Michelle Zauner

And I wished I could go back there then, back before I knew of a single bad thing.

My first word was Korean: Umma. Even as an infant, I felt the importance of my mother. She was the one I saw most, and on the dark edge of emerging consciousness I could already tell that she was mine. In fact, she was both my first and second words: Umma, then Mom. I called to her in two languages. Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.

“Really, thank you so much, Aunt,” I said in Korean one night over beers and cake at her kitchen table. Then I typed into Google Translate: “I don’t want to be a burden.” I passed her my phone to read it and she shook her head.

“No! No!” she said in English. Then she spoke Korean into her translation app. She held up the phone for me to see. In big letters it read “That’s blood ties” with the Korean text above it. “That’s blood ties,” the robot read out loud. The voice’s pacing was all wrong, slow to process the contraction and quick between “blood” and “ties,” pronouncing the syllables without regard for one another. There was so much I wanted to say to Nami. I thought of all the years my mother had taken me to Korean school, how I begged her every week to let me skip it and enjoy my Friday night with my friends. All the money and time I wasted. All the times she told me I’d regret treating the lessons as a drag one day.