Her rules and expectations were exhausting, and yet if I retreated from her I was isolated and wholly responsible for entertaining myself. And so I spent my childhood divided between two impulses, engaging in the intrinsic tomboyish whims that led to her reprimands and clinging to my mother, desperate to please her.

Sometimes, when my parents would leave me at home with a sitter, I would line up her figurines on a serving tray and cautiously wash each animal in the sink with dish soap, then dry them off with paper towels. I would dust the shelves beneath and clean the glass with Windex, then try my best to reorganize them from memory, hoping my mother would return and reward me with affection.

I developed this compulsion to clean as a sort of protection ritual performed when I felt even the slightest bit abandoned, an eventuality that tormented my young imagination. I was haunted by nightmares and an intense paranoia of my parents dying. I imagined robbers breaking into our house and envisioned their murders in horrible detail. If they returned home late from a night out, I was convinced they’d gotten into a car accident. I was plagued by recurring dreams of my father, impatient with traffic, attempting to navigate a faulty shortcut that led their car off the edge of the Ferry Street Bridge, plummeting them into the Willamette River, where they would drown, unable to escape through the doors due to the water pressure.

Judging by her positive reaction to the weekly episode of the duster and the baseboards, I concluded that if my mother returned to an even cleaner home, she would promise never again to leave me behind. It was my sad attempt to try to win her over. Once, on a vacation in Las Vegas, my parents left me alone in the hotel room for a few hours so they could gamble at the casinos. I spent the entire time tidying the room, organizing my parents’ luggage, and wiping down the surfaces with a hand towel. I couldn’t wait for them to return and see what I had done. I sat on my rollaway cot and just beamed at the door, waiting to see their faces, oblivious to the fact that housekeeping would come the next morning. When they returned, insensible to the changes, I quickly moved across the room, dragging them along with me as I pointed out my good deeds one by one.

* * *

—

I WAITED DESPERATELY for other such opportunities to shine and in my search for favorable proving grounds discovered that our shared appreciation of Korean food served not only as a form of mother-daughter bonding but also offered a pure and abiding source of her approval. It was at Noryangjin Fish Market on a summer trip to Seoul that this notion truly blossomed. Noryangjin is a wholesale market where you can choose live fish and seafood from the tanks of different vendors and have them sent up to be prepared in a number of cooking styles at restaurants upstairs. My mother and I were with her two sisters, Nami and Eunmi, and they had picked out pounds of abalone, scallops, sea cucumber, amberjack, octopus, and king crab to eat raw and boiled in spicy soups.

Upstairs, our table filled immediately with banchan dotting around the butane burner for our stew. The first dish to arrive was sannakji—live long-armed octopus. A plate full of gray-and-white tentacles wriggled before me, freshly severed from their head, every suction cup still pulsing. My mom took hold of one, dredged it through some gochujang and vinegar, placed it between her lips, and chewed. She looked at me and smiled, seeing my mouth agape.

“Try it,” she said.

In marked contrast to the other domains of parental authority, my mother was loose when it came to the rules regarding food. If I didn’t like something, she never forced me to eat it, and if I ate only half my portion, she never made me finish the plate. She believed food should be enjoyed and that it was more of a waste to expand your stomach than to keep eating when you were full. Her only rule was that you had to try everything once.

Eager to please her and impress my aunts, I balanced the liveliest leg I could find between my chopsticks, dipped it into the sauce as my mother had, and slipped it into my mouth. It was briny, tart, and sweet with just a hint of spice from the sauce, and very, very chewy. I gnashed the tentacle between my teeth as many times as I could before swallowing, afraid it would suction itself to my tonsils on the way down.

“Good job, baby!”

“Aigo yeppeu!” my aunts exclaimed. That’s our pretty girl!

My family lauded my bravery, I radiated with pride, and something about that moment set me on a path. I came to realize that while I struggled to be good, I could excel at being courageous. I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature’s greatest gifts. By the age of ten I had learned to break down a full lobster with my bare hands and a nutcracker. I devoured steak tartare, patés, sardines, snails baked in butter and smothered with roasted garlic. I tried raw sea cucumber, abalone, and oysters on the half shell. At night my mother would roast dried cuttlefish on a camp stove in the garage and serve it with a bowl of peanuts and a sauce of red pepper paste mixed with Japanese mayonnaise. My father would tear it into strips and we’d eat it watching television together until our jaws were sore, and I’d wash it all down with small sips from one of my mother’s Coronas.

Neither one of my parents graduated from college. I was not raised in a household with many books or records. I was not exposed to fine art at a young age or taken to any museums or plays at established cultural institutions. My parents wouldn’t have known the names of authors I should read or foreign directors I should watch. I was not given an old edition of Catcher in the Rye as a preteen, copies of Rolling Stones records on vinyl, or any kind of instructional material from the past that might help give me a leg up to cultural maturity. But my parents were worldly in their own ways. They had seen much of the world and had tasted what it had to offer. What they lacked in high culture, they made up for by spending their hard-earned money on the finest of delicacies. My childhood was rich with flavor—blood sausage, fish intestines, caviar. They loved good food, to make it, to seek it, to share it, and I was an honorary guest at their table.

3

Double Lid

Every other summer, while my father stayed behind to work in Oregon, my mother and I would travel to Seoul and spend six weeks with her family.

I loved visiting Korea. I loved being in a big city and living in an apartment. I loved the humidity and the smell of the city, even when my mother told me it was just garbage and pollution. I loved walking through the park across from my grandmother’s apartment building, the sound of thousands of maemi flying overhead, their chattering cicada wings coalescing with the traffic noise at night.

Seoul was the opposite of Eugene, where I was stranded in the woods seven miles from town and at my mother’s mercy to reach it. Halmoni’s apartment was in Gangnam, a bustling neighborhood on the south bank of the Han River. Just through the park there was a small complex with a stationery shop, a toy store, a bakery, and a supermarket I could walk to unaccompanied.

From an early age, I loved supermarkets. I loved investigating every brand and its shiny, captivating packaging. I loved fondling ingredients and envisioning their endless possibilities and combinations. I could spend hours examining the freezers full of creamy melon bars and sweet red-bean popsicles, wandering the aisles in search of the plastic pouches of banana milk I drank every morning with my cousin Seong Young.