Our phones carry entire lifetimes of memories—family trips, celebrations, and quiet moments. But phones can break, get lost, or simply run out of space. If that happens, years of photos and videos can disappear in seconds. The good news is that keeping your memories safe on your smartphone is simple. Here are a few habits that will help you protect your stories with confidence.
1. Turn On Automatic Backup
Most smartphones have a feature that saves your photos automatically to the internet (the “cloud”). You don’t need to do anything complicated—just turn it on once.
Android phones: open Google Photos → Settings → Backup → Turn On.
iPhones: open Settings → Apple ID → iCloud Photos → Turn On.
Once backup is on, new photos will save automatically even if you lose or replace your phone.
Tip: Ask your son, daughter, or a trusted friend to help you check this setting once a year.
2. Clean and Organize with Albums
You don’t need perfect order—just simple folders. In your Photos app, tap “Albums” → “New Album” and give it a name like Family Trips or Old Friends. Move related photos there so they’re easy to find later.
If your phone is full, delete blurry duplicates or screenshots. This keeps your memory space clear and easy to manage.
3. Write Short Notes with Each Memory
Most photo apps let you write a short caption or description. Add the year, place, or a few words: “Spring picnic with grandchildren, 2023.” These short lines turn your photos into small stories—and they’ll mean more later.
If you prefer, you can use your Notes app to record thoughts about a photo or event. It’s a simple way to connect emotion with image.
4. Share and Save Together
Set aside one day a year—perhaps around a holiday—to look through your phone photos with your family. Ask your children or grandchildren to help you move important albums to a shared folder like Google Drive or KakaoTalk Shared Album. This not only keeps your memories safe but also invites conversation and laughter.
5. Print or Save Your Favorites Twice
Even in the digital age, it’s wise to keep a few printed photos. Choose ten favorites each year and:
Save them online (Google Photos or iCloud), and
Print them at a local photo shop or kiosk.
Printed photos never run out of battery, and they carry a warmth screens can’t replace.
Your smartphone is a modern photo album—it deserves care. A few simple settings and habits can make sure your memories last for decades. Whether you do it yourself or ask for a little help, these steps will keep your family’s stories safe and easy to share. What’s your favorite memory stored on your phone? Make the picture your priority.
How Crying in H Mart, Pachinko, and Minari Illuminate the Intergenerational Landscape of Korean Memory
In recent years, three works have carved space in global consciousness for Korean and Korean-American narratives: Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart, Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko, and Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari. Though distinct in form and scope, they are connected by a shared emotional terrain: stories of family, displacement, longing, and the fragile rituals through which memory persists. Each work reveals what is inherited, what is lost, and what we try to rebuild from fragments.
Together, these narratives form a cultural triptych of diaspora. In place of epic declarations, they offer quiet gestures—a grandmother planting herbs, a mother cooking kimchi, a child trying to translate pain. They ask: What are the small, persistent things that shape who we are?
I. Grief and Language in Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner’s memoir begins in a supermarket—H Mart, where the aisles are filled with Korean groceries and a longing too heavy to name. Zauner, lead singer of Japanese Breakfast, charts her mother’s death from cancer and the identity crisis it leaves in its wake. The book is a meditation on grief, but also on bilingual belonging. As her Korean falters, so too does her connection to a maternal history carried in language, gesture, and taste.
What makes Crying in H Mart so arresting is its refusal to universalize loss. Zauner’s mourning is culturally situated: the way she watches her mother peel fruit, the unspoken rules of filial piety, the silence between English and Korean. Her grief is textured by immigrant expectation and generational misrecognition. In that way, Zauner speaks for a generation of bicultural readers caught between tongues, mourning not only loved ones but the versions of self that die with them.
II. Lineage and Shame in Pachinko
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko opens in a fishing village in Korea and ends in urban Tokyo, but its emotional arc spans four generations of a single family. It is a novel of survival and the soft violence of assimilation. Through the character of Sunja and her descendants, Lee examines the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the precarity of Korean identity abroad, and the social costs of silence.
