That Little Snack in “Squid Game” Is More Important Than You Think
A symbol of culture and persistence
Squid Game was memorable for various reasons. The eerie uniforms, the exquisite taste in music, the heartwrenching “Marbles” episode. But more than anything, the thing about Squid Game that stuck out to me was the reference to childhood games.
When Player 218 chose the door with a triangle, I gasped and slapped my wife on the arm. I knew what was coming: one of my favorite childhood snacks — one that “Squid Game” would bring back from the brink of extinction.
The Honeycomb Game: An American’s Introduction to South Korea
I was thirteen when I flew to my mother country for the first time. My brother and I boarded the plane by ourselves, on our first international flight. I lost my luggage.
I started empty-handed in a country that was supposed to be “mine.”
My grandparents were warm and doting. Aunts and uncles I’d never met embraced us as if we’d never left. My cousins introduced us to live squid and Cyworld and Lotte World.
But all the hugs in the world couldn’t fill the chasm that existed between me and my Korean identity. I couldn’t help but notice how I looked and acted so different from other Koreans my age. Were we really the same race?
In Texas I was a “reading queen” (literally a title my school gave me). In Korea, I could barely understand, let alone speak the language. Learning how to be a teenager in America was hard enough, especially as a girl. Was it still okay for me to play kickball with the boys in our cul-de-sac when all the other girls seemed to stay at home painting their nails? My trip to Korea magnified this emerging identity crisis tenfold. Why wasn’t my skin as perfect as these other girls? (Because I hadn’t started buying bottles of toner and essence and sun block since I was in elementary school, like these girls had.) I was already quite awkward in America. Why did I feel like a total idiot fumbling over social graces in Korea?
Hugs couldn’t fix my thick-tongued accent, and love couldn’t fix my acne or my slouched back. But one thing bridged the gap between my mother country and my home country: food.
My mom is a wonderful cook. To this day she can replicate almost anything she tries at a restaurant, and she’s constantly innovating new recipes. Thanks to her, I grew up eating Korean food — lots of it. We loved McDonald’s and wings and steak fajitas just as much as any other family. But the one thing that really grounded me to my culture was food.
Though my mother provided so much, Korea provided even more. There were so many different cuisines from around the peninsula, including in my mother’s hometown, Suwon, which is known for galbi (one of the most popular cuts of Korean barbequeue).
What took me off guard was how some of the best food wasn’t even sold in restaurants, but on the street. Carts hawk “quick bites” that range from desserts to full-fledged meals. More thrilling than the food itself is the atmosphere. The vendor is swift and enthusiastic, often handing you a little extra if you’re polite. You might get the cart all to yourself, but more often than not, you share the space with fellow foodies. Squeezing in shoulder-to-shoulder in a tight space made me feel connected to the locals, even if we never exchanged any words.
One of my favorite street food snacks was also a game: bbobgi, otherwise known as the “honeycomb” game or “dalgona” thanks to Squid Game. “Bbobda” means “to pluck,” or “select.” The vendor pours sugar onto a small pan, stirs it till it’s golden, then turns off the heat. As the melted sugar solidifies, the vendor places something that looks like a cookie cutter attached to a metal handle onto the disc of melted sugar. The vendor presses, but not all the way through: just enough for the outline to remain on one side. Then, after removing the cookie-cutter-on-a-stick, the vendor presses a wooden icecream stick onto the edge of the sugar cookie and hands you the treat.
Back in the day, the game was to nibble around the edges in order to gingerly remove the shape in the middle without breaking the cookie. If you succeeded, you would get another bbobgi for free.
I was obsessed with the treat/game. I played it any chance I got, any time we stumbled across a little over lady hunched over a tiny pan on a portable stove. I was never very good at it, but the game struck me as uniquely Korean. It was a window into a world where I couldn’t speak the language.
Imagine my delight when the game resurfaced decades later in the most-streamed Netflix show in the world.
Squid Game: America’s Introduction to Korea
Plenty of countries watched K-dramas and Korean movies well before 2020, but K-dramas went undeniably global with Squid Game. Part of the success was due to Netflix dubbing the show in English, which meant that Americans — arguably the biggest bottleneck in global viewership— could watch the show without having to overcome the “one-inch tall barrier of subtitles” (to paraphrase Director Bong Joon-Ho).
