Michelle Zauner

“What are you, then?” was the last thing I wanted to be asked at twelve because it established that I stuck out, that I was unrecognizable, that I didn’t belong. Until then, I’d always been proud of being half Korean, but suddenly I feared it’d become my defining feature and so I began to efface it.

That cooking my mother’s food had come to represent an absolute role reversal, a role I was meant to fill. That food was an unspoken language between us, that it had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground.

It was the year her life ended and mine fell apart.

I wanted to embody a physical warning—that if she began to disappear, I would disappear too.

felt we could go on like this for years, just fixing her.

Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could. In my grief I was desperate to construe the slightest thing as a sign.

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.

Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?

FOOD WAS HOW my mother expressed her love. 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.

I remember the snacks Mom told me she ate when she was a kid and how I tried to imagine her at my age. I wanted to like all the things she did, to embody her completely.