Unlike Zauner’s memoir, where intimacy is built through food and domestic ritual, Pachinko shows how survival often requires severing such connections. There are moments when characters must abandon tradition to survive—a son who denies his ancestry to keep his job, a mother who hides her shame to preserve her child’s future. Lee does not moralize these choices; instead, she lets the slow accumulation of compromise and resilience speak for itself.
It is also a novel of women’s labor—emotional, economic, and cultural. Sunja’s strength is not in rebellion, but in the steadiness with which she endures. Her choices echo through time, shaping descendants who never know the full cost of their legacy. If Pachinko offers a lesson, it is that history is not just something we learn. It is something we inherit.
III. Immigrant Soil in Minari
Where Crying in H Mart focuses on loss and Pachinko on endurance, Minari dwells in hope. Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical film tells the story of a Korean-American family who moves to rural Arkansas to start a farm in the 1980s. It is, on the surface, a familiar immigrant narrative. But beneath its simple plot lies a quiet radiance.
The emotional center of Minari is Soonja, the grandmother, whose arrival from Korea unsettles and ultimately transforms the household. She brings with her not only snacks and folklore, but also a reminder that memory is physical—lodged in plants, smells, rhythms. The minari she plants near a creek becomes a living metaphor for resilience: a plant that thrives where it is rooted, even in foreign soil.
There is little exposition in Minari. Chung lets glances, pauses, and miscommunications carry the emotional weight. It is a film of feeling rather than statement, and in that way, it mirrors the unspoken contracts of immigrant life: don’t complain, keep going, make it work.
IV. What Holds Them Together
Across these three works, we find no grand resolutions, no neat conclusions. Instead, they offer memory as process—fragmented, intergenerational, sensory. They suggest that identity is not a fixed inheritance but a field of negotiation.
In Crying in H Mart, that field is a grocery store aisle where a daughter remembers her mother through food.
In Pachinko, it is the layered sacrifices of four generations.
In Minari, it is a field by a creek where minari takes root.
What they share is a deep attention to the texture of lives. The mundane becomes sacred: cooking, planting, speaking, forgetting. These are the rituals through which memory persists, even when names fade.
V. From Memoir to Montage: Why It Matters
We often ask: What does a life story look like?
These works tell us: it is not always a biography or a formal timeline. Sometimes it’s a smell. Sometimes a story passed down half-remembered. Sometimes it’s a scene in a film where a boy watches his grandmother fall ill and still finds her spirit in a plant she left behind.
Together, Crying in H Mart, Pachinko, and Minari remind us that we don’t need to be famous or fluent to be remembered. We just need to be noticed, as we are.
Their stories are an invitation: to look more closely, to ask differently, to notice the soil where memory grows.
So funny, so weird, so them. A moment that says it all.
You’ve seen the meme.
A video of Jon Rahm skipping a golf ball across a pond — and somehow sinking a hole-in-one at The Masters. A grandpa launching into a dance-off after winning bingo night. Someone catching a falling baby with one hand while holding a latte.
Caption? “This moment was so iconic, I’d play it at their funeral.”
It’s a joke. But also… kind of perfect.
Because Some Moments Say: “Yep, That Was Them”
Not the job titles. Not the diplomas. We’re talking about the moment when life caught them off guard — and they handled it in the most them way possible.
Like:
That time they parallel parked into a space way too small — with five people clapping
When they saved the team presentation with a last-minute pun
The karaoke performance that should’ve been illegal (but got a standing ovation anyway)
These aren’t accomplishments. They’re character. And they stick.
The Accidental Legacy
What makes these moments special?
They weren’t curated. They weren’t planned. They were pure chaos, charm, timing — and unmistakably them.
That one ridiculous story everyone tells, again and again. The moment they became a legend in the group chat. The thing that still makes people laugh, even while crying.
If there were a funeral video montage, this would be slide one. Before the violin music. Before the candlelight.
Just that one clip that makes you go: “God, I miss that weirdo.”
