her small frame leaning against mine as we take the escalator up to the food court. The two of us in all black, “New York style,” she’d say, her image of New York still rooted in the era of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She would carry the quilted-leather Chanel purse that she’d wanted her whole life, instead of the fake ones that she bought on the back streets of Itaewon. Her hands and face would be slightly sticky from QVC anti-aging creams. She’d wear some strange high-top sneaker wedges that I’d disagree with. “Michelle, in Korea, every celebrity wears this one.”She’d pluck the lint off my coat and pick on me—how my shoulders slumped, how I needed new shoes, how I should really start using that argan-oil treatment she bought me—but we’d be together.
If I’m being honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss. That someone my mother’s age could still have a mother. Why is she here slurping up spicy jjamppongnoodles and my mom isn’t? Other people must feel this way. Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.
Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. 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.
H Marts are usually situated on the outskirts of the city and serve as a secondary center for strip malls of Asian storefronts and restaurants that are always better than the ones found closer to town. We’re talking Korean restaurants that pack the table so full of banchan side dishes that you’re forced to play a never-ending game of horizontal Jenga with twelve tiny plates of stir-fried anchovies, stuffed cucumbers, and pickled everything. This isn’t like the sad Asian fusion joint by your work, where they serve bell peppers in their bibimbap and give you the stink eye when you ask for another round of wilted bean sprouts. This is the real deal.