“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.

She was right about everything. Sitting across from Nami, I felt so fucking stupid I wanted to throw my head through a wall.

“Uljima, Michelle,” she said as tears started to form and roll down my cheeks. Don’t cry.

I wiped my eyes with the base of my palms.

“Umma always said save your tears for when your mother dies,” I said with a laugh.

“Halmoni also say this one,” she said. “You and your mom very much same.”

I was dumbfounded. All my life I’d always thought it was a particularly cruel motto, born of my mother’s unique style of parenting, an adage on hand for every tantrum I threw, be it a scraped knee or twisted ankle, a messy breakup or fumbled opportunity, the confrontation with mediocrity, my shortcomings, my failures. When Ryan Walsh smacked me in the eye with a plastic hammer. When an ex moved on before I did. When the band played like shit to rooms filled with no one. Let me feel this, I wanted to scream. Hold me, and let me wallow in it. I thought to myself that if I ever had children, I’d never tell them to save their tears. That anyone who’d been hardened with those words would grow to hate them just as much as I did. And now I discovered my rebellious mother had been scolded with this phrase all along.

“When I was young she told me she threw away a baby,” I said in Korean, not knowing the word for abortion. “She had so many secrets.”

“I know,” Nami said in English. “I think…Your mom think…Come to Korea too hard with two baby.”

Nami pantomimed cradling two infants, one on either side. I had never really believed that I was the cause of my mother’s abortion when she hurled it at me in anger years ago, but I had also never found an explanation to the contrary. A little girl, occupied by my own blissful excursions, I never realized just how important these trips had been for her, how much this country was a part of her.

I wondered if the 10 percent she kept from the three of us who knew her best—my father, Nami, and me—had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.

* * *

—

ON OUR FINAL NIGHT in Seoul, Nami and Emo Boo took us to Samwon Garden, a fancy barbecue spot in Apgujeong, a neighborhood my mom once described as the Beverly Hills of Seoul. We entered through the beautiful courtyard garden, its two man-made waterfalls flowing under rustic stone bridges and feeding the koi pond. Inside the dining room were heavy stone-top tables, each equipped with a hardwood charcoal grill. Nami slipped the waitress twenty thousand won, and our table quickly filled with the most exquisite banchan. Sweet pumpkin salad, gelatinous mung-bean jelly topped with sesame seeds and scallions, steamed egg custard, delicate bowls of nabak kimchi, wilted cabbage and radish in salty, rose-colored water. We finished the meal with naengmyeon, cold noodles you could order bibim, mixed with gochujang, or mul, served in a cold beef broth. I chose the latter.

“Me too! I like mul naengmyeon,” Nami said. “Your umma also. This is our family style. He is bibim.” She pointed at Emo Boo. When the noodles arrived, she tapped her metal bowl with her spoon. “This is Pyongyang style.” She gestured back to Emo Boo’s bowl. “This is Hamhung.”

Naengmyeon is a North Korean specialty, where the cold climate and mountainous terrain are better suited to furrows of buckwheat and root vegetables than the paddy fields of rice that line the rural river valleys further down the peninsula. Nami was referring to its two largest cities, Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, less than two hundred miles from Seoul, and Hamhung, up the northeastern coast. Both styles of the cold noodle dish became popular in South Korea by way of northerners who fled south during the Korean War, bringing their regional preferences with them. The leaders of the two Koreas, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, would later share a bowl of mul naengmyeon at the inter-Korean summit. It was the first time a North Korean leader had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel since the end of the war more than sixty years earlier, a historic event that prompted long lines for naengmyeon restaurants across the country, sparking a collective appetite for a dish seen as a promising symbol of peace.

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.

* * *

—

PETER AND I continued with our honeymoon. We visited Gwangjang Market in one of Seoul’s oldest neighborhoods, squeezing past crowds of people threading through its covered alleys, a natural maze spontaneously joined and splintered over a century of accretion. We passed busy ajummas in aprons and rubber kitchen gloves tossing knife-cut noodles in colossal, bubbling pots for kalguksu, grabbing fistfuls of colorful namul from overbrimming bowls for bibimbap, standing over gurgling pools of hot oil, armed with metal spatulas in either hand, flipping the crispy sides of stone-milled soybean pancakes. Metal containers full of jeotgal, salt-fermented seafood banchan, affectionally known as rice thieves, because their intense, salty flavor cries out for starchy, neutral balance; raw, pregnant crabs, floating belly up in soy sauce to show off the unctuous roe protruding out from beneath their shells; millions of minuscule peach-colored krill used for making kimchi or finishing hot soup with rice; and my family’s favorite, crimson sacks of pollack roe smothered in gochugaru, myeongnanjeot.

The pungent aroma reminded me of trips with my mother and her sisters to a high-end grocery on the basement floor of a department store in Myeongdong. An ajumma in a cloth hair wrap and matching apron would call out “Eoseo oseyo” and extend a toothpick skewered with different types of jeotgal to try. The sisters would sample each and discuss, then have the winner wrapped in fifty layers of plastic until it was the size of a football for us to haul home. Sometimes Mom would buy an extra suitcase just to bring it back to Eugene, and every time she served the roe with a side of rice at home, a tiny pool of sesame oil dribbled over the top, I would close my eyes and hear my aunts in careful deliberation.

From Seoul, Peter and I took a train south to Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city. A bottle of champagne was set out on the hotel bed with a note that read “Mr and Mrs Michelle, Congratulations on your weeding.” It rained all three days we were there but, undeterred, we bathed in the rooftop pools of the luxurious hotel Nami had booked us as a wedding present, the cold rain creating ripples in the water as we looked out at the East Sea.

We visited Jagalchi Fish Market, the rain still beating down on the beach umbrellas and tarp awnings that made up its patchwork roof, dripping down on red plastic basins and bright turquoise colanders filled with the bounty of the sea, spraying piles of cockles and scallops still enclosed in their ribbed shells and long, silvery beltfish hanging limply like neckties over a wooden pallet set out on the wet pavement.

We brought back hwe from the market and set our takeout containers down on the white hotel bedspread. We ate slices of whitefish sashimi, Korean style, freshly killed, still chewy, wrapped in red leaf lettuce and dipped in ssamjang and gochujang with vinegar, washing it down with big bottles of Kloud and shots of Chamisul.