Michelle Zauner

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

Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.

we are all here for the same reason. We’re all searching for a piece of home, or a piece of ourselves.

“save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on.

“Mommy is the only one who will tell you the truth, because Mommy is the only one who ever truly love you.”

“I could learn Korean! Mom! If I stayed in Korea, I could be famous!”

“You could never be famous here, because you could never be anyone’s doll,”

I needed to accept that something, at some point soon, would have to change.

Here I was again, this time returned of my own free will, no longer scheming a wild escape into the dark but desperately hoping that a darkness would not come in.

“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.