Samgwangsa

My favorite picture of my mother was taken in the summer of 1971 when she was twenty-nine and I was a baby. It was from the last set of pictures that my family took in Korea before my father brought us to the United States. In the image, we are sitting in my grandmother’s backyard in Busan. My mother is perched on a rock, back straight and tall, holding me on her lap, her brown hands securely around my waist. She smiles at the camera, her head slightly tilted so that her long black hair hangs to one side. I look away, distracted but relaxed. We are in a garden, both of us are wearing white, a green landscape our backdrop. Life starts anew.

I found this picture in one of the old family photo albums I took from my mother’s house after she died. It had always been my favorite, but it spoke such bittersweet things to me once she was gone. It was a picture of my mother as a young woman, about to embark on a journey. Her youth, the hopeful look in her eyes, the confidence in her posture, all of those things mocked me once I knew how her story ended—in a life of solitude and psychic suffering and perpetual strangeness. I suppose that it was the price she paid for a wager gone terribly wrong.

My mother was once the most fearless pioneer to ever come from my family, perhaps more so than the homesteaders on my father’s side who traveled westward from Tennessee and Nova Scotia to live off the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. Unlike them, my mother traveled alone. She was the first Asian immigrant to settle in my father’s insular little town, and the first person in her family to come to America, the significance of which should not be underestimated. In the 1970s in Korea, women who traveled without the company of a Korean man wore the stamp of impropriety, and women who traveled to America with or for an American man became so sullied that they were no longer considered Korean.

We lived transnationally for the first few years, but it was not easy to go back to a place that no longer wanted you, or to try to make a new home in a place that never wanted you to begin with. Yet my mother persevered, somehow managing to make life in our rural town more exciting than it really was, and insisting on maintaining some vestige of her life in Korea. At the same time, I know she longed to be a woman of the world, a woman who was destined for more. One day in 1976, she made a most extravagant gesture indicating as much. She purchased a four-piece Samsonite luggage set in powder blue, as an investment in her future of travel. She used it for our trip to Korea that summer, and then stored it away in the attic for the next twenty years. After she died, I found the smallest suitcase from the set among her things, the one she used to pack her toiletries. I opened it and found the jade turtle I had given her once as a symbol of long life. I then realized the irony contained in that little suitcase, that the occasions for which my mother most often packed her bags were trips to the psychiatric hospital.

* *  *

I can’t pinpoint the exact day or year my desire to go back to Korea with my mother started, but it must have been shortly after our summer vacations stopped, when the landscape of my childhood summers changed. In Korea, we lived among six million, in America, five thousand. In Korea, the streets were mazes of dirt roads, winding through the hillside neighborhoods. They were cluttered with brightly colored awnings and traditional tiled-roof houses, but there was still plenty of room to run. We ran to the store to buy red bean ices and comic books, or chased each other as billows of dust rose up around our feet. In America, everything was different. The streets were long country roads that etched borders between cow pastures, roads you could only travel by car. Running was done in private.

As time marched on, I kept running on our familiar paths—the garden behind Halmoni’s house, the dusty roads on the hill, the moss-covered trails at Geumgang Park—to hold these places near. If I closed my eyes, I could almost run across the ocean. Those places were slipping away from me, so I ran after them. I grew up and my memory dimmed, and only a few images remained, like that of lying in bed as my mother hung long green swaths of mosquito netting around me. Mosquito netting. The way she draped it tenderly around my bed, and spoke the words so sweetly, made me think that mosquito netting was the stuff of princesses. But time kept marching on and soon there was little left to remind me that we had once lived there, except the occasional shipment of sesame oil that Halmoni sent. Then that stopped, too, once my mother found a store that sold it. And we began to forget, and forgetting stirred my desire. The more distant Korea became, the more I felt her loneliness. By the time I was in high school, my dream of us returning to Korea together had become solid. Solid and specific. I would take her there myself. I did not yet know that my quest would end at Samgwangsa.

