Fill in the Blank

Lesson 1: Greetings

**Exercise 1.1.** Fill in the blank with your own name. Say the sentence aloud three times.

저는 ________ 입니다.
*Jeoneun ________ imnida.* "I am ________."

**Exercise 1.2.** Greet a person you are meeting for the first time.

안녕하세요. 처음 뵙겠습니다.
*Annyeonghaseyo. Cheoeum boepgetseumnida.* "Hello. I am seeing you for the first time."

---

The workbook gives you a line and trusts you to know what goes on it. That was the first thing I noticed, sitting at my kitchen table in Rochester in the second week of February with the furnace ticking and the window over the sink gone blue with frost. A line about two inches long. Room enough for Maren. Room enough for Maren Elise Hedberg if I wrote small. No room at all for the name on the second page of my adoption file, which was typed by someone in an office in Seoul in 1990 and which nobody has ever called me.

I wrote Maren. I said it three times to the refrigerator. Jeoneun Maren imnida. The book told me Koreans would hear my name as two even beats, Ma-ren, without the American lean on the front, and when I said it that way it sounded like a different woman, someone who had grown up warmer.

I should explain how I came to own a beginner's workbook at thirty-six, because a month before that I would have told you I had no plans to learn Korean, the same way I had no plans to learn Portuguese or to take up curling.

I am a respiratory therapist. I work twelve-hour shifts in the intensive care unit of a large hospital on the west side of Rochester, Minnesota, and most of my working life is spent listening to the way air moves in and out of people who cannot move it well on their own. I set ventilators. I suction airways. I stand at the foot of beds at three in the morning watching the little green wave on a monitor rise and fall, rise and fall, and I can tell you from across a room whether a patient is fighting the vent or riding it. I like the work. It is quiet and exact, and there is an honesty to breath. Either it is getting where it needs to go or it isn't.

Every year the hospital makes its staff fill out a health form, and every year I come to the box that says *Family medical history*, and every year I write *Unknown — adopted* in that box, and every year a nurse in employee health glances at it and says, "Oh, okay," in the tone people use for a small sad thing they have no time for. Last fall I got tired of it. Not heartbroken. Tired, the way you get tired of a squeaky hinge. My brother Nils had done one of those spit-in-a-tube tests the Christmas before to settle an argument with our dad about whether the Hedbergs were really from Småland, and the kit was still in a drawer at my parents' house with the box unopened. I asked Mom if I could have it. She handed it over without a single question, which is how my mother loves people: she gives you the thing and then she makes coffee.

I spat in the tube in October. I mailed it. I forgot about it, mostly.

The email came on the fourteenth of January at 5:52 in the morning, while I was in the break room at the end of a night shift with my mask pulled down around my chin and a granola bar half eaten. *Your results are ready.* I nearly didn't open it. I was thinking about Mr. Sundby in bed fourteen, who had pneumonia on top of emphysema and whose oxygen saturation kept drifting down into the eighties when he slept. I had turned his flow up twice. I was thinking about whether to call the doctor a third time.

Then I opened it. The first page was a pie chart and a colored map, and I skipped them, because I already knew what my face was. Below them was a list of people the company believed I was related to, and the list was one line long.

*B. Ryu.*

Beside the initial and the surname sat three possibilities in a column, in gray type: half sibling, grandparent, aunt. A note underneath said the first was the likeliest, given our ages.

I read it the way I read a chest film at the end of a shift, top to bottom, then bottom to top, looking for the thing I had missed. Three possibilities and a most likely. It was a differential diagnosis, and the patient was me. I sat with the granola bar in my hand. The microwave in the break room had a sticky note on it that said *PLEASE COVER YOUR SOUP*, and I read that note probably twenty times.

Fern Olafson came in to start her day shift, stamping snow off her clogs, and said, "You look like somebody told you a joke you didn't get."

"I have a sister," I said. "Maybe."

Fern is fifty-eight and has worked respiratory longer than I have been alive, and nothing moves her. She took off her hat. She looked at my phone. She said, "Well, you better go tell Mr. Sundby he's not your only problem anymore," and then she sat down next to me and read the whole screen with her glasses pushed up on her forehead, and when she was finished she said, "Half. So one of your folks. Over there."

"Over there," I said.

I drove home at seven-thirty with the sun not yet up. Rochester in January at that hour is a city of white: white lawns, white parking ramps, white plumes standing straight up out of every chimney because the air is too cold to move them. The thermometer on my dashboard said eleven below. I took the long way through downtown, the way I sometimes do when I need to be awake for a few more minutes, and the crows were coming off their winter roost. Every year from December on they gather by the hundreds in the bare lindens and elms around the hospital blocks, and at first light they lift all together, black scraps against a sky going from bruise to pale yellow, every one of them talking at once. I pulled to the curb and watched them with the engine running. They were saying a great deal. I didn't understand any of it, and for the first time in my life that seemed like something I could fix.

I did not message B. Ryu that day. I slept until two, the way you sleep after nights, heavy and without pictures. When I woke up the light in my bedroom had gone the color of weak broth and I lay there and thought, *She took the test too. She had to take the test too.* You don't end up on a list of relatives by accident. Someone in Korea had also spat in a tube and mailed it and waited. That meant someone was looking. I had spent thirty-six years being, as far as I knew, the only person on either side of the ocean who wondered about me, and I had not even wondered very hard.

That's the thing I want to get right about my parents, before anything else in this book. People hear *adopted* and *birth family* and *search* and they assume there was a hole in my childhood that I fell into every night. There wasn't. Karin and Lennart Hedberg picked me up at the Minneapolis airport in February of 1991, when I was eight months old, in a snowstorm that closed the interstate behind them. My father has told that story so often that I could tell it in his voice: the gate, the escort carrying me off the plane in a pink snowsuit three sizes too big, how I looked at his beard and screamed, how my mother took me and I stopped screaming instantly and he said, "Well, that's how it's going to be, then." It has been that way, more or less. My mother is the one I go to. My father is the one who shovels my driveway before I know it snowed.

They never hid anything. There was a blue folder in the hall closet with my file in it, two pages long and a little more, and they told me I could read it whenever I wanted. I read it at twelve and at nineteen and once in my late twenties after a breakup, and each time it said the same small things, and each time I closed it and felt very little. It was like reading the instructions that came with an appliance I already knew how to use.

So I did not go into this hungry. I went into it curious, and a little embarrassed by my curiosity, and protective of the people who raised me.

On the second night I typed a message to B. Ryu in English.

*Hello. My name is Maren Hedberg. I live in Minnesota in the United States. I was born in Busan in 1990 and adopted at eight months. The site says we may be half sisters. I would be glad to hear from you if you want to write. No pressure at all.*

I read it over and took out *No pressure at all* because it sounded like something you say to a coworker about a potluck. Then I put it back in. Then I sent it and shut the laptop and went to stand in my kitchen in my socks.

The answer came four days later. It was in Korean, three short paragraphs of shapes I could not read, little boxes and circles and lines that I recognized the way you recognize a bird you can't name. Underneath it, a single line in English, as if typed slowly by someone looking up each word:

*I am Bo-ram. I think you are my 언니. I am sorry my English is small.*

I knew what the Korean word was only because I pasted it into a search bar, and the search bar told me *eonni*, and the dictionary page told me what it meant. *Older sister. Used by a female speaker.* There was an explanation underneath about how Korean families name each other by where they stand, older and younger, and how a woman calls her older sister eonni and calls a younger sibling dongsaeng, and how people often use the family word instead of a name at all. I read the definition several times. A word that meant *the girl who came before me*, spoken only by a girl. I had been someone's eonni for more than thirty years and had never once been called it.

I did not want to paste the rest of her message into a translation box. I tried, once, and the English that came back was stiff and wrong in places I could feel even without knowing why, a sentence about our mother that came out sounding like a weather report. I deleted it. It felt like reading someone's diary through a keyhole.

That week, between shifts, I went to the public library downtown to look for a phrasebook, and on the bulletin board by the elevators, between a flyer for a knitting circle and one for tax help, there was a sheet of paper with a strip of phone numbers cut into tabs along the bottom. *Beginning Korean. Six months. Tuesday and Thursday evenings, 6:30–8:00. Community Education, Room 2B. Teacher: Mrs. Yoon.* Three of the tabs were already torn off.

I tore off the fourth. I put it in my coat pocket and kept my hand on it all the way home, the little slip of paper going soft under my thumb.

The class started the second week of February. The workbook came with it, the one I described at the start, spiral bound, with a gray cover and the course name in a typeface that tried to be friendly. On the first page Mrs. Yoon made each of us fill in the blank and say our names aloud to the room. There were eight of us around two pushed-together tables. A high school junior named Kyler who wanted to understand the songs he listened to. A man in his seventies, Arnold Ruud, who had milked cows outside Byron for forty years and whose son had married a woman from Incheon, and who wanted to say something to his granddaughter that she would not have to translate. Two nursing students. A couple who were adopting a toddler and wanted a head start. A woman my age who, it turned out, was Korean American and had grown up hearing her parents speak and never speaking back.

And me. When it was my turn I said, "Jeoneun Maren imnida," with the two even beats, and Mrs. Yoon, who is small and wears her reading glasses on a beaded chain and has a voice that could stop traffic, tilted her head and said, "Good. Again. Slower. You are not in a hurry."

I said it again, slower.

"Now greet me," she said. "First meeting."

I looked at the page. "Annyeonghaseyo. Cheoeum boepgetseumnida."

She bowed her head a little. Not much. The angle you would use for a stranger you had decided to like. "Bangapseumnida," she said. *Glad to meet you.* "Next."

That night I came home and opened the workbook to the first page again and looked at my name on its line. Under it there were other exercises, other lines, a whole book of them, waiting. A greeting is only the place where two people agree to begin. I opened my laptop. I wrote back to Bo-ram, not in English this time, a single line I had copied carefully from the back of the workbook, letter by letter, checking every stroke.

*안녕하세요, 보람 씨. 반가워요.*

Hello, Bo-ram. I am glad.

The crows were still arguing over the downtown rooftops when I drove under them the next morning, and I still did not know a word of what they said, but I had started.

Lesson 2: Numbers

**Exercise 2.1.** Korean has two sets of numbers. Native Korean numbers count things and age. Sino-Korean numbers count months, money, minutes and dates. Write the correct number in each blank.

나는 ________ 살이에요. (native) *Naneun ________ sarieyo.* "I am ________ years old."
________ 개월 (Sino) *________ gaewol* "________ months"

**Exercise 2.2.** Count from one to ten, both ways.

하나, 둘, 셋 … *hana, dul, set …*
일, 이, 삼 … *il, i, sam …*

---

Mrs. Yoon said the first thing to understand about Korean numbers is that there are too many of them. She said this on our third evening, writing two columns on the whiteboard in a marker that was running dry, so that the second column came out pale and ghostly next to the first.

"This side," she said, tapping the dark column, "is Korean from long ago. Hana, dul, set. You use this for counting apples, counting people, counting your age. This side," the pale one, "came with Chinese writing. Il, i, sam. You use this for phone numbers, money, months, minutes. Bus number. Floor number. Your birthday."

"How do you know which one?" asked Kyler.

"You don't," she said. "You make a mistake, someone laughs, next time you know."

Arnold Ruud said that was how he had learned to drive a tractor, and she pointed her marker at him and said, "Exactly correct," and that was the first time the whole room laughed together.

I did the exercise at home that night on the couch with the workbook propped on my knees and my feet under a wool blanket my grandmother Hedberg knitted in the 1970s, a brown and orange zigzag that my mother keeps trying to retire. *I am ________ years old.* Native number. Thirty is seoreun. Six is yeoseot. Seoreun-yeoseot sal. I said it out loud and it sounded like a staircase going down.

*________ months.* Sino number. I knew which month I would write. Pal gaewol. Eight months. That is how old I was when I came, and it is the number in the blue folder that has always seemed to me the most important, more than my birthday, which is estimated, more than the case number, which is long and means nothing to anyone outside an office.

I am good with numbers. It is part of my work. A patient on a ventilator lives inside a small set of them: the respiratory rate, the tidal volume, the pressure, the percent of oxygen we are giving, the percent that is reaching their blood. I chart them every hour. I can tell you that a resting adult breathes twelve to twenty times a minute and that a newborn breathes forty to sixty, quick and shallow like a small animal. When I teach new graduates, I make them stand at the bedside and count a patient's breaths for one full minute with their eyes on the chest, not the screen. Most of them get bored at about twenty seconds. The ones who make it to sixty usually turn out to be good at the job.

So when I sat down that week to answer Bo-ram's second message, which was longer than her first, and which I still could not read, I did the only thing I knew how to do with a thing I did not understand. I counted.

Her message had seven sentences. I could tell by the periods. Three of them contained numbers written in Arabic numerals, which sat in the middle of the Korean like stones in a stream: *1990*, *2022*, *51*. I wrote those three numbers on the back of an envelope and looked at them for a long time.

1990. My birth year. 2022. Something had happened in 2022. 51. An age, I thought. Someone's age.

I could guess. Anyone could guess. I did not want to guess.

I went back to the site and read the fine print under the three possibilities. A full sibling, it said, would share about half of my DNA. A half sibling, about a quarter. A grandparent, an aunt, an uncle: also about a quarter, which was why it had given me a column of answers instead of one. But given the age on her profile, thirty-one, and given mine, the half sibling line was the likeliest by a long way. A quarter. I thought about a quarter of a thing. A quarter of a pie. A quarter of a tank. A quarter of my body's instructions written in the same hand as a quarter of hers.

At my next shift I asked Fern what she would do.

"About the numbers?" She was restocking the cart outside room nine with suction catheters, ripping open a cardboard box with her bare hands. "Find somebody who reads it. You're not going to learn enough Korean by Tuesday."

"I don't want to use a translation website."

"So don't. You work in a building with eleven thousand people. Somebody here reads Korean."

She was right. I had only never thought about it. I went to the cafeteria at two in the morning, where the night crowd sits in the corner by the windows that look out over the dark parking ramp, and I stood near the coffee urns feeling foolish. I didn't do anything that night. I bought a bagel and went back up.

What I did instead, the next evening, was ask Mrs. Yoon after class. Everyone else had gone. She was wiping the board with the side of her hand, which left the faint gray ghost of the two number columns still visible, and I stood by the door holding my workbook against my chest.

"Mrs. Yoon. Can I ask you something that is not about homework?"

She looked at me over the beaded chain of her glasses. "You can ask."

I told her. Not all of it, but the shape of it. Adopted, Busan, the test, a sister. I said I had messages I couldn't read and I didn't want to read them badly.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I am not the right person."

I must have looked stung, because she added, quickly, "Not because I don't want. Because I am your teacher. If I read your family letters, then on Tuesday I am thinking about your family when I should be thinking about your verbs. And you are thinking that I know your business." She put the eraser down. "There is a young woman at your hospital. A researcher, in a laboratory. Her mother and I talk on the phone. She is from Daegu, she is very smart, she is lonely here, and she has a good heart. I will ask her."

"You don't have to—"

"I will ask her," Mrs. Yoon said again, in the voice that stops traffic, and that was that.

