“Do you want bibimbap today?” she asked, holding the steering wheel with one hand and searching the contacts of her pink Razr flip phone with the other.

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

“Ah ne! Ajeossi…?”

Every time my mother spoke Korean, the text sprawled out before me like a Mad Lib. Words that were so familiar mixed with long blanks I couldn’t fill in. I knew she was ordering jjamppong with extra vegetables, because I knew those words and because she always ordered the same thing. If she liked something, she stuck to it, ate it every day, seemingly never tiring of it, until one day she’d just move on inexplicably.

When we arrived, my mother greeted the old man at the counter with a big smile and burst into Korean while I dutifully poured hot tea for us from a large metal urn and placed our napkins, metal spoons, and chopsticks on the table. She paid at the counter, grabbed a Korean magazine from the front, and brought it back to our booth.

“I really like them here but they’re very slow. That’s why Mommy always call ahead,” she whispered.

She flipped through the magazine, drinking her barley tea and taking in the Korean actresses and models. “I think maybe this would be nice hairstyle for you,” she said, pointing at a Korean actress with perfectly neat, wavy tresses. She flipped the page again. “This kind of military jacket is very popular style in Korea now. Mommy want to get you one but you always wear ugly thing.”

The old man wheeled our dishes over on a cart and placed our orders and banchan on the table. The rice at the bottom of my dolsot crackled and my mother’s seafood noodle soup bellowed a steam bath from its bright red surface.

“Masitge deuseyo,” the man said with a slight bow, wishing us a good meal as he pushed his cart back to the counter.

“What’d you think of my show yesterday?” I said, squirting gochujang into my bibimbap.

“Honey, don’t put too much gochujang or it taste too salty,” she said. She swatted my hand away from my bowl. I set down the red squeeze bottle with token obedience.

“Nick said he knows a studio where I could record my songs. I’m thinking since it’s just guitar and vocals, I could record like an album in two or three days. It’d only be like two hundred dollars for the studio time, and then I could burn the discs at home.”

My mother lifted up a long string of noodles, then let them drop back into the broth. She set her chopsticks across the top of the bowl, closed the magazine, and met my eyes across the table.

“I’m just waiting for you to give this up,” she said.

My eyes fell into my rice. I broke my yolk with my spoon and pushed it around the stone bowl over the vegetables. My mother leaned in and began spooning some bean sprout soup into my bibimbap. The liquid sizzled against the sides.

“I should have never let you take guitar class,” she said. “You should be thinking about the colleges, not doing this weird thing.”

I bobbed my left leg up and down nervously, trying not to explode. My mother grabbed my thigh under the table.

“Stop shaking your leg; you’ll shake the luck out.”

“What if I don’t want to go to college?” I said brazenly, wrenching away from her grasp. I shoveled a spoonful of the scalding mixed rice into my mouth, lobbing it around with my tongue, creating an air pocket that let out the steam. My mother looked around the restaurant nervously, as if I had just pledged faith to a satanic commune. I watched her try to collect herself.

“I don’t care if you don’t want to go to college. You have to go to college.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I said. “This weird thing—is the thing that I love.”

“Oh okay, fine then, you go live with Colette!” she erupted. She grabbed her purse and stood, sliding on her oversized sunglasses. “I’m sure she’ll take care of you. You can do whatever you want there and I am so evil.”

By the time I followed her out to the parking lot, she was already in the driver’s seat, using the mirror from the sun flap to pick the gochugaru from her teeth with the folded corner of a receipt. She was waiting for me to stop her—to chase her and beg for forgiveness. But I would not give in. I could live without them, I thought to myself with foolish teenage confidence. I could get a job. I could stay with friends. I could keep playing shows until someday the rooms were full.

My mother crumpled the receipt into the cup holder, closed the mirror, and rolled down her window. I stood still in the parking lot, trying my best not to tremble as she stared me down from behind her dark lenses.

“You want to be a starving musician?” she said. “Then go live like one.”

* * *

—

THE ALLURE OF LIFE as a starving musician wore off quickly. I stayed with Nicole and Colette a few nights, then with my friend Shanon, who was a year older and had her own place. We hung around at a punk house called the Flower Shop that was basically a glorified squat. Crust punks slept on the floors, hurled glass bottles off the roof into the street, and threw kitchen knives into the drywall when they were drunk.

Without my mother as an anchor, I strayed even further from the responsibilities we’d been arguing about over the past year. The college supplements I needed to complete remained half-finished documents on my father’s desktop computer and I was pulled into a vicious cycle of truancy. I skipped classes, missed assignments, became ashamed I had gotten so far behind, and then kept skipping because I didn’t want to be confronted by the teachers who cared about me. Many mornings I would just sit outside on campus, smoking cigarettes in the high school parking lot, unable to go inside. I fantasized about dying. Every object in the world seemed to become a tool for it. The freeway a place to get pummeled, five stories high enough to jump off. I saw bottles of glass cleaner and wondered how much I’d have to swallow; I thought of hanging myself with the little string that makes window blinds go up and down.

When my midterm report card revealed I was failing all my classes and that my GPA had plummeted, my mother scheduled a meeting with the college counselor and begged for help. Frantically, she gathered the necessary documents, including the scrapped writing supplements, and sent them out to the colleges I had previously shown interest in. When I finally returned home, I began to see a therapist who prescribed medication for some “emotional breathing room” and addressed a letter to accompany my college applications explaining that this shift in mood and performance had been indicative of a mental breakdown.

* * *

—

MY REMAINING MONTHS at home were scored by a fraught silence. My mother would drift from room to room rarely acknowledging my presence. When I opted not to attend senior prom, she offered little more than a passing remark, despite the fact we had picked out a dress together nearly a year beforehand.

I yearned for my mother to speak to me but tried to appear stoic, knowing full well my constitution was much weaker than hers. She seemed unfazed by our distance right up until the day I packed to leave for Bryn Mawr, when at last the silence was broken.

“When I was your age I would have died for a mom who bought me nice clothes,” she said.

I was sitting cross-legged on the carpet, folding a pair of overalls stitched entirely out of plaid patches I’d bought from Goodwill. I set the overalls inside my bag, alongside my ugly sweater collection and an oversized Daniel Johnston shirt I had cut into a muscle tee.

“I always had to wear Nami’s leftovers and then watch Eunmi get new ones by the time they got to her,” she said. “On the East Coast everyone is going to think you are a homeless person.”