* * *

I became aware of my mother’s unspoken longing to return to Korea for the first time when I was seventeen. By that point, it had been twelve years since our last visit, and in all those years, she had stopped talking about the people and places she once called home. Someone on the outside might have looked at the situation and believed that my mother had assimilated into a new place and had finally become an American, but in our private life, I could see that her sense of displacement was stronger than it ever had been. For two years, her mental health had been on a steady decline, projecting her deeper and deeper into isolation. Perhaps, it was knowing of her psychic torment that made me want to connect her to some place intimately familiar, or maybe it was my own sense of impending loss. If I was losing my mother to mental illness, maybe Korea could bring her back.

During my junior year of high school, my history teacher handed me a book titled simply, Facts about Korea.

“There’s an essay contest, and I think you have a good shot of winning it,” she said.

It was sponsored by South Korea’s ministry of tourism, and they were calling for contestants to read the book and submit an essay on the theme of “modern Korea.” This was in 1987, the year that democracy finally triumphed over dictatorship, the year before the Seoul summer Olympics, and South Korea was gaining international attention. First prize was a trip for two to Korea.

I returned home from school that day and asked my mother, “If I win two tickets to Korea, will you go with me?”

She answered in an instant, “Yes.”

I read the book, and fully intended to make my best effort at winning the grand prize for my mother, but the week before the deadline I got a kidney infection and became bed-ridden with a temperature of 104. My head hurt so badly that I couldn’t lift it enough to take a sip of water and I heard my mother’s voice somewhere in the background. She was hovering over me the whole time, but her voice resounded in the distance, pleading with some invisible presence to save me from dying. I emerged from my fever-induced delirium to a world that was exactly the same as it had been for years. There was no possibility of returning to Korea and my mother was still slipping into darkness.

As difficult as it was to leave my mother, the following year I went away to college three thousand miles away, while she stayed in our small town, waiting. For what, I was never really sure, but she seemed to think that things would someday change. One day, she would return to the offbeat rhythms of Busan, equal parts bustling port city and sleepy beach town, the only city she ever really knew. One day she would see her sister, my emo, again. They would stand on the shores of Haewoondae, looking Westward across the Pacific, looking back at the America my mother had once dreamt of.

* * *

Over the next years, I traveled. France. 1989. England. 1990. Brazil. 1991. Each destination took me further away from Korea, as each place made me long for the new instead of the familiar. My horizons expanded as hers diminished, but my mother continued to practice patience.

During my sophomore year of college, she came to visit me. It was the first time since we went to Korea in 1976 that my mother had boarded a plane. My brother had convinced her to come and had framed the trip as a mother’s day present, but it was apparent that she had a hard time being in public and meeting new people. She avoided meeting my friends and couldn’t bear to look into the face of a stranger.

Despite the signs of my mother’s burgeoning agoraphobia, for the next two years, I fantasized about having a family reunion at my college graduation. My mother and my Korean cousins in the United States would all be there, and as a graduation present to myself, I would bring Emo from Korea and surprise them all. By the time I graduated, my mother had stopped going to unfamiliar places and could no longer tolerate crowds, so she didn’t come to graduation, nor did anyone besides my brother and his wife. Instead of a family reunion, I got the experience of being a quasi-orphan. At twenty-two, I was a well-traveled international studies graduate whose mother could barely leave the house.

