When I found out my mother was sick, I’d been out of college for four years and I was well aware I didn’t have much to show for it. I had a degree in creative writing and film I wasn’t really using. I worked three part-time jobs and played guitar and sang in a rock band called Little Big League that no one had ever heard of. I rented a room for three hundred dollars in North Philly, the same city where my father grew up and from which he eventually fled to Korea when he was around my age.

It was by sheer coincidence I’d wound up in Philadelphia. Like many a kid trapped in a small city, I felt bored and then suffocated. By the time I was in high school, the desire for independence trailing a convoy of insidious hormones had transformed me from a child who couldn’t bear to sleep without her mother into a teenager who couldn’t stand her touch. Every time she picked a ball of lint off my sweater or pressed her hand between my shoulder blades to keep me from slouching or rubbed her fingers on my forehead to ward off wrinkles, it felt like a hot iron puckering against my skin. Somehow, as if overnight, every simple suggestion made me feel like I was overheating, and my resentment and sensitivity grew and grew until they bubbled up and exploded and in an instant, uncontrollably, I’d rip my body away and scream, “Stop touching me!” “Can’t you ever leave me alone?” “Maybe I want wrinkles. Maybe I want reminders that I’ve lived my life.”

College presented itself as a promising opportunity to get as far away from my parents as possible, so I applied almost exclusively to schools on the East Coast. A college counselor thought a small liberal arts school, especially a women’s college, would be a good fit for someone like me—captious and demanding of inordinate attention. We took a college trip and visited several schools. Bryn Mawr’s stone architecture upright against the early signs of East Coast autumn seemed to measure up soundly to the ideal image of what we had always imagined a college experience should be.

It was somewhat of a miracle that I managed to get into college, having just barely graduated from high school. Senior year I had a nervous breakdown that resulted in a lot of truancy and therapy and medication, and my mother convinced all of it was a direct attempt to spite her, but somehow I managed to come out on the other side. Bryn Mawr was good for both of us, and I’d even graduated with honors, the first in my immediate family to obtain a college degree.

I decided to stick around Philadelphia because it was easy and cheap and because I was convinced Little Big League might someday make it. But it had been four years now and the band had neither made it nor shown any real sign of spurning anonymity. A few months back I’d been fired from the Mexican fusion restaurant where I’d waitressed for a little over a year, the longest I’d managed to hold on to a job. I worked there with my boyfriend, Peter, whom I’d originally lured there in a long-game play to woo myself out of the friend zone, where I’d been exiled seemingly in perpetuity, but shortly after I finally won him over, I was fired and he was promoted. When I called my mom for a little sympathy, incredulous that the restaurant would fire such an industrious and charming worker as myself, she replied, “Well, Michelle, anyone can carry a tray.”

Since then I had been working three mornings a week at a friend’s comic shop in Old City, the other four days as a marketing assistant for a film distributor at an office in Rittenhouse Square, and weekends at a late-night karaoke and yakitori bar in Chinatown, all in an attempt to save up money for our band’s two-week tour in August. The tour was planned in support of our second album, which we’d just finished recording, despite the fact that no one had really cared much about the first.

My new home was a far cry from the one I’d grown up in, where everything was kept spotless and in its place, our furniture and decor carefully curated to my mother’s specifications. Our living room had shelves made out of scrapped plywood and cinder blocks, which Ian, my drummer and roommate, had proudly salvaged from a trash heap. Our couch was a spare bench removed from the back of the fifteen-passenger van we used for touring.

My room was on the third floor. Across the hall was a small balcony that overlooked a baseball diamond where we could smoke cigarettes and watch Little League games in the summer. I enjoyed having a room on the top floor. The only real downside was that the ceiling in the closet was unfinished, exposing the beams and roofing, which never bothered me until a family of squirrels made its way through the roof and began copulating and nesting somewhere above. Sometimes at night, Peter and I would wake up to their scurrying and thudding around, which still wasn’t so bad until one of them fell into the hollow space between the walls and, unable to escape, slowly died of starvation. Its carcass released a thick, rancid stench into my room, which also wasn’t so horrible until in the unseen guts of the house, thousands of maggots spawned from the rot, breeding a plague of flies that confronted us one morning as I opened the bedroom door.

I had wound up doing exactly what my mother had warned me not to do. I was floundering in reality, living the life of an unsuccessful artist.

