For Kim Sunee, life is a summary of homemade meals to linger over, dishes that start with
fresh ingredients and end with empty bottles of wine. Like spring pea salad with minted
cream. Or wild peaches poached in Lillet Blanc and lemon verbena.
Sunee's most vivid memories, in fact, center around what was being cooked or eaten at the
time. "I might not remember somebody's name, but I will remember flavors," the 37-year-
old says.
Which is why her memoir Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search For Home serves
double duty as a cookbook. At the end of nearly every chapter, Sunee offers a memory and
correlating recipe: "Poppy whistled along, cleaning the crawfish heads, picking the tail
meat, and setting it aside for a labor-intensive but most rewarding dish," she writes before
offering a guide to making her grandfather's famous crawfish bisque.
But it is on the streets of Seoul where Sunee's earliest recollections actually begin.
Abandoned at age 3 by her mother who left her with a fistful of food, she was taken in by
police officers who estimated she had been alone for three days. Adopted along with
another little girl by a family in New Orleans, Sunee grew up as one of only two Asian
children in the community.
By 9 she was dreaming of becoming a poet, and at 14 she enrolled in the New Orleans
Center for the Creative Arts. She attended a liberal arts college in Florida and studied
abroad in France, then ended up transferring to the University of Nice to study French
language and civilization. Through a chance encounter via a mutual friend, Sunee met
Olivier Baussan, proprietor of L'Occitane, the lavish perfume and soap company. She lived
with him and his daughter in a farmhouse in Provence for several years, leading what
sounds like an idyllic life: throwing dinner parties, traveling at a moment's notice, running
a bookshop entirely dedicated to poetry, taking classes at Le Cordon Bleu.
"I'm very grateful and appreciative for everything that I have had," Sunee says about her
past. "I also realize that you can be given a whole world, but if you don't have a sense of
who you are and what you want and what you can contribute - then it really doesn't have
any resonance."
All of these ventures are, of course, detailed in Trail of Crumbs, a work that began years
ago through journals Sunee kept - although she never knew she'd one day form them into
a book. She had, in fact, hoped to publish a volume of poetry. But the notes she'd written to
herself in French about her experience in Europe read more like the makings of a memoir.
"There were a lot of things I didn't write about," she says. "But then I also feel like had I
shied away from certain things, I wouldn't really have told the story. It's me in my 20s
trying to find my way - with all my flaws."
And so readers will be privy to Sunee's heartache in Stockholm, her misgivings about her
adoptive mother's love, her longing for answers about her abandonment, her relationship
with Baussan and her constant hunger for a place that feels like home.
"Even when I was younger there's always been a sense of otherness and not really being at
home, or being a stranger and just [having] a certain restlessness," she explains. "I don't
pretend to say it's because I was abandoned - I don't know where I'm from, obviously
that's a big part of it, of identity, but I just think that hunger is metaphorical for a lot of
things, for love and a sense of belonging, whether we're adopted or not. Just trying to
figure out where we belong in the world."
The book has ruffled a few feathers, including some family members, but Sunee says for
the most part, those around her have been supportive.
"It made me laugh, cry and want to cook," says Jan Landess, 40, whom Sunee first met
more than a decade ago in France. "I think [the book] has been a necessary part of her
existence. Essential to the search for home."
Landess, herself an Ohio-born expatriate living in Paris, says she still pines for Sunee's
creations in the kitchen. "When I think of Kim's cooking, two dishes come to mind: her
jambalaya and her marinated miniature eggplant. Before she moved back to the States, we
had a party at my place with some of our friends. We made lots of food but the main dish
was Kim's ever so spicy jambalaya. At the beginning someone commented on how spicy
the dish was, but soon we were all wiping our foreheads, heaping more onto our plates,
fanning ourselves and laughing as our eyes watered."
Today Sunee continues life as a connoisseur of good eats as the food editor for Cottage
Living. She spends her days weeding through exotic food samples like pickled jalapenos
and wild hibiscus flowers in syrup, working with recipe developers and experimenting in
the magazine's test kitchen.
Now living in Birmingham, Ala., Sunee's not yet sure if she's finally found home. But she
adds, "I think I'm getting closer."