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.
Weeks went by before I saw the fridge in person. It was Thanksgiving, the second without my mother. I made sweet potato tempura, which was what my mother always brought to Thanksgiving at Uncle Ron’s house. I remember on the drive over holding the heavy serving plate in my lap, stacked high with fried, battered sweet potatoes covered in cling wrap. On the drive home, the plate would be empty, and my mother would boast about how much my American cousins loved her tempura.
I bought tempura flour and a giant tub of canola oil and six Japanese sweet potatoes, dark purple in color and white on the inside, thinner and longer than the sweet potatoes sold at most grocery stores. I washed them clean and cut them into quarter-inch rounds. I combined the flour with ice water and made a thin batter. I dipped each round and fried them in the heated oil, working in batches, careful not to overcrowd them in the sputtering pan. I used chopsticks to pull them out once they’d crisped to a golden hue, and set them on a paper towel to soak up the remaining grease. I crunched into a hot fried potato and licked the oil from my lips. I dabbed at the puffed crumbs of tempura that fell from the edges with my index finger. Somehow my mother’s had always come out perfectly crisp all around. Mine seemed unevenly battered, but they were close enough, and it made me happy to maintain our family’s little tradition.
In Bucks County, my tempura went mostly untouched and slowly deteriorated into a stack of cold, soggy circles. I tried to put my own spin on it, presenting them in little fry cones I’d constructed out of parchment paper so they might seem more accessible, but Peter’s family preferred their own traditions, filling their plates with stuffing and green bean casserole instead. Only Peter and his mother made a show of adding my offering.
“Try it, it’s like a sweet potato fry!” Peter encouraged his relatives, much to my horror.
“Are these cookies?” Peter’s uncle asked.
After dinner I went down to the in-law suite to return some roasting pans. In the far corner of the kitchen, looking comically out of place beside knickknacks from Chesapeake sailing vessels and relics of Pennsylvania coal country, was my mother’s kimchi fridge. I’d almost forgotten Peter’s parents were keeping it down here.
It looked like a normal fridge laid on its side, large and gray, its exterior a smooth plastic. It stood just above the hip, with doors that opened upward, so you could peer into it from the top. In Eugene we kept it by the washing machine, and my mother would have to contort her body around it every time she needed to flip the laundry.
In each compartment there were square brown plastic containers to store different types of kimchi. I inhaled deeply, half hoping to get a whiff of the banchan my mother stored for all those years, half hoping there’d be nothing left to rush pungently through Peter’s grandmother’s apartment. I could swear I detected the faintest scent of red pepper and onion, though it mostly smelled of clean plastic. I peered inside. The containers were filled with something, but there was no way it could be leftover kimchi. The fridge had been in storage for months and it would have been wildly rank and rotten. I grabbed one of the containers, hoisting it out by the brown handles, surprised by its weight. I set it down on the kitchen table and unclipped the plastic lid from the sides.
In place of the chonggak and tongbaechu, effervescent dongchimi and earthy, life-giving namul, in the vessel that had housed all the banchan and fermented pastes my mother stored and cherished, were hundreds of old family photographs.
There was no order to them, no set time period or landscape. Pictures of my parents before I was born—my father in front of a snow sculpture, hunched over in the cold, his hands in his pockets. He is thin with a full crop of black hair and a mustache, in blue jeans and a tan down coat. The film is Fujicolor HR and the colors have a magical, nostalgic quality.
Photographs of me as a child, in many of which I am naked—on the back of a red tricycle on the front lawn, perched on a kitchen stool by the island, leaning against the door frame with a case of colored pencils and a xylophone mallet spread out before me on the carpet. Crouched on the grass, my hand plunged into a plastic tub of cheese curls, staring at the camera like a wild dog.
I knew it was my mother behind the lens. Capturing and preserving me. My simple joys. My interior worlds. In one photograph I am lying on a small quilt, unfurled in the living room, bathed in a patch of light coming in from the north-facing window. I remember pretending to float on a body of water, the articles spread out on the patchwork, my sole possessions on my makeshift raft. There is another photo taken from far away, and while the picture shows only a lone toddler in the driveway, seated on a towel one can only guess is a magic carpet drifting on a crosswind, I can also see my mother. I can see her, although she is out of frame, at the top of the stairs, disposable camera pressed against one eye, watching me all along from the doorway. I can hear her instructing me to curtsy in front of a children’s rocking chair in the yellow dress she maneuvered me into, instructing “Man seh” as I pulled my head through its collar, my arms through its sleeves, the Mickey Mouse knee-highs she bundled in her hands before wriggling onto my feet. I search for her in the surroundings, the painted Dutch houses and the porcelain ballerinas and the crystal animal figurines. And I can see it in all my expressions as I regard her—searching for her approval, caught in the act, blissfully occupied by a gift she has given me.
I called for Peter to look, tearing up as I sorted through the pile. I passed the baby photographs around to his grandmother and his mother.
“That’s one adorable little Korean,” his grandmother said, squinting as she held the photo close to her face.
“And god, that dress,” Fran squealed, singling out a photograph in the small stack amassed in her lap. “You can tell your mother just adored dressing you up.”
In the old playroom, where we spent the night at Peter’s parents’, I took the photographs out and went through them again while Peter was sleeping. My favorites were the mistakes, ones of my mother that were objectively bad. Her eyes closed, accidentally blinking and unaware. An impromptu photo shoot at the local Rite Aid to finish off the reel. Smiling and posing in front of the cardboard Valentine’s Day decor, standing beside a coin-operated kiddie ride, the aisle of wine bottles, the lawn chair display. A surprise shot at the garage door, halfway through closing the trunk of her white Isuzu Trooper. It’s like I’m there, watching her edge along the driver’s side and come around the car to unload groceries into the house, wearing large sunglasses, as always, her mouth halfway open as if in midsentence, I can hear her call to me to put down the camera.
Candid photos where she’s not composed. Where she sits on the couch and I can see her affection radiating toward me, unaware, my back turned as I open a gift from Eunmi. Leaning back in a chair, about to take a sip of beer. Sitting on the living room carpet of our old home, watching something off camera, her nightgown falling off one of her shoulders. I can see the vaccination scar on her upper arm, the one that looked like she’d been burned by a car lighter, how it stoked all her fears that I too would have scars someday. That it was her duty to protect me from everything I might regret.
She was my champion, she was my archive. She had taken the utmost care to preserve the evidence of my existence and growth, capturing me in images, saving all my documents and possessions. She had all knowledge of my being memorized. The time I was born, my unborn cravings, the first book I read. The formation of every characteristic. Every ailment and little victory. She observed me with unparalleled interest, inexhaustible devotion.
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.