During the six-week visits, she and her mother would stay with her grandmother and two aunts, filling the already snug flat with jubilant card game nights and the fermented, garlic-infused aromas of home-made dishes.
This cherished summertime ritual was upended in her teens after her grandmother’s death. And just years later, Zauner, in her early 20s, faced the loss of both her mother and aunt to cancer.
From 2014 onwards, she immersed herself in a series of creative pursuits. The endeavours served not only to navigate the waves of grief but to gather “evidence that the Korean half of my identity did not die when they did”.
Through the band Japanese Breakfast, she crafted dreamy music as both an ode to her pain and a celebration of eventual joy, culminating in two Grammy nominations for her third album, Jubilee.
And perhaps most profoundly, she sought out food that embodied memories hovering on the brink of fading away.
“For a long time, I couldn’t remember my mother before she was sick because the last concentrated period I spent with her was as her caregiver. That was really heartbreaking for me,” Zauner says.
So she returned again and again to savour those flavours that encapsulated her memories.
“I realised if I don’t do this kind of upkeep, I was going to lose this part of myself. For me, it was like cultural maintenance,” the 35-year-old recalled.
Zauner’s commitment to cultural preservation now includes learning the Korean language. She has immersed herself in Seoul, living the life of what she describes as a “humble Korean student” for nearly six months, studying at Sogang University’s Korean Language Education Centre.
She is currently planning her second book to document her year-long adventure of acquiring a second language, one that had always existed as a distant echo in her life.
Its pages will also be sprinkled with funny anecdotes of what it is like to be “a 35-year-old Grammy nominee among a bunch of students much younger than me”, she said with a chuckle.
“When you’re learning to speak another language, your personality starts to change a lot, because you have to be very careful with your words – words that you know are so much smaller than everyone else’s, and they become very valuable,” she added.
A full year in Korea is the longest period she has ever spent in her mother’s homeland. No longer just a brief summer family holiday destination, the country has now become entirely hers to explore and discover.
Being surrounded by Korean friends has also helped her reflect on her mother and her expressions of parental affection in a new light – an experience that she did not get to have growing up as the only Asian-American kid at a school in suburban Eugene, Oregon.
“All that time, I thought it was just my mom being a difficult person until I heard from them that there are other Korean daughters and mothers who have this kind of issue,” she recalled.
She was not the only daughter getting yelled at whenever she bought her mother a gift. She was not the only one navigating life under an overbearing yet devoted eye.
“That was really comforting to know, but also a little sad. If I knew that as a younger person, I could have understood her better. Our relationship could have been easier.”
This October marks the 10th anniversary of her mother’s death. And Zauner feels like her grief is always changing.
“I don’t think there’s anything that you can do but ride that emotion,” she noted. “Now, when it comes to me, I’m honestly very grateful because it reminds me that I loved someone so much that my body is still feeling it. Holding on to these emotions is the closest way I can keep her with me.”
And if her writing can bring any comfort to someone going through that inevitable experience and finding bits and pieces of themselves within the pages, she added, she can die happily, feeling she has served a purpose in this world.