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.”

“What do I even have left to look forward to, Michelle?” [My mom] said, welling up as she eyed the wilted white cabbage. “I can't even eat kimchi.”

“Your hair is really growing back,” I said, trying to change the subject. I put my hand on her head and gently ran my palm over the sparse white fuzz. “For someone who's sick you still look very young and beautiful.”

“Do I?” she said, feigning modesty

“It's true,” I said. “It almost looks like…are you wearing makeup?” I had never realized that my mother had her eyebrows tattooed. They looked so natural it was hard to tell.

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.

I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. […] Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.

The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived in on me, in my every move and deed.

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.