Now that she was gone, there was no one left to ask about these things. The knowledge left unrecorded died with her. What remained were documents and my memories, and now it was up to me to make sense of myself, aided by the signs she left behind. How cyclical and bittersweet for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document their archivist.

I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.

The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.

* * *

—

BEFORE WE HEADED BACK to New York, I drove out to Elkins Park. I wanted to go for a scrub at the Korean bathhouse where I brought my parents and Peter the day after they first met. I put my shoes in a small cubby before stepping into the women’s dressing room. I found my locker and disrobed. I tried to take my time and be neat, folding my clothes into a compact pile, my body naturally hunching to cover itself.

When I was a kid there was a jjimjilbang near Halmoni’s apartment where Korean women of all generations came to soak naked in tubs of different temperatures and communally sweat in steam rooms and saunas. Every year my mother would pay extra for us to get a full body scrub, and after soaking for half an hour, the two of us would lie side by side atop vinyl-covered massage tables while two bathhouse ajummas in underwire bras and sagging underpants would methodically scrub us, equipped with only a bar of soap and a pair of coarse loofa mittens, until we were as pink as newborn mice. The process takes a little less than an hour and culminates when you confront your own filth in the form of a repulsive patch of curled gray threads stuck to the sides of the table. Then the ajumma dumps a giant plastic tub of warm water to rinse it clean, commands that you turn over, and starts in again. By the time you’ve made the full rotation, you feel as if you’ve lost two pounds of dead skin.

Inside there were a few older women in the baths with sagging skin, stomachs that hung. I tried politely to avert my eyes, though sometimes I would catch them in my periphery, curious how the body ages, thinking about how I’d never get to see the way my mother would sag or wrinkle.

After I’d soaked for half an hour, an ajumma dressed in a white bra with matching underwear called for me to lie on her vinyl table. She gave me a look, as if she was unsure of how I’d gotten there. She was silent as she scrubbed, speaking every few minutes only to say—

“Turn.”

“Side.”

“Face down.”

I eyed the gray threads peeling off my body and accumulating on the table, curious whether there was more or less detritus than in the cases of her other customers. As I lay on my left side, just before the final rotation, she paused as if she had only just noticed.

“Are you Korean?”

“Ne, Seoul-eseo taeeonasseoyo,” I said as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Yes, I was born in Seoul. My mouth was loose and comfortable with the words I knew, and I said them as if trying to impress her, or more realistically, trying to mask my linguistic shortcomings. The Korean soundscape of my infancy and all my years of Hangul Hakkyo had spawned a literate mimic, and the words I knew would fly out of me with the carbon-copied tonality of the women who surrounded me as a baby, but good pronunciation could only get me so far before I became a stumped mute, racking my brain for a basic infinitive.

She looked into my face as if searching for something. I knew what she was looking for. It was the same way kids at school would look at me before they asked me what I was, but from the opposite angle. She was looking for the hint of Koreanness in my face that she couldn’t quite put a finger on. Something that resembled her own.

“Uri umma hanguk saram, appa miguk saram,” I said. My mom Korean, my dad American. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth with an “ahhh” and nodded. She stared at me again, taking me in, as if to sift out the Korean parts.

It was ironic that I, who once longed to resemble my white peers and desperately hoped my Koreanness would go unnoticed, was now absolutely terrified that this stranger in the bathhouse could not see it.

“Your mom is Korean and your dad is American,” she repeated in Korean. She began speaking quickly and I was no longer able to keep up. I mimicked the Korean mumbles of understanding, wanting so badly to keep up the charade, pretending to understand long enough to catch a glimpse of a word I recognized, but eventually she asked a question I failed to comprehend, and then she too realized that there was nothing left for her to relate to. Nothing more we could share.

“Yeppeuda,” she said. Pretty. Small face.

It was the same word I’d heard when I was young, but now it felt different. For the first time it occurred to me that what she sought in my face might be fading. I no longer had someone whole to stand beside, to make sense of me. I feared whatever contour or color it was that signified that precious half was beginning to wash away, as if without my mother, I no longer had a right to those parts of my face.

The ajumma took a large washbasin, heaved it over her chest, and dumped warm water over my body. She washed my hair and massaged my scalp, then wrapped a towel neatly over my head as I had tried and failed to do myself earlier, attempting to emulate the older women in the locker room. She sat me up, pounded my back with the bottom of her fists, and smacked me one last conclusive time. “Jah! Finished!”

I rinsed off on a plastic stool, dried myself with a towel, and returned to the locker room. I changed into the loose spa clothes, an oversized neon T-shirt and billowing pink shorts with an elastic waistband. I moved into a warm jade room that boasted some obscure health benefit.

There was no one inside, just two wooden pillows that looked like miniature pillories missing their top halves. I lay down near one of the walls and rested my neck in the divot. The light was dim with a soft orange hue. I felt relaxed, clean, and new, as if I’d shed my useless layers, as if I’d been baptized. The floor was heated and the temperature of the room was perfectly warm, like the inside of a healthy human body, like a womb. I closed my eyes and tears began to stream down my cheeks, but I did not make a sound.

20

Coffee Hanjan