Crying in H Mart

When I go to H Mart, I'm not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for a buck; I'm searching for memories. I'm collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn't die when [my aunt and my mother] did. H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me, of chemo head and skeletal bodies and logging milligrams of hydrocodone. It reminds me of who they were before, beautiful and full of life, wiggling Chang Gu honey-cracker rings on all ten of their fingers, showing me how to suck a Korean grape from its skin and spit out the seeds.

Every time I ate well or bowed correctly to my elders, my relatives would say, “Aigo yeppeu.” “Yeppeu,” or pretty, was frequently employed as a synonym for good or well-behaved, and this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.

I didn't have the tools then to question the beginnings of my complicated desire for whiteness. In Eugene, I was one of just a few mixed-race kids at my school and most people thought of me as Asian. I felt awkward and undesirable, and no one ever complimented my appearance. In Seoul, most Koreans assumed I was Caucasian, until my mother stood beside me and they could see the half of her fused to me, and I made sense. Suddenly, my “exotic” look was something to be celebrated.

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 remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother's thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remember the boots she'd broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain […] It seemed only fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one's filial piety. All the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she'd endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place. […] But I could do no more than lie nearby.

[My mother] sat on the floor and confronted [her] reflection. She ran a hand along her head and stared at the hair that broke off into it. In the same full-length mirror where I had watched her pose for more than half my life. The same mirror where I'd watched her apply cream after cream to preserve her taut, flawless skin. The same mirror where I'd find her trying on outfit after outfit, runway walking with perfect posture, examining herself with pride, posing with a new purse or leather jacket. The mirror where she lingered in all her vanity. In the mirror now there was someone unrecognizable and out of her control. Someone strange and undesirable. She started to cry.

“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.

“You know what I realized? I've just never met someone like you.”

I've just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery.

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.

“Yeppeuda,” she said. Pretty. Small face.

It was the same word I’d heard when I was young, but now it felt different. […] I no longer had someone whole to stand beside, to make sense of me. I feared whatever contour or color it was that signified that precious half was already beginning to wash away, as if without my mother, I no longer had a right to those parts of my face.