After Lucille’s departure, instead of turning on the TV as she might have done at that hour, she went to the kitchen, rinsed some adzuki beans and cooked them down, making the kind of sweet bean paste she used for danpatbbang, which Lucille insisted on calling called Korean jelly donuts. After the beans cooled, she crushed ice cubes in a food processor the way her friends had shown her to do to make margaritas and daiquiris, dumped it into a bowl and then spooned some bean paste on top. She had some tteok in the fridge, so she cut a small chunk and chopped it into little pieces. After sprinkling them on top, she carried the bowl to a straw mat in the living room and sat down. Then she closed her eyes and brought a spoonful to her lips. The patbingsu was for her what the madeleine was for Proust. It brought the past back not as a memory but as something alive. Just a taste of it awakened sensations she hadn’t experienced in over fifty years.

She was once again in the little hovel that was her home. Her father had died the year she was born, and her mother did the best she could to provide for the two of them in a country ravaged by war and mired in poverty. Despite the dire circumstances, her mother had somehow managed to make a special treat for her. As she sat in her own comfortable living room with the bowl of patbingsu on her lap, she lived over again that precious, fleeting moment that felt like heaven.

The last time she she tasted patbingsu was shortly before her mother died, finally worn out by the daily struggle. After that, life for Jenny, or, as she was known then, Jin-hee, became almost unbearable. She was sent off to an orphanage where she knew only drudgery and abuse. Day after day, week after week, year after year, she lived through a nightmare that she believed would never end. But when she was eighteen years old, something extraordinary occurred. On a cold December day, when she was peddling chestnuts in the street, an occupation which didn’t provide much money but kept her hands warm as she roasted the brown pods on a charcoal grill, an American soldier stopped and bought a handful. She’d never met a foreigner before, and it was a strange experience for her. He didn’t know what to do with the chestnuts and she had to show him how to peel and eat them. His clumsiness made her laugh and she placed her palm in front of her face in order not to appear rude.

She knew only a few words of English and he knew even less Korean, but they managed to communicate. The next day he returned and bought more chestnuts from her. He was there again the following day and almost every day afterwards for weeks to come. She’d never met anyone who liked chestnuts so much, and was very surprised to learn, years later, after they were married, that he didn’t care for chestnuts at all. Like a prince from a fairy tale, Eric had arrived out of nowhere and plucked her from a life of adversity. Just over a year after she handed him those first chestnuts, she was on an airplane with him, leaving behind forever her miserable existence, heading for a magical land full of wonder and happiness. America, the land of opportunity where she would start her life again. Everything that came before could be shaken off like a bad dream.

When she arrived in her adopted country, she was amazed at its vastness, its beauty, its variety. It was everything she dreamed it would be, at least in the beginning. In the great new land she had come to, she no longer had to endure the kinds of hardships she suffered in her native country. But there were other hardships of a different kind, that she had to cope with. She had a comfortable house, modern appliances, even a car, and most importantly a husband who doted on her. It should have been perfect, but somehow it wasn’t. Language was a problem. She’d learned enough English to get by, but not enough to have real conversations, or to express herself on anything but the most basic level. Sometimes, when she spoke, people laughed, and she didn’t know why. Learning English felt like climbing a mountain that went higher and higher with no end in sight. She would never get to the top of it.

Language wasn’t the only problem. She felt like she’d been plopped down among a different species of being. She wasn’t like them and didn’t belong. They looked at her in a strange way and sometimes said rude things for no reason. Even when people were friendly, it didn’t always feel comfortable. She was often treated like a “China doll” that wasn’t quite real. Eric was her interface to the world, her translator and buffer. That made life easier, but it also retarded her English progress and made her feel as dependent as a child—and it was a childhood she’d never grow out of. Sometimes it seemed that her old life in Korea with all its misery and hardships was preferable to her comfortable life in the US.

When she left Korea, she wanted nothing more to do with it, to expunge it from her existence, and erase every trace of it from her being. How peculiar it was then, when after just a few months in the promised land, she felt a craving, a gnawing in the pit of her stomach, for something that wasn’t satisfied by the food she ate. Never had so much food been available to her—all kinds of meat, fruit and vegetables. In a month she consumed more meat than she would have in a year or more in Korea, yet she felt hungry. She added rice to her diet and it helped, but it wasn’t enough. There were other tastes she longed for—the sharp, biting flavor of good kimchi, the rich, satisfying nuttiness of a steaming bowl of doenjang jjigae. When she placed those dishes on the dinner table, her husband held his nose, so she began preparing and consuming them when he wasn’t home and cleaning up all traces of their existence. He didn’t care what she ate in private as long as he didn’t have to see or smell the food she made. So began her secret culinary life.

In time life got better. The birth of her children gave meaning and purpose to her life and kept her occupied. The discomfort of her first years in the US diminished, and although thorough mastery of English remained elusive, she was fluent enough. She was and would remain an alien in a foreign country, but her condition wasn’t so different, she thought, from other outsiders, many of whom were American-born. People with darker skin, she noticed, were treated like her, sometimes with hostility, often with apprehension, tolerated at best. She didn’t have many friends, only a few casual acquaintances with whom she went shopping or to an occasional movie. She wasn’t unhappy, at least no more unhappy than anyone else. That was how the years slipped by, until the accident. That changed everything. Where the fullness of her life had been, there was now a gaping void. Her older son, thankfully, was alive and well, but he was at college far away. He came back home for a few weeks after the accident, but then he was gone, and made only occasional, short visits. She was alone in the world again, just as she had been after her mother died.

When she lifted the spoon from the bowl to her lips, her life in America evaporated. The patbingsu brought her back to a time in her life that she had all but forgotten, those days of her early childhood, before the orphanage, when her mother was alive, when there was someone in the world who loved her with her entire soul. Life was hard. Often there was no food to eat and no means of heating their little home through the bitter cold Korean winter. But still, she’d felt real happiness. The days at the orphanage had erased her good memories and focused her mind on bare survival. Now those early memories, reborn, flooded over her, and she wept. She wept for the losses she suffered and in gratitude for what she’d had. Her hot tears fell on the flavored ice, adding another dimension of complexity to its taste.