My mother died on October 18, 2014, a date I’m always forgetting. I don’t know why exactly, if it’s because I don’t want to remember or if the actual date seems so unimportant in the grand scheme of what we endured. She was fifty-six years old. I was twenty-five, an age my mother had assured me for years would be special. It was the same age my mother had been when she met my father. The year they got married, the year she left her home country, her mother, and two sisters and embarked on a pivotal chapter of her adult life. The year she began the family that would come to define her. For me, it was the year things were supposed to fall into place. It was the year her life ended and mine fell apart.

Sometimes I feel guilty about misremembering when it happened. Every fall I have to scroll through the photos I’ve taken of her gravestone to reconfirm the date engraved, half obscured by the multicolored bouquets I’ve left these past five years, or I resort to googling the obituary I neglected to write so I can prepare to willfully feel something that never quite feels like the thing I’m supposed to be feeling.

My father is obsessed with dates. Some sort of internal clock whirs without fail around every impending birthday, death day, anniversary, and holiday. His psyche intuitively darkens the week before and soon enough he’ll inundate me with Facebook messages about how unfair it all is and how I’ll never know what it’s like to lose your best friend. Then he’ll go back to riding his motorcycle around Phuket, where he retired a year after she died, filling the void with warm beaches and street-vended seafood and young girls who can’t spell the word problem.

What I never seem to forget is what my mother ate. She was a woman of many “usuals.” Half a patty melt on rye with a side of steak fries to share at the Terrace Cafe after a day of shopping. An unsweetened iced tea with half a packet of Splenda, which she would insist she’d never use on anything else. Minestrone she’d order “steamy hot,” not “steaming hot,” with extra broth from the Olive Garden. On special occasions, half a dozen oysters on the half shell with champagne mignonette and “steamy hot” French onion soup from Jake’s in Portland. She was maybe the only person in the world who’d request “steamy hot” fries from a McDonald’s drive-through in earnest. Jjamppong, spicy seafood noodle soup with extra vegetables from Cafe Seoul, which she always called Seoul Cafe, transposing the syntax of her native tongue. She loved roasted chestnuts in the winter though they gave her horrible gas. She liked salted peanuts with light beer. She drank two glasses of chardonnay almost every day but would get sick if she had a third. She ate spicy pickled peppers with pizza. At Mexican restaurants she ordered finely chopped jalapeños on the side. She ordered dressings on the side. She hated cilantro, avocados, and bell peppers. She was allergic to celery. She rarely ate sweets, with the exception of the occasional pint of strawberry Häagen-Dazs, a bag of tangerine jelly beans, one or two See’s chocolate truffles around Christmastime, and a blueberry cheesecake on her birthday. She rarely snacked or took breakfast. She had a salty hand.

I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realizing it. She remembered if you liked your stews with extra broth, if you were sensitive to spice, if you hated tomatoes, if you didn’t eat seafood, if you had a large appetite. She remembered which banchan side dish you emptied first so the next time you were over it’d be set with a heaping double portion, served alongside the various other preferences that made you, you.

In 1983 my father flew to South Korea in response to an ad in The Philadelphia Inquirer that read simply “Opportunity Abroad.” The opportunity turned out to be a training program in Seoul, selling used cars to the U.S. military. The company booked him a room at the Naija Hotel, a landmark in the Yongsan district, where my mother worked the front desk. She was, supposedly, the first Korean woman he ever met.

They dated for three months and when the training program ended, my father asked my mother to marry him. The two of them made their way through three countries during the mid-’80s, living in Misawa, Heidelberg, and Seoul again, where I was born. A year later, my father’s older brother Ron offered him a job at his truck brokerage company. The position afforded stability and an end to my family’s biannual intercontinental uprooting, and so we immigrated when I was just a year old.

