that that mix of cultures was quite interesting. I don't think I ever thought when I was young that I didn't fit in, but now when I look back, I think I was actually constantly struggling to fit in. I think I just molded myself in whatever direction or way felt appropriate for the environment that I was in. So I've always been quite malleable, which in some ways is a really good thing and in other ways is potentially a bit toxic or damaging.

I don't think I actually specifically rejected my Asian-ness when I was young, but I think I sort of dismissed it. I just didn't really think of it as a big part of my personality. In fact, I don't think I really thought of myself in any other way than just being very British, which I guess I am — I grew up in a very British environment. But it wasn't until I was a bit older, probably not until I was in my 20s, that I really started being a lot more conscious of my heritage and where I came from. I think that just coincided with growing up and learning more about myself and connecting a bit more with my mum. Or being more empathetic with my mum, because we always had a bit of a fractured relationship when I was growing up, because we're very similar. We butted heads quite a lot. She's extremely stubborn and so am I. She's hard to please and so am I, which I think is why we really clashed when I was younger, but as I've gotten older, I've just become a lot more engaged with that side of my personality and my heritage and wanted to pay respect to that. Especially in my writing, I think that race and culture naturally come up in lots of ways. I don't think I explicitly write about race but I think it comes up when I'm talking about culture and how I feel about myself and being half-Asian.

So yeah, I went on this trip to Seoul with my parents in October. That was the first time I'd been back in 20 years. My dad hadn't been back since 1985, which was just after my parents got married, and then my mum hadn't been back in maybe seven or eight years because of the pandemic. So it was quite a big trip for us all to take and it was important for me to go. I've historically spent a lot of time travelling on my own and haven't really done a family holiday in a while so I was a little bit, not weary, but I guess it's a long time to spend with your parents. I was with them for two full weeks in small quarters. But it felt really necessary and important. My parents are a lot older and I think it was probably the last big trip I'll take with them. And considering I'd been on this big exploration of my heritage and was talking about it and writing about it, it felt really natural for me to explore it in a more tangible way.

So I went to Seoul and it was amazing. It was very familiar but unfamiliar. And I found it emotional but not like I thought I would. I thought I would find it upsetting but I didn't, I found it really amazing. I think it was really emotional for my mum because she hasn't been back in so long and it really made me see my mum in a different light — I saw her as a more three-dimensional person, which sounds kind of weird, but I think as a kid you think of your parents as just your parents. You forget that they're a son or a daughter or a sister or a brother or an aunt or anything like that. Especially because we don't have any family in the UK — my dad has a sister but we don't really see that side of our family that often, and all of my mum's family are in Korea. So I think it's interesting that usually, I see my parents in isolation, so I think of them as mine. And then when we got to Korea, I was like, Oh, yeah, you don't just belong to me. You belong to a whole other group of people and a whole other place. I think what I wrote about in my newsletter was this realization that language is such an integral part of who you are and your identity, but when you have a parent who is not from the country that you grew up in, and who speaks a different mother tongue to you, you lose a side of them, or you lose sight of a side of them. You speak French, don't you? Did you grow up speaking it?

I started learning when I was really little, but I got good at it when I was maybe 11, or 12 when we moved to Belgium.

Do you feel like you have a different personality in French and English?

I would say I'm bilingual, but my English is definitely better than my French. When I speak in French, I do feel like I need to use more body language. Depending on what the situation is, it's much more physical.

It's a lot more effort. I think when you speak in your native language, it's effortless. There's an effortlessness to it and I think that translates to your personality. So then with my mum, when I saw her in Korea, talking in Korean, there was an effortlessness to her and it just sort of felt like a weight was lifted. Like she didn't have to try. And that was really nice to see because I could tell that she just really missed speaking it. She only speaks in Korean when she talks to her family, because we don't speak Korean at home, and I never learned it. My mum likes speaking all the time, she really doesn't like to be quiet, but in Korea, you couldn't shut her up. Not in a horrible way, just in a funny way. Even my cousins, who do actually speak English, were saying, Oh, we have to let Kie-Jo speak as much as she can because she doesn't get the opportunity to speak. So we were laughing because she can fill a silence all the time with anything. I noticed this slightly lighter side of her personality come out. And how funny everyone found her! I think my mum's hilarious because she's quite brutally honest and she makes these funny observations, but I think it's even more heightened in her own language. So I thought that was really interesting, seeing her personality come through. Even though I know her, obviously, in a very bodily way in the sense that I am of her, and she doesn't have to speak for me to understand how she's feeling, it was interesting watching her interact in a very verbal way as well.

