8
Unni
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.
When we scheduled an IV drip to bolster her electrolytes, I volunteered to drive her to the appointment. Kye was reluctant to stay behind but I was firm about going with her alone.
“Please, take some time for yourself, Kye. You deserve it.”
I hadn’t driven my mother since I was fifteen and learning how to drive. Back then she was so nervous, constantly convinced I was veering over the line on her side. The two of us would screech at each other, exacerbating the situation, arguing over trivial things like how soon to utilize the turn signal and which route to take through town.
Now we were quiet. We held hands and it was nice for a moment to finally be alone together. I thought, We could do this without Kye. I could do this all myself.
At the infusion clinic a nurse took us to a private room that was quiet and dimly lit. It was in a building on the University of Oregon campus, across from a sub shop where I used to get soft serve in the summer before heading through a hole in the chain-link fence nearby that led to a section of the Willamette River banked by a rocky plateau. My friends and I used to jump off the slippery, jagged rocks and let the rapids pull our bodies downstream until we drifted a good quarter of a mile. Then we would kick our way to the shore, jump back in, and let it take us again.
I thought back to those easy summers. When my hands were sticky from soft serve topped with candy, the sun beating down on my neck as I unlocked the chain from my clunky Schwinn, eager to submerge in the cold, fresh water that waited. I had no idea what the building across the lot was. A hospital meant something different back then. Had I even known enough to identify it, I would have been incapable of imagining the people inside. What their suffering was like, both for the patients and the people who loved them, what exactly was at stake. There were so many people there with luck far worse than ours, some without families to help them, without insurance, some unable even to take time off while in treatment. Even with three of us there to labor, caretaking often felt like a herculean feat.
On the car ride home I thought better of bringing up my feelings toward Kye. Instead, I scanned through the discs loaded into my mother’s CD player. Slot one was my band’s first album; slot two belonged to my mom’s new favorite singer, “Bruno Mar”; and slot three was the Barbra Streisand album Higher Ground. My mother never seemed to listen to much music, but she loved Barbra Streisand, counting The Way We Were and Yentl as two of her favorite films. I remembered how we used to sing the song “Tell Him” together, and skipped through the album until I found it on track four.
“Remember this?”
I laughed, turning up the volume. It’s a duet between Babs and Celine Dion, two powerhouse divas joining together for one epic track. Celine plays the role of a young woman afraid to confess her feelings to the man she loves, and Barbra is her confidant, encouraging her to take the plunge.
“I’m scared, so afraid to show I care…Will he think me weak, if I tremble when I speak?” Celine begins.
When I was a kid my mother used to quiver her lower lip for dramatic effect when she sang the word “tremble.” We would trade verses in the living room. I was Barbra and she was Celine, the two of us adding interpretive dance and yearning facial expressions to really sell it.
“I’ve been there, with my heart out in my hand…” I’d join in, a trail of chimes punctuating my entrance. “But what you must understand, you can’t let the chance to love him pass you by!” I’d exclaim, prancing from side to side, raising my hand to urge my voice upward, showcasing my exaggerated vocal range.
Then, together, we’d join in triumphantly. “Tell him! Tell him that the sun and moon rise in his eyes! Reach out to him!” And we’d ballroom dance in a circle along the carpet, staring into each other’s eyes as we crooned along to the chorus.
My mom let out a soft giggle from the passenger seat and we sang quietly the rest of the way home. Driving out past the clearing just as the sun went down, the scalloped clouds flushed with a deep orange that made it look like magma.
By the time we got back, Kye was manic. She emerged from my parents’ bedroom to reveal she’d shaved her head to match my mother’s. She tipped a hip to the side, stretching her arms out, and rolled her eyes languidly as she struck a pose in the hall.
“What do you think?”
She batted her eyelashes and pushed her newly shaved head toward my mother, who reached out her hand and ran it along the stubble. I waited for my mother to scold her the way she would have if I had done such a thing, or recoil the way Eunmi had when I brought up the idea three years ago, but instead, she was moved.
“Oh, Unni,” she said, tears in her eyes as the two embraced and Kye brought her back to bed.
When her three weeks with us elapsed, Kye insisted she stay longer. Why have someone else fly in? She was up to speed and wanted to stay. My mother was relieved and grateful, but both my father and I had started to feel unsettled by her presence.
She was quite unlike the two of us—reserved and precise. She was raised in Ulsan, a city on the southeast coast of Korea, and after leaving the base in Japan, she and her husband, Woody, had spent the past twenty years in Georgia. I assumed that coming from a southern region in Korea and living in the southern part of the United States, she’d have a more forthcoming personality, but Kye was difficult to read. She was unlike most of the Korean women I’d grown up with, who were warm and maternal, referred to by the names of their children. Kye had no children of her own and interacted with my father and me at arm’s length. Her icy demeanor froze us over.