It’s Funny — But It’s Also Memory
Laughter is memory. And honestly, it’s one of the best ways we keep people close.
When we say, “I’d play this at your funeral,” we’re really saying: “This moment — it was so you, it explains everything.”
A Prompt for You (and Your Group Chat)
Think of someone you love. Now ask:
“What clip of them would you play at their funeral — just for the laugh?”
It might be:
The time they danced in the rain like they were in a drama
The firework accident that turned them into a neighborhood myth
That random night they made everyone in the restaurant sing along
Funny how sometimes the best tribute isn’t a speech. It’s just a GIF.
The Real Highlight Reel
At StoryTable, we believe that a life story isn’t just serious interviews and timelines. It’s also these weird, wonderful flashes.
The bloopers. The “you had to be there” moments.
So the next time something chaotic, hilarious, or strangely beautiful happens — Save it. Remember it.
Because someday, someone might say: “This moment? Oh yeah. This is the one I’d play at their funeral.”
How to uncover the deeper stories hidden behind silence
We often assume we know our parents, grandparents, or loved ones simply because we’ve spent years beside them. We’ve seen their routines, heard their advice, eaten their food, maybe even argued over the same old things. But what if some of their most meaningful stories—heartaches, dreams, regrets, even moments of joy—have never been spoken aloud?
It’s not always because they don’t want to share. More often, it’s because no one has ever asked.
Many people carry entire worlds inside them that never surface in everyday conversation. Whether out of modesty, trauma, fear of being misunderstood, or simply habit, these untold stories remain quietly tucked away—waiting for the right moment, or the right question.
This post isn’t about perfect interviews or formal memoirs. It’s about presence, patience, and genuine curiosity. Because sometimes, all it takes is a small, thoughtful question to unlock a memory, a lesson, or a truth that might otherwise have stayed hidden forever.
What’s Been Left Unsaid
Because life isn’t just about what happened — it’s about what stayed quiet.
Some stories are told in dates and facts. Others live in the spaces between. These questions aren’t meant to summarize a life — they’re meant to open it. They invite pause. Reflection. And sometimes, healing.
They’re a place to begin. And if you’re lucky, they’ll lead to more.
1. What is something you’ve always wanted to throw away from your life — but couldn’t? → Because we all carry things: regrets, labels, moments we wish we could erase. Asking this isn’t about fixing. It’s about freeing.
2. What did you give up for your family or someone you loved — and how did it change you? → Because love is often made of quiet sacrifices. And most go unacknowledged.
3. What question do you wish you could ask someone who’s no longer with you? → Because grief doesn’t end with silence. Sometimes it begins there.
4. When did you feel like you were being strong for someone else — even when you weren’t okay? → Because many people are praised for their strength, when what they needed was permission to fall apart.
5. What truth about yourself have you carried, quietly, for too long? → Because everyone has a story they’ve never told — and maybe they’ve just been waiting for the right person to ask.
These aren’t just one-time questions. They’re doorways — leading to memories, emotions, and deeper truths that may not come out right away.
Ask one of these today. Not for answers — but for closeness. And maybe, the beginning of something even deeper.
🕯️ Reading the Silence: What We Often Miss in Our Loved Ones’ Stories
When we think of remembering someone, we often picture their voice—what they said at dinner, the stories they repeated, the catchphrases that made us laugh. But in truth, much of who someone is exists between words: in the pauses, the gestures, the things they never said but always carried.
Not All Silence Is Empty
There’s a kind of silence that comes from deep within a person. It’s not awkward or accidental. It’s practiced. Cultural, even generational. Especially for those raised in hardship or war, or during times when emotions were a private matter, silence becomes its own language. It says: “This is how we survive.”
That’s why some elders may smile when remembering something that sounds painful. Or brush off questions with “It was nothing special”. But that doesn’t mean nothing is there. It means they’ve learned to carry weight quietly.
Memory in the Body
A clenched jaw when talking about school. A shift in posture when someone’s name comes up. A nervous habit that shows up in photos from the 1950s and still happens today.