I think the other observation that I made was about being in a space with family who I hadn't seen in a long time and feeling like they accepted me and loved me even though they didn't really know anything about me. I find it very difficult sometimes to explain what I do to my parents, but I have a constant need to justify who I am and what I do and validate that through words because I'm a writer or I write for a living, so to not be able to verbalise that was quite confronting. To be accepted no matter what was also quite confronting and confusing. Like, why do you care about me when you don't really know me, you only know me through my mother. I guess that's what happens when you don't often have close family around. It seemed like an alien experience to me. Whereas people who grew up with loads of family around them might feel like that's just what families are like.

It's interesting because within my family, for example, my ability to vocalise my opinions and talk about what I do and all of that feels quite important. But what your experience with your family in Korea shows is that there is just this universal acceptance and it actually doesn't matter what you do, they just love you, and there's so much peace in that, I think.

Definitely. I don't know whether it's a cultural thing but I felt confronted by not being able to explain myself. And I think that is maybe also a female thing — feeling like you need to justify who you are and what you do. But it also probably speaks to some level of insecurity, which I think lots of us have, like this is what I'm worth, I'm valuable, I'm worth listening to. I found it really interesting. It made me sad that I didn't know the language, not because I wanted to know everything, but because it's hard to feel like you fully know someone if you don't speak the same language. Obviously, me and my mum speak the same language, but it's her second language, so I feel like there's a part of her that's not open to me.

I’ve quoted this line from Past Lives, which is a fantastic film by Celine Song that came out earlier this year, about a Korean family who emigrated to Canada, and the daughter reconnecting with one of her childhood sweethearts in Korea, navigating the tensions between being an immigrant and the world that she now inhabits in America, and then this Korean-ness within her and how that's represented by this childhood sweetheart. In the film, she's married to this American Jewish guy and he's trying to learn to speak Korean. He says, Oh, you sleep talk in Korean and that's the only time I ever hear you speak it. He says, I think that's why I'm trying to learn because it feels like there's a part of you that I will never know. I thought that was really poignant and I felt that with my mum — there's a part of her that I will never be able to fully access because I can't speak the language.

And it's not just about verbal communication, it's everything that a language opens, or even closes the door to. My mum told me about this word in Korean and it's this very specific Korean word about the deep sorrow in the hearts of Korean people. It goes back to the Japanese occupation and then the Civil War and it's almost like an elemental thing that is buried deep within the lineage of Korean people because they were occupied. The land was occupied by Japan and they were so subjugated. And that was really interesting to me because I can learn as much as I want about the history of a place, but I'll never feel that sorrow. I can feel sympathy and I can try and empathize, but I'll never actually have it in me. And that sounds weird — it's not like I want to inhabit this sorrow, but it's wanting to communicate with someone and feel like you get them. And I think there's a big part of my mum's life that I don't know about.

I don't think she necessarily wants to talk to me about everything that happened in her childhood — her mum died when she was seven and her dad died just before my parents’ wedding. She's had a very hard life. She grew up in the middle of the Civil War, she had TB when she was 18 and couldn't go to university — loads of stuff! But she really holds that inside of her and I think that's sometimes where the tensions between me and my mum have come up because I feel like I don't know her fully. I think she just doesn't want me to know all of the sadness because she's trying to protect me. She's like, I don't want you to know all of that pain, we worked really hard for you not to experience that so you could have this wonderful, lovely life, which is what my parents have provided for me and my brother and which I'm so grateful for. But there's also a part of me that wants to peek through the door. I want to know everything but I don't want to upset her so, to be honest, I very rarely bring up anything to do with her mum.

