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There's a lot to love about Korean food, but what I love most is its extremes. If a dish is supposed to be served hot, it's scalding. If it's meant to be served fresh, it's still moving. Stews are served in heavy stone pots that hold the heat; crack an egg on top, and it will poach before your eyes. Cold noodle soups are served in bowls made of actual ice.

By my late teens my craving for Korean staples started to eclipse my desire for American ones. My stomach ached for al tang and kalguksu. On long family vacations, with no Korean restaurant in sight, my mom and I passed up hotel buffets in favor of microwaveable rice and roasted seaweed in our hotel room.

And when I lost my mother to a very sudden, brief, and painful fight with cancer two years ago, Korean food was my comfort food. She was diagnosed in 2014. That May she'd gone to the doctor for a stomachache only to learn she had a rare squamous cell carcinoma, stage four, and that it had spread. Our family was blindsided.

I moved back to Oregon to help my mother through chemotherapy; over the next four months, I watched her slowly disappear. The treatment took everything-her hair, her spirit, her appetite. It burned sores on her tongue. Our table, once beautiful and unique, became a battleground of protein powders and tasteless porridge. I crushed Vicodin into ice cream.

Dinnertime was a calculation of calories, an argument to get anything down. The intensity of Korean flavors and spices became too much for her to stomach. She couldn't even eat kimchi.

I began to shrink along with my mom, becoming so consumed with her health that I had no desire to eat. Over the course of her illness, I lost 15 pounds. After two rounds of chemo, she decided to discontinue treatment, and she died two months later.

As I struggled to make sense of the loss, my memories often turned to food. When I came home from college, my mom used to make galbi ssam, Korean short rib with lettuce wraps. She'd have marinated the meat two days before I'd even gotten on the plane, and she'd buy my favorite radish kimchi a week ahead to make sure it was perfectly fermented.

Then there were the childhood summers when she brought me to Seoul. Jet-lagged and sleepless, we'd snack on homemade banchan in the blue dark of Grandma's humid kitchen while my relatives slept. My mom would whisper, "This is how I know you're a true Korean."

But my mom never taught me how to make Korean food. When I would call to ask how much water to use for rice, she'd always say, "Fill until it reaches the back of your hand." When I'd beg for her galbi recipe, she gave me a haphazard ingredient list and approximate measurements and told me to just keep tasting it until it "tastes like Mom's."

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How Learning to Cook Korean Food Helped Me Grieve (and Heal)

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There's a lot to love about Korean food, but what I love most is its extremes. If a dish is supposed to be served hot, it's scalding. If it's meant to be served fresh, it's still moving. Stews are served in heavy stone pots that hold the heat; crack an egg on top, and it will poach before your eyes.

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Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart. For those of you who don't know, H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food. The "H" stands for han ah reum, a Korean phrase that roughly translates to "one arm full of groceries." H Mart is where parachute kids go to get the exact brand of instant noodles that reminds them of home. It's where Korean families buy rice cakes to make tteokguk, a beef soup that brings in the new year. It's the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it's the only place that truly understands how much garlic you'll need for the kind of food your people eat. H Mart is freedom from the single-aisle "ethnic" section in regular grocery stores. They don't prop Goya beans next to bottles of sriracha here. Instead, you'll likely find me crying by the banchan refrigerators, remembering the taste of my mom's soy-sauce eggs and cold radish soup. Or in the freezer section, holding a stack of dumpling skins, thinking of all the hours that Mom and I spent at the kitchen table folding minced pork and chives into the thin dough. Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, "Am I even Korean anymore if there's no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?"

When I was growing up, with a Caucasian father and a Korean mother, my mom was my access point for our Korean heritage. While she never actually taught me how to cook (Korean people tend to disavow measurements and supply only cryptic instructions along the lines of "add sesame oil until it tastes like Mom's"), she did raise me with a distinctly Korean appetite. This meant an over-the-top appreciation of good food and emotional eating. We were particular about everything: kimchi had to be perfectly sour, samgyupsal perfectly crisped; hot food had to be served piping hot or it might as well be inedible. The concept of prepping meals for the week was a ludicrous affront to our life style. We chased our cravings daily. If we wanted the same kimchi stew for three weeks straight, we relished it until a new craving emerged. We ate in accordance with the seasons and holidays. On my birthday, she'd make seaweed soup: a traditional dish for celebrating one's mother that is also what women typically eat after giving birth. When spring arrived and the weather turned, we'd bring our camp stove outdoors and fry up strips of fresh pork belly on the deck. In many ways, food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she seemed-constantly pushing me to be what she felt was the best version of myself-I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.