Kye had a habit of letting produce rot on the counter. Fruit flies started to gather in the kitchen, and with my mother’s immune system in peril, my father and I grew concerned that some of the ingredients Kye was using could spoil. When my father confronted her about some persimmons that had attracted a plume of gnats, she became irritated and mocked him for being overly cautious.
One night, at dinner, I set my place next to my mother’s. Kye moved my silverware across the table to take the seat herself. After we had eaten, she handed my mother a lengthy letter, handwritten in Korean, and asked her to read it silently while my father and I were still at the table. It was three pages long, and halfway through my mother began weeping and took her hand.
“Thank you, Unni,” she said. Kye smiled back solemnly.
“What does it say?” my father asked.
My mother was silent and continued to read. If it weren’t for the drug-induced haze, she’d have picked up on our discomfort, but in her current state, she was blind to our apprehension.
“It’s just for us,” Kye said.
Why was this woman here? Didn’t she miss her husband? Wasn’t it odd for a sixty-something-year-old woman to leave her home in Georgia to come live with us for more than a month without any compensation? I wasn’t sure if I was on to something or just being paranoid or, worse, jealous that this woman was a better caretaker for my mother than I was. How self-obsessed was I to begrudge a woman who had selflessly volunteered to help?
As her medication took ever greater hold, my mother became drowsy and colorless and it became increasingly difficult to communicate. She began to slip into her native tongue, which made my father especially crazy. She had spoken fluent English for nearly thirty years and it was shocking when she began to forget to translate, to exclude us. At times it even felt like Kye was taking advantage of it, responding back in Korean and ignoring my father’s pleas to speak in English.
When we visited with the pain doctor, I caught myself trying to haggle the numbers down, afraid that if they upped her dosage, she’d fade from us even more. Are you sure your breakthrough pain is really a six and not more of a four? With my spiral notebook pressed against my chest, part of me wanted to withhold the tallies I’d recorded, the number of times we’d had to administer liquid hydrocodone on top of her 25 mcg/day Fentanyl patch. It’s not as bad as it looks, I wanted to insist. I did not want her to be in pain, but I also did not want to lose her completely.
The doctor could sense my frustration and prescribed a small dosage of Adderall to help counteract the effects of the painkillers. The first time she took it, she was filled with so much energy we had to physically restrain her to keep her from cleaning the house. For a short while it felt like I had my mother back. The next time we were alone together, I took the opportunity to bring up how I was feeling about Kye.
“She does so much for me,” my mother said, her voice quivering. “No one has ever done for me what she has. Michelle-ah, she even wipes my ass.”
I want to wipe your ass, I wanted to say, realizing it was ridiculous.
“Kye had a very hard life,” she said. “Kye’s father was a playboy. When he left Kye’s mother for a new mistress, he made that mistress raise her. Then when he met even another woman, he abandoned both of them. That mistress woman raised Kye her whole life and never told her she wasn’t her real mother. But Kye knew, because she heard rumors from all of the peoples around town. So then, when the mistress woman got the cancer, Kye took care of her until she died. Even on her deathbed, she never told Kye she wasn’t her real mother, and Kye never told her she already knew.
“And you know she is Woody’s second wife, and his children never really accepted her because she was an affair,” my mother added. “Even though they’ve been married for over twenty years now, his children are still cruel to her because of what they feel she did to their mother. She told me one time they made her so upset she had to go to a mental hospital.”
The next morning, Kye prepared soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. She cracked open the top of a shell and held out the rest of the egg for my mother to eat with a spoon. The yellow yolk floated atop its silky, translucent membrane. It looked mostly raw.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.
I’d always preferred my eggs with a runny yolk, but my mother’s illness had made me increasingly paranoid. Food poisoning was no longer a rite of passage. It was a gamble we couldn’t afford. Kye ignored me, her gaze focused on cracking the shell of her own egg.
“I’m just worried because her immune system is weak,” I added. “I don’t want her to get sick.”
Kye squinted at me like a smudge on a lens. She let out a soft scoff. “This is how we eat this one in Korea,” she said. My mother sat silently beside her like an obedient pet. I waited for her to come to my defense but she was silent, holding her egg in both hands, clouded over.
What a cruel twist of fate, I thought, my face reddening as I fought back the tears. I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone full. Someone whole. For a long time I had tried to belong in America, wanted and wished for it more than anything, but in that moment all I wanted was to be accepted as a Korean by two people who refused to claim me. You are not one of us, Kye seemed to say. And you will never really understand what it is she needs, no matter how perfect you try to be.