He was adopted from South Korea, raised in Boyle Heights and then deported. Now he brings the flavors of his East L.A. upbringing back to Seoul.
At every turn of Christian Morales’ life — and he’s had several lives’ worth of twists and turns — there was food.
Here, the tatted-up 40-year-old Korean adoptee with a shaved head, thick Chicano accent and streetwise scowl is re-creating the flavors of the closest thing he has to home, a place he is legally barred from returning to since he was deported 17 years ago: East L.A. When he was about 6, Morales and his sisters ended up in East L.A. with a third family in as many years. In each of the three households there was abuse, physical and otherwise, he says, the details of which he doesn’t care to recount.
Outside her kitchen, life in Boyle Heights was rough. Morales had a temper and fought any time anyone picked on him or his younger sister, who, as some of the only Asian kids in the neighborhood, stood out. At 14, he was arrested and sent to juvenile hall, where he was taken under the wing of a South L.A. gang member.It helped that he was Asian, he says, and could dodge drug-dealer stereotypes by donning a pair of glasses.
I’m very proud of being from East Los. I’m very proud of the Chicanos I grew up with. My homies always looked at me as one of their own.At 19, he was arrested with two Glocks and a cache of weed and cocaine worth thousands of dollars. Facing up to life in prison with his priors, Morales agreed to plead guilty, serve a three-year sentence and, upon completion, be deported to his birth country: South Korea.
The worst part was the food. The strange smells. The stickiness of the rice. The fermentedness of pretty much everything. The year he turned 30, he decided to finally pursue the one passion that’d been a constant and that didn’t land him in trouble: cooking. The corn tortillas had been sitting on the table for some time as Jeong tells me how she met Morales in 2006 in Busan, while he was in rehab for alcohol abuse. She was an intern finishing up her training as a counselor, the only one who spoke any English at the facility.
What started as the two of them cooking in a cramped basement kitchen is now a staff of 12, including two dedicated to making tortillas from scratch. A second restaurant in Pyeongtaek, near the U.S. military base, is due to open in the coming months.
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