Her name was Ahn So-ra, and she wrote to me two days later in an email that began *Hi Maren! Mrs. Yoon told me you need someone to read Korean for you. I would love to help. Also I would love to have a friend who is not a mouse.* She worked in a lab that studied the way certain lung cells repair themselves, which meant that, in a roundabout way, we were in the same business. She was twenty-nine. She had been in Rochester for fourteen months. She called herself Sora, two even beats, and she said nobody in Minnesota could pronounce Ahn properly so I shouldn't try.

We met at a coffee shop downtown on a Sunday afternoon with the skyway overhead throwing a long stripe of shadow across the street. Sora was tiny and fast-moving and wore a puffy black coat that came down past her knees, the kind I would later see on what seemed like half of Seoul, and she pulled it off and folded it on the seat next to her like a sleeping bag. She ordered a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. She asked me three questions in a row without waiting for answers, then laughed at herself and stopped.

"Okay," she said. "Show me."

I turned my laptop toward her. She read Bo-ram's first message and her second, scrolling slowly, her lips moving very slightly. Then she sat back.

"She writes very politely," Sora said. "Very careful. Like she's writing to someone older that she wants to respect." She glanced at me. "Which is you. You're the older one."

"What does it say?"

Sora did not translate word for word. She told it to me the way you tell a friend what a letter says, sitting across from them, with her own pauses in it. I have thought since about how much I owe to the fact that the first time I heard my birth mother described, it was in a person's voice and not a box on a screen.

Bo-ram's mother's name was Seo Geum-ja. In Korea, Sora explained, women keep their own family name when they marry, so Bo-ram is Ryu like her father, and her mother was Seo. Geum-ja had been born in 1971. In 1990, when she was nineteen, she had a baby girl in Busan who was adopted overseas. Some years later she married Bo-ram's father, Ryu Dong-chul, and Bo-ram was born in 1995. Geum-ja died in 2022, at fifty-one, of a heart problem that came on fast. A few months before she died, Bo-ram wrote, her mother had told her for the first time that she had an older sister who had gone to America. Her mother did not say much more than that. Bo-ram had thought about it for a long time. Then, last year, she took the test.

*I do not know if you are the one,* Bo-ram had written, *but the numbers say you are.*

Sora stopped there. The whipped cream on her hot chocolate had sunk into a pale ring.

"That's the end," she said. "Then she says she hopes you are healthy. And she says sorry again for her English, which, by the way, is not so bad."

I did the arithmetic in my head because I could not do anything else. Nineteen in 1990. Fifty-one in 2022. Four years ago. I had been thirty-two in 2022. I had been on day shift that year. I had been, I tried to remember, training for a half marathon that I never ran because of a stress fracture in my left foot. Somewhere in that year a woman whose face I had never seen had stopped breathing, and nobody had counted for her the way I count for strangers.

"Maren," Sora said. "Are you okay?"

"I'm doing math," I said.

She nodded as if that were a reasonable thing to do. Then she reached over and turned the laptop back toward herself, and said, "Do you want to write back now? I can type it. You tell me, I'll make it Korean. Then later you learn, and you do it yourself, and I am out of a job."

We wrote back. It took an hour. I said what I wanted to say, and Sora asked me what I meant, and then asked me again, and then typed, deleting and retyping, explaining as she went: this word is softer, this ending is more polite, this one sounds like a bank. I said I was sorry about her mother. I said I would like to know her if she wanted. I told her my age, my job, my city, my parents' names. I said I was learning Korean. I asked her how old her daughter was, because her profile photo had a little girl in a yellow hat in it.

At the end Sora said, "How do you want to sign? Your name, or eonni?"

I looked at the screen. Two even beats. "Maren," I said. "For now."

That night I filled in the second blank in my workbook. Pal gaewol, eight months. Then, without quite meaning to, I wrote two more numbers in the margin beside it, small, in pencil, where nobody else would ever see them: 19, the age she was. 51, the age she stopped.

On Tuesday Mrs. Yoon walked us through counting to ten in both systems, and the whole class chanted the native numbers together, eight of us saying hana, dul, set to a room on the second floor of the library, and I kept the count the way I keep it at the bedside, steady, all the way to yeol.

Lesson 3: Family Words

**Exercise 3.1.** Korean family words depend on who is speaking. Match each word to its meaning for a *female* speaker.

언니 *eonni* ____ a. younger sibling
오빠 *oppa* ____ b. older sister
동생 *dongsaeng* ____ c. older brother
엄마 *eomma* ____ d. mom
아빠 *appa* ____ e. dad

**Exercise 3.2.** Draw your family. Write the correct word under each person.

---

The second exercise had a box on the page, four inches square, with a dotted line across the bottom for labels. That was all. *Draw your family.* I think whoever wrote the workbook pictured a stick-figure mother and father and two stick-figure children holding hands under a sun with lines coming out of it. I sat with my pencil over the box for so long that the lead left a gray dot where it rested.

Mrs. Yoon went around the table that Thursday and had each of us hold up our drawings. Arnold Ruud had drawn a barn with eleven people in front of it, including a dog, and labeled the dog *gae*, which was not on the list but which he had looked up on his own, and Mrs. Yoon gave him a gold star sticker from a sheet she kept in her purse. Kyler had drawn his mom and his stepdad and a little half-brother with a baseball bat. The couple who were adopting had drawn the two of them and a blank circle with a question mark inside it, and they looked at each other when they held it up, and nobody said anything, and Mrs. Yoon said, "Very good. Very honest."

Mine was not finished. I held it up anyway. Two people on the left, a tall one with a beard and a small round one with short hair. Me in the middle. A boy beside me. On the right, nothing. White paper.

"Who goes there?" Mrs. Yoon asked, pointing at the white.

"I don't know how to draw her yet," I said.

She looked at me for a second longer than she looked at anyone else that night, and then she said, "Okay. Next week," and moved on to the nursing students.

The rule for family words, as she taught it, goes like this. A woman calls her older sister *eonni* and her older brother *oppa*. A man calls his older sister *nuna* and his older brother *hyeong*. Anyone younger than you is your *dongsaeng*, and if you need to be specific you can add *yeo* for girl or *nam* for boy. Your mom is *eomma* when you are little and when you are close, *eomeoni* when you are grown or when you are being respectful. Your dad is *appa*, then *abeoji*. There are separate words for your mother's side and your father's side, so that your mother's mother and your father's mother are not the same kind of grandmother. There are words for the wife of your older brother and the husband of your younger sister. Mrs. Yoon drew it on the board as a branching diagram that took up the whole thing, and Kyler said, "This is insane," and she said, "This is a family," and wrote *gajok* at the top, which means family.

"In English," she said, "you can talk about a person for one hour and never know if they are older or younger than you. In Korean, impossible. The language will not let you."

I liked that, and I didn't. I liked the idea of a language that refused to let anyone be vague about where they stood. I didn't like how it made me notice that I didn't know where I stood, not entirely. I was the eonni. That much was clear. But what was Geum-ja to me? What did I call a mother I had never called anything? *Eomma* was the word for the woman who wiped your nose. *Eomeoni* was more distant, more formal, the word you would use for your friend's mother or your own mother in a letter. Neither of them felt like it fit. And I already had a mom. She lives eleven minutes from my house, and she makes the best scalloped potatoes in Olmsted County.

I drove to my parents' house that Sunday for dinner. They still live in the house I grew up in, a two-story with green siding in an old neighborhood off the hospital end of town where the trees are tall enough to arch over the street. In March the snow along the curbs had gone gray and granular, the color of old dishwater, with black grit from the sand trucks frozen into it in layers like rings in a tree. My father was out front with a steel ice chopper, breaking up the ridge at the end of the driveway that the city plow had left. He has been retired from the county highway department for six years, and for thirty-one years before that he drove a plow on the night routes out past Stewartville, and he still cannot stand to see a ridge of packed snow at the end of a driveway. He considers it a personal comment.

"You missed a spot," I said, getting out of the car.

"I'm getting to it." He leaned on the chopper. He has a white beard now, trimmed close, and a red wool cap he has owned since before I was born, and when he smiles his eyes go almost shut. "Your mother made the potatoes."

"I know. I could smell them from the corner."

Inside, the kitchen windows were fogged from the oven and my mother was setting the table in the dining room with the good placemats, the ones with the blue Dala horses on them that her sister sent from Sweden in the eighties. Nils was there, in from his crew's rotation, still in his wool socks and flannel, sitting at the counter eating olives out of the jar. He is three years younger than I am. He is my parents' biological son, which surprised everyone including the doctors, and he has never in his life treated me as anything other than the bossy older sister who taught him to ride a bike by letting go before he was ready.

I told them at the table, after the potatoes but before the bars. I had told them the first week, on the phone, that I had a match. I had not told them about Geum-ja, or the numbers, or Sora reading the message aloud in the coffee shop. I told them now. I said her name, and her age, and that she had died.

My mother put her fork down. She is a retired school librarian, and she has a librarian's way of listening, very still, with her whole face, as if you are the only book in the building. When I finished she said, "Oh, honey," and then she said, "Oh, that poor girl," and it took me a moment to understand she meant Geum-ja. Nineteen. My mother was thinking of her at nineteen.

My father didn't say anything. He looked at his plate. Then he got up and went into the kitchen, and we could hear him running water in the sink, and Nils looked at me across the table and raised his eyebrows. When my father came back he had a dish towel in his hands, which he was folding and refolding, and he sat down and said, "Well. Fifty-one. That's no age at all."

"No," I said.

"And this girl in Busan. The sister. She has a family?"

"A husband and a little girl. Seven."

"Seven," he said, and nodded as if that settled something. "Well, then she's an aunt. You're an aunt." He turned to my mother. "Karin, she's an aunt."

"I heard, Len."

"I'm going to be an aunt's father," he said, and Nils snorted, and my father pointed the folded towel at him and said, "You laugh, but you've given me nothing in that department," and the table relaxed, the way it does when my father decides it should.

After dinner my mother and I did the dishes together. She washes, I dry. We have done it this way since I was tall enough to reach the cupboards. I told her about the workbook, the box, the drawing I couldn't finish. I said I didn't know how to put both of them on the same page without it looking like I was choosing.

My mother handed me a wet glass. "Then don't put them on the same line," she said. "Put them on different lines. Next to each other. With you underneath both."

"Like a tree."

"Like a tree." She rinsed a plate. "You know your grandmother kept the Hedberg side on the blank pages at the back of her Swedish cookbook? Pages and pages, in pencil, every cousin back to the ones who came over on the boat. Nobody ever said she had to choose which side of the family went first. She just drew both of them and they met at the bottom where the kids were."

"Did she put me in it?"

My mother stopped washing. "Of course she put you in it. She put you in it the day we called from the airport. In ink."

I had not known that. I dried the plate three times.

That night, back at my own kitchen table, I started a family tree in the private family space Bo-ram had invited me into the week before, the one her cousin had set up so that the Ryu and Seo relatives could share pictures without the whole internet looking. Sora had helped me through the Korean on the invitation screen, which asked me to choose my name and my relationship. I had chosen *Maren* and, after a long pause, *eonni*.

It was a plain screen. A white field and a box for each person and lines you could drag between them. Bo-ram had already put herself in, and Tae-ho, her husband, and Ha-eun, the little girl in the yellow hat. Above Bo-ram there were two boxes: *Ryu Dong-chul* and *Seo Geum-ja*, with a small gray line under Geum-ja's name showing her years, 1971–2022. Off to the side, by itself, with no line connecting it to anything, there was a box with no name in it, only a word in Korean that Sora had told me meant *older sister*. Bo-ram had made a place for me before she knew if I was real.

I filled it in. *Maren Hedberg, 1990.* Then I did what my mother said. Above my box I made two new boxes, side by side with Geum-ja's, and typed *Karin Hedberg* and *Lennart Hedberg*. I drew a line from each of them down to me. I drew a line from Geum-ja down to me. Then I sat and looked at the space above me where a fourth box should go, the place for whoever my father was. There was no name. Bo-ram didn't know. Bo-ram's mother, as far as anyone could tell, had never said.

Bo-ram had offered, in her third message, to post photographs of our mother. I had asked Sora to write back for me: *Not yet, please. I would like to see her for the first time when I am there with you.* I could not have explained why, except that I had waited thirty-six years to see a face and it seemed wrong to see it first on a laptop between a utility bill and a work schedule. Bo-ram wrote back one word, which Sora said meant *understood*, and a second word, which meant *promise*.

So the box under Geum-ja's name had no picture in it either. I left the box above my own name empty too. I didn't delete the space. I just left a white place on the screen above my name, next to the three people I could account for, and I drew a dotted line up to it, the kind you use for something you can't confirm.

On Christmas Eve, every year of my life, my father has made lutefisk. It is a family joke and also it is not a joke at all. He soaks it himself in the garage in a white bucket for days, changing the water, and the smell gets into the whole house, a briny, faintly soapy smell that my mother pretends to hate. He serves it in a white sauce with allspice and boiled potatoes, and there is lefse with butter and sugar beside it, and nobody under the age of sixty eats much of the fish, and he doesn't care, because he says it's not about the taste, it's about doing it. When I was nine I asked why we ate a food nobody liked and he said, "Because my grandmother did, and her mother did, and it would be a shame to be the one who stopped." I remember that more clearly than almost anything he has ever said to me.

I thought about that bucket in the garage as I looked at the tree on my screen. Two sides. One where the food and the stories went back so far nobody remembered why, and one where I could not even fill in a name.

I took the workbook out of my bag and finished the drawing in the box. My parents on the left. A woman on the right, drawn smaller, in a long coat, because I had no idea what she looked like and a coat seemed safe. Me in the middle, with lines going up to all three. Nils beside me. Bo-ram on the other side, with a small girl in a hat. Above me, between the coat and my father's beard, a dotted line going up to nothing.

Under my mother I wrote *eomma*. Under the woman in the coat, after a long time, I wrote *eomeoni*. Under Bo-ram I wrote *dongsaeng*. Under myself I wrote *eonni*, and it was the first time I had written the word in my own hand.

Lesson 4: Asking Directions

**Exercise 4.1.** Ask where a place is. Fill in the blank with a place from the list.

________ 이/가 어디예요?
*________ i/ga eodiyeyo?* "Where is ________?"

병원 *byeongwon* hospital · 시장 *sijang* market · 역 *yeok* station · 바다 *bada* sea

**Exercise 4.2.** Give directions.

왼쪽 *oenjjok* left · 오른쪽 *oreunjjok* right · 똑바로 *ttokbaro* straight ahead · 여기 *yeogi* here · 저기 *jeogi* over there

---

In April the snow finally let go of Rochester all at once, the way it does some years, as if somebody pulled a plug. For two days the gutters ran like creeks and every parking lot was a shallow brown lake with the sky in it. Then the ground showed through, matted and yellow, littered with everything the winter had been hiding: a mitten, a plastic sled runner, the corner of a pizza box, a whole rubber boot standing upright on the median of Second Street as if its owner had stepped out of it and kept walking.

Mrs. Yoon had us practice asking directions by sending us around the second floor of the library in pairs with index cards. My partner was Arnold Ruud. His card said *byeongwon*, hospital, and mine said *sijang*, market, and we were supposed to ask each other and answer using only the words on the page.

"Sijang-i eodiyeyo?" I asked him.

