The streets of Sea-Like-Sorrow are oil-stained and salt-crusted, bedrock soaked with the smell of the ocean. Folks swear that the ghosts of prehistoric fish swim through the alleys; kids dare each other to hang out a lantern and maybe a good bone or two, look for a monster who'll bite the hook. The houses are built on oyster shells, broken glass, limestone fossils, but somehow the foundations never even quiver. Good bones, says the townsfolk. That's what matters in a place like this. Something good to make a living off of.
The Kim women know about good livings, know what it leaves on your hands, what it does to your heart. The town still tells the story of Grandmother Kim, first of her name, who walked into town with only the clothes on her back and the baby on her hip and built up a legacy with nothing but a few dollars, her callused hands, and a recipe for sundubu-jjigae that her own grandmother had passed onto her. And Grandmother Kim built it, but Mother Kim inherited it, Mother Kim finished it, as daughters often do—by the time Mother Kim had Daughter Kim, she was single-handedly running the finest seafood bar in all of Sea-Like-Sorrow.
Sea-Bar. A joke in the Kim family that no English speaker can laugh at like they do. It's where folks go to for food and drinks and good conversation, and nowhere else do they serve the dishes that Mother Kim whips up: cuts of raw fish on small plates, salads dressed with seaweed, oysters soaked in spicy scarlet sauces, exotic fare with closely guarded family recipes. Good women, says the townsfolk. Good mothers. Then they raise their glasses to them both and drink in their honor.
Daughter Kim watches. That's how her mother finds her: watching. A girl still small enough to hide under the counter, ear pressed to plywood, stealing stories from the sailors, who doesn't even complain anymore when she's pulled out of the shadows and put back to serving the customers.
"Head full of fairytales," her mother sighs. There's a cigarette tucked into the corner of her smile; there's a fishbone splinter stuck under her fingernail. The kiss she plants on her daughter's hair smells like the makkoli she taste-tests before serving. "My fault for letting you listen to them, I guess." Then she shoos the girl back into the kitchen, where she can help debone the fish, feeling very grown-up with a knife in her hand.
They tell stories about Grandmother Kim, tell stories about Mother Kim, but the former's already finished her tale and the latter's nearing the end of hers and the only one left to tell is about Daughter Kim, who's still called that by the neighbors old enough to remember her miraculous grandmother, but she never answers to it, only goes by her name. Haru. Nothing more and nothing less. Kim Haru, the third of her name, only kid in this half-drowned town with eyes shaped like hers.
So why don't we tell a story about Haru, for once—Haru who's got her mother's handiness around a knife, a childhood spent shucking abalones until she could do it one-handed and blindfolded; she can tell the difference between a halibut and a cod by smell alone. The story of how there's less fish brought in these harder, leaner days, but Haru's mother makes do, like their family always has. She simmers broth out of fish bones, thickened with silky tofu, chopped radish, chrysanthemum greens plucked from the garden—fresh fillets and chopped cucumbers are mixed with ginger, garlic, pepper, taste-tested to that perfect balance—battered scallion pancakes made with clams when she can get them, shrimp when she can't, a crispy golden-brown bite of hot greasy flavor.
Magic, Haru thinks, a girl small enough to hide under the counter, stealing dropped change to save in her piggy bank. Her mother could be nothing less than magic.
"Not magic," her mother corrects when she tells her—a smile all honey, a pinch of sugar in a salt-brined life. "Just good food." Just rice, just eggs, just fish. Just the tricks Haru's grandmother had learned in this very same kitchen, turning memories of her homeland into mouthfuls of momentary relief. Miraculous, really, what Haru's mother could do with a kitchen, with even one bowl of steamed short-grain rice. How she could serve up just the right breakfast—fluffy eggs, or miso soup, or a perfectly peeled mandarin, pith picked off before presentation—how it took just one spoonful to smoothen all the rough edges off a face. Haru is not a storyteller, but if she was, this would be her favorite fairytale.