That March I turned twenty-five, and by the second week of May I was starting to get antsy. I decided to head up to New York and meet with my friend Duncan, whom I’d known in college and who had since become an editor at The Fader. Privately, I was harboring a half hope that when the time came to finally give up on trying to be a musician, my interest in music might successfully parlay into a career in music journalism. As things stood, that time might be sooner than later. Deven, Little Big League’s bass player, had recently started playing in another band that was gaining traction. They were set to perform on the Lower East Side that very weekend at a small club exclusively for press, which in itself seemed a sure-enough sign that Deven would not be in our band for much longer. They were, in Deven’s words, on the path to becoming “Jimmy Fallon big.” I wasn’t quite ready to admit it, but I was going to New York that weekend, in part, to start laying the groundwork for something to fall back on.

The week before, my mother had mentioned she was having stomach problems. I knew she was scheduled to meet with a doctor that day, and I sent a few texts in the afternoon to follow up on her appointment. It was unlike her not to respond.

I boarded the Chinatown bus with a sinking feeling. My mother had mentioned a stomachache a couple months before that, in February, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. In fact, I’d made a joke out of it, asking in Korean if she had diarrhea: “Seolsa isseoyo?” It was a word I always remembered because it sounds a lot like salsa and, well, the similarity in texture made it easier to recall.

My mother rarely saw doctors, committed to the idea that ailments passed of their own accord. She felt Americans were overly cautious and overly medicated and had instilled this belief in me from a young age, so much so that when Peter got food poisoning from a bad can of tuna and his mother suggested I take him to urgent care, I actually had to stifle a laugh. In my household, there was nothing to do for food poisoning except throw it up. Food poisoning was a rite of passage. You couldn’t expect to eat well without taking a few risks, and we suffered the consequences twice a year.

For my mother to see a doctor, something had to be fairly serious, but I never considered it could be something lethal. Eunmi had died of colon cancer just two years before. It seemed impossible that my mother could get cancer too, like lightning striking twice. Nevertheless, I began to suspect my parents were keeping a secret from me.

The bus arrived in the early evening. Duncan suggested we meet at Cake Shop, a small bar on the Lower East Side that booked shows in the basement. I’d stuffed a hefty backpack full of clothes for the weekend and felt immediately frumpy and juvenile as I walked up Allen Street toward the bar.

Spring was giving way to summer and people getting off work were shedding their jackets, folding them over their forearms to carry. A familiar itch was creeping in. That aching toward something wild—when the days get longer and a walk through the city becomes entirely pleasant from morning to night, when you want to run drunk down an empty street in sneakers and fling all responsibility to the wayside. But for the first time it felt like an impulse I needed to turn away from. I knew there were no more summer vacations for me, no more idle days. I needed to accept that something, at some point soon, would have to change.

I got to the bar well before Duncan, who informed me he was running about twenty minutes late. I called my mom and got no answer. “What’s going on???” I texted, beginning to feel neglected. I dropped my bag beneath a bar stool and leafed through the records by the front window.

I’d never been especially close friends with Duncan. He was two years older than me and a senior at Haverford when we met. Buses ran between our two campuses and students from either school could enroll in classes and clubs at either college. Duncan was one of five members of FUCs, a group that was in charge of booking the bands that came to play on campus. He’d advocated for me when I applied to join, and now I hoped he might look out for me again.

I felt my phone buzz. It was my mother, finally, so I grabbed my bag and slipped outside to take the call.

“Mom, what’s going on?”

“Well, sweetie. We know you’re in New York for the weekend,” she said. “We wanted to wait until you were back in Philadelphia. When you’re at home and with Peter.”

Usually her voice trilled from the other end of the line, but now it sounded as if she spoke from a deadened room. I started to pace the block.

“If something’s wrong I’d rather know now,” I said. “It’s not fair to keep me in the dark.”

There was a long pause on the other end, one that indicated my mother had started the conversation with the intention of putting me off until I got home but was now beginning to reconsider.

“They found a tumor in my stomach,” she said finally, the word falling like an anvil. “They say it’s cancerous, but they don’t know how bad it is yet. They have to run some more tests.”

I stopped pacing, frozen and winded. Across the street a man was entering a barbershop. A group of friends sat at an outdoor table, laughing and ordering drinks. People were deciding on appetizers. Bumming cigarettes. Dropping off dry cleaning. Bagging dog droppings. Calling off engagements. The world moved on without pause on a pleasant, warm day in May while I stood silent and dumbfounded on the pavement and learned that my mother was now in grave danger of dying from an illness that had already killed someone I loved.

