Allergies

My sister was born with a variety of severe allergies. As a baby, she was allergic to all dairy, eggs, oranges, nuts, and chicken. In one of my earliest memories, my parents are holding her arms and torso down on the floor as she screams; I’m holding her legs. My dad paints red medicine on her arms and legs, raw from scratching, as she screams and kicks; my dad misses and paints a swipe of red on the floor. My mom says that she discovered my sister’s allergy to milk when I, a milk fiend, dribbled some on her hand, which blossomed into rashes.

Perhaps because of her allergies, my sister developed an eerie ability to detect allergenic items. The first time we were in Hawaii, my mom and I went to town on the local macadamia nuts. My mom urged my sister to try some. My sister, normally a voracious and adventurous eater, refused. After my mom convinced her, my sister’s lips began to swell until they looked like a duck’s beak. From that day on, my mom never tried to get my sister to eat something she didn’t want to.

You might think growing up with someone like my sister would make me overprotective and concerned for her health. In fact, my morbid sense of humor (my sister might call it callousness) takes over when these incidents occur. Over the years, my sister developed a series of remedies to combat an allergen if accidentally ingested. If she feels the telltale prickle at the back of her mouth, she will start drinking liter after liter of cold water. She will bundle up in layers, because the amount of cold water she consumes chills her, and in bad cases, she’ll take a nap to help her body recover. My role, when I’m there, is to identify the allergen (usually nuts), and provide a continuous supply of water. Thanks to her allergies, I have a very sensitive palate when it comes to identifying nuts in a dish, be it in savory or sweet.

I have an arsenal of favorite anecdotes about my sister’s allergic episodes, much to my sister’s chagrin. She’s usually a good sport about it, but I’m sure she resents my gleeful chortling when I recount exactly how swollen her face was and how I had to drag her to the hospital despite her protestations that she was “too ugly.” (My response: “Doctors are used to seeing ugly people.”) Somehow, many of her allergic episodes occur when we’re together; it could be because we’re eating out more, or we’re eating more desserts, which tend to have hidden nuts. We joke that I’ve saved her life many times, thanks to my excellent water pouring skills and my amazing ability to point a car in the direction of the local hospital.

My sister visited me recently. And, as usual, we had another allergic incident. We’d gone to a celebrated bakery in town and made a point of saying that she was “deathly allergic to nuts,” and asked the staff to tell us which of our choices were off limits. The woman vowed that there were no nuts in a pear tart we were considering, so we picked that along with a few other treats. Back at home, my sister took the first bite of the tart. She declared that she didn’t like it, that it tasted weird. A few minutes later, I joined her at the table and took a bite. “It’s good,” I told her, and then it dawned on me: almonds. The tart was heaped with almond paste! We sprang into action. She sprinted to the garbage to spit out her mouthful and gargled with water, and I set up our usual system of water bottles and glass.

This is a never-ending, complicated problem: the employee was obviously ill-trained, people tend to be dismissive of severe allergies, and some who merely dislike an ingredient claim to be allergic to it when eating out, making it that much more difficult for those with true allergies. Often, a restaurant will reassure us that no nuts were included in a salad, but then we would find pine nuts: they hadn’t realized that the catch-all word “nuts” included that kind as well. Once, at a hip, fancy restaurant in Los Angeles, the waiter brought a “nut-free” menu for my sister when he was asked which dishes have nuts. We were thrilled; it would be much easier than depending on the waiter’s memory of the components of a dish. But as dish after dish came out, it dawned on us that there was some kind of nut in every one. We finally hailed down our waiter for an explanation. He looked haughtily at us, and said, “Chef believes that the integrity of the dish will suffer if there are any modifications to it.” He didn’t seem to understand that death was far worse than some chef’s compromised integrity.

My public service announcement for 2013: Please don’t say you’re allergic to parsley when you simply don’t like the green flecks getting stuck in your teeth.

Chi-Young Kim is a literary translator based in Los Angeles. She has translated works by Shin Kyung-sook, Kim Young-ha, and Jo Kyung-ran. Contact her at chiyoung@chiyoungkim.com or via her website, chiyoungkim.com. <The Korea Times/Chi-Young Kim>