Arnold studied his sheet with his reading glasses down on his nose. He had big, square hands, the knuckles thick from decades of milking, and he held the workbook the way some men hold a seed catalog in January, careful of the spine. "Jeogi," he said, and pointed at the drinking fountain. "Ttokbaro. Oenjjok."

"There's no market by the drinking fountain, Arnold."

"There is now," he said.

We got through it. We were not the best pair. The nursing students had worked out a whole route to the restrooms with three turns. But Arnold, as we walked back to the table, said in English, very quietly, "My daughter-in-law says the hardest thing when she came here wasn't the language. It was that she didn't know where anything was. Where to buy the right rice. Where the doctor was. She said she felt like a ghost for a year." He sat down heavily. "I didn't know that until last Thanksgiving. Twelve years she's been in my family."

I thought about that while Mrs. Yoon wrote the next exercise on the board. *Where is the hospital?* For most people in that room it was a practice sentence. For me it was a real question. The blue folder said I was born at a hospital in Busan. It gave the name. That was all it gave: no ward, no doctor, no time of day. A name, and the district.

Sora and I had been meeting on Sunday afternoons since March. We rotated between the coffee shop and my kitchen and, once, her apartment, a fifth-floor one-bedroom by the river with a rice cooker that sang a little electronic song when it finished and a whole shelf of instant noodles in red packages arranged by spice level. She worked six days a week in the lab and said Sundays with me were the only time she spoke Korean out loud except for calls with her mother. I was, I think, a good excuse.

By April the messages between Bo-ram and me had settled into a rhythm. I would write in English, in the private family space, and Sora would sit next to me and help me make it into Korean, and then I would copy it out a second time by hand into a notebook so I could study the shapes. Bo-ram would write back in Korean, with a line or two of English at the end, and on Sunday Sora would read it to me aloud. She always read the whole thing first in her head, her lips moving a little, and then she would say, "Okay," and tell me. If something was sad she said it slower. If something was funny she laughed before she got to it, so I always knew a joke was coming.

The week of the asking-directions lesson, Bo-ram sent a map.

It was not a drawing. It was a map of Busan inside the family space, the kind where you can pin places and attach a note and a photograph to each pin. Bo-ram had made three pins. Sora pulled my laptop closer and leaned in.

"This one," she said, touching the screen over a blue pin near the water, "is the market. Jagalchi. You know it?"

"I've seen pictures."

"Everyone in Korea knows it. It's the big fish market, right on the harbor. The women who work there are famous, the Jagalchi ajimae. That's Busan for ajumma. Tough. Loud. They can clean a fish in two seconds." She clicked the pin. A note came up in Korean, and a photograph of a long covered aisle with red plastic tubs on either side and fluorescent light reflecting off wet concrete. "Bo-ram says: our mother worked here from when she was seventeen. She cleaned and sold fish at a stall that belonged to someone else. Later, after she married, she stopped. Bo-ram says Mom always said she could still smell it in her hair for twenty years."

I looked at the photograph. Red tubs. Gray water. A rubber hose coiled on the floor like something sleeping.

"This one," Sora said, moving to a red pin farther up the hill, "is the hospital."

The name matched the one in my folder. I knew it would, but I still felt my stomach drop when I saw the characters spelled out in English underneath. There was a photograph of a tall beige building with a glass entryway, very new.

"Bo-ram says the old building was torn down about ten years ago. This is the new one. Same place. She says Mom told her you were born there, in the summer, and it was very hot, and the fans were going in the hallway." Sora paused. "That's all she says about it."

"That's all she knows," I said.

"Yes," Sora said. "I think so."

The third pin was a green one, on an island across a short bridge from the city center, in a district called Yeongdo. It was Bo-ram's apartment. The photograph showed a stack of tall white buildings on a steep slope, with a sliver of the harbor below them, cranes and ships, and a bridge in the distance painted a dull sea-green. "She says the bridge still lifts," Sora said. "At a set time, for visitors now. It's old. She says Ha-eun likes to watch it."

I sat back. On the screen the three pins sat in their little triangle: the market by the water, the hospital up the hill, the apartment across the bridge. Inside that triangle, more or less, was the entire known story of my first eight months, and the first nineteen years of the woman who had me, and the life of the sister I had never met. Everything outside it was white.

"Can I add one?" I asked.

Sora pushed the laptop toward me. I searched for Rochester, Minnesota, and the map pulled back and back, over the Sea of Japan, over the Pacific, over the long white curve of Alaska, down across the plains, and the sheer distance of it unspooling on the screen made both of us go quiet. I dropped a pin on my own neighborhood. Then I scrolled across town and dropped another one on the hospital where I work, the west-side building where I stand at the foot of beds and count.

"What do you want the note to say?" Sora asked.

I thought about it. Then I typed, in English, and she translated, and I copied it again by hand into my notebook that night: *This is where I work. I help people breathe. It is a very big hospital and I still get lost in it sometimes.*

Under the pin for my house I put a photograph from the week before, taken from my front step: the street wet and shining, the yards matted yellow, the sky a thin cold blue, the rubber boot still standing on the median two blocks down if you looked closely. *This is my street. Spring came two days ago. In Minnesota we say spring when the snow is gone, even if it is still cold.*

When I clicked out of the map, the view zoomed all the way back to show the whole thing at once. Three pins on one side of the world and two on the other, and between them nothing but blue.

Sora rested her chin on her hand. "When I came here," she said, "I didn't know where the grocery store was for three weeks. I ate granola bars from the vending row in the hospital basement. My mother sent me a box of food by mail and it cost more than the food." She smiled. "Then a lady at the lab drove me to the Asian market on the south side. I almost cried in the frozen aisle. They had fish cakes."

"Fish cakes made you cry?"

"Eomuk," she said. "You'll see. When you go to Busan you'll understand. Every corner in winter, there's a cart with a pot of broth, and the fish cakes on long sticks, and you stand there and eat them and drink the broth from a paper cup. Busan eomuk is the best in Korea. Everyone says so, even people from Seoul, and they never say anything good about anywhere else."

"When I go to Busan," I said.

She looked at me. "You're going, right?"

I had not said it out loud before. I had thought it, in the car, in the shower, at the foot of a bed in the middle of the night. I had looked at flights once, and closed the window, and looked again. I had not told my parents. I had not told Bo-ram.

"After the class," I said. "When I can ask where things are."

That Tuesday Mrs. Yoon had us write one real question in the space at the bottom of the lesson page, using the pattern, a question we might actually need to ask someday. Kyler wrote *Where is the concert?* The couple who were adopting wrote *Where is the bathroom?* and laughed, and then the woman, more quietly, crossed it out and wrote *Where is the park?* Arnold wrote *Where is my son's house?* and sat looking at it.

I wrote: *Jagalchi sijang-i eodiyeyo?* Where is Jagalchi market?

Under it, after a long time, I wrote a second line, smaller. I didn't have the vocabulary for the question I really meant, so I used the pattern I had, and it came out simple and wrong and exactly right.

*Eomma-ga eodiyeyo?* Where is Mom?

Mrs. Yoon came around and read over my shoulder, the way she did with everyone. She looked at the second line for a while. Then she took my pencil and, without a word, made one small correction, adding a single short stroke to one of my letters that I had left off. She gave the pencil back. "Now it's correct," she said, and moved on.

Lesson 5: Food

**Exercise 5.1.** Say these before and after a meal.

잘 먹겠습니다. *Jal meokgetseumnida.* "I will eat well." (before)
잘 먹었습니다. *Jal meogeotseumnida.* "I ate well." (after)

**Exercise 5.2.** Fill in the blank.

________ 맛있어요! *________ masisseoyo!* "________ is delicious!"

---

The first hotteok I ever made was a disaster, and the second was worse, and the third my father ate standing up at my stove, blowing on it, and said was the best thing he had put in his mouth since the State Fair.

That was May. The lilacs along my back fence had come out in a two-day rush, and the whole yard smelled of them, sweet and a little like soap, and the evenings had gone long and gold. Mrs. Yoon had assigned a food unit, and for homework each of us was supposed to make one Korean dish at home and bring a photograph. Kyler made instant ramyeon and added an egg, which Mrs. Yoon accepted with visible pain. Arnold's daughter-in-law made him a whole tray of kimbap and he brought it in and claimed he had helped roll it, and when Mrs. Yoon asked him what the green thing was, he said, "Spinach," with great confidence, and it was.

I chose hotteok because Sora told me to.

"It's winter street food," she said. "So it's wrong for May. But it's easy and it's sweet and your father will like it."

"How do you know what my father will like?"

"Every father likes hotteok," Sora said. "It is a scientific fact."

She came over on a Sunday with a bag of glutinous rice flour, a small bag of chopped peanuts, and a box of dark brown sugar she had bought at the Asian market on the south side of town. I had the rest: regular flour, yeast, cinnamon, oil. We made the dough in my biggest mixing bowl, warm milk and water and yeast and sugar and the two flours, and Sora stirred it with a wooden spoon until it went from lumpy to glossy and stringy, pulling up off the spoon in long elastic threads.

"It's very sticky," she said. "Too sticky. That's correct."

We covered it with a dish towel and set it near the warm stove, and while it rose we sat on my back step in the lilac smell with two cans of sparkling water and she read me Bo-ram's latest message.

Bo-ram had written about food too. I think she had looked at my workbook page, which I had photographed and posted in the family space, and decided to answer it. She said that when she was little, in winter, her mother used to take her to the market on Saturdays after the stall work was finished, and they would stand at a cart near the subway exit and eat eomuk on skewers out of a big flat pan of broth. The fish cakes in Busan, she said, are folded on the stick like ribbon, like a long flat noodle bent back and forth, and they sit in the broth all day with radish and kelp and green onions so the broth becomes the best part. You eat one, you hold out your paper cup, the lady fills it from a ladle, and you drink it standing in the cold with your hands around the cup. Her mother always ate exactly three. Never two, never four.

"Bo-ram says she still eats three," Sora said. "She says it's not a rule. It's just what her body does."

There was more. Bo-ram had asked her father, Dong-chul, how her mother made eomuk broth at home, because she had never written it down. He had told her, and Bo-ram had typed it up and put it on a page in the family space with a photograph of a dented aluminum pot on a two-burner stove. Sora read it aloud slowly, like a recipe should be read.

"Dried anchovies, big ones, with the heads and the black insides taken out so it's not bitter. A square of dried kelp, about as big as your hand. Korean radish, the fat white one, cut in thick coins. Cold water. Bring it up slowly, not boiling hard, and take out the kelp before it gets slimy. Then the anchovies after twenty minutes. Then the radish stays. Soy sauce, a little. Salt. Green onion at the end." She looked up. "Then the fish cakes go in. Bo-ram says her father told her, *Your mother always said the broth must be clear enough to see the bottom of the pot.*"

I asked Sora to read that last line again.

Under the recipe, in the space where you could add a comment, I posted a picture I had taken the week before at my mother's house: the index card for her scalloped potatoes, stained and soft at the corners, in her neat school-librarian cursive. *Slice potatoes thin. Layer with onion, flour, butter, salt, pepper. Pour scalded milk to just below the top. Bake 350 until brown and bubbling, about 1½ hours. Don't rush it.* My mother had underlined *Don't rush it* twice in a different pen, probably years later, and I typed a note under the photo saying so. Sora translated the card into Korean for Bo-ram, and when she got to *Don't rush it* she laughed and said, "Every mother in the world writes this sentence."

When the dough had doubled, we oiled our hands and pulled off pieces the size of golf balls. You flatten each one in your palm, put a spoonful of filling in the center, brown sugar and cinnamon and chopped peanuts mixed together, and pinch the edges up around it into a sealed ball. Then into a pan of hot oil, seam side down, and after a minute you press it flat with a spatula so it spreads into a round, thin pancake with the sugar melting inside.

My first one tore when I pinched it and the sugar spilled into the oil and smoked, and the whole kitchen smelled like burnt caramel and the smoke detector went off, and Sora waved a dish towel under it while I fanned the back door open and closed. My second one I pressed too early and the dough split down the middle and the filling oozed out like lava, black at the edges. Sora ate it anyway, crouched by the stove, making small sounds of pain because the sugar was still molten.

"Hot," she said. "Very hot. You have to blow."

"You should have waited."

"In Korea nobody waits," she said, her mouth full. "That's the whole point. You burn your tongue, you complain, you eat another one."

The third one came out perfectly. Golden brown on both sides, crisp at the edges, slightly puffed, with a dark seam of sugar showing through in one place like a vein in marble. I slid it onto a paper towel and we both stood and looked at it.

That was when my father knocked on the back door. My mother had sent him over with a casserole dish I'd left at their house, and he came in holding it in both hands with his red cap on, smelling the air, and said, "Something's been on fire."

"Two somethings," Sora said. "This is the one that survived."

He put the dish down. He looked at the hotteok on its paper towel. I tore it in half for him and warned him about the sugar, and he did not listen, the way he has never once listened about anything being hot, and he bit into it and immediately opened his mouth and breathed out with his eyes squeezed shut, and Sora said, "You have to blow!" and he said, "Now she tells me," and then he chewed, slowly, and swallowed.

"Well," he said. "Well, that's good. That's very good."

"Masisseoyo," Sora said to him. "Say it. Masisseoyo. It means it's delicious."

My father looked at her with his eyes half shut, the way he does when he is smiling and pretending not to. "Ma-shi-sso-yo," he said, carefully, like a man stepping onto ice.

"Good!" Sora clapped. "Again!"

"Masisseoyo," he said, better. Then he ate the other half.

We made eight more. Some of them were ugly, but none of them caught fire. My father stayed and ate three and said he had to stop because my mother would know, and then he ate a fourth. Sora showed him how to fold one in a paper towel to hold it, the way they do on the street, so the oil doesn't get on your fingers. He wrapped two in foil to take home to my mother. He stood at my back door with the foil package in his hand and the lilacs behind him and said, "Your mother's going to want this recipe."

"I'll put it with the potatoes," I said.

He didn't know what I meant, and I didn't explain. After he left, Sora and I sat at the kitchen table with the last hotteok between us on a plate, cooled enough to eat without blowing, and the room still faintly hazy and smelling of cinnamon and burnt sugar and lilac. I took a photo of the plate and posted it in the family space under the eomuk broth recipe and my mother's potato card, with a note: *My first hotteok. My father ate four. He said masisseoyo.*

Bo-ram answered within the hour, which meant it was early morning in Busan. She must have been up with Ha-eun. Her reply was mostly in Korean, and Sora read it to me while picking peanuts off the plate one at a time.

"She says it looks very good for a first try. She says the edges are a little dark but that is normal. She says in Busan the most famous hotteok is a different kind, they cut it open on the street and fill it with seeds, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and she will take you to eat it." Sora smiled. "She says, *When you come.*"

I looked at the screen. Below the Korean, Bo-ram had added a single line in English, as she always did.

*Tell your father, 잘 먹었습니다. He ate well.*

That night I opened the workbook to the food page and filled in the blank. I thought about writing *hotteok*, because it was true. I thought about writing *eomuk*, because I had not even tasted it yet and I already knew it would be. In the end I wrote a word I had copied out of Bo-ram's message about her mother and the broth, a word Sora had told me meant soup, or broth, the liquid itself. *Gungmul*. Then the ending, which I had learned that week, and which I was beginning to be able to write without looking.

*Gungmul-i masisseoyo.* The broth is delicious.

