Though the title is Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?), Korean-American playwright-performer Zoë Kim’s solo show at the Public Theater is not centered on food. There’s a passing mention of persimmons—while pregnant, her Umma (mom) ate a bucket of them every day—but otherwise, food is hardly discussed.
“Did you eat?” is Umma’s all-purpose opener, the fallback line she uses “instead of saying the thing she really means to say,” explains Kim. A query about food becomes a show of concern, an apology, even an expression of love. But if you do eat… “이제 그만 먹어. 뚱뚱해져.” Or in English (all the Korean dialogue is translated via projections): “Don’t eat too much. You’ll get fat.”
Kim clearly cherishes Umma’s moments of (mis)communication. Thankfully for us, Kim is more direct in her conversation—clear-eyed, open-hearted, and generous with her memories in Did You Eat?, a Ma-Yi Theater Company production. With a wide, disarming smile, she welcomes the audience (“I’m so happy to see you!”), then steps into a narrator role, chronicling the formative, and often traumatizing, events of her childhood and adult life. The suffering started at an early age: “The day you are born is a tragic day. When the nurse hands you to Umma, she knows she has failed her duty to produce a son.” Resentment (from Umma) and disinterest (from Appa, her dad) inevitably follow.
“You’ll feel like a nuisance to everyone around you. You’ll make yourself small so you don’t upset Umma and Appa,” Kim recalls of her early years in Korea. “Imagination will be your favorite toy. Independence will be your best friend.” Eventually, Appa becomes interested—in cruelty, both emotional and physical (mostly physical). “By inflicting relentless pain and suffering, he believes that he could make a son out of you.”
When, as a teenager, Kim is sent to boarding school in America, we exhale, thinking that’s the end of her troubles. But the move brings challenges of its own—mainly, a language barrier and an identity crisis. Of the latter, Kim says she’s often asked if she’s more Korean or more American. “Like, you can’t be equal parts of both,” she wonders. “I cry in Korean but laugh in English. Koreans say I’m too American but Americans say I’ll never be American enough.” And Appa’s abuse continues, first via forced summer SAT prep with beatings, and then—well, it’s hard to reveal here, and it’s better coming from Kim. But she does finally ask for help from Umma, whose reply is, sadly, as stoic and perfunctory as we expect. “네 아빠다. 괜찮아. 말 잘 듣고 있어.” In other words: “He’s your father. You’ll be fine. Be a good daughter.”
The fact that Kim tells the story of her upbringing not with rancor and resentment, but rather with acceptance and understanding, seems almost unfathomable. But she does, and she tells it with her whole body, moving nearly the entire time. (The intricate, sometimes balletic, sometimes aerobic, choreography is by Iris McCloughan.) It’s as if she’s processing her emotions through with each carefully controlled step, turn, twist, and sweep.
Did You Eat? opened Oct. 24, 2025, at the Public Theater’s Shiva Theater and runs through Nov. 16. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
