Disappearing Acts: An Immigrant History

The Friendly City

Chinese, Japanese, sings child, tugging his eyelids upward, then downward, to slant.

Dirty knees, look at these. He grabs at his nipples with his thumb and forefinger, pulling out the polyester fabric on his chest to simulate a woman’s breasts.

I am stunned silent at first, then find a retort.

I’m not Chinese or Japanese.

The scene repeats every few days at recess, as I play alone on the always-damp log toys of my elementary school playground. It is usually a boy or group of boys that taunts me. Each time, my reply is a little quicker. I’m not Chinese or Japanese. Sometimes I add I’m Korean.

Over time my response evolves. I’m half Korean. I want to distance myself from the words that make slanted eyes and women’s breasts seem shameful, but it’s too late. The shame is already inside of me.

Chinese, Japanese . . .

I’m half American. I say. My father is American. With enough time I learn to make my mother disappear.

Drive along the I-5 corridor between Seattle and Portland, and where dense evergreens start to give way to sprawling pastures, you will see a billboard off the highway with a picture of Uncle Sam. It was the property of a farmer named Alfred Hamilton, who erected the sign in the early 1960s to spread “his archconservative views in big block letters” (Kershaw, 2004). It’s double-sided so that passersby in both directions can read his words: “Bangladesh has clean air, but would you want to live there?” and “AIDS: the wonder disease that turns fruits into vegetables.” ¹ Just as you begin to digest Uncle Sam’s serving of right-wing patriotism, you will see exit 76: 13th St., Chehalis, Washington. That’s where I grew up. My White American father was born and raised in Chehalis, whose official nickname was “The Friendly City.” He met my mother when he was working as a merchant marine in Korea, and he brought the rest of us to his hometown shortly thereafter. In 1972, when we moved to Chehalis, the sign off exit 76 read “Welcome to The Friendly City.”

No doubt, some people did experience it as a friendly city, and indeed, some of the people in our immediate midst were friendly. Next-door neighbors, schoolteachers, and my father’s friends and relatives were mostly kind and well-meaning. The others, who knew us only from a distance, saw us as foreigners that didn’t belong in their town, and many of them held the same kind of views that Alfred Hamilton preached through his Uncle Sam sign. My most salient memory of “The Friendly City” is that it was a place of unrelenting hostility.

To survive at my father’s hometown, we sometimes had to make ourselves invisible. My mother tried to wring the foreignness out of her tongue by speaking only English, except for the names of Korean foods and things for which there were no translation, and therefore, I was an outsider not only to the place where I grew up but also to the language of my birth country. I would always be excluded from the we of woori mal, “our language,” as Koreans call Korean. Decades later, even after summers of studying Korean in windowless classrooms in Seoul and conforming the sound of my speech to the standard dialect, I could not utter the words “woori mal” to Koreans without an interrogation. Where are you from? Why don’t you speak Korean well? Are both your mother and father Korean? No, they would conclude, you are not Korean.

Neither of my parents ever talked about how they met or why we moved to my father’s hometown in the United States, yet growing up in rural America in the 1970s and 80s, I internalized a story about it nonetheless: America was better than Korea, and therefore, naturally, we would live here instead of there. The other story—about my mother and her life before America—disappeared, like so many things that were once hers. I have tried to reconstruct another story from the few things my mother and aunt told me about Korea once I was grown, childhood memories of being with my Korean relatives, and most important, the decades of research I did about a time and place that I never directly experienced. And now, I imagine an entirely different narrative about American supremacy and the social and historical context in which we became immigrants to the United States.

Korea

By the time my mother reached the age of 20, half of her family had already died. My grandfather died during the Korean War of “natural” causes. He had stomach cancer at the time when there was no place left for the sick to go. Within the first 6 months of fighting, American bomber planes had burned all the hospitals to the ground, their ashes mingling with the bones of napalmed children. I imagine that my grandfather died at home with nothing to ease his pain, or worse, when they were on the run without shelter or food.