I hadn't tasted it. But I could see the bottom of the pot.

Lesson 6: Past Tense

**Exercise 6.1.** Change each verb to the past tense.

가요 *gayo* (go) → ________ *(went)*
먹어요 *meogeoyo* (eat) → ________ *(ate)*
태어나요 *taeeonayo* (be born) → ________ *(was born)*
몰라요 *mollayo* (not know) → ________ *(didn't know)*

**Exercise 6.2.** Write three sentences about your childhood in the past tense.

1. ________
2. ________
3. ________

---

Mrs. Yoon said the past tense in Korean is a sound you add, a little hinge in the middle of the verb, *-ass-* or *-eoss-*, depending on the vowel before it. Ga-yo becomes ga-sseo-yo. Meogeo-yo becomes meogeo-sseo-yo. You hear a doubled *s*, a small hiss, like air let out of a tire. "Everything that is finished," she said, "has this sound."

It was June. The second-floor classroom had a window unit air conditioner that rattled in its frame and dripped onto the sill, and all of us had moved our chairs to the side of the table where it blew. Outside, the trees along the library parking lot had filled in so thickly that the room was green-lit in the afternoons, as if we were sitting at the bottom of a pond.

I did the first exercise in four minutes. The second one I could not start.

Three sentences about my childhood. I had plenty. I learned to skate on the outdoor rink at the park two blocks from our house, where my father flooded the ice himself some nights with a hose from the warming house. I broke my wrist in fourth grade falling off the monkey bars and wore a purple cast that Nils drew a horse on. I won the eighth-grade spelling bee on the word *chrysanthemum* and my mother cried in the bleachers. Those were sentences I could make with the verbs I had. But the exercise said *childhood*, and I kept thinking of the first eight months, the part before the airport, the part that belonged to someone else's past tense.

I had decided, a few weeks before, to read the blue folder again with Sora.

I brought it to her apartment on a Sunday evening. The river below her window was high and brown with June rain, and her rice cooker was going, and she had set out two bowls of cucumber with sesame oil and a jar of kimchi her mother had shipped her in a box packed with frozen gel packs. I put the folder on her small table between the bowls. It is a plain blue paper folder, the kind with pockets inside, faded on one edge where it sat in a sunny closet for thirty years.

"Okay," Sora said. "Can I?"

I nodded.

There are three documents. The first two are in English, typed on a typewriter, in the flat language of offices: the summary my parents received, and a medical report. I knew them nearly by heart. The third is a single sheet in Korean, handwritten, with a carbon-copy blur, and I had never been able to read a word of it. Over the years I had assumed it said the same things as the English pages. I had never asked anyone.

Sora read the English summary first, out loud, though I told her she didn't need to. *Female child born at* — the hospital name — *in Busan. Birth mother: unmarried, age 19, employed at a market. Birth father: unknown. Birth mother states she is unable to raise the child. Child placed in foster care at age 3 weeks. Healthy. Birth weight 3.1 kg. Developing normally.* Then a paragraph about the agency and the placement, which I won't repeat here, because it is the same kind of paragraph that thousands of other people have in their own folders.

That is something I learned that spring, reading on my own late at night after shifts. I am not unusual. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Korea sent a very large number of children overseas for adoption, many of them to the United States, a great many to Minnesota in particular, which has one of the largest communities of Korean adoptees anywhere. The numbers in the eighties were especially high. It continues now, at a much smaller scale. There are people my age at the grocery store in Rochester, at the hospital, on my old high school volleyball team, with blue folders of their own. I had never talked to most of them about it. I'd always thought my folder was the most boring thing about me.

Then Sora picked up the Korean sheet. She read it to herself first. It took her a long time. Her finger moved down the lines and stopped and went back.

"This is from the foster mother," she said finally. "Or written by someone at the agency about what the foster mother said. It's notes. Like a report on you. While you were with her." She looked up at me. "Did you know you had a foster mother?"

"The English says foster care," I said. "I never thought about it being a person."

"Her name was Bae," Sora said. "Mrs. Bae. Only the family name. It says you were with her from three weeks until you left." She looked back at the paper. "Maren, it's very sweet. Do you want me to read it?"

I said yes.

So Sora read it, translating as she went, slowly, with long pauses while she figured out the handwriting, and this is what it said, more or less, though her English made it softer than the clipped notes probably were.

*Eats well. Takes the bottle without trouble. Sleeps after feeding for three hours. Wakes at night once. Does not like to be held lying down; prefers to be held upright, facing outward, so she can see. Watches people's faces for a long time. First tooth at six months, bottom. Laughs when a spoon is tapped on a pot. Has a small red mark on the back of the neck that is fading. Not afraid of loud noises. Is quiet when taken outside. Likes the sound of the market.*

Sora stopped.

"It says that? The market?"

"It says, *sijang sori-reul joahanda*. Likes the sound of the market." She frowned at the paper. "Maybe Mrs. Bae lived near a market. Or took you shopping. I don't know."

I didn't say anything for a while. Sora got up and checked the rice cooker, which had gone quiet, and opened the lid, and a breath of steam came out and rose to the ceiling and spread there. She stood with her back to me longer than she needed to.

I had always been told I was a good baby. My parents said I slept through the night from the first week, which was a lie my mother later confessed to, and that I liked to sit in the front-facing carrier at the grocery store and stare at everyone, which was true. My father said I was always looking. I had thought that was a thing about me that started in Minnesota. It hadn't. Someone named Mrs. Bae, who has no first name in any document I own, had noticed it first. She had held me upright so I could see. She had tapped a spoon on a pot.

"Is there anything else?" I asked.

Sora sat back down. She turned the sheet over. The back was blank. Then she picked up the English summary again and pointed at a line I had read a dozen times and never really looked at, a line near the bottom with a printed label and a blank after it.

*Name given by birth mother:* and then nothing. A typed line, empty.

"It's not filled in," she said.

"No."

"Maybe she didn't give a name. Or she did and nobody wrote it."

"Or she did and somebody wrote it somewhere else," I said, "and that paper is gone."

We looked at the blank together. The rice cooker began to sing its little electronic song, late, as if it had only just remembered.

In July, with the class almost over, I wrote to Bo-ram about the folder. I asked if her father knew anything about Mrs. Bae, or about a name. Bo-ram asked him. The answer took a week. When it came, Sora read it to me in my kitchen with the back door open and the cicadas going in the elm, a sound like a dry electric hum that rises and falls in the heat.

Dong-chul didn't know. He had met Geum-ja in 1993, two years after I left, at a dwaeji gukbap restaurant near the shipyard on Yeongdo where he ate lunch most days. She was waitressing there by then. She was twenty-two. She told him about the baby before they married, he said, because she said it was only fair. She did not tell him much. She said it was a girl. She said the baby went to America. She said she did not want to talk about it again, and he respected that, and they did not. He had not known about Mrs. Bae. He did not know if she had named me. He did not know who the father was. He said, Sora translated, *I am sorry. I did not ask. I thought that not asking was a kindness. Now I think maybe it was only easier.*

Bo-ram wrote below his words, in her own voice: *I am sorry too, eonni. I wish I asked Mom when she was alive. I did not know it was the last chance. You never know that.*

I sat with that for a long time after Sora went home.

Here is what I know about the past tense in Korean. It is a sound, a little hiss in the middle of a word, that means a thing is finished. I was born. I went. I ate. I didn't know. You add it, and the thing is closed.

But there are things in the past that I will never get to put the hiss on, because nobody can tell me what they were. Who my father was. Whether she gave me a name. Whether Mrs. Bae lived near a market, and whether she thought of me after I was carried down the jet bridge in a pink snowsuit. Those things happened, or didn't, and they are not finished, because nobody can finish them.

That night I did the second exercise. Three sentences about my childhood.

*Jeoneun Busan-eseo taeeonasseoyo.* I was born in Busan.

*Jeoneun Minnesota-e gasseoyo.* I went to Minnesota.

The third one took me a long time, because I had to look up two words in the back of the book, and then check the ending twice. Then I wrote it, very carefully, and showed it to Mrs. Yoon on the last Tuesday of the class, and she read it and nodded and did not correct anything.

*Jeoneun sijang sori-reul joahaesseoyo.* I liked the sound of the market.

The next weekend my mother came over with the three padded albums she has kept on the living room shelf since I was small, and her flatbed scanner, and we sat at my kitchen table for an entire Saturday afternoon putting them into the family space one at a time, in order, with dates, so Bo-ram could see them. Me at nine months in a high chair with oatmeal on my forehead. Me at two on my father's shoulders at the county fair. Me at six on the ice with my arms out like wings. My mother typed the captions herself, in English, slowly, two fingers, and asked me before every single one: "Is that all right? Is that too much?"

Every time, I said it was all right.

Lesson 7: Honorifics

**Exercise 7.1.** Korean changes depending on who you are talking to. Rewrite each sentence in polite speech for an older person.

밥 먹어. *Bap meogeo.* "Eat." (to a friend) → ________ (to an elder)
잘 자. *Jal ja.* "Sleep well." (to a child) → ________ (to an elder)

Hint: 드세요 *deuseyo*, 안녕히 주무세요 *annyeonghi jumuseyo*.

**Exercise 7.2.** What do you call your friend's father? ________

---

The last real lesson of the course was honorifics, and Mrs. Yoon saved it for the end on purpose. "If I teach this first," she said, "you all quit."

It was the third week of July, and the air conditioner had given up entirely. Someone from the building had propped the classroom door open with a rubber wedge and set a box fan in the hallway, and it pushed warm air at us that smelled of floor wax and toner. Kyler had his hair tied up on top of his head. Arnold had rolled his shirtsleeves past the elbow, and his forearms were brown to a sharp line where his gloves had stopped for forty years.

Mrs. Yoon drew a staircase on the whiteboard. Five steps. At the bottom she wrote *banmal*, which she said means half-speech, the way you talk to close friends, children and people younger than you, with the endings cut short. In the middle she wrote the *-yo* ending we had been using all spring, polite and safe for almost everyone. Near the top she wrote *-seumnida*, which is formal, the way a news announcer speaks, or a waiter in a good restaurant, or a person giving a speech. At the very top she drew a little crown.

"Then there is a special word," she said, "for when the person is above you. Not only the ending changes. The verb changes." She wrote *meogeoyo*, eat, and next to it *deuseyo*. "Your friend eats. Your grandmother *deuseyo*. You sleep, *jayo*. Your grandfather *jumuseyo*. You are at home, *isseoyo*. Your teacher is at home, *gyeseyo*." She tapped the board. "Same action. Different word. Because the person is different."

"So you have to learn every verb twice," said one of the nursing students.

"Some, three times," Mrs. Yoon said cheerfully. "Welcome to Korea."

She explained that you could also put a small sound, *-si-*, into the middle of most verbs to lift them up, a kind of bow made of syllables. *Gayo* becomes *gaseyo*. *Haeyo* becomes *haseyo*. That's why *annyeonghaseyo*, our very first word in February, has the *-se-* in it: you are already, in the act of saying hello, raising the other person a little.

"So hello was polite the whole time," Kyler said.

"Of course," said Mrs. Yoon. "You think I teach you rude hello?"

I was listening harder than I had listened to anything since February, because the following Sunday, for the first time, I was going to see my sister's face.

We had planned it for weeks. The time difference between Rochester and Busan in summer is fourteen hours, so nine on a Sunday morning for me was eleven on Sunday night for them, after Ha-eun's bedtime, which Bo-ram said was impossible, and seven in the evening for me was nine on Monday morning for them, when Tae-ho had already left for work. We settled on eight on a Sunday night my time, ten on Monday morning in Busan. Bo-ram took the day off. Her father would come. Ha-eun had a school holiday. Sora would sit beside me and translate, in person, because neither Bo-ram nor I wanted a voice in a box between us.

I asked Mrs. Yoon after class what I should call Bo-ram's father.

She thought about it. "He is not your father," she said. "He is not your uncle. He is your sister's father. There is no exact word." She took off her glasses and let them hang on their chain. "I would say *abeonim*. It's respectful. It's what you call the father of someone close to you. A friend's father, a husband's father. He will understand that you are showing respect, and he will understand that you are not pretending to be his daughter. Both."

"And Bo-ram? She's younger. Can I talk to her in banmal?"

"No," Mrs. Yoon said firmly. "Not yet. Not until she tells you. Usually the older one offers. You can say, *Let's talk comfortably.* But you don't know her yet. Use *-yo*. When you are close, you will feel it." She put her glasses back on. "And Maren. The little girl. She will call you *imo*."

"What's imo?"

"Your mother's sister. Mother's side, so imo. If you were her father's sister you would be *gomo*. But you are her mother's sister, so imo." Mrs. Yoon smiled at me, the first wide smile I'd seen on her. "It's a good word. Imo is the aunt who spoils you."

On Sunday night Sora arrived at my house at seven-fifteen carrying a bag of shrimp crackers and a pack of tissues, which she set on the kitchen table next to my laptop without comment. She was wearing a dress, which I had never seen her in, a plain blue one. "My mother said I should look nice," she said. "Because I'm representing Daegu."

I was wearing a cardigan in July. I had changed my shirt three times. My kitchen was hot even with every window open, and the light outside was going long and orange through the elm, and the cicadas had started up in the yard. I had the workbook open on the table beside the laptop, to the honorifics page. I had written the words I wanted to remember on an index card and propped it against the sugar bowl where I could see it without looking down.

At eight o'clock exactly, the call connected.

They were sitting on a couch. That is the first thing I took in, before faces, the way you take in a room: a gray couch against a white wall, and behind it a window full of morning light so bright it washed the edges of them out. Then my eyes adjusted. Bo-ram in the middle, in a striped shirt, her hair pulled back. A little girl on her lap, wriggling, in a yellow dress. An older man at the end of the couch, sitting very upright, in a short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the collar, with gray hair cut very short and a face brown and folded from weather.

Bo-ram had my mouth. I don't know how else to say it. I had looked at that mouth in the mirror every day of my life, the slightly fuller bottom lip, the way the corners turn down a fraction when it's at rest, so that people are always asking me what's wrong when nothing is. And there it was on a woman in Busan. She was looking at the screen and I could see her looking at my face, at my mouth probably, and her hand came up and covered her own, and above it her eyes filled.

Nobody said anything for what Sora later told me was eleven seconds. I believe her. She is a scientist.

Then the little girl leaned toward the camera until her whole face filled the screen, a huge brown eye and part of a nose, and said, loudly and clearly, "Hello! Imo!"

And everyone laughed, and that was how it started.

I said the things on my index card. *Annyeonghaseyo. Cheoeum boepgetseumnida.* Hello, I am seeing you for the first time. I said them to Bo-ram, and then I turned a little toward her father's end of the couch, as if the screen were a room, and bowed my head the way Mrs. Yoon had shown us, and said, "Abeonim, annyeonghaseyo."

Ryu Dong-chul's face did something I can't describe. He bowed back, lower than I had, from his seat on the couch. He said something in a deep, rough voice, quite fast, and Sora leaned toward me and said softly, "He says, you speak very well. He says, thank you for calling him that."

He said something else. Sora hesitated.