I can hardly speak Korean, but in H Mart I feel like I'm fluent. I fondle the produce and say the words aloud- chamoe melon, danmuji. I fill my shopping cart with every snack that has glossy packaging decorated with a familiar cartoon. I think about the time Mom showed me how to fold the little plastic card that came inside bags of Jolly Pong, how to use it as a spoon to shovel caramel puff rice into my mouth, and how it inevitably fell down my shirt and spread all over the car. I remember the snacks Mom told me she ate when she was a kid and how I tried to imagine her at my age. I wanted to like all the things she did, to embody her completely.

My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary. I can tell you with a straight face what it was like watching my mom's hair fall out in the bathtub, or about the five weeks I spent sleeping in hospitals, but catch me at H Mart when some kid runs up double-fisting plastic sleeves of ppeong-twigi and I'll just lose it. Those little rice-cake Frisbees were my childhood: a happier time, when Mom was there and we'd crunch away on the Styrofoam-like disks after school. Eating them was like splitting a packing peanut that dissolved like sugar on your tongue.

I'll cry when I see a Korean grandmother eating seafood noodles in the food court, discarding shrimp heads and mussel shells onto the lid of her daughter's tin rice bowl. Her gray hair frizzy, cheekbones protruding like the tops of two peaches, tattooed eyebrows rusting as the ink fades out. I'll wonder what my Mom would have looked like in her seventies-if she would have the same perm that every Korean grandma gets as though it were a part of our race's evolution. I'll imagine our arms linked, her tiny frame leaning against mine as we take the escalator up to the food court. The two of us in all black, "New York style," she'd say, her image of New York still rooted in the era of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." She would carry the quilted-leather Chanel purse that she'd wanted her whole life, instead of the fake ones that she bought on the back streets of Itaewon. Her hands and face would be slightly sticky from QVC anti-aging creams. She'd wear some strange, ultra-high-top sneaker wedges that I'd disagree with. "Michelle, in Korea, every celebrity wears this one." She'd pluck the lint off my coat and pick on me-how my shoulders slumped, how I needed new shoes, how I should really start using that argan-oil treatment she bought me-but we'd be together.

If I'm being honest, there's a lot of anger. I'm angry at this old Korean woman I don't know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger's survival is at all related to my loss. Why is she here slurping up spicy jjamppong noodles and my mom isn't? Other people must feel this way. Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.

Sometimes my grief feels as though I've been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I'm colliding into a wall that won't give. There's no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.

H Marts are usually situated far from a city's center. When I lived in Brooklyn, it was an hour-long drive in traffic to Flushing. In Philly, it's about the same to Upper Darby or Elkins Park. H Marts often serve as the center of larger complexes of Asian storefronts, and are surrounded by Asian restaurants that are always better than the ones found closer to town. We're talking Korean restaurants that pack the table so full of banchan side dishes that you're forced to play a never-ending game of horizontal Jenga with twenty-plus plates of tiny anchovies, stuffed cucumbers, and pickled everything. This isn't like the sad Asian-fusion joint by your work, where they serve bell peppers in their bibimbap and give you the stink eye when you ask for another round of wilted bean sprouts; this is the real deal.

You'll know that you're headed the right way because there will be signs to mark your path. As you go farther into your pilgrimage, the lettering on the awnings slowly begins to turn into symbols that you may or may not be able to read. This is when my elementary-grade Korean skills are put to the test-how fast can I sound out the vowels while in traffic? I spent more than ten years going to hangul hakkyo every Friday, and this is all I have to show for it: I can read the signs for churches in different Asian texts, for an optometrist's office, a bank. A couple more blocks in, and we're in the heart of it. Suddenly, it's like another country. Everyone is Asian, a swarm of different dialects crisscross like invisible telephone wires, the only English words are "HOT POT" and "LIQUORS," and they're all buried beneath a handful of different characters, with an anime tiger or hot dog dancing next to them.

Inside an H Mart complex, there will be some kind of food court, an appliance shop, and a pharmacy. Usually, there's a beauty counter where you can buy Korean makeup and skin-care products with snail mucin or caviar oil, or a face mask that proudly and vaguely advertises "PLACENTA." (Whose placenta? Who knows?) There will usually be a pseudo-French bakery with weak coffee, bubble tea, and an array of glowing pastries that always look much better than they taste.

