Hahlmuhnee, my paternal grandmother, is standing at the entryway of the kitchen, her form outlined by the glow of the dingy marigold wallpaper Omma selected when she first moved in back in 1983. She is holding a small plate of kimbap – I can see the glistening residue of sesame oil on her fingers all the way from where I stand as I unsaddle my backpack and wriggle out of the pink jelly shoes I’d slipped into that morning despite the stink-eye it provoked from Hahlmuhnee.

Hahlmuhnee does not approve of wearing jelly shoes to school. It’s hot outside; Hahlmuhnee left the front door wide open. A sticky breeze sweeps through behind me, and I can hear the thick-veined leaves of the oak tree whispering at me from the front yard. The house swells with the scent of sesame and doenjang as if expelling a sigh at my return, and I follow Hahlmuhnee to the kitchen table, where a tall glass of ice-cold boricha (barley tea) to wash down my kimbap is waiting for me.

“Eat this,” or “이거 먹어,” were the two most repeated words of my childhood. I’d come home from school and Hahlmuhnee would have a snack ready for me on the ugly brown kitchen table of our Skokie house. An apple pear cut up into wedges. A small ceramic bowl of shrimp chips or, if she was feeling particularly loving, the same ceramic bowl, only filled with Doritos.

“Eat this,” she’d say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of whatever afternoon delights she’d prepared.

Over the years, I learned to translate my grandmother’s “eat this” into the following:

“Welcome back from school.”

“I know you worked hard today.”

“You look too tired.”

“I’m worried about you.”

And, invariably:

“I love you.”

Of course, I never literally heard any of those things from my grandmother. Between walks to the park, story time before bed, swinging contests at Gleiss Park, and nightly check-ins with our favorite TV show, Mr. T and “The A-Team,” we didn’t have time in the day for the kinds of heart-to-hearts that would have required putting words to what passed from Hahlmuhnee to me with a plate of cut fruit.

Hahlmuhnee came to my rescue, once. Not a life-and-death thing, but, in some ways, still life altering. I was maybe nine years old and got really sick. I was never one of those kids who pretended to be sick to get out of school, so the fact that I had marched over to the nurse’s office and told her I didn’t feel right was a measure of how awful I must have actually felt. The nurse had me lie down on a little bed in a dark room while she picked up the phone and started dialing the number she found on an index card she kept in a small box on her desk. And even then, in the pit of my stomach, I knew things wouldn’t go the way they usually did for the nurse.

Sure enough, I could hear her from where I lay, “Hello? Hello? Am I speaking with Joanne Lee’s mother?” A short pause, followed by the inevitable, “I’m sorry, do you speak any English?”

A few seconds later, the nurse’s shoes began shuffling toward me. She knocked gently on the door she’d left ajar before poking her head in. “Um … I think your mom is on the phone, but she doesn’t seem to speak any English?”

“That’s not my mom. That’s my grandma.”

My head felt like it was about to shatter into tiny shards of glass, but I rolled out of the bed, landed on my feet, and followed the nurse into her small office. She gestured toward the phone.

“Yobohsehyoh? Hello?”

“Sunyoung, is that you? What’s the matter? Who was that lady?”

My grandmother, always so sure of herself, sounded small and off-balance on the other end of the phone line, and it occurred to me in that moment that I’d never actually talked to my grandmother on the telephone before. Her commanding voice had been replaced by a tinny, unsure replica, and tears instantly welled in the corners of my eyes.

“Hahlmuhnee. I’m sick,” I managed to say.

“Oh no. What are we going to do? Your mom and dad are not here. What are we going to do?”

I pushed the heel of my hand against my lips to keep from sobbing.

And then Hahlmuhnee said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be there. Just wait.”

“But how are you going to get here without Mommy or Daddy?”

“Don’t worry. Just wait.”

I was cold, and I was practically delirious with fever, but instead of sitting in the nurse’s office, I went outside to wait for Hahlmuhnee. I was worried she wouldn’t know how to navigate the school hallways to find me. The playground, which I’d only ever seen crawling with kids, was eerily silent, the pavement beneath uncharacteristically unwelcoming. After about forty-five minutes, I could see Hahlmuhnee’s small figure in the distance, inching closer, her brown knit shawl grasped in a fist above her heart. When she finally reached me and pulled me into her arms, I started to cry, not really knowing why. Maybe because I was sick and weak and I’d had to wait outside in the cold for her. But also, because my little grandmother had to walk all the way to school to come pick me up. As we walked into the wind toward our home, I knew that it would be like this all the time – us against the world, me protecting her as much as she protected me.

When we got home, she tucked me into bed. Her cool hands pressed against my forehead as she muttered indiscernible things beneath her breath, her silver tooth peeking out from between lips that never seemed to still. My face was hot, but my body wouldn’t stop shaking, even as Grandma swaddled me in thick blankets, the kind we unfurled from the closet only for the coldest winter nights. Using her thumb, she wiped a bead of sweat trickling down the side of my face, hissing softly. She left me for a moment and returned with a wet pink towel, the one she used to wash her face every night before bed. She folded and pressed it gently over my forehead before padding out of my room, down the corridor, and into the kitchen. I could just make out the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of her knife chopping on a cutting board as it lulled me to sleep.

I woke to the familiar smell of sesame oil, so lustrous it had lassoed me out of sleep. Hahlmuhnee walked in and set a tray on the worn bedside table as she sat next to me on the bed: a small bowl of piping hot juk, the sticky porridge that comes together only after hours of stirring unlocks the sweet starch of the rice. After guiding a spoon around the rim of the bowl where the juk was starting to cool, she brought it up to her lips. She blew and blew and blew and then, while holding one hand under it to catch any scalding kernels of rice, she brought the spoon to my mouth and said: “Eat this.”

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