"He says, *You have her eyebrows.*"

We talked for an hour and forty minutes. Sora translated nearly all of it, sitting close enough that our shoulders touched, sometimes speaking over Bo-ram in a low voice so that I heard both at once, the Korean and the English braided together. Some of it I didn't need translated. When Bo-ram said *eonni*, I knew. When Ha-eun said *imo*, I knew. When Dong-chul said *mianhaeyo*, which I had just learned meant sorry, I knew, though I didn't yet know what he was sorry for, and when Sora told me, it was only that he was sorry his English was so bad, and I said, in my bad Korean, *Gwaenchanayo*, it's okay, and he laughed.

Bo-ram showed me their apartment by carrying the screen around. A small kitchen with a rice cooker the same color as Sora's. A balcony with laundry hanging and, past it, a view straight down a steep hill to the water, where a ship with a red hull was sliding past. Ha-eun showed me her school bag, and a stuffed rabbit missing an ear, and a drawing she had made, which turned out to be of me, copied from the photographs my mother had posted: a girl on ice skates with her arms out like wings.

I asked Dong-chul, through Sora, how he was. He said, through Sora, that his knees hurt and that he was retired from the shipyard and that he walked to the market every morning. He said Geum-ja would have liked to see this, and then he stopped and looked down at his hands, and Bo-ram put her hand on his back, and he said something short, and Sora did not translate it, and I didn't ask.

Near the end, my parents came. I had told them they could, if they wanted, for the last ten minutes. They came in through the back door at a quarter to ten, my mother in her good cardigan, my father in his red cap until my mother made him take it off. They stood behind my chair because there wasn't room to sit. I watched them appear in the little box in the corner of the screen, two tall pale faces bending in over my head.

My mother said, "Hello, Bo-ram. We're so glad." Sora translated.

My father cleared his throat. He looked at Ryu Dong-chul on the other side of the world, a man about his own age, in a buttoned white shirt, with weathered hands. Then my father bowed. I had never seen him bow to anyone in my life. It was a careful, stiff-hipped Swede's bow, the bow of a man who has seen it done in a movie once. And he said, slowly, "An-nyeong-ha-se-yo."

Dong-chul stood up from the couch to bow back. Properly, all the way.

After the call ended, the four of us sat in my hot kitchen with the shrimp crackers. Nobody said much. My mother had gone through half of Sora's tissues. My father was turning his cap around and around in his hands.

"He stood up," my father said finally. "Did you see that? He stood up."

"That's respect," Sora said. "You said it very nicely, so he stood up."

My father nodded slowly, as if he were adding it to a list of things he would remember. Then he said, "So when are you going, Maren?"

I hadn't told them. I hadn't told anyone but Sora, and not even her for sure. I looked at my mother. She was looking at me with her librarian's whole-face listening, and she was not surprised.

"December," I said. "I've got the time saved. Three weeks."

"December," my father said. "Well, it'll be warmer than here, anyway."

That night, after everyone had gone, I filled in the last blank on the honorifics page. *What do you call your friend's father?* I wrote *abeonim*, and then I sat looking at it, and then I crossed out the word *friend's* in the question and wrote above it, in pencil, *sister's*.

Lesson 8: Weather

**Exercise 8.1.** Describe today's weather.

날씨가 ________. *Nalssi-ga ________.* "The weather is ________."

추워요 *chuwoyo* cold · 더워요 *deowoyo* hot · 맑아요 *malgayo* clear · 흐려요 *heuryeoyo* cloudy

**Exercise 8.2.** Complete the sentence.

________ 이/가 와요. *________ i/ga wayo.* "________ is coming down."
눈 *nun* snow · 비 *bi* rain

---

It snowed the morning I left, the way it snowed the night I came.

My father drove me to the airport in Minneapolis at four in the morning in his truck, because he does not trust anyone else to drive on Highway 52 in December, least of all me. The snow had started around two, fine and dry and steady, and by the time we passed Cannon Falls it was coming straight at the windshield in the headlights like a tunnel of white static. My father drove with both hands at ten and two and his body leaned forward, the way he drove the plow for thirty-one years, reading the road through the snow by the ridges and the ghost of the center line. The heater roared. Neither of us talked. There were no other cars. It was like driving through the inside of an empty page.

At the curb at the terminal he got out to lift my suitcase, though I could have done it, and stood there in the blowing snow in his red cap with his breath streaming off sideways.

"You call your mother when you land," he said.

"I will."

"And you eat something that isn't a granola bar."

"I will."

He looked at me for a while. Snow was collecting on his eyebrows. "Thirty-six years ago, near enough," he said, "I stood in a terminal right in there and they carried you off a plane." He nodded at the glass doors. "Now look."

He hugged me, hard and short, the way he does, and got back in the truck. I watched his taillights go red and then pink and then vanish into the white.

The flight was thirteen hours. I slept in pieces and woke each time to the cabin dark and blue, the window shades down, the little map on the seatback showing our plane as a white shape crawling over a blank ocean. Somewhere over Alaska I raised my shade an inch and saw nothing but cloud lit from underneath by a moon I couldn't see, a vast gray floor going on forever. Somewhere over the Sea of Japan I raised it again and the sun was coming up, flat orange on a layer of haze, and below the haze, very faint, a coastline.

I landed at Incheon at five in the afternoon local time and stood at the window of the arrivals hall for a long time, looking at the sky. It was clear and pale and very cold, a hard winter blue going to rose at the edges. The light was nothing like Minnesota light. Minnesota winter light comes off the snow, from below, so that everything is lit upward and has no shadow. This came from the side, low and thin, and the shadows were long and sharp. *Nalssi-ga malgayo*, I thought. The weather is clear. *Chuwoyo.* It's cold. They were the first Korean sentences I said in Korea, silently, to a window.

I spent four days in Seoul before going south. Bo-ram had said I should see it, because I would never see it the same way again once I had family to visit, and because she said, through Sora, that Seoul is where everyone goes first, and that it's loud. She was right about the loud.

My hotel was in Jongno, an old district in the center of the city, on a narrow side street where every building was hung with signs from the second floor to the roof, stacked one above another, red and white and blue and green, in Korean and English and numbers. At night they all came on at once. I stepped out of the hotel the first evening, jet-lagged and light-headed, and stopped on the sidewalk with my hand still on the door. The whole street was lit. Not the way a street at home is lit, with a streetlamp every fifty feet and darkness in between, but from every surface, every window and sign and doorway, a solid wall of light on both sides going up into the black sky. A convenience store glowed white on the corner. A restaurant beside it glowed red, steam rolling out of its door. Above the restaurant, a sign for a dentist glowed blue, and above the dentist a sign for something I couldn't read glowed a pink so electric it seemed to hum.

I thought of my street in Rochester at that same hour, the snow blue in the dark, the houses with one or two windows lit and the rest black, the silence so complete you could hear the furnace in the house next door. Here there was no dark anywhere. There was nowhere for anything to be blank.

I walked. I walked for hours that first night and every night after. I followed the Cheonggyecheon, a stream that runs below street level through the middle of the city in a long stone channel, with lights set into the walls so that the water glowed and the steppingstones across it were lit from beneath. People walked along it in long puffy coats like Sora's, black and gray and navy, coats that came down to their ankles, so that from behind everyone looked like a sleeping bag with a head. Couples. Old men with their hands clasped behind their backs. Groups of high school girls in school uniforms and bare legs in the cold, shrieking. Nobody looked at me. That was the strangest thing. For the first time in my life I walked down a street and nobody's eyes stopped on my face. I was the same as everyone. I didn't know how much I had always been noticed until I wasn't.

But I was also not the same as everyone, and I learned that within ten minutes, at a cart on the corner selling fish-shaped pastries. I pointed and said, very carefully, "Hana juseyo," one please, and the woman at the cart answered me in a fast stream of Korean, smiling, and I stood there with my mouth open and understood nothing. She waited. I said, "Mianhaeyo. Hanguk-mal jal mot-haeyo." Sorry. I don't speak Korean well. Her face changed. Not unkindly. It was a look I came to know well over the next three weeks: a quick recalculation, a softening, sometimes pity, sometimes curiosity, sometimes just a small tired nod. She said, in English, "Where you from?"

"America," I said. "Minnesota."

She handed me the fish pastry in a paper sleeve. It was hot, filled with sweet red bean, the dough crisp and patterned like scales. "Welcome home," she said in English, without irony, and turned to the next customer.

On the third day I went to the agency.

I won't say much about it, because it was an office, and offices are mostly the same everywhere. It was in an older building on a side street of small hotels and print shops, up two flights of stairs, with a waiting area of padded chairs and a water cooler and a rack of pamphlets in English, Korean, French, Danish, Dutch. I had written ahead months before. A caseworker named Ms. Han met me, a tired, kind woman about my mother's age who spoke careful English and had clearly done this many hundreds of times. She took me into a small room with a table and a box of tissues and a window that looked out at the brick wall of the next building.

She had my file. It was thicker than the copy in my blue folder, but not by much. She went through it with me page by page, turning it so I could see, translating where I needed it. I could read some of it now. Not much, but some. I could read *Seo Geum-ja* in the box for the mother's name, which my own folder had never shown, and I sat and looked at it while Ms. Han waited. I could read the word for *market*. I could read the name of the hospital. I could see, in the box for the father, a single short dash.

The original intake notes said what my folder said. Unmarried, nineteen, working at the market, unable to raise the child. There were the foster mother's notes, the same ones Sora had read to me in June. Ms. Han said Mrs. Bae had fostered many babies for the agency in the late eighties and early nineties and that the agency had lost contact with her long ago. She didn't know if Mrs. Bae was alive. She was sorry.

The name line was blank here too. Ms. Han said that was common. Sometimes mothers gave names and sometimes they didn't, and sometimes the names were written on a separate card that didn't survive, and in the rush of those years a great deal didn't survive.

Then she turned to the last page, which I had never seen. It was a log of contacts, dated, handwritten. Most of the entries were from 1990 and 1991, the routine notes of my placement. Then there was a gap of seven years. Then a single entry.

Ms. Han read it to me. *March 1998. Telephone call. A woman asked whether the girl sent to America in February 1991 from the foster home of Mrs. Bae was healthy. Told her we could not release information. She did not give her name. She thanked us and hung up.*

That was all. One line, in faded blue ink.

"Was it her?" I asked.

Ms. Han closed the file gently. "I don't know," she said. "It could be. It could be Mrs. Bae. It could be another person. We never know these things." She looked at me across the table with an expression I will not forget, very steady. "But somebody asked."

I went out onto the street afterward and stood there for a long time. It had gotten colder. The sky had gone flat and white, low over the rooftops, and the wind was coming down the narrow street off the mountains to the north, bitter and dry, smelling of exhaust and charcoal smoke from a grill restaurant somewhere nearby. *Barami bureoyo*, I thought. The wind blows. *Heuryeoyo.* It's cloudy. I had no other words for what I felt, so I used the weather.

That night it began to snow. Just a little, the first of the season in Seoul, dry flakes so small they were almost dust, drifting down through the neon. I stood on the stone bank of the Cheonggyecheon and watched them fall into the lit water and vanish. Red light, blue light, pink, the flakes going pink and then gone. A couple next to me held out their phones to photograph it. A little boy in a puffy coat tipped his head back with his mouth open.

*Nuni wayo.* Snow is coming down. I said it out loud this time, very softly, to nobody.

In my hotel room afterward, I opened the family space on my phone. My mother had posted a photograph that morning, Minnesota time: my own driveway in Rochester, plowed clean, the snow piled high and square on either side with the sharp shoulders only one person I know can make. Behind it, my house dark under its white roof. A single set of boot prints going up the steps to check the door. Her caption said: *Your father did your drive. He says the furnace is fine. Twelve inches overnight. It is very quiet here.*

I looked at that photo for a long time, the white of it, all that clean silence, on a screen in a room where a pink sign outside the window turned the curtains the color of the inside of a shell.

Under it Bo-ram had already commented, in Korean, and then in English. *Eonni, Busan has no snow. Only wind and sea. Come soon.*

Lesson 9: The Body

**Exercise 9.1.** Label the face.

얼굴 *eolgul* face · 눈 *nun* eye · 코 *ko* nose · 입 *ip* mouth · 귀 *gwi* ear

**Exercise 9.2.** Label the body.

손 *son* hand · 가슴 *gaseum* chest · 폐 *pye* lungs · 숨 *sum* breath

Note: 눈 *nun* means both "eye" and "snow." Context tells you which.

---

The train from Seoul to Busan takes about two and a half hours. I sat on the right side, by the window, because Sora had told me to, so I could see the sea at the end. For most of the trip there was no sea. There was winter Korea going by: gray fields of cut rice stubble in neat squares, frozen at the edges, with white plastic greenhouses lined up in rows like long loaves of bread. Bare brown hills, every one with a stripe of pines along the top. Small towns of white apartment blocks with numbers painted huge on their sides, 101, 102, 103, so that from the train each town looked like a page of a ledger. Rivers, very low and pale. Here and there, a field with a thin crust of the snow that had followed me down from Seoul, already going gray.

I didn't read. I had brought the workbook in my bag and I took it out twice and put it back both times. I looked at my hands on the tray table. I looked at my reflection in the window, laid over the fields, and tried to see whatever my sister would see when I stepped off the train.

The body lesson in the workbook is the one that made me laugh in class, in April, before we got to it in order, when I was flipping ahead. *Nun* means eye, and *nun* means snow. Same letters, same sound. Mrs. Yoon said in old Korean the snow word was said a little longer, but nobody hears that anymore. "So you say, *nuni wayo*," she told us, "snow is coming, and everyone looks up. Nobody thinks your eye is falling from the sky." But I thought about it. I thought about it on the train. A word that meant both the thing you see with and the white that covers everything over so there's nothing to see.

The last half hour the hills closed in and the tunnels began, one after another, the windows going black and then bright and black again, my own face appearing and vanishing in the glass. Then a long slow curve, and the city rose up on both sides at once. Busan is built into mountains that come straight down to the sea, and the apartment towers climb the slopes in white tiers as far up as they can go before the pines take over. Then, between two towers, for one second, a flat bright band of water with the afternoon sun on it, so silver it hurt.

*Bada*, I thought. Sea.

Busan Station is huge, all glass and steel, with a vaulted ceiling and a great open hall. I came down the escalator from the platform with my suitcase bumping on each step behind me and my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth. I am a respiratory therapist. I know what a heart rate of a hundred and twenty feels like from the inside and I know how to bring it down. Breathe in for four. Hold for four. Out for six. I did it twice on the escalator. It didn't work at all.

They were standing by a pillar near the exit. Bo-ram in a long camel-colored coat with a gray scarf wrapped up to her chin. Ha-eun in a pink puffy coat with a hood shaped like a bear's head, ears and all, holding her mother's hand and jumping up and down in place. Nobody else. Bo-ram had said her father would wait at home, because he said the first meeting should be for sisters.

Bo-ram saw me before I saw her see me. Her face did something, folded, and then she let go of Ha-eun's hand and walked fast across the floor, almost running in short careful steps in her boots, and I left my suitcase where it was and walked toward her, and we met in the middle of the hall with people going around us on both sides like water around a stone.

She took both my hands. She didn't hug me, not at first. She held my hands in both of hers, hard, and looked at them. Turned them over. Looked at my palms. Then she held up her own hand next to mine, palm to palm, and we both looked.

