We travel between your memories and mine. I pick up where you leave off, but sometimes we are one road with two names. I am a shadow in your kitchen, trying to learn a lifetime of Korean recipes in a few spare days. I am here because I've realized, too late, that each dish is a memory. When you go, they will trail after you, leaving behind only a vapor of recollections. So I am vigilant; keen on keeping some memento: the delicate way to slice a scallion or the right proportion of garlic to pepper paste.
Today, we make kimchee — a basic food — but I struggle to tally and track the ingredients that pass from bowls to fingertips to pan. In the pot, minced spices blend and swirl to a texture that is rich and perfect. We dip and taste at intervals. I'm supposed to divine readiness by flavor and color, depth and density. That's how you know what more to add.
But I am all direction and no sense. I am anchored by measuring spoons and numbered checklists. When I taste, I can only describe a few obvious flavors but not what's missing, not what is needed.
Sometimes you forget why I am here, and you don't wait for me to take notes. I bought recipe cards just for this occasion. I imagine a keepsake box labeled "Mom's Recipes" sitting on the counter of my kitchen. From there, I will take my memories when I need them. I imagine gathering ingredients, following the directions, and making my way back to you one spice at a time.
You watch me make my food-stained lists, both of us knowing I'll never be able to recreate anything we eat here. And when I fail miserably, you will feed me a full plate of memories as a distraction, and I will forget all of my disappointments.
You are not often friendly with memory. The break and burst of some sudden recollections cast a weariness over you. But you allow me to pick and draw them out, so I will have more to hold.
I call them your warrior days, the early years. You call them yen-nahl, "back then," a wide, encompassing phrase, like "the war" or "the plague." These were the first months that taught you the importance of forgetting.
I remember the broken walk-in freezer in the back room of our diner. We played inside, but you would not enter. You remembered how we lived there once, in between apartments. We slept wedged on the floor, the mice leaping over our faces, the counting sheep of the poor.
We eventually moved into an apartment upstairs, four of us in one room. But during the day, it was for me alone. Just old enough to walk, I sat among a day's supply of bottles, waiting for you to rush in, change a diaper, and race back downstairs in between customers.
Here, your memories stretch longer than mine. You still see the way I stumbled to follow as you turned to leave; feel the dampness of my shirt as you forced me back, sometimes pushing me down, so you could shut the door without catching fingers. You hear the slump against the door and the dragging of two tiny palms looking for the way out. You feel the jerking of your long strides down the hall, trying to outrun the whimpers and wails that pulled you back as you tried to force your way forward. Each time, you walked away, you could feel your insides unmooring themselves, shaking loose and draining down as you ran. You managed to reassemble yourself every time, but never in the exact right way.
This part of our journey, I do not recall, but you offer it up like a confessional. "This, you have to know," you say. "Mining memory without truth is a hollow journey." If we are to dip and linger in the vessels of our memories, we must drink with fullness, like wicks whose fibers draw inward and upward, ready for fire and light.
In my immersion, I have lost track of where we are. The kimchee is ready for its marinade, and I notice huge gaps in my recipe list. I try to trace back what I've missed, but I know it's too late to do more than watch. With gloved hands, you take each oblong head of Napa cabbage, part its stalks, and coat the leaves with a swathe of spice.
I set aside my cards and notes, resting my chin in my hands. "It's no import," you say, meaning it's not that important. But I'm convinced that it is. It's all slipping through, and I'm catching only the barest of slivers.
You tear a small leaf wedge and tuck in a pocket of spice. You hold it out to me, as you did when I was a little girl, watching as I am now. I lean over and you drop the pouch into my mouth. And as I taste the snap and crunch of flavor, I can, for a moment, decipher all that is there.
Eson Kim received her MFA from Emerson College and is currently a Writing and Literature instructor at Westwood Online. She spent most of her life in Brooklyn, New York, but now resides in New Jersey where she struggles to make sense of those jug-handle turns.