My grandmother gave birth to at least four children between the years 1922 and 1941—one boy and three girls, with my mother being the youngest. All of them were born when Korea was a colony of Japan, and Gyeongsang Province, where my mother’s family lived, by virtue of its proximity to Japan, endured the greatest violence. Under Japanese colonial rule, Koreans were dispossessed of their land and homes and forced into various forms of labor. Many of the girls were taken to Japan to work as sex slaves for the imperial army. Korean subjects were ordered to speak only Japanese or risk having their tongues cut out, so my grandparents raised their children to speak their oppressors’ language. If my grandmother had given birth to more than four children, no one ever spoke of them. The first and third children lived through their colonized childhoods but died as young adults. My mother and her eldest sister were the survivors.

Japanese colonial rule ended in 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and many Koreans living in Japan were killed along with Japanese civilians. My mother’s family was in Osaka during World War II, and so they were spared the nuclear holocaust. Although the United States usually takes credit for “liberating” Korea, there had been decades of organized Korean resistance to Japanese imperialism, and the world would never know whether Koreans could have achieved independence on their own. At the end of World War II, the United States drew a line at the 38th parallel, dividing the country in two and ceding the north to the Soviets. As soon as Japanese occupation of Korea ended, American and Soviet occupation began, and Korea became the United States’ first laboratory in communist containment. The presence of foreign occupation governments did not quell the revolutionary forces that had been gaining momentum during Japanese colonization. If anything, it sowed the seeds for the most devastating yet least known war in modern history—a war that killed one in 10 civilians and boasted the highest collateral damage rate of the 20^th century.

My grandmother’s first child and only known son disappeared at the start of the war in 1950. His body was never found, and the family could not officially claim him as dead nor did they want to believe that he was gone forever. Historical records would later file his disappearance under the ambiguous category of “missing or wounded,” which by some counts was as high as 2 million. At this point, in my mother’s brief existence, she had already experienced a lifetime of heartache, but her pain was also that of a whole people. Nearly everyone, save the elites, had suffered irrecoverable losses.

When the armistice agreement was signed in 1953, it spelled out a contract between the United States and North Korea that the war would be resolved with a peace treaty and the divided country would be put back together within 6 months. The 10 million families (over one third of the surviving population) that had been torn apart because they ended up on opposite sides of the border were given a promise that they would soon be reunited. This meant that my mother’s brother might resurface once the border reopened. But none of these promises was fulfilled, the signatories of the armistice have remained locked in a stalemate ever since, and my mother’s family never found out whether their missing son had died, defected, or merely been displaced. For their own safety, South Korean families had to treat their missing loved ones as if they were dead. If the South Korean dictatorship suspected that they had any ties to the North, even if such ties were accidental, they would have been persecuted as enemies of the state. So my grandmother took in my uncle’s 5-year-old boy, one of the millions of children orphaned by the war, and raised him as her fifth child.

Family Tree

The first time I had an inkling of my family history was at the age of nine, when my third-grade teacher assigned us the task of constructing a family tree. As much as I had tried to impress upon my peers that I was half American, my father was away at sea, so my American half was merely a stump. I knew the name of my father’s mother, Grace, because she was my namesake, though my mother insisted that I was named after Grace Kelly, and for a long time, I believed her. My father was away for long stretches of my childhood, so it took a couple of years before he found out that he needed to set the record straight: “You were named after your grandmother, dammit. My mother’s name was Grace.”

The name of my paternal grandfather I knew because it was written on the back of a photograph of him, circa 1921. “To my beloved wife and son. Love, Gideon.” This was the only concrete evidence of my paternal grandfather’s presence before he vanished from my father’s life. He went out one day when my father was 2 years old and never returned.

With my father at some far away port—usually Manila or Guam or Singapore—I concentrated my research efforts on my mother’s family. I knew my grandmother and aunt, Halmeoni and Imo, and the two cousins I met during our summer trips to Busan. Until then, I had always believed that they represented the whole of my Korean family.

I sat down at the high counter that looked out onto the kitchen from the living room. There were white wooden shutters that opened above the sink and allowed me to face my mother. This was my favorite spot in the house because I felt tall in the swiveling vinyl barstool, I could always see the action in the kitchen, and it was within arm’s reach of the Goofy cookie jar, which my mother kept perpetually filled with home-made chocolate chip. From there, I could watch her work in the fluorescent-lit kitchen. The formica table where we ate most of our meals and the lighting were bright white, but everything else was decorated in a 1970s palette of orange, brown, and yellow—the appliances and wall phone were mustard yellow, the low-pile carpet was brown and orange paisley—“good for hiding stains,” my mother had said—and the linen napkins were orange with brown pompoms on the border. With my Garfield notebook and pencil in hand, I began the interview.