Same hand. I don't mean similar. Our fingers were the same length, the same slight bend in the last joint of the little finger, the same square nails. Her hand was a little smaller and much warmer than mine. She had a pale burn scar across the back of her thumb, and I had a white line on my index finger from a scalpel blade in nursing school, and those were the only differences.

"*Son*," she said, very softly. Hand.

"*Son*," I said.

Then she hugged me. Ha-eun had caught up and was wrapped around both of our legs at once, saying *imo, imo, imo* into my coat. I could smell Bo-ram's hair, which smelled of some shampoo I didn't know, and under it, very faintly, of the cold outside, of salt and diesel and something frying.

What I want to say about that first hour is that it was mostly body. We had so few words in common that our bodies did most of it. Bo-ram kept touching my face. Not in a strange way. The way you touch something to make sure. My cheek. My ear. She held my ear between two fingers and looked at it and then pulled back her own hair and showed me hers, the same small attached lobe, the same little fold at the top. She said a word I knew: *gwi*. Ear. Then she touched my eyebrow with one fingertip and said *eomma*, Mom, and I understood. Her father had been right. Our mother's eyebrows.

Ha-eun, meanwhile, had decided I was a climbing structure. Seven years old and thin as a reed, she held my hand and swung on it and talked to me in a stream of Korean that I understood maybe one word in twenty. When I said, "Mianhae, Ha-eun-a, imo-neun Hanguk-mal jal mollayo," sorry, Ha-eun, Imo doesn't know Korean very well, she stopped and stared at me with her mouth open, and then shouted something to her mother, and Bo-ram laughed so hard she had to sit down on my suitcase.

"What did she say?" I asked, in English, which Bo-ram understood.

Bo-ram wiped her eyes. "She says," Bo-ram said slowly, searching for each English word, "*Imo talks like a baby. I will teach her.*"

We took a taxi to lunch. Bo-ram had been planning this, I could tell, for weeks. It was a place on a side street not far from the station, a low old building with steam on its front window and a line of people waiting outside in the cold, men in work jackets and women with shopping bags and a pair of students in school uniforms. Bo-ram stood in line with her arm through mine. Ha-eun stood on my feet.

"Daegu-tang," Bo-ram said, pointing at the sign. Then, in English, proudly: "Fish soup. Winter."

"Daegu?" I said. "Like Sora's city?"

She laughed, shook her head, nodded, gave up, and drew a fish in the air with a big open mouth. Sora explained it to me later on the phone: the city and the fish are written with the same Korean letters and are different words underneath, the way *nun* is an eye and also snow. The fish is cod. In December, Bo-ram told me with her hands, the cod come in fat off the south coast, and Busan eats them all winter.

"Summer," she said, holding up one finger, "milmyeon. Cold noodle. You come back summer."

Inside, the restaurant was hot and loud and smelled of garlic and red pepper and boiling radish, and the tables were steel and the stools were plastic and the floor was wet from the boots. A woman in an apron set a wide, shallow pot on the gas ring in the middle of our table without asking what we wanted, because there was only one thing to want. In a broth already turning red lay thick white pieces of cod on the bone, half a head with its jaw open, coins of radish, a tangle of bean sprouts, and a heap of green minari stems on top. There was also a spoonful of something soft and pale and folded that Bo-ram pointed to with great satisfaction as the best part, and that I decided not to ask about. The woman lit the flame. The pot came up to a boil in front of us, rattling its lid, and she came back once to stir it with a ladle and went away again.

Bo-ram filled my bowl first, then Ha-eun's, picking the bones out of her daughter's with her chopsticks so fast I hardly saw her do it. Then she slid a little dish of extra pepper flakes away from my side of the table and shook her head, smiling. Not for you. Not yet.

I took a spoonful.

It was hotter than anything I had ever eaten, first from the boil and then from the pepper, and the steam went straight up my nose and made my eyes stream. Under the heat the cod was so soft it came apart in big white flakes at the touch of a spoon, sweet and clean, and the radish had drunk up the broth, and the minari tasted green and sharp, like something picked from a wet field that morning. I sat there with tears running down my face and my lips burning and broth on my chin.

Bo-ram was watching me with her spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.

"Masisseoyo," I said, choking. "Jinjja masisseoyo." Really delicious.

Ha-eun clapped. A man at the next table, an old man in a flat cap eating alone, looked over at me and nodded once, gravely, as if I had passed a test.

Afterward we stood outside in the wind and Bo-ram bought us each a paper cup of hot barley water from a vending stand by the door, and I held it against my cheek. My sinuses were still burning. Ha-eun was riding on my back by then, her bear-eared hood against my neck, her arms around my throat a little too tight, so that I could feel her breath on my ear, quick and warm, about thirty breaths a minute. I counted without meaning to. It is a habit I cannot break. She was a healthy child, breathing fast because she was excited. Her chest went up and down against my back.

Bo-ram works at the international ferry terminal, at a ticket counter, selling seats on the boats that cross to Japan. She told me this in the taxi to Yeongdo, partly in English and partly in Korean and partly with her hands, drawing a boat in the air and then a wave and then making a little *whoosh*. She works shifts. She said she likes it because she can see the water all day.

The taxi went over a bridge and up a hill so steep the driver had to downshift twice, and then we were on her street. The towers I had seen in the photo on the map, white and tall and stacked up the slope. Her building was the fourth one up. From the parking lot you could see down the whole hill to the harbor, where the late afternoon light had turned gold on the water and the cranes stood up black against it. A container ship was coming in, enormous, as long as a city block, pushed by two small tugs, and the sound of its horn came up the hill a long time after I saw the puff of steam.

Ryu Dong-chul was waiting in the doorway of the apartment in his socks. He bowed to me. I bowed back, lower. He said, "*Eoseo oseyo*," which I knew from the workbook: *Welcome, please come in.* Then he looked at my face for a long moment, the way his daughter had, and nodded, and stepped aside to let me in.

That night I slept on the floor. In Korea, Bo-ram explained with her hands, the heat comes up through the floor, and in many homes people sleep on thick folded quilts laid down on it. She made up a bed for me in Ha-eun's room, a soft cotton mattress on the warm floor with a heavy quilt on top in a pattern of pink peonies. Ha-eun had insisted on sleeping next to me. She fell asleep in four minutes with one hand flung across my arm.

I lay on my back in the dark with the warmth of the floor coming up through the mattress into my spine and my shoulder blades, a slow deep heat like lying on sun-warmed stone. Through the window I could see a slice of the harbor, the lights on the cranes, red and white, and the long lit shape of a ship at anchor. The apartment was quiet. Somewhere a refrigerator hummed. Ha-eun's breath beside me went slow and even, twenty, then eighteen, then sixteen breaths a minute as she went deeper.

I put my hand flat on my own chest and felt it rise. *Gaseum*. Chest. Under it, my lungs, *pye*, filling and emptying. *Sum*. Breath. A body built from instructions written partly in the same hand as the body in the next room, and the one sleeping beside me, and one that wasn't anywhere anymore. I fell asleep counting, and lost count.

Lesson 10: Apologies

**Exercise 10.1.** Choose the right apology.

미안해. *Mianhae.* (to a friend or a child)
미안해요. *Mianhaeyo.* (polite)
죄송합니다. *Joesonghamnida.* (formal, to an elder or a stranger)

**Exercise 10.2.** Answer the apology.

괜찮아요. *Gwaenchanayo.* "It's okay."

---

Ryu Dong-chul knocked on the door of Ha-eun's room at a quarter to six in the morning and said, through the door, a single word I didn't know. Then, after a pause, in English, with great effort: "Market. Go."

It was still dark. Bo-ram had told me the night before that her father wanted to take me to Jagalchi himself, early, the way he walked there every morning, and that she would meet us later. I dressed in the dark beside the sleeping child, layering everything I'd brought, and found him in the front hall in a padded navy jacket and a knit cap, holding a second knit cap out to me. It was brown and smelled of mothballs. I put it on. He nodded.

We walked down the hill. The streets of Yeongdo were empty and blue, the shop shutters still down, a single convenience store lit on a corner with a young man inside stacking boxes of milk. The wind came up the slope from the water, damp and very cold, smelling of salt and of something sharp and chemical, paint or tar, from the shipyards along the shore. Dong-chul walked fast for a man with bad knees, with his hands clasped behind his back, and every so often he pointed at something without stopping and said its name. *Jeogi*. Over there. A shipyard gate, chained shut. A pharmacy with its green sign still dark. A staircase going up between two houses so steep it was nearly a ladder.

At the bottom of the hill was the bridge. Yeongdo Bridge, old and low and painted that dull green, with a walkway along its edge. We walked across it. Below us the channel was black and the water moved under the lights in long oily swells, and the lights of the city on the far shore were coming on and going off as the sky behind them began to lighten. Gulls were already up. They stood on the railings and watched us pass and did not move.

Dong-chul stopped in the middle of the bridge. He pointed down at the water, and then across at the market, the market's big white building on the far shore, its roof lifted in curves like a gull's spread wings. Then he pointed at himself, and made a walking motion with two fingers on the rail, back and forth, back and forth.

I understood. Every day, back and forth.

Then he pointed at the market again and said, "Geum-ja." And made the same walking motion with his fingers, but going only one way.

Jagalchi at dawn is the loudest place I have ever been, including an emergency room on a holiday weekend. Before we were even through the outer stalls I could hear it: a roar of voices, the slap and gush of water, a hoarse amplified voice calling numbers somewhere inside, engines idling, a steady hiss of hoses. Then the smell reached me, and I stopped walking. It was the smell of the sea turned inside out. Brine and blood and wet concrete and gasoline and seaweed and ice, cold and sharp and alive, so thick I could taste it at the back of my throat.

The covered market stretched in long aisles under fluorescent light, every surface wet. On both sides, stall after stall of tanks and tubs: red plastic basins full of live octopus, their arms curling up over the rims; flat trays of silver fish laid in rows like knives; buckets of clams spitting; long tanks of something brown and coiled that I later learned were sea squirts; a whole tub of crabs climbing over each other with a sound like knuckles on a table. And the women. They sat or stood behind every stall in rubber boots and long rubber aprons and sun visors and padded vests, with red rubber gloves to the elbow, cleaning fish with a speed I could hardly follow, knife in, a flick, a scrape, the guts into a bucket, the fish into a tray, the next fish already in their hand. They called out to people passing. They called out to each other. Some of them were very old. One of them, at a stall of mackerel, was singing to herself under the noise, a tune I didn't know.

Dong-chul walked me down the aisles to the far end of the market, near the doors that opened onto the harbor, where the light was getting gray and the gulls were screaming over the water. There he stopped at a stall selling dried and salted fish, flat brown shapes hung in rows from wires overhead like laundry, and spoke to the woman behind it.

She was tiny and wiry and, I guessed, eighty. Her face under the sun visor was brown and creased as a walnut, and she had on two padded vests one over the other and red gloves. Dong-chul spoke to her for a while. She looked at me. Then she came around the side of the stall and walked right up to me, peeling off one glove, and put her bare hand on my cheek. Her fingers were icy and rough and smelled of salt.

She said something. Then she said it again, louder, as if volume were the problem.

I said the only thing I could think of. "Mianhae. Hanguk-mal jal mot-hae."

Her eyebrows went up. Dong-chul made a small sound beside me, not quite a laugh. And I understood, a second too late, what I had done. I had used banmal. Half-speech. To a woman of eighty, a stranger, in a market. It was what I had said to Ha-eun the day before, and it had come out of my mouth by habit, the most recent version I'd used. It was like walking up to my mother's oldest friend and saying *sorry, kid.*

My face went hot under the borrowed cap. "Joesonghamnida," I said quickly, and bowed. "Joesonghamnida. Hanguk-mal-eul jal mot-hamnida."

The old woman looked at me for a long moment. Then she threw back her head and laughed, a huge cackle that turned heads at the next three stalls, and slapped my arm, hard, and said something to Dong-chul that made him laugh too. She went on laughing as she put her glove back on.

Later, much later, Bo-ram would explain to me, with Sora on the screen helping, what the woman had said. Her name was Nam Sun-ok, and she had run the stall next to the one where our mother worked from 1987 until the old market building was replaced. She had said, laughing, *She talks to me like I'm her little sister. That's exactly what Geum-ja would do. That girl never once spoke to me properly in three years.*

Mrs. Nam told us what she remembered. It was not much. She said Geum-ja came from one of the small islands off the south coast and came to the city to work at sixteen or seventeen. She said Geum-ja was the fastest cleaner on the row, faster than women twice her age, and that she laughed so loud you could hear her from the bridge. She said Geum-ja liked to sing the old songs while she worked, very badly. She said one year Geum-ja was away for a while, some months, and when she came back she was thinner and quieter and nobody asked, because that was how it was then, and when you are young and alone in the city and there is something you cannot carry, the people around you look the other way so you don't have to see them seeing.

Then Mrs. Nam stopped. She looked at the fish hanging on the wires above her stall, turning a little in the draft from the harbor doors. She said, quietly, something with *mianhae* in it.

Dong-chul translated with his hands as best he could, and I understood only the shape of it. Later Sora gave me the words. *I am sorry. We were all so young and so tired. Nobody helped her. I should have asked.*

I said, "*Gwaenchanayo*." It's okay. I bowed. It was the only answer I had, and it was not true, and it was not untrue either. Mrs. Nam pressed a paper bag of dried anchovies into my hands, the big ones, the kind for broth, and wouldn't take any money, and waved us off.

Dong-chul took me to breakfast. It was seven in the morning and the restaurant, a narrow room up a flight of steps off an alley near the market, was already full of men in work clothes eating in silence with their heads down. He said the place where he had met Geum-ja, near the shipyard, had closed years ago. He said this place was almost as good. He did not let me order. He held up two fingers to the woman at the counter.

Dwaeji gukbap came in heavy black stone bowls, still boiling when they set them down, the broth churning at the edges. Pork bone soup, simmered so long the broth had gone milky white and opaque, like skim milk, with thin slices of boiled pork fanned across the top and a scatter of green onions. Bowls of rice on the side. Small dishes all around: a tangle of garlic chives dressed in red pepper and sesame; a dish of tiny pink salted shrimp; a red paste; raw onion and green peppers with a dark bean paste for dipping; two kinds of kimchi.

Dong-chul showed me. A spoonful of the salted shrimp into the broth, for salt. A little of the red paste, stirred in until the white went pink. A big pinch of the chives on top. Then the rice, tipped right into the soup. He did all of this to my bowl first, without asking, before his own, the way my father butters my mother's roll at dinner without either of them noticing.

I ate. It was nothing like the cod soup. Where that had been red and fierce and full of sharp green stems, this was white and deep and plain, so rich it coated my lips, so soothing it seemed to go down into my legs. The pork was soft. The chives were sharp. The rice softened in the broth and turned to something halfway to porridge. I ate the whole thing. I sweated under the brown cap and took it off. Dong-chul watched me and said nothing and ate his own, and when we were both finished, he set down his spoon and looked at the table.

He spoke slowly, for a long time, knowing I couldn't understand. He was not speaking to be understood. I caught a few words. *Geum-ja.* *Mian.* *Mollasseoyo.* I didn't know. He said that word several times.

Then he looked up at me and said, in English, so carefully that each word sounded carried across a distance: "I. Am. Sorry."