We moved to Eugene, Oregon, a small college town in the Pacific Northwest. The city sits near the source of the Willamette River, which stretches 150 miles north, from the Calapooya Mountains outside of town to its mouth on the Columbia. Carving its way between mountains, the Cascade Range to the east and the Oregon Coast Range to the west, the river defines a fertile valley where tens of thousands of years ago a series of ice age floods surged southwest from Lake Missoula, traveling over eastern Washington and bringing with their floodwaters rich soil and volcanic rock that now shore up the layers of its earth, alluvial plains fit for a vast variety of agriculture.

The town itself is coated in green, hugging the banks of the river and spreading out up into the rugged hills and pine forests of central Oregon. The seasons are mild, drizzly, and gray for most of the year but give way to a lush, unspoiled summer. It rains incessantly and yet I never knew an Oregonian to carry an umbrella.

Eugenians are proud of the regional bounty and were passionate about incorporating local, seasonal, and organic ingredients well before it was back in vogue. Anglers are kept busy in fresh waters, fishing for wild chinook salmon in the spring and steelhead in the summer, and sweet Dungeness crab is abundant in the estuaries year-round. Local farmers gather every Saturday downtown to sell homegrown organic produce and honey, foraged mushrooms, and wild berries. The general demographic is of hippies who protest Whole Foods in favor of local co-ops, wear Birkenstocks, weave hair wraps to sell at outdoor markets, and make their own nut butter. They are men with birth names like Herb and River and women called Forest and Aurora.

When I was ten we moved seven miles outside the city, out past the Christmas-tree farms and the hiking trails of Spencer Butte Park to a house in the woods. It sat on nearly five acres of land, where flocks of wild turkeys roamed picking for insects in the grass and my dad could drive his riding mower in the nude if he wanted to, shielded by thousands of ponderosa pines, no neighbors for miles. Out back, there was a clearing where my mother grew rhododendrons and kept the lawn kempt. Beyond it the land gave way to sloping hills of stiff grass and red clay. There was a man-made pond filled with muddy water and soft silt, and salamanders and frogs to chase after, catch, and release. Blackberry bramble grew wild and in the early summer, during the burning season, my father would take to it with a large pair of gardening shears and clear new pathways between the trees to form a circuit he could round on his dirt bike. Once a month he’d ignite the burn piles he’d gathered, letting me squeeze the lighter fluid onto their bases, and we’d admire his handiwork as the six-foot bonfires went up in flames.

I loved our new home but I also came to resent it. There were no neighborhood children to play with, no convenience stores or parks within biking distance. I was stranded and lonely, an only child with no one to talk to or turn to but my mother.

Left with her in the woods, I was overwhelmed by her time and attention, a devotion that I learned could both be an auspicious privilege and have smothering consequences. My mother was a homemaker. Making a home had been her livelihood since I was born, and while she was vigilant and protective, she wasn’t what you would call coddling. She was not what I’d refer to as a “Mommy-Mom,” which was what I envied most of my friends for having. A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas.

But every time I got hurt, my mom would start screaming. Not for me, but at me. I couldn’t understand it. When my friends got hurt, their mothers scooped them up and told them it was going to be okay, or they went straight to the doctor. White people were always going to the doctor. But when I got hurt, my mom was livid, as if I had maliciously damaged her property.

Once, when I was climbing a tree in the front yard, the notch I used to hoist myself up gave out from under my foot. I slid two feet, dragging the skin of my bare stomach on the coarse bark as I tried to regain my footing, falling six feet onto my ankle. Crying, ankle twisted, shirt ripped, my stomach scraped and bloody on either side, I was not scooped into my mother’s arms and taken to a medical professional. Instead, she descended upon me like a murder of crows.

“HOW MANY TIME MOMMY SAY STOP CLIMBING THAT TREE?!”

“Umma, I think I sprained my ankle!” I cried. “I think I have to go to the hospital!”

She hovered over my crumpled body screeching relentlessly as I writhed among the dead leaves. I could have sworn she threw a few kicks in.

“Mom, I’m bleeding! Please don’t yell at me!”

“YOU WILL HAVE THIS SCAR FOREVER! AY-CHAM WHEN-IL-EEYA?!”

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry!”

