—

AFTER THE HONEYMOON, Peter and I posted up at his parents’ place in Bucks County. During the day we updated our résumés, applied for jobs, and looked at apartments online. I attacked these tasks with abandon. I’d essentially spent the last year as an unpaid nurse and cleaner, and the five years before that failing to make it as a musician. I needed to commit myself to some kind of career as soon as possible.

I applied indiscriminately to what seemed like every available office job in New York City and messaged everyone I knew in search of potential leads. By the end of the first week I was hired as a sales assistant for an advertising company in Williamsburg. They had long-term leases on nearly a hundred walls around Brooklyn and Manhattan, and an in-house art department that hand-painted mural advertisements like they did in the fifties. My job was to assist the two main account reps, helping them sell walls to prospective clients. If we were going after a yoga clothing company, I created maps that pinpointed every Vinyasa studio and organic health food store within a five-block radius. If we were pitching to a skate shoe company, I charted skate parks and concert venues to determine which of our walls in Brooklyn men between eighteen and thirty were most likely to pass by. My salary was forty-five grand a year with benefits. I felt like a millionaire.

We rented a railroad apartment in Greenpoint from an old Polish woman who’d acquired half her husband’s real estate in their divorce. The kitchen was small, with little counter space, and the floor was peel-and-stick checkerboard vinyl. There was no sink in the bathroom, just a large farmhouse-style sink in the kitchen that pulled double duty.

For the most part, I felt very well adjusted. Everything was so unfamiliar—a new big city to live in, a real grown-up job. I tried my best not to dwell on what could not be changed and to throw myself into productivity, but every so often I was plagued by flashbacks. Painful loops would flare up, bringing every memory I had hoped to repress inescapably to the forefront of my mind. Images of my mother’s white, milky tongue, the purple bedsores, her heavy head slipping from my hands, her eyes falling open. An internal scream, ricocheting off the walls of my chest cavity, ripping through my body without release.

I tried therapy. Once a week after work I took the L train to Union Square and attempted to explain what I was feeling, though generally I was unable to take my mind off the ticking clock until half an hour in, when time was already up. Then I’d take the train back to Bedford Avenue and walk the half hour back to our apartment. It was hardly therapeutic and seemed just to exhaust me even more. Nothing my therapist said was anything I hadn’t psychoanalyzed in myself a million times already anyway. I was paying a hundred-dollar copay per session, and I began to think it would be much more fulfilling to just take myself out for a fifty-dollar lunch twice a week. I canceled the rest of my sessions and committed myself to exploring alternative forms of self-care.

* * *

—

I DECIDED to turn to a familiar friend—Maangchi, the YouTube vlogger who had taught me how to cook doenjang jjigae and jatjuk in my time of need. Each day after work, I prepared a new recipe from her catalog. Sometimes, I followed her step by step, carefully measuring, pausing, and rewinding to get it exactly right. Other times, I picked a dish, refamiliarized myself with the ingredients, and let the video play in the background as my hands and taste buds took over from memory.

Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home. Knife-cut noodles in chicken broth took me back to lunch at Myeongdong Gyoja after an afternoon of shopping, the line so long it filled a flight of stairs, extended out the door, and wrapped around the building. The kalguksu so dense from the rich beef stock and starchy noodles it was nearly gelatinous. My mother ordering more and more refills of their famously garlic-heavy kimchi. My aunt scolding her for blowing her nose in public.

Crispy Korean fried chicken conjured bachelor nights with Eunmi. Licking oil from our fingers as we chewed on the crispy skin, cleansing our palates with draft beer and white radish cubes as she helped me with my Korean homework. Black-bean noodles summoned Halmoni slurping jjajangmyeon takeout, huddled around a low table in the living room with the rest of my Korean family.

I drained an entire bottle of oil into my Dutch oven and deep-fried pork cutlets dredged in flour, egg, and panko for tonkotsu, a Japanese dish my mother used to pack in my lunch boxes. I spent hours squeezing the water from boiled bean sprouts and tofu and spooning filling into soft, thin dumpling skins, pinching the tops closed, each one slightly closer to one of Maangchi’s perfectly uniform mandu.

Maangchi peeled the skin off an Asian pear with the giant knife pulled toward her, just like Mom did when she cut Fuji apples for me after school on a little red cutting board, before eating the leftover fruit from the core. Just like Mom, chopsticks in one hand, scissors in the other, cutting galbi and cold naengmyeon noodles with a specifically Korean ambidextrous precision. Skillfully stretching out the meat with her right hand and cutting it into bite-sized pieces with her left, using kitchen scissors like a warrior brandishes a weapon.

* * *

—

SOON ENOUGH I was driving out to Flushing to stock up on salted shrimp, red pepper flakes, and soybean paste. After an hour in traffic, I found five different H Marts to choose from. I discovered the one on Union Street in the height of summer. There was a large outdoor area set up in the parking lot with various plants and heavy brown earthenware jars on display. I recognized the onggi, the traditional vessels for storing kimchi and fermented pastes, though my mother never had one at home. Nami told me in the olden days every family had at least three in their backyard. I picked up a medium jar. It was heavy and I had to hold it with both arms. It felt hardy and ancient. I decided to buy it and try my hand at the ultimate trial and Maangchi’s most popular recipe—kimchi.

I opted to make two kinds, chonggak and tongbaechu. A giant head of napa cabbage was only a dollar and practically the size of the onggi. Three chonggak radishes, banded together by blue rubber bands, were seventy-nine cents a bundle. I bought six of them, their green ponytail tops overflowing out of my tote bag. I collected the rest of the ingredients—sweet rice flour, gochugaru, fish sauce, onion, ginger, scallions, fermented salted shrimp, and a huge tub of garlic—and headed home.

I propped my computer up on my kitchen table and hit play. I sliced the cabbage in half. It emitted a charming squeak as the knife cut through the base, waxy and firm. I pulled it apart, “gently and politely,” as Maangchi instructed, the leaves separating easily like sheets of crumpled tissue paper. The halved cabbage revealed a beautiful inner ombré. Its core and outer shell shone a pristine white, with light-green leaves yellowing in hue toward the center. The largest bowl I had was a turkey roasting pan Fran had bought me as a wedding present. I filled it with cold water and soaked the halves to clean them. I emptied the pan and sprinkled a quarter cup of salt between the leaves, put the roasting pan with the salted cabbage on my kitchen table, and set a timer for half an hour to turn it.

The only ingredient I was unfamiliar with was the sweet rice flour. I learned I would be turning it into a porridge to use as a binding agent. I combined two tablespoons of flour with two cups of water in a small pot, then added two tablespoons of sugar when the mixture began to bubble and congeal. Mine looked thicker than Maangchi’s. It was a milky, gelatinous white not unlike the consistency of semen.