“Try not to worry too much,” she said. “We will figure this out. Go and see your friend.”

How? How how how? How does a woman in perfect health go to a doctor about an upset stomach and leave with a cancer diagnosis?

I could see Duncan turn the corner in the distance. He waved as I hung up. I swallowed the lump in my throat, slung my bag back over my shoulder, and smiled. I thought, Save your tears for when your mother dies.

Happy hour was buy one, get one free, so we ordered two bottles of Miller High Life with seconds on standby. We caught up on each other’s postgraduate lives. He had just finished a cover story on Lana Del Rey and when I pressed him for details on the interview, he told me she chain-smoked through its entirety and recorded the whole thing on her iPhone to guard against misquotes, which endeared her to me.

On our second round I admitted I was entertaining the idea of moving to New York, fully aware that I was now speaking as a sort of character, mentally disavowing the information I’d learned only an hour before. I realized that any plans I might have had were now null and void, that I’d probably have to move back to Eugene to be there for my mother’s treatment. I was delirious with secrecy. It was against my nature to withhold such monumental information, but it felt entirely inappropriate to bring it up to someone I knew only marginally, and I was afraid if I even said the words out loud I’d start crying.

Duncan was supportive of the move and encouraged me to reach out again when the time came. We said our goodbyes and I called Peter from the same stretch of sidewalk where I’d learned two hours prior that my mother had cancer.

Peter was the first person I dated that my mother had ever liked. They met for the first time in September of the previous year. My parents were celebrating their thirtieth anniversary in Spain and arranged to stop in Philadelphia beforehand. It’d been three years since they’d visited me on the East Coast, this the first time since graduation. I was determined to impress them with my knowledge of the city and my self-sufficient, albeit flimsy version of young adulthood, and so I spent weeks researching and reserving tables at the best restaurants in the city and planned a day trip to Elkins Park to show my mother the Korean neighborhood.

Peter drove us all out to Jong Ga Jib, a restaurant that specializes in soondubu jjigae, a spicy soft-tofu stew. My mother lit up as she browsed the menu, excited by the variety of dishes the Korean restaurants in Eugene lacked, picking out things my father would enjoy. Peter was recovering from a cold, so she suggested he order samgyetang, a hearty soup made from a whole chicken stuffed with rice and ginseng. For the table she ordered haemul pajeon “basak basak,” a tactic she always employed to try to get the edges as crispy as possible. Over soondubu jjigae and crunchy, thick slices of seafood pancake, I told my mother about a Korean spa I’d heard about in the neighborhood, similar to the ones we went to in Seoul.

“They even have the scrub,” I said.

“Really? They even have scrub? Should we all go?” my mother asked with a laugh.

“That sounds fun,” Peter said.

Jjimjilbangs are typically separated by gender, with a communal area for both sexes to socialize in the loose-fitted, matching pajamas provided on entry. Inside the bathhouse, full nudity is standard. If Peter came with us it would mean he and my father would have to be naked together a little less than twenty-four hours after they first met.

Peter ate his soup dutifully, thanking my mother for the recommendation, and partook joyfully in the banchan on our table—miyeok muchim, slick seaweed salad dressed with tart vinegar and garlic; sweet and spicy dried squid; gamja jorim, buttery, candied potatoes in sweet syrup—all dishes he’d discovered a love for since we’d started dating. One of my favorite things about Peter was the way he closed his eyes when he ate something he really liked. It was as if he believed cutting off one of his senses amplified the others. He was bold and never made me feel like what I was eating was weird or gross.

“He eats like a Korean!” my mother said.

When Peter excused himself to use the bathroom, my parents hunched in toward the center of the table.

“I bet you he chickens out of the bathhouse,” my dad said.

“I bet you a hundred dollars he’s going to do it,” my mother countered.

The next day in the spa lobby when it was time to separate, Peter moved toward the men’s locker room without flinching. My mother shot my father the smug grin of a winner and rubbed her fingers together, expecting him to pay up.

The bathhouse was smaller than the ones we usually went to in Seoul. There were three tubs of varying temperatures—cold, warm, and hot—and across from them a dozen showerheads where women rinsed off, seated on miniature plastic stools. On the far end were a sauna and a steam room. My mother and I showered, then slowly eased our way into the hottest tub, sitting side by side on the slick blue tile. In a corner, sectioned off, three ajummas in their undergarments diligently scrubbed their subjects. Inside it was warm and quiet, the only sounds the continuous gushing stream of water that jetted out from the ceiling into the cold tub and the occasional smack of a scrubbing hand against the bare back of an anonymous woman.