I resumed my travels again a year after graduation with my new boyfriend. We went to study music and dance at the National School of the Arts in Havana—music for him and dance for me. Cuba was a remote paradise with little contact with the outside world and none with the United States. If you wanted to call Cuba from the United States, you had to first contact a service in Canada, who would then connect you to the party in Cuba. Sending letters operated in the same way—fax to Canada, then to Cuba. After three weeks in Havana, having had no contact with my family in the states, I came home to find that my mother had gone upstairs to the attic and had hidden in the crawl space, in the deepest corners where she stored things that she would never again use. She hid in there and swallowed a bottle of Haldol, washed down with a glass of wine, and laid down to die. The police came to investigate my mother’s disappearance and looked all over the house, but they didn’t think to look in the crawl space. Just as they began down the attic stairs, my mother—unconscious and half alive—let out a long groan. The police turned around and found her just in time to save her. All of this—her disappearance, her overdose, and her recovery—happened when I was in Cuba and no one in my family had been able to get in touch with me.

Everything changed after my mother’s suicide attempt. She kept herself more and more confined and didn’t go out. Her agoraphobia was magnified by schizophrenia, in that she internalized voices that told her it was unsafe to go outside. After my father died, she moved out to the east coast to be closer to my brother and me. The world in which I traveled consisted of Southern California, where my boyfriend’s family lived, and the Northeast corridor. I went to visit my mother every six weeks or so and knew that it was not enough, but I was scared to go more often. It pained me to see her like this—a recluse living on packaged ramen and canned fruit cocktail. This was not the mother I knew, and increasingly she turned into someone who bore only the vaguest resemblance to the woman who had raised me. Somehow I felt partly responsible for it. If only I could have done something for her before it had come to this. My impulse was to flee again, but something else happened instead.

After a long power struggle, I began cooking for her—something she had never let me do before, and we developed a new kind of relationship. I made recipes out of Bon Appetit and Food and Wine, international flavors that neither she nor I had ever tasted. She seemed grateful for the novelty, and so did I. In the course of a meal, it felt as if we had traveled, in baby steps, together.

Throughout my twenties and early thirties, I developed what my therapist told me was survivors’ guilt, manifested most clearly in the contrast between my freedom to travel and my mother’s confinement to her house. My therapist’s words made sense, but they were not as powerful as the messages I would get through dreams, whose recurring themes revolved around my abandoning my mother.

I see us sitting in her living room, looking at old family photo albums and scrapbooks of things I don’t remember collecting. She seems at peace, for once. Something compels me to go outside—either I just remembered that I have something to do, or there’s something I need to get, but whatever it is, it’s just going to be for a moment. “I’ll be right back,” I say, and suddenly, without transition, I am walking down the empty streets of a big city, oversized buildings casting shadows on the sidewalk. Someone gestures for me to walk in his direction. “The boat is about to depart!” he yells. I run to the loading dock and jump on the boat as it pulls away into the ocean. I am overcome by a feeling of relief, but no sooner does it dissipate. I realize what I have I just done. I hopped on a boat that is crossing the ocean and it will take weeks to get to the other side. Then, I remember that she is at home waiting for me to come back. I consider jumping overboard and swimming back, but the shore has already disappeared. I know her anxiety grows by the minute, because I have not come right back like I said I would. What explanation is she concocting for my lateness? I know how her mind works—one scenario after another in an auto-play of catastrophe and loss. She’s imagining that I have been struck by a car, or caught in the crossfire of a shooting incident, and maybe I am not dead, but probably hurt or endangered. Then, she might put those thoughts out of mind for a second and others creep in. She wonders if I left because I had something better to do, someone I wanted to be with more, and I probably never loved her much anyway. Somewhere inside, she feels it is her fault. “I’m sorry. Mother, my heart is broken for having left you alone.”

* * *

By 1999, I had the opportunity to go abroad again, but from then on my travels took on a whole new mission. Over the next eight years, I traveled to seven countries and each time I sought out some way to share it with my mother. From the Netherlands, I brought back cheese from the Alkmaar Cheese Market. “That is the best cheese I ever tasted,” she said. From Mexico, I brought back goat’s milk caramels, and from Argentina, alfajores, a pastry whose strange name she marveled in. “Al-fa-ho-res. Al-fa-ho-res,” she repeated in slow motion. From Germany, fig and caramel chocolates made her exclaim, “I didn’t even know they made such a thing!” There were no food items from Singapore and Malaysia, but I took pictures of a hundred different orchids so she could glimpse the botanical world.

