Three weeks passed and my mother began to turn a corner, regaining her strength by the end of June, just in time for her second treatment.

There was a plan in place for three Korean women to join us, a sort of all-hands-on-deck strategy. Friends and family and hospital workers had all insisted that we would be better caretakers if we also made time for ourselves. With a rotating cast we’d have some breathing room and extra help to focus on her diet, insight into dishes that might entice her, Korean food she could stomach through the nausea.

Kye would arrive first. Then, three weeks later, LA Kim would relieve her, and three weeks after that, there was some thought that Nami would come, but since Nami Emo had been Eunmi’s sole caretaker for two years before she died, we hoped it wouldn’t come to that, that we could manage well enough on our own and spare her the sight of a second sister going through it all over again.

When Kye arrived, it seemed like everything was going to get better. She exuded calm and focus, like a stern nurse. Short, with a sturdy build and a wide face, she was several years older than my mother, I guessed in her mid-sixties. She wore her long salt-and-pepper hair up in a bun like a proper madam. When she smiled, her lips stretched out flat and stopped before curving upward, as if paused midway through.

The three of us crowded around her at the kitchen table. Kye had come with goals and distractions, a printed packet of research, Korean face masks, nail polish, and packets of seeds. My mother was wearing pajamas and wrapped in a robe. Her hair was patchy, like an unloved doll.

“Tomorrow morning I want us all to plant this one,” Kye said.

She held up three thin packets. Seeds of red leaf lettuce, which we used for ssam, a cherry tomato plant, and Korean green peppers. Once, when I was a kid, I had impressed my mother, intuitively dipping a whole raw pepper into ssamjang paste at a barbecue restaurant in Seoul. The bitterness and spice of the vegetable perfectly married with the savory, salty taste of the sauce, itself made from fermented peppers and soybeans. It was a poetic combination, to reunite something in its raw form with its twice-dead cousin. “This is a very old taste,” my mother had said.

“Every morning we can take a walk around the house,” Kye continued. “And then we can water our plants and watch them grow.”

Kye was sage and inspirational and it reinvigorated the hope in me that had been shaken. With my father beginning to flounder, her presence came as a relief. She asserted firmly, “I’m here.” With Kye, my mother could really beat this, she could heal.

“Thank you so much for coming, Kye unni,” my mother said.

She reached her hand across the dining room table and placed it on top of Kye’s. Unni is how Korean women refer to their older sisters and close women friends who are older. It translates to “big sister.” My mother didn’t have many unnis in Eugene. The only time I remembered hearing her say it was in Halmoni’s apartment, when she spoke to Nami. It made her seem childlike, and I wondered if in Kye’s seniority, a strong new tactic could be mobilized. It’d be easier for her to lean on someone who was older, who shared her culture, who was not the daughter she instinctively sought to protect. Before the strength of an unni, my mother could naturally surrender.

The next morning, we planted Kye’s seeds and slowly walked together around the house. My father was at his office and Kye encouraged me to take some time too, insisting she and my mother could manage on their own. I decided to take my first break and headed into town.

For many years I had stubbornly regarded all forms of physical activity as a waste of time, but I found myself strangely compelled then to drive to my parents’ gym. Before my mom got sick she was always sharing articles about how often successful people exercised, and I had formed a thought that if I ran five miles every day, I could transform into a person of regimen, a valuable caretaker and perfect cheerleader, the daughter my mother had always wanted me to be.

I spent an hour on the treadmill. In my head I played a game with the numbers. I thought to myself, If I run at eight for another minute, the chemo will work. If I hit five miles in half an hour she’ll be cured.

I hadn’t run with such conviction since sixth grade, the first day of middle school, when our gym teacher announced we’d have a timed mile around the schoolyard. I thought I had it in the bag. The year before I was the fastest runner in my grade and I was ready to shine, eager to impress my new peers with super speed, only to be confronted by a harsh reality. Overtaken in a matter of seconds, I was a meerkat running in a pack of gazelles.

Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school, where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who’ve already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters. A time when anything that is unique about ourselves, anything that makes us depart ever so slightly from the collective, prototypical vision of popular beauty becomes an agonizing pockmark and self-denial the only remedy at hand.

After gym class and when I was still reeling from the shame of my fall from athletic grace, a girl from my class confronted me in the bathroom with what would become a familiar line of questioning.

“Are you Chinese?”

“No.”

“Are you Japanese?”

I shook my head.

“Well, what are you, then?”