“What’s Halmeoni’s name?” I asked my mother, who was chopping something or other at the pull-out cutting board. Everything in our kitchen was attached to the walls, even the table and the cutting board.

“Cho Sung-Woon. C-H-O. First name you spell S-U-N-G-W-O-O-N.”

“What’s your father’s name?” I didn’t call him Halabeoji because I had never even seen a picture of him and therefore had not yet made an emotional connection to him as my grandfather.

“Ha Jum-Eul.” Again, she spelled out the name.

“What were your grandparents names?

“Huh. I don’t know,” she said shaking her head. “Koreans don’t call people by their first names.”

“What are the names of the children?” I asked, drawing two lines for my mother and her sister, my imo.

My mother spelled Imo’s name, as well as her own. Then she wiped some bits of scallion off the cutting board and leaned against it. She focused her eyes on the wall two feet in front of her and said, “I had a brother and another sister, too.”

I nearly dropped my notebook as I looked up, mouth agape.

“My brother disappeared during the war. I don’t know what happened. I just never saw him again.”

“How old were you then?”

“Oh, about your age,” she said, still staring at the wall.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to never see my brother again and an urge came over me to rip up my homework assignment into little pieces, but then, I worried that my teacher would be disappointed.

“My sister was my favorite. She was by far the best looking out of all three of us girls . . .”

“What happened to her?”

“She died before you were born.” Her gaze finally connected with mine, and the two of us stood in silence, amplified by the humming of the long fluorescent bulb mounted on the wall. Then she closed her eyes and sighed the words, “Aigu! Dap-dap-eu-rah.”—a Korean expression that signaled how oppressed she felt by the sadness of remembering.

There were no pictures of my dead aunt or anyone else from my Korean family prior to the 1963 glamour shot of my 22-year-old mother in a beehive hairdo, off-the-shoulder faux fur stole and black kohl eyeliner, flashing her wide dimples for the camera. I had internalized this image as the epitome of feminine beauty, so it was hard for me to imagine a sister who was more stunning than my mother, but my surviving aunt later corroborated that my dead aunt was in fact a vision of such otherworldly proportions that she could make any woman look ordinary by contrast.

My mother didn’t like to talk about the past, but in service of my education, she would have done just about anything. I looked at my finished tree and felt sad that it did not seem like a normal tree. It was lopsided and some of its branches could not sprout new life because most of my mother’s siblings were dead.

“They Just Disappeared”

In 1961, the year my mother turned 20, her heavenly beauty of a sister died of stomach cancer at the age of 26. She left behind two young children, who also went missing. I didn’t know about these cousins until I was well into my thirties, when one night over dinner, my mother and I were talking about Korea and she let loose a family secret.

“Chunja Imo had two children, you know. Boys.”

“No, I didn’t know! Where are they now?”

“No one knows. They just disappeared.”

“Wait. What do you mean ‘they just disappeared’?”

“You see, in Korea, children belong to their father. No one knows what he did with them after she died.”

By this point in my life, I had spent many years researching the dark history of United States–Korea relations and the Korean diaspora, and I suspected that they had been given up for adoption and were living somewhere in America, with names like David and John. Although international adoption from Korea began as a rescue mission in 1954 to find American homes for war orphans, it quickly turned into a substitute for social welfare and a government policy to rid the country of an unwanted population.

South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, whose motto was “one race, one nation,” publicly denounced the presence of “Yankee wives” and mixed-race children as a social crisis (E. Kim, 2007). He signed a presidential order for the placement of these children in transnational adoption as a solution to “the GI baby problem” (Oh, 2015, p. 52). In an unprecedented move, he also wrote personal letters to American families pleading that they consider adopting a mixed-race child (E. Kim, 2010, p. 62). At the same time, Korean social workers launched an aggressive campaign to convince mothers working in the camptowns that Korea could offer nothing of value to their children and the only rightful place for them was in their father’s country. And indeed, the law was structured to make it so. Children born to Korean mothers and foreign fathers would not be allowed to attend public schools or register as South Korean citizens. This was all part of Rhee’s carefully engineered social program to restore Korea’s identity as a people free of foreign invasion. Long before I was born, Korea had already determined the conditions of my exile.

