“I had the feeling of watching someone build their world as they wrote the essay. An event happens: the discovery of a dress from a mother’s childhood, and with that, the discovery, in a way, of the mother. Present and hidden both in the family’s life, in the narrator’s life. And so the essay is like a trail through the woods that when completed is an outline of her life, the barest one, making remarkable use of the talismans left behind. Argentinean, Korean, queer, the child of a Korean adoptee, this narrator is trying to understand what it would mean to belong even to themselves.”

-Alexander Chee