All of these instances of giving my mother a taste of the places I had visited sprung from my desire for her to live vicariously in some small way and see the world beyond her bedroom walls. But, they did not prepare me for the trips that really mattered.

People had always asked me why I traveled so much but never went back to Korea, and the truth was that I didn’t want to go without her. In my imagination, a Korea without my mother didn’t exist and I failed to conjure one up. Although I already knew more or less what her answer would be, I’d occasionally ask my mother if she would consider going to Korea with me to see her sister. She always declined, but her answer betrayed the fact that she was no longer capable of going outside. “I want to show Emo this country. There are so many places here I’ve never seen.” And then she let out a sigh of “aiguuu,” an expression she often used to signal her heart’s longing.

* * *

In 1994, while my college boyfriend and I were preparing to go to Cuba and watching the World Cup with our Brazilian friends in Boston, he proposed that we plan a trip to Korea for the 2002 World Cup. At that time, it was easy to say yes. I was intoxicated by the energy of Brazilian futbol fans who had shown me the beauty of the game. The thought of returning to Korea was intimidating, but eight years was a long time to prepare, and part of me was skeptical that it was possible to stay committed to a plan made so far in advance. Likewise, part of me disbelieved that he and I would stay together for another eight years. So I said yes, without giving it another thought until 2001 rolled around and his mother bought tickets for the semi-finals in Seoul. With the prospect of returning to Korea becoming ever more real, I could no longer avoid telling my mother. “Mom, I am going to see the World Cup in Korea next summer.” Her eyes became intensely focused on something straight ahead, a telltale sign that she was distressed. I felt a mix of disappointment, anxiety, and guilt, yet managed to get the next sentence out. “I want to see Emo while I’m there.”

Over the next few months, my mother fretted about all kinds of things—what would Emo think of my being in my thirties and unmarried? Worse yet, what would she think of my traveling with a man to whom I wasn’t married? How would she judge my overly casual (by Korean standards) American dress? What if it was too much of a burden on Emo to cook for me? Despite her incessant worries about how my visit would affect Emo, my mother called my aunt and said without a moment’s hesitation, “Grace is coming to Korea in June to see soccer. Can you make her some dansul?”

In the months leading up to my departure, I had my own set of worries to wrestle. I could barely speak Korean and had been taking a crash course in resurrecting my once functional but broken tongue, practicing the answers to the two questions I was sure to get: “Why aren’t you married?” and “Why didn’t your mother come with you?” The answer to the latter question I repeated over and over, to tame the words—“Mah-eum-i apa-yo. Her spirit is sick.” One should not speak of mental illness directly, my friend Hyeonsu advised me, and so she suggested a more delicate way of phrasing it. Mah-eum-i apa-yo. Mah-eum-i apa-yo. No matter how much I practiced, the words could not begin to explain my mother’s twenty-five year absence.

Returning to Korea in the midst of World Cup fever, when the South Korean national team, affectionately known as “the Reds,” was on a winning streak and all of Seoul was a sea of red shirts, was nothing short of surreal. Although I had never been to Seoul before, I was taken aback by its efficiency and ultra-modernity. The Korea to which I arrived in June 2002 was a world away from the Korea that I remembered. After an intensive five-day frenzy of watching one South Korean win after another on big screens throughout the city, we headed out to the World Cup stadium to see the semi-finals, tickets to which my partner’s mom had bought a year in advance. In the stadium that night were South Korea and Germany. I had such intense anxiety on the way there that I nearly passed out on the train. I was nervous about the outcome of the game, and even more so about the fact that the next day we would leave Seoul. The Reds’ winning streak came to an end that night, and the next day we left the Korea that did not feel like Korea for Busan, the city of my birth.