These are clues.
Psychologists and anthropologists often speak of embodied memory—the idea that our experiences live not just in our minds, but in our muscles, in how we move, sit, gesture. It’s especially true for memories tied to trauma or deep emotion. They resist narration, but they don’t disappear. They become part of how a person is.
The Unspoken Emotions
Sometimes people never talk about a parent, a child, a first love. Not out of shame, but because it hurts too much to name. Other times, they avoid topics they’ve already turned into myth—stories rehearsed for others but emptied of real feeling.
Silence isn’t always avoidance. It’s sometimes a way of protecting the people they love—from the full force of a story that still aches.
Listening with More Than Ears
To understand our elders—or anyone, really—we have to practice another kind of listening:
Listen to tone: Is it too light for the subject? Too flat?
Watch the body: Where do they look? When do they fidget?
Notice the pattern: What do they always skip over?
Sometimes, gently returning to these skipped places opens something. But more often, simply noticing and holding space is enough. The act of asking again—and listening fully—is already a gift.
When Silence Is a Story
Not everyone wants to revisit the past. That’s okay.
But if we never even try to listen—to the words, the silences, the gestures—we miss the richness of who someone is beyond their resume, beyond their role in our life. We miss the contradictions, the humor, the heartbreaks they tried to carry alone.
Sometimes, the most powerful stories begin with silence. They just need someone to sit with them long enough.
John Berger was never just a critic. He was a storyteller, an essayist, a drawer of connections between the visible and the invisible. In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos—a slim, hybrid work first published in 1984—he dismantles the neat boundaries between art criticism, personal memory, poetry, and philosophy.
I first encountered this book during my master’s studies in cultural anthropology, where Berger’s work was treated not only as literature, but as methodology—a way of seeing and thinking about lives. Reading it again now, the book feels startlingly contemporary, even necessary.
In a world saturated by images and half-told stories, Berger reminds us not only how to look, but why it matters. For those of us engaged in the work of preserving life stories—be it through memoirs, interviews, or everyday remembrance—this book is a quiet manifesto.
I. Seeing as an Act of Love
From the first page, Berger sets up a tension between absence and presence, loss and longing. “To look is an act of choice,” he writes in Ways of Seeing, and Faces extends that insight into the realm of memory. To look at a face, a landscape, a photograph—even briefly—is to engage in a moment of affection, even if that moment is fleeting or fraught.
What Berger does masterfully is connect the visual to the emotional. He does not just ask what we see, but what we miss when something disappears. In this way, looking becomes mourning, and remembering becomes a form of devotion.
Berger’s sensibility often reminds me of Mark Rothko’s paintings—those blurred edges, suspended forms, fields of color that seem to weep without a face. Like Rothko, Berger’s work does not shout, but it lingers. It feels its way into the room. To behold is to ache, both artists seem to say.
For families struggling to understand the people they’ve lost—or are losing—this offers something profound. Berger teaches that the practice of noticing is itself a form of love. This perspective, in turn, echoes Erich Fromm’s definition of love—not as a fleeting feeling, but as an ongoing act of care, attention, and responsibility.
II. The Body as Archive
Berger returns often to the idea that memory is not just a mental exercise. It is embodied. We carry our pasts in our gestures, in how we sit, how we carry bags, how we turn our faces.
“The memory of the body is stronger than that of the mind,” he writes.
This connects beautifully to what we now understand through neuroscience: that memory is deeply connected to sensation—smells, touches, sounds. Berger intuited this decades ago. He doesn’t just describe a past moment; he inhabits it, and asks us to do the same.
For those trying to reconstruct the lives of their parents or grandparents, this insight is invaluable. Look not only at their words, he says, but at their postures, their rituals, their silences. The body remembers.
III. Time and Fragmentation
There is no linear narrative in Faces. Berger doesn’t believe in biography as chronology. Instead, the book is structured in fragments: prose sections interspersed with short poems, recollections broken up by aphorisms or philosophical insights. This can be disorienting at first. But then you realize: this is how memory actually works.