“Did you shave your boji tul?” she said.

I crossed my legs tightly, mortified. “I trimmed it,” I said with a blush.

“Don’t do that,” she instructed. “It looks slutty.”

“Okay,” I said, slinking deeper into the water. I could feel her gazing unhappily at the tattoos I’d accumulated despite her vehement disapproval.

“I like Peter,” my mother said. “He’s New York style.”

Anyone who has actually lived in New York would be loath to describe Peter as “New York style.” Though he’d attended NYU, Peter lacked the bristly nature and fast-paced hustle a West Coaster usually associates with an East Coast personality. He was patient and gentle. He balanced me out in the way my mother did my father, who like me was always in a rush, quick to give up on any task at the first sign of failure and delegate it to someone else. What my mother meant was that she liked that Peter proved early on that he was a stand-up guy.

“I’ll come up,” Peter said over the phone. “As soon as I get off, I’ll be there.”

It was Friday night and he had the late shift at the bar. The sun was setting, the sky getting pink. I started toward the subway and told him not to bother. He wouldn’t get off until two and it wasn’t worth coming up for the night when I was already planning on taking the bus back in the morning.

I took the M train to Bushwick, where I was crashing at my friend Greg’s for the night. Greg played drums in a band called Lvl Up and lived in a warehouse known as David Blaine’s The Steakhouse that hosted DIY shows. He had five roommates who all slept in tiny lofted bedrooms they’d built themselves out of drywall. They reminded me of the tree forts where the Lost Boys slept in Peter Pan. I lay on the couch in the living room and felt numb. I wondered what their mothers thought when they visited. The conditions musicians put themselves in for cheap rent and the freedom to pursue their unconventional passions.

I remembered how after our scrubs, my mother suggested we stock up on groceries at H Mart, so that she could marinate some short rib at my house and I could have a taste of home after she left. How I held my breath as she entered my dilapidated home, waiting for her to pick it apart in all its squalor or serve up some of the same acerbic wisdom she proffered when I’d gotten fired, but instead, she made her way to the kitchen without a word of critique, squeezing past the collection of bikes propped against the wall without faltering. She even generously ignored the gaping hole in the back wall, to which our landlord had taken a hammer in a resourceful effort to warm the frozen pipes, revealing in the process the utter lack of fluffy pink insulation.

She didn’t comment on how nothing in our kitchen cabinets matched, that our dishware was made up of thrift store finds and spare parts from my roommates’ parents’ houses. She found the things she’d gifted me over the years—the orange LocknLock storage containers, the Calphalon pans—then pushed up her sleeves and spread the meat she’d bought from H Mart out on a cutting board and began to tenderize it with a mallet. I kept waiting for her to say something under her breath. I knew she saw all the things I did and more, her sharp eye tearing apart the used furniture and undusted corners and the chipped, mismatched plates in the same way she used to tear apart my weight and complexion and posture.

She had spent my whole life trying to protect me from living this way, but now she just moved about the kitchen with a smile, chopping green onions, pouring 7Up and soy sauce into a mixing bowl, tasting it with her finger, seemingly unbothered by the cockroach traps that lined the counters and the smudged fingerprints on the fridge, intent only on leaving a taste of home behind.

My mother had either finally given up, conceding in her efforts to try to shape me into something I didn’t want to be, or she had moved on to subtler tactics, realizing it was unlikely that I’d last another year in this mess before I discovered she’d been right all along. Or maybe the three thousand miles between us had made it so she was just happy to be with me. Or maybe she’d finally accepted that I’d forged my own path and found someone who loved me wholly, and believed at last that I would end up all right.

Peter drove up to New York anyway. He closed the restaurant at two and got to Greg’s by four in the morning. Still sticky from blood-orange margaritas, refritos caked onto his jeans, he squeezed next to me on the couch and lay still as I cried into his gray college T-shirt, finally able to release the billow of emotions I’d suppressed all day, grateful he hadn’t listened when I told him not to bother. He didn’t tell me until much later that my parents had called him first. That he had known she was sick before me, that he had promised them that he would be there when I found out. That he would be there through it all.