I wanted to inform her there were more than two countries that made up the Asian continent but I was too confounded to answer. There was something in my face that other people deciphered as a thing displaced from its origin, like I was some kind of alien or exotic fruit. “What are you, then?” was the last thing I wanted to be asked at twelve because it established that I stuck out, that I was unrecognizable, that I didn’t belong. Until then, I’d always been proud of being half Korean, but suddenly I feared it’d become my defining feature and so I began to efface it.

I asked my mother to stop packing me lunches so I could tag along with the popular kids and eat at the shops off campus. Once, I was so petrified that a girl would judge what I ordered at a coffee shop that I ordered the exact same thing as her, a plain bagel with cream cheese and a semisweet hot chocolate, blandness incarnate, a combination I never would have chosen myself. I stopped posing with the peace sign in photos, fearing I looked like an Asian tourist. When my peers started dating, I developed a complex that the only reason someone would like me was if they had yellow fever, and if they didn’t like me, I tortured myself over whether it was because of the crude jokes boys in my class would make about Asians having sideways pussies and loving you long time.

Worst of all, I pretended not to have a middle name, which was in fact my mother’s name, Chongmi. With a name like Michelle Zauner, I was neutral on paper. I thought the omission chic and modern, as if I had shirked a vestigial extremity and spared myself another bout of mortification when people accidentally pronounced it “Chow Mein,” but really I had just become embarrassed about being Korean.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be the only Korean girl at school,” I sounded off to my mother, who stared back at me blankly.

“But you’re not Korean,” she said. “You’re American.”

When I got home from the gym, Kye and my mother were eating together at the kitchen table. Kye had cooked the soybeans she’d soaked the night before and blended them with sesame seeds and water to make a cold soy milk broth. She’d boiled somen noodles, rinsed them under the cold tap, and served them in a bowl with julienned cucumber, the milky white broth poured over top.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This one is called kongguksu,” Kye said. “You want to try?”

I nodded and sat in my usual seat at the table, across from my mother. I always considered myself well versed in Korean food but I was beginning to question the breadth of my knowledge. I had never heard of kongguksu. My mother had never made it and I’d never seen it at a restaurant. Kye returned with a bowl for me and sat back down next to my mother. I took a bite. It was simple and clean with a nutty aftertaste. The noodles were chewy and the broth was light with small, coarse bits of blended soybean. The perfect dish for summer, and the perfect dish for my mother, who was easily nauseated by the scents and tastes she’d relished before her treatment.

My mother hovered over her big blue ceramic bowl and guided the rest of the thin noodles into her mouth. The patchy parts of her scalp had been shaved clean.

“You shaved your head,” I said.

“Yes. Kye unni did it for me,” my mother said. “Doesn’t it look so much better?”

“It looks so much better.”

I felt guilty for not having suggested we shave it earlier, and couldn’t help but feel a little left out that they’d done it without me.

“Gungmul masyeo,” Kye coaxed. Drink the broth.

My mother obeyed, tipping back the bowl and drinking the liquid. Since she had started chemo, it was the first time I’d seen her consume a dish in its entirety.

In the evening, Kye used our rice cooker to make homemade yaksik. She mixed rice with local honey, soy sauce, and sesame oil, adding pine nuts, pitted jujubes, raisins, and chestnuts. She rolled the mixture out on a cutting board and divided the flattened cake into smaller squares. Fresh out of the rice cooker it was steaming and gooey. The colors were golden and autumnal, the jujubes a rich, dark red, the light-beige chestnuts framed by the bronze, caramelized rice. She brought it to my mother in bed with a mug of barley tea.

At night Kye brought out the Korean face masks she’d left in the freezer and set out a tray of nuts and crackers, cheese and fruit. The three of us laid the cold white sheets onto our faces and let the viscous moisturizer soak into our pores. We took turns with the vape pen my father had gotten at the weed dispensary, puffing from it as if it were Holly Golightly’s glamorous cigarette holder.

Then Kye spread magazines out on my mother’s duvet and waved her arm over the collection of nail polish she’d brought from home, telling my mother to pick a color for her pedicure. I reproached myself for not thinking of these things sooner. Watching my mother take pleasure in small practices of vanity was soothing, especially after she’d lost her hair. I was grateful Kye was here, someone with the maturity to guide us.

The next morning, Kye was in the kitchen cooking jatjuk, a pine nut porridge my mother used to make for me when I was sick. I remembered her telling me that families make jatjuk for the ill because it’s easy to digest and full of nutrients, and that it was a rare treat because pine nuts were so expensive. I recalled its thick, creamy texture and comforting, nutty flavor as I watched the porridge thicken in the pot. Kye stirred slowly with a wooden spoon.