South Korea’s adoption program and American campaigns to save Korean children from communism and the “Asian disregard for human life” had become so successful that, by the 1960s, Korean social workers had to expand their recruitment efforts to other vulnerable populations. (Oh, 2015, p. 27). Single mothers and poor families of “pure” Korean descent became the new targets. Instead of finding homes for needy children, adoption agencies began looking for children to place in homes, thus continuing the steady supply of Korean adoptees westward (H. Kim & Cho, 2012). According to one former Korean social worker, “I misunderstood my job and thought I was supposed to make the birth mothers relinquish their children” (Oh, 2015, p. 121).

In the minds of many Koreans, America became a mythic place where there was no poverty or racism, and anyone could make it big. In the words of one woman who gave her two Amerasian children up for adoption:

My children were mocked because of their mixed physical features. One time my older one came home with his trousers soaked and frozen with his own pee. Children bullied him by saying “You must have a big penis. Let me see.” By the time my older one was around eight and the younger around seven, I decided . . . I talked to them for about a month and said, “we have been waiting a long time for your father who has never come. If you stay here, you will face constant discrimination. However, in the U.S. there is no such thing. (Sunlit Sisters’ Center, 2008).

Dog Eaters

It is a mild fall day in 1977, first grade, and I have just gotten off at the bus stop near my house. The blonde-haired bully from my neighborhood calls after me. “Wait! Wait! I want to show you something.” I turn around and watch her crouch down and peer into the shady grass beneath a small grove of oak trees. Tentatively, I stop and move in her direction. When I am close enough to almost see over her shoulder, she springs to her feet with a rusty hammer in her hand and waves it at me. I begin to run and think I have lost her before I realize that she has stopped to dip the hammer into a mound of fresh dog poo. She begins chasing me again, aiming her shit-smeared weapon at my head. Another child from the bus stop joins in and tackles me. He pins me down as the blonde bully holds the hammer above my face, but somehow I wriggle away and run. Panic pulses through my body as I feel myself slipping on mud and falling into a ditch. I land on my back and look up through the tops of the gold and green sun-dappled trees at a rare blue sky. A trickle of cold water runs down my neck and soaks through the back of the red corduroy jacket that my mother had just washed that morning. I picture how upset she will be that it’s already dirty, and the tears start. I squeeze my eyes shut so that the blonde bully cannot see me crying, but I hear her cackling at the top of the ditch. “Dog eater!” she calls out and drops the hammer into the water next to me, splashing mud and feces onto my jacket.

Sometime in the early 1960s, my mother moved from her family’s ancestral town of Changnyung to the port city of Busan in search of work, though it took decades for me to articulate my mother’s journey, the details of which I assembled from the crumbs of information she dropped during our dinner conversations over the last 10 years of her life. Once in a while, she would sketch out a character or scene from postwar Korea that stayed in her memory, and in so doing, she gave me the outline of a story.

Though my mother had lost half her family, it seemed as if her heart remained open. She spoke with compassion about the other survivors among whom she lived. Around her were people of all ages trying to make a living in a country still reeling from the devastation of the war—the grandmothers who carried heavy bundles of cabbages into the city to take to market, the girls who quit school to toil long days in the factory, the men who stole and butchered dogs to sell for meat. She couldn’t admit that she pitied the dog traders, because they were regarded as the dregs of society, and no respectable person could excuse the filthiness and dishonesty of their work. One of her own dogs even fell victim to them and was turned into meat. As much as she hated them for snatching her family pet, and as much as she internalized public opinion that they were unworthy of her concern, she could not help but wonder what circumstances led them to that fate. In some small way, she felt for them, too.

There was a young boy in her neighborhood that she watched with particular tenderness. He was a peddler of red bean ice, about 8 or 9 years old. At the height of summer, his covered basket was no match for the sun and his ices turned to slush at a rate much faster than he could sell them. On those sweltering days, the boy crumpled up on the side of the road and cried in frustration, as drops of red bean syrup formed little rivers in the dust. Whenever my mother had enough change to spare, she would buy an ice or two to save him from the humiliation of failure.

