In 48 hours, my newborn daughter Plum would turn 100 days old. Back in the day in Korea, infant mortality was so high that it was considered a great achievement for the baby to survive this long. My father and his wife were flying into Los Angeles all the way from Illinois for this “joyous occasion.”

I didn’t have a Baegil (100 days celebration) myself, but I wanted to have one for Plum because we had tried for so long to have a baby. Plum’s father is Filipino and Mexican so the culture of our home is mixed, but my mission was to throw a Baegil feast for Plum that adhered to the books as much as possible.

I envisioned myself gracefully preparing the traditional foods of the Baegil, like seaweed soup, jellyfish mustard salad, shikhye (sweet rice drink), and baeksolgi (the majestic steamed rice cakes specific to the event). My parents will be so proud, I thought, with a glazed look in my eyes, oblivious to the ridiculous amount of kitchen work that awaited me.

Admittedly, I was functioning on only a few hours of sleep because I had stayed out late attending a rap concert on Sunset Boulevard the night before for my job as a music critic. And I still had to haul ass to the market in Koreatown Galleria, buy all of the ingredients, chop great quantities of pungent ginger and garlic to marinate the meats, prepare beef stock out of brisket, and wash untold bunches of earthy green vegetables in several rinses of water. Time was running out.

The art of Korean cooking can be painful. Just making the side dish japchae requires the peeling and slicing of zucchini and carrots into perfectly uniformed slivers. Then you are supposed to cook the glass noodles, and the sliced ribeye steak separately, only to toss everything together at the end with sesame oil.

No wonder Korean women of my grandmother’s generation lived a life as sequestered and oppressed as that of many women in the Islamic world. My halmeoni’s entire existence took place in the kitchen, bless her soul. During her long life, she spent every waking moment either praying with her rosary beads or fermenting beans for stinky soybean paste. She usually had a simmering stockpot with dried anchovies going, too.

She didn’t have a career or any agenda for personal fulfillment. She didn’t need the “48 Laws of Power” or “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” to find her salvation; her only goal was making sure our stomachs were full. When I came home from school, she’d have salted egg-shaped rice balls sprinkled with sesame seeds waiting for me. I can still hear her continuous refrain: “Eat some rice, eat some rice.”

The kitchen was undeniably a Korean woman’s prison, but it was also the hearth where she raised and showed her bottomless love for her children. The Korean kitchen’s nourishment begins before birth. When I was pregnant, I frequently craved spicy, burbling clay pots of sundubu jjigae to the point of tearful desperation.