Crying in H Mart

Standing at the counter, we'd open every Tupperware container full of homemade banchan, and snack together in the blue dark of the humid kitchen. Sweet braised black soybeans, crisp yellow sprouts with scallion and sesame oil, and tart, juicy cucumber kimchi were shoveled into our mouths behind spoonfuls of warm, lavender kong bap straight from the open rice cooker. We'd giggle and shush each other as we ate ganjang gejang with our fingers, sucking salty, rich, custardy raw crab from its shell, prodding the meat from its crevices with our tongues, licking our soy sauce-stained fingers. Between chews of a wilted perilla leaf, my mother would say, “This is how I know you're a true Korean.”

When my mom returned from the funeral, she was devastated. She let out this distinctly Korean wail and kept calling out, “Umma, Umma,” crumpled on the living room floor, her head heaving sobs into my father's lap as he sat on the couch and wept with her. […] I’d never seen my mother's emotion so unabashedly on display. Never seen her without control, like a child. I couldn't comprehend them the depth of her sorrow the way I do now. I was not yet on the other side, had not crossed over as she had into the realm of profound loss.

[…] I could only think of the last words my grandmother said to me before we returned home to America.

“You used to be such a little chickenshit,” she said. “You never let me wipe your asshole.”

I screamed to [my mom] in her language, in my mother tongue. My first word. Hoping she'd hear her little girl calling, and like the quintessential mother who is suddenly filled with enough other worldly strength to lift the car and save her trapped child, she'd come back for me. […]

Umma! Umma!

The same words my mother repeated when her mother died. That Korean sob, guttural and deep and primal. The same sound I'd heard in Korean movies and soap operas, the sound my mother made crying for her mother and sister. A pained vibrato that breaks apart into staccato quarter notes, descending as if it were falling off a series of small ledges.

That wasn’t so hard, I thought to myself, happy to have conquered the dish Kye had mystified.

This was all I wanted, I realized, after so many days of decadent filets and pricey crustaceans, potatoes slathered in the many glorious permutations that ratios of butter, cheese, and cream take. This plain porridge was the first dish to make me feel full.

Standing at the counter, we'd open every Tupperware container full of homemade banchan, and snack together in the blue dark of the humid kitchen. Sweet braised black soybeans, crisp yellow sprouts with scallion and sesame oil, and tart, juicy cucumber kimchi were shoveled into our mouths behind spoonfuls of warm, lavender kong bap straight from the open rice cooker. We'd giggle and shush each other as we ate ganjang gejang with our fingers, sucking salty, rich, custardy raw crab from its shell, prodding the meat from its crevices with our tongues, licking our soy sauce-stained fingers. Between chews of a wilted perilla leaf, my mother would say, “This is how I know you're a true Korean.”

When my mom returned from the funeral, she was devastated. She let out this distinctly Korean wail and kept calling out, “Umma, Umma,” crumpled on the living room floor, her head heaving sobs into my father's lap as he sat on the couch and wept with her. […] I’d never seen my mother's emotion so unabashedly on display. Never seen her without control, like a child. I couldn't comprehend them the depth of her sorrow the way I do now. I was not yet on the other side, had not crossed over as she had into the realm of profound loss.

[…] I could only think of the last words my grandmother said to me before we returned home to America.

“You used to be such a little chickenshit,” she said. “You never let me wipe your asshole.”

I screamed to [my mom] in her language, in my mother tongue. My first word. Hoping she'd hear her little girl calling, and like the quintessential mother who is suddenly filled with enough other worldly strength to lift the car and save her trapped child, she'd come back for me. […]

Umma! Umma!

The same words my mother repeated when her mother died. That Korean sob, guttural and deep and primal. The same sound I'd heard in Korean movies and soap operas, the sound my mother made crying for her mother and sister. A pained vibrato that breaks apart into staccato quarter notes, descending as if it were falling off a series of small ledges.

That wasn’t so hard, I thought to myself, happy to have conquered the dish Kye had mystified.

This was all I wanted, I realized, after so many days of decadent filets and pricey crustaceans, potatoes slathered in the many glorious permutations that ratios of butter, cheese, and cream take. This plain porridge was the first dish to make me feel full.