Whenever Mom had a dream about shit, she would buy a scratch card.

In the morning, on the drive to school, she’d pull wordlessly into the 7-Eleven parking lot and tell me to wait while she kept the car running.

“What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, grabbing her purse from the back seat.

“What are you going to buy at the 7-Eleven?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Then she’d come back with a handful of scratch cards. We’d drive the last few blocks to school, and she’d scrub off the gummy film with a coin on the dashboard.

“You had a poop dream, didn’t you?”

“Umma won ten dollars!” she’d say. “I couldn’t tell you because then it doesn’t work!”

Dreams about pigs, the president, or shaking hands with a celebrity were all good-luck dreams—but it was shit in particular, especially if you touched it, that was license to gamble.

Every time I had a dream about shit, I couldn’t wait to ask my mom to buy me a scratch card. I’d wake up from a dream about accidentally shitting my pants or walking into a public bathroom to find some extraordinarily long, winding shit, and when it was time to drive to school I’d sit quietly in the passenger seat, hardly able to contain myself until we were a block away from the 7-Eleven on Willamette Street.

“Mom, pull over,” I’d say. “I’ll tell you why later.”

Shortly after we returned to the States, I started having recurring dreams about my mother. I’d suffered one such episode before, when I was a paranoid kid, morbidly obsessed with my parents’ deaths. My father is driving us across Ferry Street Bridge and to skirt traffic up ahead, he maneuvers the car onto the shoulder, weaving through a gap under construction and aiming to vault off the bridge onto a platform below. Eyes focused on the mark, he leans in close to the steering wheel and accelerates, but we miss the landing by several feet. The car plunges into the rushing current of the Willamette River and I wake up breathing heavily.

Later, when we were teenagers, Nicole told me a story she’d heard from her mother about a woman who suffered from recurring nightmares that all revolved around the same car accident. The dreams were so vivid and traumatic that she sought a therapist to help her overcome them. “What if, after the accident, you try to get somewhere,” the therapist suggested. “Maybe if you try to get yourself to a hospital or some kind of safe place, the dream will reach a natural conclusion.” So each night the woman began to will herself out of the car and crawl further and further along the side of the highway. But the dream kept coming back. One day the woman really did get into a car accident and was supposedly found dragging herself across the asphalt in an attempt to reach some nebulous location, unable to distinguish reality from her lucid dreaming.

The dreams about my mother had small variations, but ultimately they were always the same. My mother would appear, still alive but incapacitated, left behind someplace we had forgotten her.

In one I’m alone, sitting on a well-manicured lawn on a warm, sunny day. In the distance I can see a dark and ominous glass house. It looks modern, the exterior made up entirely of black glass windows connected by silver steel frames. The building is wide, mansion-like, and sectioned off in squares, like several monochromatic Rubik’s Cubes stacked next to and on top of one another. I leave my patch of grass, making my way toward the curious house. I open its heavy door. Inside, it is dark and sparse. I wander around, eventually making my way toward the basement. I run my hand along the side of the wall as I descend the staircase. It is clean and quiet. I find my mother lying in the center of the room. Her eyes are closed and she is resting on some kind of platform that’s not quite a table but not a bed either, a kind of low pedestal, like the one where Snow White sleeps off the poisoned apple. When I reach her, my mother opens her eyes and smiles, as if she’s been waiting for me to find her. She is frail and bald, still sick but alive. At first I feel guilty—that we gave up on her too soon, that she’d been here the whole time. How had we managed to get so confused? Then I’m flooded with relief.

“We thought you were dead!” I say.

“I’ve just been here all along,” she says back to me.

I lay my head on her chest and she rests her hand on my head. I can smell her and feel her and everything seems so real. Even though I know she is sick and we will have to lose her again, I’m just so happy to discover that she is alive. I tell her to wait for me. I need to run and get Dad! Then, just as I begin to ascend the stairs to find him, I wake up.

In another dream, she arrives at a rooftop dinner party and reveals she’s been living in the house next door all along. In another, I am walking around my parents’ property. I amble down a hill, skidding on the thick clay toward the man-made pond. In the field below, I discover my mother lying alone in a nightgown surrounded by lush grass and wildflowers. Relief again. How silly we were to think you were gone! How on earth did we manage to make such a monumental error? When you’re here you’re here you’re here!

Always she is bald and chapped and weak and I must carry her to bring her back into the house and show her to my father, but as soon as I bend down to scoop her into my arms, I wake up devastated. I shut my eyes immediately and try to crawl my way back to her. Drift back to sleep and return to the dream, savor just a bit more time in her presence. But I’m stuck wide awake or I fall into another dream entirely.

Was this my mother’s way of visiting me? Was she trying to tell me something? I felt foolish indulging in mysticism and so I kept the dreams hidden, privately analyzing their possible meanings. If dreams were hidden wishes, why couldn’t I dream of my mother the way I wanted? Why was it that whenever she appeared she was still sick, as if I could not remember her the way she’d been before? I wondered if my memory was stunted, if my dreams were consigned to the epoch of trauma, the image of my mother stuck where we had left off. Had I forgotten her when she was beautiful?

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.

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.”