Eating beans, writing zines, and living your dreams with Hannah Bae
Hannah Bae is a journalist, writer and illustrator living in New York. We met over matcha at a cute Park Slope cafe while she let me pick her brain about finding the joy in her career, finding the best beans, and finding out that print is not dead!
If you could sum up your job in one sentence, what would you say?
My current job is that I'm mostly a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer, and then I do illustration here and there. I would say it's one of the smallest segments of my career right now, but it's something that brings me a lot of joy.
Clearly you do a bunch of different stuff. What was your approach to your career? Did this develop naturally just kind of by chance, or did you plan it all out like this to be a freelance journalist and illustrator on this side?
I would say it's been a slow building process, like block by block. I majored in journalism and creative writing in college, and then immediately after college began working in journalism. Did not include a lot of food writing at the time. It was more like a survey of all the different things you could do in journalism.
I have technically dabbled in journalism, but I've never gone to journalism school. I feel like that would be very intense.
The thing is that I learned in journalism school was that anyone can be a journalist. It's not something that you have a license for, and I really liked that. That was part of my training because I think the more that people understand about media and how to practice it, I think the more respect that journalists can get and the more it can feel like a give and take and less of an extractive sort of relationship where it's like “Hey, source, give me this story and take from you and then leave you alone for the rest of your life.” I feel like there should be more of a community, like a relationship. And then soon after college I moved to South Korea and was working there as a copy editor on a journalism fellowship. And when I was living in South Korea, I was working as a copy editor for my newspaper, but they needed someone to also do the food review and I didn't get paid extra, but they did reimburse my restaurant bills.
Worth it.
Yes. Worth it. I thought it was worth it, so I felt really privileged to be able to do this at my newspaper. And it was a mix of trying Korean food, Asian food, as well as cuisines from all over the world, whatever was available in Seoul. Then I got to do a little more freelancing and food writing for CNN. And I also Miele, the cookware company, used to have a guide to Asian restaurants, so I got to contribute to the Miele Guide as one of its Korea contributors, but I've always done just any kind of journalism that anyone has asked me to do. So when I was living in Korea, it was everything from Korean affairs to sports.
Before moving to Korea, what was the first ever writing job you ever had?
I guess my very first writing job would be as an undergrad in college. I was writing for the school paper a little bit, but then also by my junior and senior year we got to write professional articles for the Miami Herald. It was such a good experience in terms of getting out, really getting to know your community and telling stories. So I wrote about an indigenous archeological site that's right in downtown Miami called the Miami Circle. And so it's surrounded by all of these glass, shiny, high rises, but it's this really important archeological site.
You really do get to learn about everything. Do you have a background in archeology?
No, no, I don't. I took a summer camp class in archeology. You just ask questions and you become a little tiny expert for a short period of time in something. It's been just a lot of bouncing around and saying “yes” when people ask me to do stories, and that’s the method. You just say yes. I say yes and try my best.
Hannah and her dog Ramona.
Photo by Gaby Deimeke.
“I love human beings, so I want to talk to them and I want to hear their stories.”
Do you think it's important to have fun at your job? Is that something that you've always wanted or a goal for you?
I think maybe more than having fun, having a sense of purpose has been really important. I feel really, really lucky that I get to write about things that I love for work these days. I've been doing a lot of books coverage, and it feels a privilege to be able to talk about books that I love in this world because there's even less and less attention paid to books and different media outlets these days. So it's like any chance I get feel really grateful for.
In general, do you find writing to be fun? Do you have fun when you're writing?
I would say it depends on the topic. I love talking to people, which is why I chose journalism as a profession. It's not always fun talking to people, but it can be really meaningful and moving. But I don't know. I think I love human beings, so I want to talk to them and I want to hear their stories.
Food writing is definitely fun.
Do you prefer cooking food or drawing food?
I think I prefer cooking food. It's very, very rewarding to eat the food. And I think what I love most is when I make something for someone who I love and having them enjoy it. It is the best feeling. If they don’t like it I'm always personally offended, but they don't say anything. I think about it for weeks. And I think the reciprocal is also such a gift is when you eat food that was cooked lovingly by someone and it's so delicious and you can feel the love.
You really can. So when you are making an illustration, do you model it after something that's in front of you or is it from the imagination?
I would say both these days, probably more based on models of real life things. The most recent project that my writing partner and I did was for this farmer who's out in the Bay Area. Her name is Kristen Leach, and she has a farm called Namu Farm. It's still going. And then I think recently she purchased a plot of land and is calling it Gohyang as means like hometown. And then she also runs the seed company called Second Generation Seeds, where she's preserving heirloom seeds from different cultures, especially Korean culture. She's adopted from Korea. But then also getting more bipoc farmers involved and preserving seeds from their cultures as well. And it's just been great to see what she's doing. It's such a gift to be able to talk to these incredible farmers, talk about what these crops mean, and then to illustrate them.
This is the zine you guys work on recently, correct? Were you able to get it printed?
