Crying in H Mart

I wondered if the 10 percent [my mom] kept from the three of us who knew her best—my father, Nami, and me—had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.

I tried to explain to Nami how much it meant to share food with her, to hear these stories. How I’d been trying to reconnect with memories of my mother through food. How Kye had made me feel like I wasn’t a real Korean. What I was searching for when I cooked doenjang jjigae and jatjuk on my own, the psychological undoing of what I felt had been my failures as a caretaker, the preservation of a culture that once felt so ingrained in me but now felt threatened. But I couldn’t find the right words and the sentences were too long and complicated for any translation app, so I quit halfway through and just reached for her hand and the two of us went on slurping the cold noodles from the tart, icy beef broth.

I swayed back and forth with [Nami], squinting to try to sound out the vowels and keep up with the melody, a melody I searched for deep within a memory that may or may not have existed, or a memory that belonged to my mother that I had somehow accessed. I could feel Nami searching for something in me that I had spent the last week searching for in her. Not quite my mother and not quite her sister, we existed in that moment as each other’s next best thing.

[…] I tried my best to sing along. I wanted to do all I could to help resuscitate her memory. I chased after the Korean characters that seemed highlighted at the breakneck speed of a pinball. I let the lyrics fly from my mouth always just a little bit behind, hoping my mother tongue would guide me.

I wondered if the 10 percent [my mom] kept from the three of us who knew her best—my father, Nami, and me—had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.

I tried to explain to Nami how much it meant to share food with her, to hear these stories. How I’d been trying to reconnect with memories of my mother through food. How Kye had made me feel like I wasn’t a real Korean. What I was searching for when I cooked doenjang jjigae and jatjuk on my own, the psychological undoing of what I felt had been my failures as a caretaker, the preservation of a culture that once felt so ingrained in me but now felt threatened. But I couldn’t find the right words and the sentences were too long and complicated for any translation app, so I quit halfway through and just reached for her hand and the two of us went on slurping the cold noodles from the tart, icy beef broth.

I swayed back and forth with [Nami], squinting to try to sound out the vowels and keep up with the melody, a melody I searched for deep within a memory that may or may not have existed, or a memory that belonged to my mother that I had somehow accessed. I could feel Nami searching for something in me that I had spent the last week searching for in her. Not quite my mother and not quite her sister, we existed in that moment as each other’s next best thing.

[…] I tried my best to sing along. I wanted to do all I could to help resuscitate her memory. I chased after the Korean characters that seemed highlighted at the breakneck speed of a pinball. I let the lyrics fly from my mouth always just a little bit behind, hoping my mother tongue would guide me.