When the sauce is ready, we pour the thick, glossy mixture over the fresh, plump noodles. Zauner immediately takes her chopsticks to it, coating each strand with precision. We’ve already plated up the various banchan into palm-sized dishes: dongchimi (tart radish water kimchi), mulchi (sweet stir-fried anchovies), danmuji (fluorescent yellow pickled radish), and jeotgal (spicy spirals of preserved squid). Zauner hands a small bowl of noodles to everyone on set, and we tuck into our creation and inhale it practically without breathing. The sound of people slurping noodles is almost like ASMR to us.
“I was such a sensitive cunt,” comes Zauner’s quick reply when I ask what she was like as a teenager. As a kid who felt “too big for [her environment],” she didn’t yet understand the motivations of her mother, who relentlessly pushed her into extracurriculars. Ahead of important exams in high school, Zauner purposefully loaded heavy textbooks into her bag “as a physical reminder that I had to do this thing,” she says. “I feel like in a way, I still do that. I just always have this weight on me that I’m not doing enough.”
Indie rock emerged as Zauner’s escape from her dreary Pacific Northwest town. She picked up the guitar as a middle schooler, hoping to emulate her early inspirations like Modest Mouse. Later, she started counting Björk and Kate Bush, musicians “who have built worlds around their music,” among her inspirations. So Zauner channeled her diligence into her musical dreams. After writing a couple songs, she quickly became a one-girl record label, taking her own pictures, recording her own tracks, designing her own flyers, and acting as her own booker and publicist.
“I’m just waiting for you to give this up,” Zauner recalls her mom telling her after one early show as a teenager, sparking one of many fights that led Zauner to a depression-induced mental breakdown her senior year of high school.
Around that time, Zauner also realized she wanted to be a writer. She voraciously took fiction writing classes while attending college at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, where she was taught that “gritty, white men” like Raymond Carver and John Updike were the literary voices she should be aspiring to.
Following in their school of thought, she wrote a thesis of “self-serious” short-stories, including one based on her late aunt Eunmi, who also died of cancer, before Zauner’s mother. In the tale, her aunt’s name is Emmy, and all of Zauner’s family is white. “Instead of eating a Korean meal, they eat chicken and broccoli, because I was like… that’s what white people eat,” she says. Looking across our colorful spread of saucy noodles and banchan, we burst into pained laughter.
