SPAM smiles

Canadian Thanksgiving came to a close this weekend and won’t take place in the states until the end of November. But in Korea we celebrated Chuseok in early September, the holiday they tell foreigners translates roughly to our time to be thankful.

The gift giving here is standardized into thin square boxes of essentials, which the parents of our students purchased and left at our desks. In one of the two boxes gift-wrapped for each of the foreign teachers were enough toiletries to last the year out. In the other, cans and cans of Spam.

I’d never tried the stuff. A can of comic relief in Canada, its regularly consumed here. So I ripped open one of my cans and let the smell waft through the apartment. Lit up the gas stove top and sliced off two strips to fry up. Doused in sauce and ketchup to cover the drip of packing preservatives, I cooked it to a slow warm.

Toasted two slices of bakery bread and slipped in a slice of cheese. A cut down the square centre and my grilled spam cheese was done. It tasted like tuna-bacon. It wasn’t awful, but I scrubbed hard to get the Spam smell out of my sink and hid the rest of the cans in the back of my cabinet to be forgotten, saying to self: Happy Chuseok.