I knew what I was supposed to say. *Gwaenchanayo.* It's okay. I had the word in my mouth. Instead I heard myself say, in English, "No. I'm sorry. I came here and made you think about all of it."

He didn't understand the words. He understood the shape. He shook his head, hard, and said something sharp and short in Korean, and then, frustrated, he reached into his jacket and took out his phone and opened the family space and typed a message to Bo-ram, slowly, with one thick finger, and turned the screen so I could see it, though I couldn't read it.

That night, in Bo-ram's kitchen, after Ha-eun was asleep, Bo-ram called Sora on video, and Sora, eating cereal at her desk in Rochester at seven in the morning with her hair still wet from the shower, read us what he had written.

*Tell your sister there is nothing for her to be sorry about. Tell her she is the only one who came.*

In the afternoon, between the market and that kitchen, Bo-ram had taken me to the hospital. I should say that too. We took a bus up the hill and got off and stood across the street from it, a tall beige building with glass doors and an ambulance bay and a flag snapping on a pole in the wind. People went in and out. A man in a hospital gown and a padded coat stood smoking by the door with an IV pole, which made me wince with my whole professional body. Up the hill behind the building, the old apartment blocks climbed into the gray sky.

I didn't go in. There was nothing inside it that was mine. The building I was born in had been gone ten years.

Bo-ram stood with me, her arm through mine. After a while she said, "*Eonni. Gwaenchanayo?*" Are you okay?

"*Ne*," I said. Yes. Then, because it was my sister and because it was true, I tried the word without the ending, the way I had heard her say it to Ha-eun. "*Gwaenchana*."

She looked at me sharply. Then she smiled, a wide crooked smile with our mother's eyebrows above it, and said, "*Ne. Uri banmal-hae.*" Yes. Let's talk comfortably.

I took a photograph of the building and pinned it on the map, on the red pin that had been waiting there since April. In the note I wrote, in Korean, by myself, slowly, checking each letter: *Yeogi-eseo taeeonasseoyo.* I was born here. Then a second line, in English, because I had no Korean for it yet. *I stood across the street. It was very windy. My sister was with me.*

Lesson 11: Future Tense

**Exercise 11.1.** Change each verb to the future.

가요 *gayo* (go) → 갈 거예요 *gal geoyeyo* (will go)
와요 *wayo* (come) → ________ *(will come)*
봐요 *bwayo* (see) → ________ *(will see)*

**Exercise 11.2.** Write two sentences about your plans.

1. ________
2. ________

---

On the fourth day, Bo-ram kept her promise.

She had waited until Ha-eun was at her afternoon English class and her father was asleep in his chair with the television murmuring, and then she came and sat beside me on the warm floor of the living room with her laptop and a cushion for each of us. The balcony door was open a crack for air, and the sound of the harbor came in, a low continuous hum of engines and the occasional long note of a horn. The light was the pale gold of a December afternoon in Busan, which, as Bo-ram had told me, has no snow, only wind and sea. She opened a folder in the family space. She turned the screen toward me.

"Eonni," she said. "Ready?"

I wasn't. I said, "Ne."

There are six photographs of Seo Geum-ja. That is all there are in the world, as far as anyone knows. Bo-ram had had them scanned the year after her mother died, from prints that had lived in a single plastic album in a kitchen drawer. They are not old enough to be beautiful. They are drugstore color prints from the nineties and two thousands, faded toward orange.

The first is from her wedding to Dong-chul in 1994: a small hall, a white dress with puffed sleeves, Dong-chul in a gray suit looking terrified, and Geum-ja beside him not looking at the camera at all but at someone off to the side, laughing, her mouth wide open. The second is her holding Bo-ram as a baby on a balcony, squinting into the sun. The third is a family photo at a beach, maybe 2001, all three of them in matching blue windbreakers. The fourth is Geum-ja in her forties at a table in a restaurant, half turned toward the camera, a glass of something in her hand. The fifth is Geum-ja and Ha-eun, a newborn, in a hospital bed, the year before she died.

The sixth is the oldest. It is a small square snapshot that someone, Bo-ram didn't know who, had taken at the market in 1989 or 1990. Four young women in rubber aprons and boots stand in a row in front of a stall of fish, their arms around each other's waists, squinting and grinning. Behind them, out of focus, the red plastic tubs. One of them, second from the left, is shorter than the others, with a round face and heavy straight eyebrows and her hair pulled back under a kerchief, and she's laughing at something, mouth wide open, the same laugh as the wedding picture five years later.

"*Eomma*," Bo-ram said, and touched the screen over her face.

Nineteen. Maybe eighteen. Maybe, I thought, already carrying me, though there was no way to know from the picture and there never would be.

I looked at that face for a long time. I don't know how long. I know Bo-ram didn't move or speak. She sat beside me on the warm floor with her shoulder against mine and let me look. I tried to find myself in the photograph and I found pieces. The eyebrows, yes. Something in the set of the jaw. Not the laugh. I have never laughed like that in my life, wide open, head back, not caring who heard. I'm a quiet person. I wondered if I would have been louder if I'd stayed. I wondered if she would have been quieter if I had.

There was no one to ask.

That evening, after dinner, Tae-ho drove us out to Haeundae.

I haven't said enough about Tae-ho. He is Bo-ram's husband, thirty-four, a delivery driver for a company that brings groceries and packages to the apartment towers on the hills, and he is the kind of quiet, solid, patient man who seems to have been put on earth to carry heavy things up stairs. He speaks almost no English and was shy of me for the first two days. On the third day he discovered that I would eat anything he put in front of me, and after that we were friends. He drove a small blue truck with an open bed, very clean, with a cardboard pine tree hanging from the mirror, and we all squeezed into the cab, Bo-ram and Ha-eun and me, with Ha-eun on my lap in her bear coat.

On the way, Bo-ram made him stop in Nampo-dong, near the market, at a square with lights strung across it in long lines overhead and crowds moving under them. At a cart in the middle of the square, a man in a white cap and a white apron was frying hotteok on a griddle in a sizzling inch of oil. He pressed each one flat with a steel stamp, flipped it, fried it gold, then lifted it out and sliced it open along one side like a pocket and stuffed it with a big scoop of seeds, sunflower and pumpkin and chopped nuts, so that the hot brown sugar inside soaked into them. He folded it into a paper cup. Bo-ram bought four.

"*Ssiat hotteok*," she said, handing me mine. Seed hotteok. "Busan."

I bit into it and the sugar burned my tongue exactly the way it had burned my father's in May in my kitchen, and I made the same sound he had, and Bo-ram and Tae-ho both laughed at me, and Ha-eun shouted, "*Imo, hoo hoo!*" and blew on it for me with her cheeks puffed out. The seeds were toasted and crunchy and the dough was chewy and the whole thing tasted like brown sugar and oil and cold air. I thought of the eight hotteok my father and Sora and I had made, the smoke alarm going, the lilacs. I took a photograph and posted it for my parents with a caption, in English: *The real thing. Dad, you have to blow.*

Then we drove on to the sea.

Haeundae at night in winter is wide and empty and lit up like a stage. The beach is a long curve of pale sand, very fine, nearly white under the streetlights along the boardwalk. Behind it rise towers so tall and so close together they look like a single glass cliff, every window lit, gold and white and blue, and along the very top of the tallest ones, lights that shifted color slowly, pink to violet to green. In front of all that light was the sea. Black. Completely black, except for the white of the waves coming in, row after row, out of the dark. The wind came off the water hard and steady and cold and smelled of salt and nothing else.

We walked down to the edge of the water. Tae-ho carried Ha-eun on his shoulders. Bo-ram and I walked with our arms linked. Far off to the right, across the bay, a long bridge was lit up in moving colors, blue and then purple, laid across the black like a string of beads. A few other people were walking on the sand: a couple with a dog in a little coat, a group of college students taking pictures with a flash, an old woman in a long padded coat standing alone at the waterline with her hands in her pockets, looking out.

We stood at the edge where the sand was wet and hard. A wave came in and slid up toward my boots and stopped an inch away, fizzing, and went back.

Bo-ram said, slowly, in Korean, choosing simple words because she knew I was trying, "*Eonni. Naenyeon-e Minnesota-e gal geoyeyo.*"

I worked it out. *Naenyeon*. Next year. *Minnesota-e*. To Minnesota. *Gal geoyeyo*. Will go.

"*Jinjja?*" Really?

"*Jinjja*." She pointed up at Ha-eun on Tae-ho's shoulders. "*Ha-eun-do gal geoyeyo.* Summer." In English: "She wants to see the... the black birds. In the trees."

The crows. I had posted a video of them in March, the whole loud roost lifting off the bare downtown trees at sunrise, and Ha-eun had asked about them every day since. By summer they would be scattered across the county in ones and twos, and I had neither the heart nor the Korean to tell her.

"*Geureom*," I said, which I'd heard Bo-ram say a hundred times. Of course. Then, slowly, I made my own sentence, my first real one in the future. "*Jeo-neun Hanguk-mal-eul gyesok gongbu-hal geoyeyo.*" I will keep studying Korean.

Bo-ram squeezed my arm.

I tried another. This one I'd been practicing in my head since the morning. "*Eomma-hago appa-ga*..." I lost the verb. I laughed at myself. Bo-ram waited. "*Eomma-hago appa-ga ol geoyeyo*," I said finally. My mom and dad will come. "*Sahul hu-e*." In three days.

"*Ne*," Bo-ram said. "*Algo isseoyo.*" I know. She had been cleaning her apartment for a week in preparation.

We stood there. The wind pushed at us. Ha-eun, up on her father's shoulders, was singing something to herself, a little tuneless song with my name in it, *imo, imo, Maren imo*, over and over. Tae-ho swayed with her like a tree.

What is the future tense for, in a language? Mrs. Yoon said in Korean you build it from a word that means a thing, a fact, and a little ending that means it's going to be. *Gal geoyeyo*. A going that will be. You make the future out of a promise that it's real.

I thought about the photograph on the laptop. Four girls in rubber aprons. The one second from the left with her mouth wide open. She had no future tense in that picture. Or she did and I would never know it, what she thought would happen, what she planned. Whether she thought about Minnesota, a word she might never have heard. Whether, in March of 1998, she was the woman who picked up a telephone and asked a stranger in an office if a girl was healthy, and was told nothing, and said thank you, and hung up.

That is a sentence I will never be able to put in any tense. *She called.* *She didn't.* I have to carry both.

"*Eonni*," Bo-ram said. "*Chuwoyo?*" Are you cold?

I was. My face was numb and my hands were numb in my gloves. "*Ne*," I said. "*Gwaenchanayo.*"

We walked back up the sand toward the lights. Behind us, the black sea kept bringing in its white rows, one after another, the way it would all night, the way it had the summer night I was born a few miles from here, the way it would after all of us were gone. In the truck on the way home, Ha-eun fell asleep on my lap with seeds on her chin, and Tae-ho drove slowly so as not to wake her, and Bo-ram, in the front seat, opened the family space on her phone and sat for a long time adding names and dates to the six photographs, one by one, so that no one who came later would have to guess.

When she got to the market picture, she turned in her seat and held the phone back to me in the dark of the cab, lit up, and asked me something. I didn't understand. She tried again in English.

"Who," she said, and pointed at the other three girls in aprons. "I don't know names."

Nobody did. Mrs. Nam might have, but she was at home in bed. I looked at the four faces in the little lit square. Then I took the phone, and under the three unknown girls I typed, in Korean, slowly, the only honest caption: *Ireum moreum.* Name unknown. And under the fourth, second from the left, laughing, I typed *Eomma*.

Lesson 12: Conditionals

**Exercise 12.1.** Join the two parts with *-(으)면*, "if."

눈이 오다 *nuni oda* (snow comes) + 집에 있어요 *jibe isseoyo* (I stay home)
→ 눈이 오면 집에 있어요. *Nuni omyeon jibe isseoyo.* "If it snows, I stay home."

**Exercise 12.2.** Write your own.

만약 ________ -면, ________.
*Manyak ________ -myeon, ________.* "If ________, then ________."

---

My parents landed at Gimhae airport on a Tuesday at noon, and my father came through the arrivals door pushing a cart with two suitcases and a cooler on it.

"Dad," I said. "What's in the cooler?"

"Gifts," he said. He was wearing his red cap. He looked exhausted and gray and enormously pleased with himself, the way he looks after a long night on the plow when every road in his route is open. My mother came behind him in her good wool coat, holding her passport and boarding pass in one hand as if she expected to be asked for them at any moment, looking all around her at everything with her whole librarian's face.

Bo-ram had come with me. She had dressed carefully, a gray sweater and a long black skirt, and she stood beside me holding a bunch of pink roses and baby's breath wrapped in cellophane, and when my mother saw her, my mother stopped walking in the middle of the arrivals hall and put her hand over her mouth, the way Bo-ram had in the first video call. Then she came the rest of the way and took Bo-ram's face in both her hands and looked at her and said, "Oh. Oh, look at you."

Bo-ram didn't understand the words. She understood. She bowed, still with my mother's hands on her face, so that it was an awkward, tipping, lovely bow, and then my mother hugged her, flowers and all, and the cellophane crackled between them.

My father put his hand out to shake. Bo-ram looked at it, and then at me, and then took it in both of hers and bowed over it. My father looked at me over her head with an expression of pure panic. I nodded at him. *Bow.* He bowed. Two people bowing over a handshake in the middle of the airport while the luggage carts went by.

The cooler, it turned out, contained six pounds of frozen walleye fillets from a fish house on Lake Pepin, wrapped in newspaper and double-bagged, and three packages of my mother's frozen cardamom bread. There had also been a ring of smoked Swedish sausage. Customs kept the sausage and let the rest through, after a long conversation that my father described as "friendly." He had brought fish to a fish city. I didn't have the heart to tell him.

Ryu Dong-chul did not tell him either. That evening, when my father opened the cooler on the kitchen floor of Bo-ram's apartment and lifted out the walleye in its newspaper and presented it with both hands, Dong-chul took it with both hands, very seriously, and unwrapped it, and examined a fillet with his thumb, turning it in the light. He nodded. He said something to Bo-ram. Bo-ram said, in English, "He says, good fish. Lake fish. He never ate one."

My father beamed.

I had been worried about the two of them. I don't know what I'd been worried about, exactly. That they would sit across from each other in silence. That it would be like the agency office, polite and careful and sad. That my father would feel like a guest in someone else's story, or that Dong-chul would feel like a guest in mine.

It was not like that. It turned out that a retired county snowplow driver from Minnesota and a retired ship-repair welder from Busan have a great deal to say to each other with no common language at all. They said most of it the next morning, at six, walking together to the market while my mother and Bo-ram and I followed thirty feet behind.

They walked down the hill and over the green bridge the way Dong-chul and I had, hands clasped behind their backs, both of them, though I don't think either one noticed the other doing it. They stopped and pointed at things. Dong-chul pointed at the shipyard cranes and made a welding motion, one fist steadying, the other moving in small circles, and my father nodded and pointed at the sky and mimed a big steering wheel and made a sound like a diesel engine, and then mimed pushing a wall of snow, and Dong-chul nodded too, and pointed at the sky, and said "*Nun?*" and my father said, "Snow, yes," and Dong-chul made a gesture with both hands, high, very high, and raised his eyebrows, and my father held his hand up at his chest. Then higher, at his chin. Dong-chul whistled.