Seeing my aunt for the first time since my childhood, and returning to Busan, restored a broken link for me. Before, the past had only been in the present as something ghostly and intangible. Now, it was a reality manifested in the smell of fresh fish and ocean that permeated the Busan air, in the heady scent of dansul, the sweet fermented rice drink I associated with my childhood, in the firm stroke of Emo’s hand as she insisted on scrubbing my back as if I were still a little girl. These were all things that I could savor in the present moment, yet they brought me back to the memories of Korea I had once tried so hard to preserve. What it meant to Emo that I had returned I am less certain of. I know she was happy to see me, yet I felt like a poor substitute for my mother. Emo asked the question, Why isn’t your mother here? She asked me the moment she picked me up at the train station, and again when we were lying together on the floor, getting ready for sleep. I explained that my mother’s health wasn’t good and she couldn’t travel. Mah-eum-i apa-yo. She nodded as if she understood. After two short days, we said goodbye at the Daegu bus station. Emo followed me onto the bus, gripping my hand as she spoke through tears. Ddo-bwa-yo. I will see you again. She nodded as she repeated this, as if trying to tell herself that it was OK to let go. I mimicked the gesture. I nodded and choked on the words, Ddo-bwa-yo. Ddo-bwa-yo, she repeated, and next time bring your mah-mi. Finally, she let go of my hand.

* * *

I nurtured the fantasy of returning to Korea with my mother for twenty years before it finally played out. In my fantasy, the reunion between my aunt and my mother was boisterous and tearful. Emo would be waiting for us at the airport, craning her neck to see above tall men and women in heels. At the very moment that she and my mother spotted each other, Emo’s fan would go slack and she’d shout, “Dong-seng-ah, dong-seng-ah, why did you wait so long to come back to me?” and my mother would smile and say, “I’m here now, aren’t I?” They would clutch each other and sob “Aiguuu! Aiguuu!” Passersby would watch as if they were in the audience of a daytime talk show. In my fantasy, both of them looked not a day older than they did the last time I saw them together at Kimhae International Airport in 1976, the year it opened. Emo was crying then, too. She sobbed uncontrollably and pulled my mother away from the gate and begged her not to go back to America. It was my last childhood memory of Korea.

The real scenario looked nothing like the one I had cultivated in my mind. The real one looked like this: On July 3, 2008, I boarded a plane from John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) to Seoul, a city that my mother had never visited. A black plastic box containing my mother’s ashes was packed inside my carry-on, and her papers—the permit from the South Korean embassy to transport human remains across international borders—were inside my purse. No one from my family greeted us on the other side.

* * *

For the first three weeks in Korea, I rented a room in a boarding house in Sinchon and studied intensive Korean at Ewha Women’s University. Although I had gotten by on my two previous trips with my broken Korean, I knew I still had my mother in absentia, to call ahead, or to follow up afterward. My mother had always been the translator between my Korean relatives and me, and now she could no longer serve that function.

The boarding house was full of international students studying Korean, most of whom were in high school or college. I was thirty-seven, a college professor. At least I had gotten the largest room in the house, one with air conditioning and a nice view from atop the hill. I settled in the room, and before unpacking anything else, I took the black box out of my carry-on bag and wondered where to keep it before deciding to put it in the window. For the last twenty years of my mother’s life, she had avoided windows because she didn’t want anyone to see her. Things are different now, I thought. I talked to my mother every day to make sure she was OK sitting in the window. Now that you’re free from your body, you must be free from your mind, too. I know you like cities, and you have never seen Seoul. Enjoy the view, Mama. It’s not too late to show you the world.

