Each morning I washed and cut three organic tomatoes and blended them together with honey and ice as she’d instructed. Other meals proved more challenging. I didn’t know how to cook many Korean dishes on my own, and the few I had learned to prepare were too heavy for her current state. I felt lost. I asked her constantly if she could think of anything I could cook for her, but she had no cravings to chase and dismissed my suggestions listlessly. The only thing she could come up with was Ottogi brand cream soup, an instant powder I could buy at the Asian grocery that was neutral and easy to digest.

There was no H Mart in Eugene. Instead, twice a week my mother and I would go shopping for Korean groceries at Sunrise Market, a small business in town run by a Korean family. The husband was short and dark. He wore large aviator glasses and yellow work gloves and was constantly winded from hauling new shipments inside. The wife was pretty and petite and wore her hair in a short perm. She was friendly and soft-spoken and usually worked the register. Occasionally, one of their three daughters would be there to help bag groceries and stock the shelves. Every few years a new daughter would grow old enough to replace whichever one went off to school, and I would hear the name of some prestigious college proudly mentioned, poking out of the Korean phrases she exchanged with my mother, ringing up our bean sprouts and tofu.

At the front of the store there were giant sacks of rice piled high on industrial shelving that wrapped around to an open refrigerator with ten different types of kimchi and banchan. There were aisles of instant noodles and curries in the center, freezers full of mixed seafood and dumplings on the other edge. In the back corner there was a Korean VHS section with shelves full of bootleg tapes housed in anonymous white sleeves, handwritten texts running down their spines, where my mom would rent outdated series of K-dramas her friends and family in Seoul had already seen and had been telling her about for years. If I was good, my mother would treat me to a snack displayed near the register, usually a Yakult yogurt drink or a little cup of fruit jelly, or the two of us might share a package of mochi on the drive home.

When I was nine, Sunrise Market relocated to a larger store. My mom pored giddily over the new imports that came with the expansion: pollack roe frozen in little wooden boxes; packages of Chapagetti instant black-bean noodles; bungeo-ppang, fish-shaped pastry filled with ice cream and sweet red-bean paste, each new item reviving bygone memories of her childhood, conjuring new recipes to capture old tastes.

It was strange to be on my own in a place we’d always gone to together. I was so accustomed to following her lead as she investigated frozen bags of mixed seafood and pajeon flour mix, likely trying to discern which was most similar to the ones Halmoni would use. Untethered from my mother’s cart, I scanned the shelves for the instant soup she’d asked me to find, slowly reading the Korean characters in search of the correct brand.

I learned to read and write Korean in Korean language school, Hangul Hakkyo. Every Friday from first to sixth grade, my mother would take me to the Korean Presbyterian Church. A small building at the bottom of the parking lot housed two or three classrooms separated into varying levels of difficulty. The rooms were all covered in colorful illustrations of Bible scenes left over from Sunday school. Up the hill was a larger building with a kitchen and another classroom, and upstairs the actual church where we gathered for assemblies once or twice a year.

Every week the mothers would take turns providing dinner. While some approached this service piously, an opportunity to prepare traditional Korean fare, others regarded it as a rote duty and were perfectly content to order ten boxes of Little Caesars, much to the delight of the students. “I can’t believe they actually like pizza for dinner when Grace’s umma was just being lazy,” my mother would grumble on the ride home. All the Korean moms took on the names of their children. Jiyeon’s mom was Jiyeon’s umma. Esther’s mom was Esther’s umma. I never learned any of their real names. Their identities were absorbed by their children.

When it was my mom’s turn she made gimbap. At home after school she cooked a big pot of rice and spent hours rolling yellow pickled radish, carrots, spinach, beef, and sliced omelet into perfect cylinders with a thin bamboo mat, then cut them into colorful, bite-sized coins. Before class the two of us snacked on the leftover ends where the vegetables protruded messily out of the sides.

I didn’t have any Korean friends outside of Hangul Hakkyo. During our dinner breaks, I often felt out of place, wandering around the parking lot, which doubled as a playground for our half-hour recess. There was a basketball hoop that the older boys would commandeer. Everyone else just sat on the curbs trying to entertain themselves. Most of the kids there were full Korean, and I struggled to relate to the obedience that seemed to possess them, inculcated by the united force of two immigrant parents. They wore the visors their moms bought for them without protest and all attended church together on Sundays, a practice my mother had opted out of early on, despite the central role Christianity seemed to play in our sparse Korean community. Perhaps by nature of my mixed upbringing, I always felt like the bad kid, which only made me act out more. When I misbehaved, the teachers would make me stand in the corner with my arms over my head while the others carried on with their lessons. I never became fluent in Korean, but I did manage to learn to read and write.

* * *

—

“KEU-REEM SEU-PEU,” I said quietly, sounding out the Konglish. For someone like me who was just barely literate, Konglish was a blessed free pass to a large bank of vocabulary. It’s a fusion of Korean and English that obeys Korean rules of pronunciation. Since there is no z in the Hangul alphabet, English words that contain the letter z get replaced with a j sound, so pizza becomes pee-jah, amazing becomes ama-jing, and a word like cheese, in which the s emulates a z sound, becomes chee-jeu. In this case, r’s were replaced with l sounds. “Keu-reem seu-peu,” I whispered. Cream soup. The packet was bright orange and yellow and had a logo of a winking cartoon man licking his lips. I bought several varieties and a few bowls of the same brand’s instant Korean porridge and a package of mochi and returned home.

I washed my hands and placed a pink mochi on a small plate to bring to her in bed.

“No thank you, honey,” she said. “I don’t feel like it.”

“Come on, Mom. Just eat half of one.”

I sat beside her, watching. She took a small bite unhappily and put it back on the plate, flicking the fine residue of sweet rice flour from her fingers before setting it on her nightstand. I left the room to prepare the cream soup.

I combined the dry powder with three cups of water and heated it through. I tried to recall some of the caretaking tips I’d read online. Serve small amounts frequently, create a pleasant mealtime atmosphere. Meals can be made more appealing if they’re served in large bowls, making portions appear smaller and more manageable. I poured the contents into a pretty blue bowl big enough to make the soup seem like a drop in a well. Despite the illusion, she consumed only a few spoonfuls.

Later that evening, I had the brilliant idea of making gyeranjjim, a steamed, savory egg custard usually served as a side dish at Korean restaurants bringing their A game. Nutritious with a mild and soothing flavor, it was one of my favorites growing up.

I looked up a recipe online. I cracked four eggs into a small bowl and beat them with a fork. I searched the kitchen cabinets, found one of my mother’s earthenware pots, and heated it over the stove, adding the beaten eggs, salt, and three cups of water. I put the lid on and after fifteen minutes returned to find it had come out perfectly soft and jiggly, like a pale yellow, silken tofu.

I set it on a hot pad on the table and eagerly helped my mother to the kitchen.

“I made gyeranjjim!”

My mother winced at the sight of it. She turned her face away with distaste.

“Oh no, baby,” she said. “I really don’t want this one right now.”