On our trip, there was a moment that was really sad. We were at my uncle's house — my mum's one of six — and we were having breakfast. I was just sitting in this shard of light that was coming through the apartment window and just kind of half-listening to things, everyone was speaking Korean. I could hear her and her brother and one of her sisters talking, and suddenly I heard this noise. I thought they were laughing but they were crying and my mum looked at me, and then obviously I wanted to cry because seeing my mum crying makes me want to cry. And she was like, We're talking about my mum, and how sad it is that we got so little time with her. But I didn't ask anything else because if you see someone's upset, you almost don't want to do the thing that's going to perpetuate the sadness. It's also potentially a cultural thing to not talk about lots of emotional things. It's a fairly broad generalization about East Asian culture, but it tends to be a little bit more about keeping a lid on your emotions. Even though me and my mum are both incredibly emotional people, I think we're both also quite embarrassed by our emotions. We don't want to be seen to be upset and I think that part of her is still quite like locked away and I don't know whether that’s a box that I have the right to open. She has to be the one who tells that story. It would have been amazing if I knew Korean and I could connect with her in that way, but I don't think that means that we have any less connection. It's just completely different.

It's funny that you say that because then with your aunts and uncles and cousins who don't speak English, you don't have any linguistic connection necessarily, but from what you've told me, you actually did have really beautiful moments of connection without speaking, like with your mum's older sister who would hold your hand, and all the food that you ate. I feel like gathering around the table and eating together was a really big part of it as well.

Yeah, I think food is such a massive connector. It's such a vehicle for forging intimacy with someone. Someone must have written about this because I cannot be the only person who's talked about this, but how the bodily function of ingesting something, putting something in your mouth is so intimate that it can only forge a connection because it's so tactile and tangible.

It's funny because, in England, we obviously have a food culture in some ways, but it's not as tied to things as in other countries, especially Eastern countries, where family and food are really, really, really the bedrock of everything, the root of everything. So in Korea, food for me has always felt like a way of getting to know someone or a way of showing affection. That's why I cook for people. I'm a really terrible gift giver, and I don't really care about receiving gifts, but the way that I show affection is by cooking for people. That's a big part of my life, hosting for friends or asking people to come for dinner. And that's how my mum has always shown affection. She's not an overly affectionate person, I'm always trying to chase her for a hug, and she's like, get off me. But she will make me my favourite meal or as soon as I get in the house, she's like, What do you want to eat?

Being in Korea was like that. I was at my uncle's house — we got there at 10pm — and his wife, who is just the cuddliest teddy bear of a woman, I love her, had prepared this entire feast of raw fish and octopus and these intricate little Ban Chan, tiny little stuffed mushrooms and things like that — so far beyond the normal remit of putting some rice on. So much care and love had gone into the food. And it was the same thing when we woke up in the morning, she had spent two hours basically just cooking for all of us. She didn't even eat anything! It was basically just for me and my mum. That was really special. I think food is a really, really massive part of how our family shows love for each other.

And has that made you feel more connected to them and made you feel like you know them a bit better now?

Yeah, definitely. I think it just made me realise that you don't need to be constantly communicating with someone to show that you care. I feel like I constantly have to use words to show how I feel and I’ve spent so much of my life trying to prove my worth to everyone and anyone, employers, romantic partners, and even friends, and it just sort of made me realise that when people care about you, you don’t need to constantly communicate with them.

You know that feeling when you’re so comfortable with someone, like your partner, and you just don’t have to talk. It's really nice to sit in silence with someone and a real sign of unconditional love. So it was an affirmative feeling, being able to have this very nonverbal relationship with a group of people that I don’t know that well and it just proved to me that the way that you communicate can be varied and there are so many ways of doing it that you don’t always need to rely on the perfect set of words, which I think is quite an alien concept for a writer.

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Me again! I will be sharing three of these interviews for free, and after that, they will be available for paid subscribers. If you enjoyed this one and fancy supporting, you can update your subscription settings by clicking on this nifty button.

Thanks so much and see you in the next one,

Annabel x