Michelle Zauner

From an early age, I loved supermarkets. I loved investigating every brand and its shiny, captivating packaging. I loved fondling ingredients and envisioning their endless possibilities and combinations. I could spend hours examining the freezers full of creamy melon bars and sweet red-bean popsicles, wandering the aisles in search of the plastic pouches of banana milk I drank every morning with my cousin Seong Young.

And I wished I could go back there then, back before I knew of a single bad thing.

My first word was Korean: Umma. Even as an infant, I felt the importance of my mother. She was the one I saw most, and on the dark edge of emerging consciousness I could already tell that she was mine. In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.

“Really, thank you so much, Aunt,” I said in Korean one night over beers and cake at her kitchen table. Then I typed into Google Translate: “I don’t want to be a burden.” I passed her my phone to read it and she shook her head.

“No! No!” she said in English. Then she spoke Korean into her translation app. She held up the phone for me to see. In big letters it read “That’s blood ties” with the Korean text above it. “That’s blood ties,” the robot read out loud. The voice’s pacing was all wrong, slow to process the contraction and quick between “blood” and “ties,” pronouncing the syllables without regard for one another. There was so much I wanted to say to Nami. I thought of all the years my mother had taken me to Korean school, how I begged her every week to let me skip it and enjoy my Friday night with my friends. All the money and time I wasted. All the times she told me I’d regret treating the lessons as a drag one day.

I tried to explain to Nami how much it meant to me 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.

These were the places my mother had wanted to visit before she died, the places she’d wanted to take me to before our last trip to Korea was quarantined to a hospital ward. The last memories my mother had wanted to share with me, the source of the things she raised me to love. The tastes she wanted me to remember. The feelings she wanted me to never forget.

It was a stark contrast to what we usually ate on tour in North America, the long drives fueled by gas station snacks and fast-food chains. In Taipei we had oyster omelets and stinky tofu at Shilin Night Market and discovered what is arguably the world’s greatest noodle soup, Taiwanese beef noodle, chewy flour noodles served with hefty chunks of stewed shank and a meaty broth so rich it’s practically a gravy. In Beijing we trekked a mile in six inches of snow to eat spicy hot pot, dipping thin slivers of lamb, porous wheels of crunchy lotus root, and earthy stems of watercress into bubbling, nuclear broth packed with chiles and Sichuan peppercorns. In Shanghai we devoured towers of bamboo steamers full of soup dumplings, addicted to the taste of the savory broth gushing forth from soft, gelatinous skins. In Japan we slurped decadent tonkotsu ramen, bit cautiously into steaming takoyaki topped with dancing bonito flakes, and got hammered on whisky highballs.

If there was a god, it seemed my mother must have had her foot on his neck, demanding good things come my way. That if we had to be ripped apart right at our turning point, just when things were really starting to get good, the least god could do was make a few of her daughter’s pipe dreams come true.

Korean people tend to disavow measurements and supply only cryptic instructions along the lines of “add sesame oil until it tastes like Mom’s”

No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.