Michelle Zauner

Food was how my mother expressed her love.

I remember the snacks Mom told me she ate when she was a kid and how I tried to imagine her at my age. I wanted to like all the things she did, to embody her completely

There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

I sent my mother photos of the different bodices and skirts over Kakao

If there was a god, it seemed my mother must have had her foot on his neck, demanding good things come my way.

“Are you Chinese?”
“No.”
“Are you Japanese?”
I shook my head.
“Well, what are you, then?”

Even as she was dying, my mother offered me solace, her instinct to nurture overwhelming any personal fear she might have felt but kept expertly hidden

I imagined our four bodies in aerial view. On the right side, two newlyweds beginning their first chapter, on the left, a widower and a corpse, closing the book on over thirty years of marriage

I wondered if the 10 percent she kept from the three of us who knew her best—my father, Nami, and me—had all been different, a pattern of deception that together we could reconstruct. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.

“Love, Loss, and Kimchi