I apologized over and over again, sobbing dramatically. Big fat tears and insistent stuttering wails. I pulled myself toward the house with my elbows, gripping the dry leaves and cold dirt as I stiffly dragged my limp leg forward.

“Aigo! Dwaes-suh! That’s enough!”

Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn’t care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this world would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.

“Stop crying! Save your tears for when your mother dies.”

This was a common proverb in my household. In place of the English idioms my mother never learned, she coined a few of her own. “Mommy is the only one who will tell you the truth, because Mommy is the only one who ever truly love you.” Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.

My mother was always trying to shape me into the most perfect version of myself. When I was an infant, she pinched my nose because she was worried it was too flat. In my elementary years, she feared I was too short, so every morning before school she’d instruct me to hold the bars of my headboard and pull my legs in an effort to stretch them out. If I furrowed my brow or smiled too widely, she’d smooth my forehead with her fingers and instruct me to “stop making wrinkles.” If I walked with a slouch, she’d push a palm between my shoulder blades and command, “Ukgae peegoo!” “Shoulders straight!”

She was obsessed with appearances and spent hours watching QVC. She phoned in orders for cleansing conditioners, specialty toothpastes, and jars of caviar-oil scrubs, serums, moisturizers, toners, and anti-aging creams. She believed in QVC products with the zeal of a conspiracy theorist. If you questioned the legitimacy of a product, she’d erupt in its defense. My mom was wholeheartedly convinced that Supersmile toothpaste made our teeth five shades lighter and Dr. Denese’s Beautiful Complexion three-piece skin-care kit shaved ten years off our faces. Her bathroom counter was an island full of glass pots and tinted jars she dipped, dabbed, rubbed, patted, and smoothed onto her face, religiously following a ten-step skin-care regimen that included a microcurrent wand for electrocuting wrinkles. Every night from the hall I could hear the clapping of her palms against her cheeks and the hum of pulsing electricity supposedly tightening her pores as she zipped and zapped, then applied layer after layer of cream.

Meanwhile, boxes of Proactiv toners piled up, shoved beneath the cabinet of my bathroom sink; bristles of a Clarisonic cleansing brush remained dry and mostly unused. I was too impatient to keep up with any kind of regimen my mother tried to impose, a source of contention that would escalate throughout my adolescence.

Her perfection was infuriating, her meticulousness a complete enigma. She could own a piece of clothing for ten years and it’d look like it’d never been worn. Never a speck of lint on a coat, a pill on a sweater, or a single scuff on a patent-leather shoe, whereas I was reprimanded constantly for destroying or abruptly losing even those belongings I most dearly cherished.

She applied the same fastidiousness to the household, which she kept immaculate. She vacuumed daily, and once a week she would have me run a duster along all the baseboards as she doused the hardwood floors in oil and smoothed them over with a washcloth. Living with my father and me must have felt like living with two oversized toddlers hell-bent on destroying her perfect world. Often my mother would erupt over some small disarray, and the two of us would look out at the same horizon and have no clue what was unclean or misplaced. If either of us spilled something on the carpet, my mother would react as though we had set it on fire. Instantaneously, she’d release a pained wail, rush to collect the QVC carpet cleaning sprays from under the sink, and push us aside for fear we would spread the stain. Then we would just hover over her in embarrassment, watching stupidly as she dabbed and sprayed at our errors.

The stakes got higher when my mother began amassing various collections of precious, delicate things. Each set had a special place in the home where it was neatly displayed and organized: Mary Engelbreit miniature painted teapots lining the bookshelves in the hallway; porcelain ballerinas on the entryway credenza, the one in third position missing two fingers, a daily reminder of the consequences of my oafishness; and blue-and-white Dutch houses on the kitchen windowsills filled with gin, two or three with corks sloppily dug into in some drunken stupor, to remind my father of his. Crystal Swarovski animals mounted the glass shelves of the living room armoire. Every birthday and Christmas, a new glistening swan, porcupine, or turtle found its place on the wall, adding to the prismatic light that projected across the living room in the early morning.

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, pâtés, 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.