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

Craig and Deven learned the respected drinking customs—never pour your own drink, pour for your elders with both hands—and Jon taught us games like Titanic, in which an empty shot glass is balanced in a cup full of beer and you take turns pouring small amounts of soju in, until it sinks and the loser has to shoot it back. This deadly combination of soju and maekju, the Korean word for beer, is called somaek, a common culprit for the Korean hangover.

When the bar died down, Jon played us a song by Shin Jung-hyeon, a sort of Korean Phil Spector type who produced sugary hooks and psychedelic riffs for girl groups of the era. The song was called “Haennim,” written for the singer Kim Jung Mi. It was a sprawling, six-minute folk song that started on finger-picked acoustic guitar and swelled with melancholy strings as it went on. We listened in silence. None of us could understand the lyrics, but it had a sound that was captivating and timeless and we were drunk and somber and moved.

Shin Jung-hyeon

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,”