My mother walked beside me with her arm through mine. "Look at them," she said. "Your father hasn't talked that much since 1987."

At the edge of the market, where the street met the outer stalls, there was an eomuk cart.

I had been waiting for this. I had eaten eomuk every day since I arrived, sometimes twice, but I had been saving this cart, the one Bo-ram had told me about in May, at the corner by the subway exit where our mother had stood with her on Saturdays when she was small. It was a metal cart with a canvas awning, and on it a long rectangular steel pan of broth steaming hard in the cold, and in the broth, dozens of long wooden skewers, each with a ribbon of fish cake folded back and forth on it like an accordion, soaking. Chunks of white radish bobbed among them. Kelp. Green onion. A woman in a padded vest and a knit hat stood behind it with a ladle and a stack of paper cups, and the steam rose off the pan into the gray air and blew sideways toward the harbor.

The smell was the smell from my kitchen in May. Anchovy, kelp, radish, soy. Clear enough to see the bottom of the pan.

Bo-ram stepped up first and took a skewer out of the broth and handed it to my mother, and then one to me. Then she showed my father: you take your own. You eat. You count the sticks when you're done, and that's what you pay. She held a paper cup out to the woman, who filled it from the ladle and handed it back, and Bo-ram gave the cup to my father. "Broth," she said in English. "Best part."

My father took a skewer and bit into it. The fish cake was soft and springy and hot all the way through, salty and a little sweet, soaked full of broth. He chewed. He drank from the paper cup and his glasses fogged completely, and he stood there in the steam with his glasses white, chewing, his eyes invisible.

"Well," he said. "Well, I'll be."

Dong-chul was watching him. He said something, and Bo-ram translated, slowly. "My father says, Geum-ja always ate three. Here. Exactly three."

My father looked at the skewer in his hand. He looked at the cart. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his scarf and put them back on. Then he ate a second one, and a third, slowly, standing at the corner of the cart with the steam blowing past him toward the sea. When he finished the third he set the stick down in the little cup with the others, and he did not take a fourth, and nobody said anything about it.

On the way back, my father tried to explain lutefisk to Dong-chul.

I think he had been waiting to do this the whole trip. He did it with his hands and three words of Korean and Bo-ram's English and my halting translations. A fish, dried, very hard, like wood. You put it in a bucket. Many days. Water, more water. Then — and here he could not find it at all, the lye, the soaking, so he made a face of terrible disgust, scrunching his whole face up, and fanned his nose, and Dong-chul burst out laughing. Then Christmas. You cook it. You eat it. Nobody likes it. You eat it anyway. *Why?* Dong-chul asked, I think, with his palms up. And my father said, in English, "Because my grandmother did," and patted his chest, and then pointed back toward the eomuk cart, and Dong-chul looked at the cart for a long time, and then nodded slowly. He understood.

That afternoon, my mother and I walked down to the foot of the Yeongdo Bridge in the early afternoon to watch it lift.

It rises now only at its posted hour, and only for a little while, for visitors and for the old people who remember when it opened for the ships. A crowd gathers along the railings on both shores. There's music from a loudspeaker, an old song, and an announcement, and then, slowly, with a deep mechanical groan, one whole section of the road tips up, tilting toward the sky, until it stands almost straight up like a wall with the traffic lines painted on it going up into the air.

We didn't stand on the bridge itself, of course. We stood on the walkway at the edge, at the barrier, watching it rise. My mother held the railing. The wind off the channel was strong and smelled of salt and diesel. Gulls wheeled around the tipped road, as if it had disturbed them.

"Maren," my mother said, watching it. "Can I say something, and you won't be mad?"

"I won't be mad."

She was quiet for a while. The bridge reached the top of its lift and stopped there, a road standing on end.

"If we hadn't gone to the agency that year," she said. "If we'd waited, or gone somewhere else. If there hadn't been so many children. You'd have been someone else's. Or you'd have stayed here." She was still looking at the bridge. "I've been thinking all week, if you'd stayed. If she'd been able to keep you. You'd have grown up on that hill with that girl. You'd have a different name. You'd talk like them. You'd laugh like that woman in the picture." She took a breath. "And I've been thinking, what kind of person am I, if I'm glad it went the way it did. If I'm glad I got you."

The bridge began to come down. Slowly, groaning, the road tipping back toward level.

I thought of the conditionals page in my workbook, still blank, the second exercise. *If ________, then ________.* I had been carrying it around all week. I had a hundred ifs. If she'd had help. If she'd been older. If someone had asked. If the man who was my father had stayed. If I'd been born ten years later or twenty years earlier. If the agency had sent me to Denmark, to France, to Michigan. If, if. Every one of them led somewhere I wasn't.

"Mom," I said. "If I'd stayed, I wouldn't know you."

She didn't answer.

"That's not a nice thing or a sad thing," I said. "It's just true. I can't wish I'd stayed without wishing you away. And I can't wish you away. So I don't do that one." I looked at the water. "I just don't do that one."

My mother let go of the railing and put her arm around my waist. We stood that way while the road came down and settled flat with a shudder and a clank, and the traffic lights changed, and the cars started across again as if nothing had happened.

That night, in the family space, Nils had posted a photograph from Rochester: our parents' driveway, plowed by him for once, the edges a little crooked, under a caption that said *Dad, don't look.* Under it, Ha-eun had added a row of snowmen. Then I filled in the blank. I worked on it for an hour at Bo-ram's kitchen table, with my mother asleep in the next room and my father snoring on the warm floor beside Dong-chul's chair, where he had dozed off watching a baseball replay with him without either of them understanding a word the announcer said. I looked up two words. I checked the ending three times.

*Manyak nuni omyeon, uri gachi eomuk meogeoyo.*

If it snows, we eat fish cakes together.

It wasn't what I'd meant to write. It was simpler. But it was the only conditional I had where both halves were true, and I left it.

Lesson 13: Review

**Exercise 13.1.** Review everything. Fill in every blank you can.

저는 ________ 입니다. *Jeoneun ________ imnida.*
저는 ________ 살이에요. *Jeoneun ________ sarieyo.*
________ 이/가 어디예요? *________ i/ga eodiyeyo?*
________ 맛있어요! *________ masisseoyo!*
만약 ________ -면, ________. *Manyak ________ -myeon, ________.*

**Exercise 13.2.** If you cannot fill in a blank, leave it. Come back to it later.

---

On our last night in Busan, nobody went out.

It had been decided without anyone deciding it. My parents and I were flying home in the morning, Gimhae to Seoul to Minneapolis, and Bo-ram had asked through Sora, two days earlier, what we would like to do on the final evening: a restaurant, the night market, the tower on the hill with the view of the whole city lit up. My mother had looked at me and I had looked at her, and I said what we were both thinking. "Could we just stay in?"

Sora had translated it into the family space. Bo-ram wrote back in a minute. *Yes. Good. I wanted that too. We will make one thing.*

So in the late afternoon, while the light went from pale gold to orange over the harbor, the kitchen of the apartment on the hill in Yeongdo filled with women, and the living room filled with men pretending not to wait.

We made eomuk-tang. Fish cake soup. One pot. It was my mother's idea to use the recipe page from the family space, the one Bo-ram had typed up in May from her father's memory, and Bo-ram had printed it out and stuck it to the cupboard door with tape, a single sheet with a photograph of the dented aluminum pot at the top. The same pot was on the stove now. Dong-chul had taken it down from a high shelf that afternoon and washed it himself, slowly, by hand, before he gave it to his daughter.

My mother had never cooked a Korean dish in her life and she approached it the way she approaches everything, with total concentration and a pair of reading glasses. Bo-ram showed her what to do with gestures. They didn't need me to translate, which I think was the point. I stood at the counter cutting the radish into thick coins as instructed, and watched them.

Bo-ram took the paper bag of dried anchovies that Mrs. Nam had pressed on me at the market and poured them out onto a newspaper on the table. Big ones, silver and stiff, as long as my finger. She showed my mother how to snap off each head with a thumbnail and split the body and pull out the dark thread inside, so the broth wouldn't go bitter. My mother did one, slowly, and held it up. Bo-ram nodded. My mother did another. Within ten minutes she was doing them faster than Bo-ram, her fingers going quick and neat the way they go when she's mending a book spine, and the two of them sat side by side at the table with a pile of heads and a pile of bodies growing between them, not speaking, and the kitchen smelled of the sea.

Into the pot: cold water, the cleaned anchovies, a square of dried kelp as big as a hand, the radish. Bo-ram turned the flame low. "Slowly," she said in English, and then in Korean, "*cheoncheonhi*," and my mother repeated it, "*cheon-cheon-hi*," and wrote it on the back of her hand in ballpoint so she wouldn't forget, which is something I have seen her do my whole life with phone numbers and never once with a word.

The broth came up slowly, the way the page said. The kitchen windows fogged. Bo-ram took the kelp out at exactly the right moment, fishing it up with chopsticks and laying it on a plate like a wet green flag. After twenty minutes she lifted out the anchovies. The radish stayed. A little soy sauce. A little salt. Then she called her father.

Dong-chul came into the kitchen in his socks and his buttoned white shirt. He stood over the pot and looked down into it for a long time. My father had come and stood in the kitchen doorway behind him. Nobody said anything. The broth was simmering very gently, barely moving, pale gold, and through it, if you looked, you could see the dull bottom of the old aluminum pot and the white coins of radish resting there, every edge of them clear.

Dong-chul nodded once. He said something quietly. Bo-ram did not translate it. She didn't need to. I knew what he'd said.

Then the fish cakes. Bo-ram had bought them that morning from a shop near the market that has been making them since before any of us were born: flat sheets folded onto skewers, round balls, long thin tubes, a few stuffed with vegetables. They went into the broth and floated up and swelled. Green onions on top. That was all. No other dishes. A rice cooker of white rice and a single small bowl of kimchi, because Bo-ram said a meal without kimchi is not a meal, it is a snack. The pot went onto a portable gas burner in the middle of the low table in the living room, and we all sat down around it on the warm floor.

There were seven of us. My mother and father on one side, cross-legged with enormous difficulty, my father's knees up near his ears. Bo-ram and Tae-ho across from them. Dong-chul at the end, where he could reach the burner. Ha-eun next to me, half in my lap. And me in the middle of the long side, where I could see everyone.

Nobody made a speech. I want to say that clearly, because I had worried, all week, that someone would. That my father would stand and clear his throat. That Dong-chul would. That someone would raise a glass and say something about the families coming together, and I would have to sit and listen, and it would be true, and it would also somehow be too much. Nobody did. Tae-ho put a small ladle in the pot. Bo-ram filled the rice bowls. Dong-chul took a skewer out of the broth and laid it in my father's bowl, and my father took a skewer out and laid it in Dong-chul's, which he had clearly been planning, and then everybody did it, passing skewers across the table into each other's bowls, until all of us had more than we could eat and nobody had served themselves at all.

"*Jal meokgetseumnida*," Ha-eun said loudly, and so we all said it. My mother said it. My father said it, every syllable distinct, *jal meok-get-seum-ni-da*, and Ha-eun gave him an approving look.

We ate. That's most of what happened. The broth was clear and salty and tasted of the sea, and the fish cakes were soft and hot and soaked through, and the radish had gone sweet and almost translucent and fell apart under a spoon. The burner hissed. The windows were fogged so thick that the lights of the harbor came through them as soft blurs of red and white, a ship's lights at anchor, a crane's red eye, the lit green span of the bridge. Every so often someone ladled more broth into someone else's bowl. My father dropped a fish ball into his lap and Ha-eun laughed so hard she fell over sideways. Tae-ho told a story about a delivery that had gone wrong, with his hands, a box and a dog and a staircase, and it made Dong-chul laugh, and then my father, without knowing what the story was. My mother asked Bo-ram, through me, what Ha-eun was going to be when she grew up, and Ha-eun said, through me, a doctor for animals, and then said, a doctor for lungs, like Imo, and then said, a doctor for fish, and settled on fish.

At some point I realized I was understanding almost a third of what was said around me in Korean. Not the words. The shapes. The *-yo* and the *-seumnida* and the banmal going back and forth, who was speaking up to whom and who down, and in what tense, and when someone was asking and when someone was teasing. I had learned that much. A third. In February I'd had nothing.

Later, after the pot was nearly empty and the burner was off and Ha-eun had fallen asleep with her head on my knee, Bo-ram reached behind her and brought out my workbook. I had left it on the kitchen counter. She opened it to the last page. The review page. All the blanks.

"*Eonni*," she said. "Finish."

So I did, there at the low table, with a pencil Tae-ho found in a drawer, in the hot fogged room with the two families around me watching, my father leaning over to look, my mother with her reading glasses on.

*Jeoneun Maren imnida.* I am Maren.

*Jeoneun seoreun-yeoseot sarieyo.* I am thirty-six.

*Jagalchi sijang-i eodiyeyo?* Where is Jagalchi market? I knew now. I could have walked there in the dark.

*Gungmul-i masisseoyo.* The broth is delicious. I had tasted it.

*Manyak nuni omyeon, uri gachi eomuk meogeoyo.* If it snows, we eat fish cakes together.

Then there was a line at the very bottom of the page that I had never noticed. Not an exercise. Just a blank line, with nothing printed above it or below it, the kind a workbook leaves for your own notes. I looked at it for a long time.

There are things I will never be able to write on a line. My father's name, the other one, the one who was never anybody. The name she gave me, if she gave me one. Whether it was her voice on the telephone in March of 1998. Where Mrs. Bae went. What the three girls in the market photograph were called and whether they're still alive and what they would say if I found them. I have put a dotted line on the family tree for each of those things. I have left the boxes empty, not deleted. That is what you do with a blank you can't fill. You leave it, and you come back to it later, and maybe one day there's something to write and maybe there isn't. The workbook says so. Exercise 13.2.

I was still looking at the last line when Ha-eun woke up.

She sat up on my knee, rubbing her eyes, and saw the pencil in my hand and the page, and before anyone could stop her she took the pencil out of my fingers and leaned over the workbook and wrote on the blank line herself, in big uneven letters, her tongue between her teeth. Then she gave the pencil back and lay down again on my knee and was asleep before anyone could ask her anything.

Bo-ram leaned over to look. She laughed, very softly, so as not to wake her.

Ha-eun had written, in Korean, with one letter backward: *Maren imo, uri gajok.*

Maren Imo, our family.

My mother asked what it said, and I told her, and she took off her glasses and pressed the back of her wrist against her eyes. My father looked at the page for a long time and said, "Well." Dong-chul reached over and, very gently, with one thick finger, touched the backward letter, and said something, and Bo-ram said, in English, "He says, don't fix it."

I didn't fix it.

We sat a while longer. Nobody wanted to be the first to stand. The pot sat empty in the middle of the table, and through what was left at the bottom, a little pale gold broth and a single coin of radish, you could see the floor of the pot, scratched and dull and old, clear all the way down.

Outside, beyond the fogged glass, the lights of the harbor went on burning, red and white and green, on the water where our mother had worked and laughed too loudly and walked to every morning, one way, across the bridge. In Minnesota it was the small hours of that same day, not yet light, and snowing, and somewhere on a road out past Stewartville a plow was going by with its blue light turning, pushing the white aside so that someone could get home.