In March of that year, I called my cousin’s house to inform him and my aunt that my mother had suddenly died—a heart attack, according to the coroner’s report, though no one knows for sure. I had my doubts, but that is the story I told my relatives in Korea. My cousin answered the phone, and I mustered enough composure to say, “Umma dora-ga-shu-seoyo. Shim-jang mahbi.” “Mama passed away. Heart attack.” With the help of my friend Hyeonsu as translator, I gathered that my cousin welcomed the idea of my bringing my mother’s ashes to Korea to hold a funeral there. He suggested that we scatter her ashes from the stone footbridge in her hometown of Changnyung, which was about an hour from Busan. He was not yet ready to tell my aunt the news because her health was too unstable to handle it, but he would find the right time. My aunt called me in May, when she finally found out. The only words I could make out were Aigu, Dong-seng-ah. Again, through Hyeonsu, I learned that my aunt wanted to hold a funeral on August 15, so I planned my departure for Korea six weeks beforehand, so that I could have plenty of time to get used to living in Korea, in Korean, and to psyche myself up for what I believed would be the most important ceremony of my life.

About two weeks after my arrival in Seoul, I received an agitated call from my aunt, most of which I couldn’t understand despite my daily six hours of Korean study and immersion in the language. She was upset about something. That much I knew. My cousin followed up with a long email that was easier to understand than the phone call, but still not entirely comprehensible. Hyeonsu read the letter to me with tears in her eyes. It said that I was not to set foot in their house with my mother’s ashes and that I needed to find something else to do with them right away. The tone of the letter was harsh and accusing. Why didn’t I put my mother’s remains to rest sooner? What was the matter with me thinking I could take them here and there? I was utterly confused about the abrupt change in attitude and wondered why they had waited until I had come all this way to tell me that they no longer wanted to scatter my mother’s ashes together. Despite the condemnation of my character, the line that stung the most was about my mother. If your mother had wanted to return to Korea, she would have done it when she was alive. As I feared, they hadn’t understood what I meant six years earlier when I tried to explain my mother’s condition with the words Mah-eum-i apa-yo.

I wrote back, with much help from Hyeonsu, that returning to Korea was one of my mother’s unfulfilled wishes, to see her sister again her greatest longing. It was impossible, however, because my mother suffered from agoraphobia and schizophrenia and had barely been able to leave her house for the last fourteen years of her life. In some ways, she had always been an exile from Korea, knowing that the society had shunned her for the choices she had made, but her inability to travel and her mental suffering gave new meaning to the term. If her greatest desire had been to see Emo again, mine was to bring my mother back and finally put an end to her exile. This time, the tears did not stay in Hyeonsu’s eyes as she read the letter. The response I received from my cousin was cold and emphasized that I needed to figure something out, by myself.

There I was in Seoul, a city to which my mother had no connection, as a virtual foreigner, being pressured by my relatives to take care of my mother’s ashes immediately. Until then, I would not be welcome in their house. The rejection from my Korean family re-ignited my feelings of loss and anger, and highlighted the impression I had had growing up, that my mother and I were a special isolated unit of our family. But Hyeonsu stepped in. “Maybe we can do something together in Busan. I will ask my mom.” A few days later, Hyeonsu and I boarded the bullet train from Seoul to Busan. The black box of my mother’s remains was once again nestled inside my backpack.

* * *

When you were alive, I dreamt of you almost nightly. You were always with me, always there beneath the surface. When you died, your absence became so absolute that you no longer visited me in sleep. Not until three weeks after we arrived in Korea. The night I got the letter from Sung, I dreamt of you for the first time in months, the first time since your death. In the dream, I see you from across the room. You are wearing a paisley blouse, your hands moving quickly to pack a vermilion trunk—a few clothes and toiletries, but mostly, sandwiches. You look beautiful and vibrant, smiling with a full set of teeth. Buzzing with excitement to see your family and home again, your smile grows wider and a soft red light radiates from your face. It is the most alive I have seen you in twenty-five years.

The sight of you makes my heart tender and I want to protect you from any more hurt or disappointment. I want to see you smiling like this forever. “Are you sure it’s going to be OK, Mama?” I ask, doubting whether or not I should have brought you here after half a lifetime of seclusion, wondering whether the trip might be too much.

