It might have been overly ambitious to take on two types of kimchi, but I figured I might as well use the same marinade for both. Before the timer went off to turn the cabbage, I started cleaning the radishes in the other half of my roasting pan. I raked the bristles of my vegetable scrubber across a dirty white radish, but it wouldn’t come clean. I decided to peel the radishes, losing a good centimeter of width on an already small radish in the process but revealing a vibrant white. When the timer went off to turn the cabbage, I flipped the halves to soak on their other side in the briny liquid emerging at the bottom of the pan. The leaves were already beginning to wilt.

I used my blender to mince the onion, garlic, and ginger just as LA Kim had for her galbi marinade, and transferred my radishes into the largest pot I had. I rinsed the other half of the roasting pan and combined the blended aromatics with fish sauce, salted shrimp, red pepper flakes, chopped green onion, and the jizz porridge I’d made earlier that had finally cooled. The mixture was bright red and fragrant, and immediately my mouth began to water. When the last timer went off, I washed all the vegetables thoroughly, grateful for my large, albeit solitary sink.

The apartment was hot and all the windows were open. I was sweating and stripped down to my sports bra, conveniently ensuring I didn’t get kimchi on my top. Out of space on the counters, I set all my bowls down on the kitchen floor. With the red paste in the roasting pan between my legs, I set the freshly washed cabbage into the mixture. I painted the paste between the leaves the way Maangchi instructed, inhaling deeply to take in the experience. I used my chin to pause the video, since my hands were coated bright red. I folded the kimchi into a neat little bundle, packed it into the bottom of my onggi, and added the radishes on top.

We didn’t have a dishwasher, so I spent the next half hour washing my roasting pan and blender by hand, then mopping the stubborn kimchi-paste smudges from the floor. The whole process took a little over three hours, but the labor was soothing and simpler than I thought it would be.

After two weeks of fermentation, it was perfect. The ideal complement to every meal, and a daily reminder of my competence and hard work. The whole process made me appreciate kimchi so much more. Growing up, if there were a couple of pieces of kimchi left on the plate after a meal, I’d lazily toss them, but now that I’d made it from scratch, I conscientiously returned my uneaten pieces back to my onggi.

I started making kimchi once a month, my new therapy. I reserved an older batch for cooking stews, pancakes, and fried rice, and newer batches for side dishes. When I had made more than enough to eat, I started pawning it off on friends. My kitchen began to fill up with mason jars—each stuffed full of different types of kimchi in various stages of fermentation. On the counter, day four of young radish, still turning sour. In the fridge, daikon in its first stages, sweating out its water content. On the cutting board, a giant head of napa cabbage pulled apart from the bottom, ready for a salt bath. The smell of vegetables fermenting in a fragrant bouquet of fish sauce, garlic, ginger, and gochugaru radiated through my small Greenpoint kitchen, and I would think of how my mother always used to tell me never to fall in love with someone who doesn’t like kimchi. They’ll always smell it on you, seeping through your pores. Her very own way of saying, “You are what you eat.”

19

Kimchi Fridge

In October, a year after my mother died, my father put our house up for sale. He sent me the listing. In the top corner was a photograph of the real estate agents, a man and woman, standing back to back in front of a green screen that had been replaced with a stock image of the Willamette Valley. The photo was the size of a stamp, so their little teeth looked cartoonish, like two solid white lines. The man wore a pink shirt with a red tie, and the woman wore a purple scoop neck, the frame graciously cropped just above her cleavage. These were the people selling my childhood home.

The accompanying photographs were unsettling, so familiar and yet so strange in their new context. The agents had advised my father to hold on to most of the furniture until the house sold, and had restaged our belongings to try to appeal to new buyers.

My bedroom’s orange and green walls had been restored to a pristine eggshell. The caption read “bedroom #3.” The end table that belonged in the guest room had been moved over to make the room look less empty. On top of it was a small clock and a lone Beanie Baby that must have dodged conscription to the donation piles.

The pillows on all the beds were still dressed in my mother’s cotton cases. The tablecloth under the glass-top kitchen table was the one she had chosen, the table’s corner the same that had dented my skull when I was five. My parents’ bathtub, where my mother lost her hair, remained, but the full-length mirror where she’d spent so many hours modeling, where she witnessed her bald head for the first time, was gone. The counters were cleared of all her tinted sunscreens and moisturizers, a single, clinical bottle of Dial soap in their place. The bed that she died in was still on display in the master bedroom. The photograph of our backyard, where Peter and I got married, was edited in such high contrast that the lawn was practically neon. “Live here,” it invited in some new, anonymous family.

I was ten years old when we moved into that house. I remember in the early days how scandalized I was when confronted by the traces of the family that came before us. In the guest room closet, an unlacquered bookshelf with the names of sports teams engraved into the shelves in blue ballpoint pen. A miniature wooden nun standing by a large tree at the bottom of the property that my mother refused to get rid of even when my friends and I begged her, affirming with all the enthusiasm of youth that it was haunted.

I wondered what the new tenants might find of us. What accidentally got left behind. If the agents would skirt around the fact that my mother died in one of the rooms. If some part of my mother’s ghost still lived there. If the new family would feel haunted.

* * *

—

MY FATHER had spent the last few months in Thailand and planned on moving there for good once the house was sold. Because he was out of the country, his friend Jim Bailey arranged to ship some furniture from Eugene to Philadelphia. There were three large items: a queen-sized sleigh bed, an upright Yamaha piano, and my mother’s kimchi refrigerator, which we didn’t have room for in our apartment and would go to Peter’s parents’ house in the suburbs for the time being.