Lately, my local H Mart is in Cheltenham, a town northeast of Philadelphia. My routine is to drive in for lunch on the weekends, stock up on groceries for the week, and cook something for dinner with whatever fresh bounty inspired me. The H Mart in Cheltenham has two stories; the grocery is on the first floor and the food court is above it. Upstairs, there is an array of stalls for different kinds of food. One is dedicated to sushi, one is strictly Chinese, and another is for traditional Korean jjigaes, bubbling soups served in traditional stone pots called dolsots, which act as mini cauldrons to insure that your soup is still bubbling a good ten minutes past arrival. There's a stall for Korean street food, which serves up Korean ramen (which basically just means Shin Cup Noodles with an egg cracked in them); giant steamed dumplings full of pork and glass noodles, housed in a thick, cake-like dough; and tteokbokki, chewy, bite-sized cylindrical rice cakes boiled in a stock with fishcakes, red pepper, and gochujang, a sweet-and-spicy paste that's one of the three mother sauces used in pretty much all Korean dishes. Last, there's my personal favorite: Korean-Chinese fusion, which serves tangsuyuk-a glossy, sweet-and-sour orange pork-seafood noodle soup, fried rice, and jajangmyeon.

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Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart. For those of you who don't know, H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food. The "H" stands for han ah reum, a Korean phrase that roughly translates to "one arm full of groceries."

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The narrator of Split Tooth is, in many ways, an ordinary teenage girl. She cares about makeup and getting her hair just right; she looks at boys, wants them to like her, is frightened of the feelings this attraction evokes.

It's the 1970s - no one has a phone, there's not much television, boredom and excitement alike are self-generated in a community of young people. But the environment the narrator inhabits is not one most readers will know. "It's a dusty summer night in the High Arctic. The sun is shining brightly overhead. The sun always brings life and mischief, serenity and visions. It's two o'clock in the morning and I've shrugged off my curfew. There will be hell to pay when I get home and my father's thunderous footsteps shake the house with a blazing ire that only he can conjure."

Tanya Tagaq's debut novel is set in her native Nunavut, and the writing is saturated by this distinctive environment. The simple facts of life in the Arctic mean time and space function in a completely different way from in the south. This is a story deeply informed by an extraordinary landscape and the Inuit connection to that landscape, but it is also a story about how colonialism worked to brutally fracture that connection, and how it might be remade.

Tagaq is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and a visual artist. Split Tooth was published in 2018 in Canada, where it was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller prize. It has been picked up in Britain by And Other Stories, and increasingly it is small independent publishers who will commit to the radical possibilities of the novel, opportunities fully on display in Split Tooth. Sections of prose are interwoven with poems or lyrics, some of which can be found in Tagaq's 2022 album Tongues, which works as a companion to the novel. There are also black and white line drawings that add another layer of understanding. Tagaq is creating a world that, for many readers, will be like nothing they have known: the book's multifaceted structure allows alternating paths into the space Tagaq wishes to open.

The narrator's daily life is imbued with a powerful bond to the natural world that is elementally expressed

The narrator's daily life is, from the beginning, imbued with a powerful bond to the natural world that is elementally expressed. Her family has a fish tank in the living room; no big deal. But her "ritual" is to take one of the newts that live in the tank and place it on her tongue, "the little suction cups on its toes grasping my taste buds". Eventually, the newt crawls under her tongue and sleeps there for a while, "using my tongue as a huge duvet". She pulls nature within her. As the novel progresses we will see how animals, plants and spirits of the Arctic call to her and possess her. Running in parallel to the narrator's deep sense of her heritage, Tagaq demonstrates - in devastatingly casual asides - the destruction wreaked on her people by European violence: lives permanently damaged by residential schools, by alcoholism and drugs.

But Split Tooth is a reclamation, and as it progresses the narrator's closeness to the Land (the capital letter is Tagaq's) deepens to an extraordinary extent. "Land protects and owns me," the narrator says. "Land feeds me. My father and mother are the Land. My future children are the Land. You are the Land. We destroy her with the same measured ignorance of a self-harming teenager. That is what I was in my fifteenth year, what is your excuse?"

She spends a night out on the ice, allowing the northern lights to enter and consume her - a spiritual and physical awakening. The aftermath of this consummation is the beautiful, terrifying heart of this tale. Split Tooth is a compact wonder: remarkable honesty and a sense of the deep magic of the Earth combine in this brief, compelling book.

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Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq is published by And Other Stories (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq review - coming of age in the High Arctic

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An Inuit teenager faces nature's power and the repercussions of colonialism in a compelling debut from a singer-songwriter

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Do you have a connection to food? Tell us about a food memory?