“Yes,” you say, your voice calm and resolute. “We are just going to travel for one day and then I can go home and rest.”

You have planned the itinerary for us. Of course. Even after all these years, after three decades of modernization, the fall of two dictators, a bloody battle for democracy, a meteoric economic rise, after all this change, you still know Korea far better than I. You knew all along where we were headed, where this journey would end.

“We will go to Jinju. We will go to the mountain. Then I can go home and rest.”

I awoke and felt, for the first time since her death, that my mother was with me again. Her presence saturated the room, and although I knew she was trying to tell me something, I had not yet connected the words in the dream with my current predicament. I had not yet considered the possibility that my mother was acting as my guide. Instead, I called up Hyeonsu and asked, “Is Jinju a real place?” “Yes,” she said. “It’s a real place.” I fixated on the name Jinju while neglecting the rest of my mother’s itinerary from the dream.

Upon our arrival in Busan, we went straight to Hyeonsu’s mother’s house, where we rested only a short time before moving on to complete our mission. Hyeonsu’s mother had researched a couple of options for places where we could scatter the ashes. There were two temples that she had suggested: one in the city and the other on the outskirts. Remembering that my mother often longed for city life, I chose Samgwangsa, the temple in Busan proper. I tried to express my gratitude to Hyeonsu’s mother for doing what my own family would not do, but instead of words, all I could let out were tears. She responded in kind, her own tears communicating a non-verbal sentiment that she knew my pain, my sense of injustice. In some small way, she knew my mother, too, and wanted her to have a proper burial. The three of us sat together on the floor of her front room, not speaking, but crying.

That afternoon we took a cab to Samgwangsa. It was July 27, during the week considered the peak of the summer, when Koreans throughout the country consume special foods designed to replenish and fortify the body against the heat. Indeed, it was especially steamy that day and I was ill-equipped for the elements, having focused all my preparation on the psychic aspects of this trip. The cab dropped us off at the main entrance to the temple, at the foot of the mountain. Almost as soon as we began climbing up, beads of sweat formed on my nose, causing my glasses to slip, and my jeans clung to my skin from the humidity. I tried to banish all unpleasant thoughts from my head, as I knew how much my mother hated it when I complained. At that moment, Hyeonsu’s mother looked over at me with the backpack full of ashes and said, “You’re carrying your mother on your back, the same way she carried you when you were a baby. Now you are a mother to your mother.” Although I had the impulse to cry then, the whole experience felt too surreal for me to connect with my feelings of grief at that moment.

Once at the top of the mountain, I found a small clearing in the trees, away from the hiking path. “This is good,” I said. “It will give her privacy and there’s a view of the city.” With Hyeonsu and her mother as witnesses, I opened the black box and grabbed handfuls of my mother’s incinerated remains and scattered them around the trees. The internal dialogue I had with her was too full and fast for words. The only thing I could manage to say out loud was “I’m sorry,” and with that the tears flowed.

After we took my mother’s ashes to Samgwangsa, I got a call from my cousin and aunt. They did not ask where her ashes were, but only wanted to know that they were resting. My cousin tried to reassure me that I had done the right thing. “I believe that we all choose our final resting place,” he said. “When your mother was alive, Busan was the place she chose for herself as her home.” I contemplated his words, and although I didn’t trust his motivations for telling me this, I realized that Busan was in fact the only place my mother had ever really chosen to live. The drama that had gone down during the previous week—my relatives’ inexplicable rejection of my mother and me, the overwhelming doubt I experienced—all seemed to dissipate like a cloud of thick black smoke in the open sky.

I boarded a northbound bus to travel toward my future. Just outside of Busan, I saw a sign for the town of Jinju. Then, I remembered the dream.

We are just going to travel for one day . . . We will go to Jinju. We will go to the mountain. Then, I can go home and rest.