“Can you teach me to make this?” I asked. “My mom said you could help me learn how to cook for her. I want to be able to help so you can make sure you have time to take breaks for yourself too.”

“Don’t worry about this one,” Kye said. “Just let me take care of it and you can help me by cooking dinner for you and your daddy.”

I wondered if I should try to explain how important it was to me. That cooking my mother’s food had come to represent an absolute role reversal, a role I was meant to fill. That food was an unspoken language between us, that it had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground. But I was so grateful for Kye’s help that I didn’t want to bother her. I chalked these feelings up to the unwarranted self-involvement of an only child and decided if Kye wouldn’t teach me, I should commit myself to another role.

So I became the resident recorder. I wrote down all the medications my mother took, the times she took them, and the symptoms she complained of, learning how to combat them with the other drugs we were prescribed. I monitored the consistency and texture of her bowel movements, introducing laxatives when necessary as the doctor had suggested. In a green spiral notebook I kept by the phone in the kitchen, I began to obsessively notate everything she consumed, researching the nutritional value of every ingredient, calculating the calories in every meal, and adding them up at the end of the day to see how far we were from a normal two-thousand-calorie diet.

Two tomatoes made forty calories. With a tablespoon of honey clocking in at sixty-four, I figured we cleared a hundred calories after my mother drank her morning tomato juice.

She didn’t like nutritional supplement drinks like Ensure because they were chalky and shakelike, but one of the nurses at the oncology center suggested we try Ensure Clear, which tasted more like juice. These my mother found much more palatable, which was a glorious victory. My father bought cases of every flavor from Costco and piled them up in our garage, where my mother used to keep her cache of white wine. We tried to get her to drink two or three a day, compulsively refilling the wineglass from which she used to drink her chardonnay. That brought us to at least six or seven hundred.

Misutgaru became another staple. A fine, light-brown powder with a subtle, sweet taste we used to eat atop patbingsu in the summer. Once or twice a day I would mix it with water and a little honey. Two tablespoons would edge us close to a thousand.

For meals, Kye would prepare porridge, or nurungji. She’d spread freshly cooked rice in a thin layer on the bottom of a pot, toast it into a crispy sheet, then pour hot water over it and serve it like a watery, savory oatmeal.

For dessert, strawberry Häagen-Dazs provided a momentous win, clocking in at a whopping 240 calories for half a cup.

My mother developed sores on her lips and tongue that made eating nearly impossible. Anything with flavor stung the tiny cuts in her mouth, leaving us with few dietary options that weren’t tepid or bland or mostly liquid, making two thousand calories harder than ever to achieve. When her sores got so bad that she couldn’t swallow her painkillers, I crushed Vicodin with the back of a spoon and scattered the bright blue crumbs over scoops of ice cream like narcotic sprinkles. Our table, once beautiful and unique, became a battleground of protein powders and glorified gruel; dinnertime, a calculation and an argument to get anything down.

This obsession with my mother’s caloric intake killed my own appetite. Since I’d been in Eugene, I’d lost ten pounds. The little flap of belly my mother always pinched at had disappeared and my hair began to fall out in large chunks in the shower from the stress. In a perverse way I was glad for it. My own weight loss made me feel tied to her. I wanted to embody a physical warning—that if she began to disappear, I would disappear too.

The seeds we planted began to sprout from the soil, effortlessly consuming the July sun with their own undaunted appetites. My mother went for her second chemotherapy. After the catastrophic response to the first treatment, our oncologist scaled back her dosage to nearly half of what we had started with, but the following week was still difficult.

Kye had been with us for two weeks, and my parents began to rely on her more and more. I started to worry we wouldn’t be able to care for my mother without her. My father was spending more time away from the house in town, and my mother naturally found it easier to ask for Kye’s help and assistance. I suspected it hurt her pride to rely on me. Even in the throes of chemo, she’d often ask how I was doing, or if my father and I had eaten.

Kye refused to take any breaks, despite our encouragement. She’d spend the whole day with my mother, massaging her feet and doting on her every need, never leaving her side even when I subtly hinted for a moment with my mother alone. It made me feel guilty, even when I was only leaving the house for an hour to run at the gym. The two of them were inseparable, and while I felt indebted to Kye for her support, I was beginning to feel edged out. Even though I had pushed fear of the worst to the furthest corners of my mind and tried to bury it with positive thinking, deep down I knew there was a possibility these could be my last moments with my mother, and I wanted to make sure to cherish our time together while I still could.