We haven't done a printed version yet, but it's definitely something we've been talking about.
Yeah. I think that would be very cool. I mean, do you think there's something special about zines nowadays? I find that people say print is dead, but I completely disagree.
So I actually did this article very recently, I think it came out this week, about this groundbreaking Asian-American publication that started as a hand stapled zine. It's called Giant Robot. It's been around for 30 years now. They started in 1994 in Los Angeles. And it was just these two Asian American guys who wanted to write about things that they thought were cool. They happened to be Asian or Asian related, and it was very much driven by their point of view and what they loved. And it had a very irreverent sensibility, a great voice. And Drawn and Quarterly, the amazing publisher of comics put together this book and it's like a big chunky book, like a coffee table book of articles pulled from over the years, as well as memories from people, images from the magazine. And the magazine was publishing through 2011, and then the financial downturn really affected things for them. And they used to have stores, one in LA, one in San Francisco and one in New York. They still have one in LA as well as a gallery space. So that's how Giant Robot is surviving now as a store where they're selling cool art and other zines. They also highlight the work of emerging Asian American artists at their gallery. I was talking to one of the founders, Eric Nakamura, and he was saying that he's starting to put out copies of the original zine, and he's seen young people pick them up and he is like, “I hope they like it. I just quietly watched them and see if they pick it up.”
Oh, that's awesome.
But I think there is an interest in zines. There was an amazing exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year, maybe, or last year about zines. And it's just really, really amazing to see that these very independently put together and distributed artifacts are preserved, are respected.
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely something special about holding a physical thing and web articles, obviously there's a place for them, but I don't know, something about it just feels better.
I feel like you can see the care put into it. Looking at those zines at the Brooklyn Museum and then also talking to the Giant Robot guys, they said that when they were starting out, they were physically cutting text, old school style using glue sticks, and eventually they got a graphic designer and all of that. But it was very, very old school, and I think I have a lot of respect for that.
Do you have any wisdom about writing or designing a zine?
I would say the most important thing is the content. Is the story good? Is the interview good? Is the art good? And how can you make it as good as possible? I just try to stay true to what the person I'm talking to, what they have to say, how they feel about something. I wanted to bring that sense of care and love to the art.
What kind of stuff did you write about?
It was interviews with farmers and then it was a crop from their culture and what it means to them and how they grow it, what people should know about it. So we had a farmer named Nadia, who's a Palestinian descent, who talked to us about maramiyya, which is a type of mint that has been used in teas and in healing in her culture. We talked to another farmer who is of South Asian descent and talked about curry leaves. We talked about perilla, which is a really important crop in Korean food with a farmer named Jane, who's out in California, and we got to illustrate the actual thing itself.
If you ever do get it printed, I can think of nine people in the NYU food studies program who would love to read it. There's a seed library. And they do events, I think they have one coming up where they're harvesting their special heirloom beans.
I'm literally making beans at home right now.
No way.
I was in the Rancho Gordo bean club for a long time.
What is that?!
Do you know about Rancho Gordo beans in California?
No. So I'm actually Canadian and I just moved here, so I need to know.
Oh my gosh. So first I read an article about Rancho Gordo. It was in the New Yorker, and it's this man Steve Sando, who is out in the Bay area of California, and he's very passionate about heirloom beans. And I first started seeing them over there at Union Market, which is a fancy grocery store. But now I'm a member of the Park Slope Food Co-op, where I'm headed after this, and they sell the Rancho Gordos now, but for a while, normal grocery stores like Union Market, the only sold a selection of Rancho Gordo beans. But there are smaller quantities that they have that they can't sell commercially, but they would reserve them for their bean club, and so people would get quarterly shipments of a box of beans, and sometimes they'd be really special unusual beans.
That's so cool. I need to join. Oh my gosh.
So I ended up quitting the bean club after my ex-partner and I split because it was a lot of beans for one person to eat.
Oh, I think I could handle it.
I've never heard of the ones that I'm making at home. They're called Yellow Eye and they almost look like a black eyed pea, but instead of a black spot, there's a yellow spot, and I'm using it as a substitution for white beans and a recipe, but I also have what they call Christmas lima beans. So they're a type of lima bean. They're kind of striped with a burgundy and white. Oh my gosh. And they have more of a chest nut flavor than a typical lima bean. Very good. Okay. I got one. They beautiful black beans, beautiful Mexican red beans, such an amazing variety.
Okay. Wow. I wonder if they have any of those at the Seed library.
I wonder, you probably go to Union Market and just take a gander. Yeah, I going to hit it up after we finish up. Rancho Gordo, man. I mean, it's more expensive than normal beans, but they're still dried beans, so they're not that expensive. It's like $6 for a pound, but they're special beans and they're really delicious. Really delicious.
It's rare that you find delicious beans that are delicious on their own, not just because you've put pork in them.
Yes. I love that.
And I love beans, so that sounds really awesome. Okay. Okay. I know we went on a bean tangent.
We did go on a bit of a bean tangent, but I'm happy we did.