Time in this book folds in on itself. A lover long gone appears in a sentence as suddenly as a remembered painting. There are no clean beginnings or endings—just returns.
“Every city has a sex and an age which has nothing to do with demography,” he writes. So, too, every memory has a season, a mood, a weather of its own.
For anyone documenting a life story, Berger’s structure is an important reminder: people do not remember linearly. They remember in constellations.
IV. Language and Loss
One of the most poetic threads in the book is Berger’s meditation on language—particularly in exile. Having lived much of his life in rural France, away from his native England, he reflects on how language can become foreign even when it’s yours.
This is especially poignant for anyone who has migrated, or aged into silence, or simply felt their own vocabulary grow strange. Berger’s prose often slips into the language of longing—for a homeland, for a lover, for clarity.
For adult children trying to piece together a parent’s life—especially across cultures—this theme resonates. Berger seems to whisper: they may not have said everything, but they left clues. In silences. In syntax. In the words they couldn’t quite find.
V. Photography and the Presence of Absence
Throughout Faces, Berger writes about photographs—not just as objects, but as vessels of presence and absence. A photograph captures a moment that no longer exists. And yet, the image persists.
“What makes a photograph profound,” he suggests, “is not only what it shows, but what we know has disappeared.”
This is not merely poetic—it is practical. When working with family archives, photographs can feel like puzzles with missing pieces. Who is that person? What day was this taken? Why are they smiling?
Berger’s approach invites us to treat photos not as evidence, but as invitation—to imagine, to speculate, to feel.
VI. Love, Separation, and the Ordinary
One of the most tender themes in Faces is separation. Berger writes about lovers parted by time, by war, by choice. But the book’s most aching moments are about everyday separations—those caused by the drift of years, misunderstandings, or simply growing older.
There’s a section where he writes about waiting for someone who will never arrive. And yet, the book never dips into sentimentality. Berger’s gift is to treat the ordinary—waiting for a train, chopping wood, drying dishes—as sites of philosophical revelation.
For us at StoryTable, this is key. So often, people think their lives aren’t “interesting enough” to preserve. Berger dismantles that. Every life, he insists, is a web of meaning.
VII. A New Kind of Biography
In this book, biography is not about summary. It’s not about achievements or clean timelines. It’s about presence. About holding contradictions.
“To bear witness is not a passive act,” Berger says. It’s participatory.
Faces isn’t just about one man’s thoughts—it’s a blueprint for how we might begin to truly see one another. And in this way, it becomes an argument not only for remembering, but for preserving.
Final Reflection: What Berger Offers Us Now
In the years since its publication, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos has become a quiet classic. Not a bestseller. Not a pop sensation. But a book that is passed from hand to hand when someone loses a parent. Or when someone tries to write their memoir. Or when someone needs to remember how to look.
It’s not a book that explains how to tell stories. It is itself a story: broken, beautiful, unfinished.
In our work documenting lives—especially those of elders—Berger reminds us that we are not just collecting facts. We are holding space. For contradiction. For forgetting. For love.
To tell someone’s story is to risk seeing them fully. It is to say: your face, your voice, your way of being in the world—brief as it was—mattered.
Have you ever smelled something—roasted sesame oil, an old book, sun-warmed vinyl seats—and been transported straight back to a moment you hadn’t thought about in years? It’s not just nostalgia; it’s your body remembering. Science tells us that memory doesn’t live solely in the brain. It resides in scent, in texture, in posture, in the small details our bodies carry long after our minds forget.
In this post, we explore what it means to remember through the body. We reflect on how childhood memories—especially the ones that return without warning—can guide, comfort, and challenge us. And we offer practical ways to begin reconnecting with those stories, not just with your head, but with your senses.
The Memory Lives in the Muscle
Think back to your childhood. Not a specific story, but a sensation: the weight of a winter coat zipped too high, the sting of a scraped knee, the burnt sweetness of barley tea. These aren’t just random memories—they are the body’s bookmarks.