Still, it a lot of people off guard that so many people watched the show — including the people who watched the show. NPR alone published a flurry of articles trying to explain why Americans liked the show so much. The costumes were weird. The games were foreign. There was a lot of blood and gore, yet the shock value alone wouldn’t explain why Squid Game was successful compared to, say, a good Thai horror film.
While the social messaging was haunting, it’s undeniable that the most enduring part of the show was the games. That would explain why Netflix recreated the show in real life. The tone deaf series gets to replicate the games without thinking too hard about the irony of throwing a bunch of people into a ruthless tournament based on a show that used the symbol of a ruthless tournament to warn against the dangers of unfettered competition.
Rant aside, Korean organizations around the world have capitalized on the popularity of the show to promote and preserve Korean culture. Cultural centers across the U.S. hosted events on how to make ddakji (the folded paper you throw on the ground), and Korean supermarkets sold honeycombs, complete with a metal tin and a needle (which is true to the show but not to how they are traditionally made, as described above).
But the most important boost in popularity was probably right back at home, in Korea, where bbobgi street vendors saw a surge in sales that brought them back from the brink of extinction.
Street Food: A Dying Cultural Legacy
South Korea faced — is facing — a predicament that is unfortunately familiar to many developing cities in Asia. Modernization means cleaner, newer storefronts. It means more tourists and even more locals. All this increased traffic and cleanliness unfortunately means there is less room for open-air food carts, no matter how tidy they might be. Modernization means that, by some twisted logic, the street vendors that breathed so much charm and character into Asia’s vibrant culture are now embarrassing. (Street Food: Asia on Netflix documents Asian street food culture just as much as it documents the threat to their survival: governments.)
I lived in Korea from ages fifteen to nineteen, and until twenty-eight I used to return at least twice a year. Gangnam street (of “Gangnam Style” fame) used to be lined with street vendors of all sorts. They hawked not just food but also cute phone accessories, plushies, and shoes. There were cheap-as-dirt shoe repair stalls that performed better work than any repair shop I’ve had to go to in America.
Some time between 2005 and 2015, these street vendors died out. Gangnam street got cleaner. Garosu Lane lost the string of vendors that used to line the streets. Even Hongdae, which is still unbelievably busy, brushed their vendors indoors into proper storefronts.
One winter, I spent hours driving around Seoul with my mom looking for boong-eo-bbang. This fish-shaped bread stuffed with red bean puree used to be easy to find: I’d just step outside, onto the street corner. If the lady there had wrapped up for the day, I would cross the street to another vendor.
That winter, years after I’d left for college, the streets around my house had tidied up. There were scintillating storefronts, fancy new buildings, and even freshly remodeled subway entrances all around my intersection. There were no street vendors, except for the guy who repaired shoes.
My mom and I drove to about five neighborhoods we could think of. Surely these hotspots would have boong-eo-bbang. We’d sat around and had odaeng or soondae or ddeokbokki in these neighborhoods, hadn’t we? Sitting under an orange tarp filled with the steam of whatever was cooking.
We couldn’t find it. We ended up having to go to a luxury department store to buy it from the food court in the basement.
Bbobgi: A Symbol of Persistence
If you’ve never played the honeycomb game, you should try. Amazon has plenty of “dalgona” kits so you can make the treats at home. Instead of using a needle, as in the show, try nibbling.
What you’ll find is that there are no shortcuts. There are no tricks. You just have to be patient, and that is exactly why so many people fail.
Bbobgi, just like so many other street foods, were on the verge of extinction. To my surprise, there were Koreans my age who had never heard of bbobgi until Squid Game went viral.
Now, bbobgi vendors — as well as others — are back. Profits have increased literally a hundredfold, and lines are ever-present.
Just like Greek yogurt or guacamole, bbobgi seems to be a global mainstay. It’s a happy ending from a bleak show, for the food and for the culture. By becoming both local and global, bbobgi also narrowed the gap between my Korean and American homes.
