THE WANDERER'S CURSE

A first-generation Korean American attempts to come to terms with her mother, who won’t stand still.

On one level, Bon Appétit editor Choi’s memoir is a not-unexpected account of life as a struggling millennial in New York City, seeking success as a creative while working scrape-by jobs in bars and restaurants. Meanwhile, back in California, Umma, her mother, rules an empty roost: “Umma was the Boss Bitch, the Decider, our Head Honcho, who held every account and paid every bill working morning and night shifts as an open-heart surgery nurse.” Finally fleeing an unsatisfying marriage, Umma lights out for the territory, heading for a new life in Alaska. Soon enough she’s wandering the globe, eventually resettling in South Carolina, where Choi eventually moves in with her, another survival strategy for straitened times. Mom is sometimes harsh in her impatience: “I never should have raised you American. If you were a real Korean daughter, you would just sit there and listen. Like a wall.” Meanwhile, Choi begins to appreciate her mother’s strength while sorting out her own life; late in the narrative, Choi explores the Korean term “yeokmasal,” which translates to her book’s title, as a means of understanding her mother’s peripatetic nature. There are a few MFAish flourishes, such as the obligatory aside on the “science” of wandering (“Those bearing the polymorphic DRD4-­7R gene variant are said to share a lower sensitivity to dopamine”), and plenty of overblown language (“Are there also random acts of kindness and solidarity transpiring every day? Yes. But jouncing between these vicissitudes I worried had altered my grip on reality”). Still, Choi’s memoir is a sympathetic study in the way mothers and daughters so often talk past each other while seeking accommodation—or, in some senses, a truce—and understanding.

Sometimes affecting, sometimes stumbling, but appealing in its moments of reconciliation and redemption.