Neuroscientists have shown that sensory memory—especially smell and touch—are directly connected to the brain’s limbic system, where emotional memory is stored. That’s why a whiff of your grandfather’s cologne or the feel of a school desk under your fingers can bring back a whole world in an instant.
But there’s more than brain chemistry at work here. Cultural anthropologists have long studied “embodied memory”—how traditions, movements, even emotional habits are passed on and retained physically. If your mother always hummed while doing the dishes, you might find yourself doing the same without realizing it. Not because you decided to—but because your body remembers.
The Stories That Never Got Written
For many of us, childhood stories live under the surface. They’re felt rather than told. We remember the rules of the house through our posture. We recall a sibling rivalry not through a specific argument, but through the tension in our shoulders when that sibling calls.
Some of these memories were never spoken aloud. Maybe the adults around you didn’t talk much. Maybe no one asked. Or maybe certain experiences were too confusing to explain. But those moments left traces.
In our work preserving life stories, we often hear people say, “I don’t know what stories I have.” But once they begin with something small—a smell, a sound, a gesture—the rest follows. That’s not just memory. That’s narrative emerging from the body’s archive.
Sensory Prompts to Access Memory
Want to access these deeper, older memories? Here are a few prompts to try:
Smell: Open an old spice jar or childhood shampoo brand. What images come back?
Touch: Run your fingers over tree bark, corduroy, cold metal. What does your body recall?
Sound: Listen to a school bell, a cassette rewinding, a lullaby. What room are you in?
Taste: Eat something your caregiver made. Not the gourmet version—their version.
Movement: Mimic a childhood habit—jumping a crack in the sidewalk, tracing wallpaper patterns. How does it feel?
These are not just creative exercises. They are portals. Your senses are time machines, capable of returning you to places your mind forgot.
When Memory Is Painful
Of course, not every memory feels good. The body also remembers fear, confusion, or shame. A slammed door can bring up feelings long buried. A childhood smell might trigger unease instead of comfort.
That’s why revisiting embodied memory should be done gently. You don’t need to force recall. Let what surfaces come without judgment. And know that even difficult memories, when held with care, can offer insight. They show what you survived. They explain how you learned to move through the world.
Sometimes, these memories explain habits we didn’t understand—why we avoid certain sounds, why we tense during holidays, why we cry at smells others barely notice. When we listen with compassion, we start to see the full shape of who we are.
Sharing the Unspeakable
One of the most powerful parts of embodied memory is that it often reveals stories that words never caught. And when we begin to tell those stories—even haltingly—we give others permission to do the same.
A woman once shared a memory of her grandmother’s cracked hands washing rice. She had never thought of it as a story, but as she described it, she realized how much it said: about sacrifice, care, repetition, and silence. Her whole family came to see her grandmother differently.
Stories like this don’t need plot twists. They don’t even need beginnings or endings. They just need presence. If someone you love tells you, “I don’t have a story,” try asking them, “What does your body remember?” Then wait.
The Practice of Remembering
Memory is not a file cabinet; it’s a garden. It needs tending. It grows best when we return to it with curiosity, not judgment.
Here are a few practices to nurture embodied memory:
Take a “sensory walk” through your home or neighborhood. What do your senses pick up?
Keep a memory journal, not for events, but for impressions—textures, sounds, smells.
Share one small physical memory with someone close. A gesture, a sound, a scene.
Ask elders in your life to describe how something felt—not just what happened.
You’ll find that memory begets memory. One scent leads to a room, that room leads to a feeling, that feeling to a story. The past unfolds not in sequence, but in pulses.
Remembering Forward
Ultimately, the stories we tell aren’t just about the past. They shape how we walk into the future. When we recover the sensory threads of childhood, we reclaim a sense of self that is grounded, complex, and deeply alive.
And in doing so, we offer something lasting—not just for ourselves, but for those who come after. They, too, will one day ask: What did my parents or grandparents feel? How did they carry memory?
Let’s leave them something textured. Something real. Let’s give them what the body remembers.
Story Table 