Off in the distance was a U.S. naval base where local girls walked hand in hand with American soldiers, who showered them with gifts of sweets and perfume. It must have seemed as if they wanted for nothing. I’ve always wondered whether my mother moved to Busan already knowing what kind of work she would do, or if she had come with another purpose, only to be seduced by a more promising opportunity. I wonder if she looked at the GI girls and marveled at their comfort or if she knew from the beginning that she was going to be one of them.

American Dreams

My surviving aunt, 16 years my mother’s senior, was like another mother to my mother. Indeed, her children were only a few years younger than my mother. So when her husband died and her sons were grown, she spent more time with my mother. As much as my aunt fretted over her baby sister, she could not protect her from everything. My mother dreamed of getting an education, but she was a girl, and girls helped pay for the educations of their brothers instead of going to school themselves. Her missing brother’s son was now 16 and aspiring to go to university.

In the 1960s, South Korea was in the throes of massive transformation—reconstruction of the country after the war, urbanization, and rapid industrialization. Rural people moved to the cities in search of work. Bars and nightclubs were established around American military bases so that the soldiers could feel comforted by a feminine touch. Aspiring performers sang and danced. Pretty girls sold drinks on commission and chatted with men at the bars. Koreans went to the bases in droves, only to beg for crumbs or pull leftovers out of the garbage. For some women, it was a small leap from eating out of the trash to exchanging services for food. Exchanging sex for dinner. Selling food on the black market for more money with which to buy more food. Selling sex in nightclubs to pay for things more expensive than food, debt mounting with each passing day. These were the kinds of things people did to survive.

Because the Korean War was never resolved, American bases and the service industry catering to them flourished, and public sentiment toward the American presence in Korea remained ambivalent. The emerging South Korean nation depended on the United States for both national and economic security, and the bases provided much of the currency that the average person needed to get by. Koreans were grateful for the opportunities to work, but resentments still ran high because Americans enjoyed privileges that most Koreans had never imagined—spacious accommodations, an endless supply of food, and the guaranteed company of women.

There were two places of employment designated for young women who weren’t from elite families—the factory or the army base. I imagine that my mother, being a person of great ambition, chose the latter. She may have been attracted to the American base for its wealth of exotic foods, for its day-to-day life filled with small luxuries, and opportunities to sometimes sing on stage. Most of the jobs in the camptowns offered shorter hours and greater earning potential than did those in the factory. More importantly, it promised the glamour of America and the possibility of one day moving there by building a life with an American soldier. The chances of that actually happening were slim, but my mother, and a million other women like her, made a wager. As much as my aunt may have tried, she could not convince my mother that such a place would lead to her certain ruin. Or maybe my mother knew this already, and it was the prospect of ruin itself that drew her in. Maybe there was nothing about the life she currently lived that she wanted to keep pristine, and in a reckless moment, she plunged headfirst into the uncharted waters of America town. What did she have to lose, after all?

The women who flocked to the American bases could not have foreseen the consequences. The barmaids, the club hostesses, the singers, the dancers, the prostitutes, the waitresses, the shopkeepers who supplied convenience items to the soldiers; the beauticians who coiffed the entertainers; the black market peddlers who traded in PX (post exchange) goods; the casual passersby who paid attention to catcalls—all of these women were branded as “western princesses” and “yankee whores.” It was bad enough that they casually mingled with men who were unacceptable to their families, and that they did so in seedy settings, but what made it worse was that these men were Americans—the very Americans to whom the Koreans were indebted and subordinated. It was an affront to the nation. Although South Korea profited greatly from U.S. military presence, to the point that the government aggressively promoted the sex industry around the bases as a form of “foreign diplomacy,” the women workers were gradually stripped of their rights. Korean society reviled these women so much that life in “normal” society became impossible. Fathers legally disowned the very same daughters whose labor paid off their families’ debts. Some women even died at the hands of their abusers—men that were never brought to justice.

The women who dreamed of America did not yet know how hazardous the work could be—that drunken soldiers with extraterritorial protections could be lethally violent. That club owners sent “slicky boys” after girls who didn’t play by the rules. That their children would become stateless subjects. That they would soon be sinking in quicksand and there would be only two ways out—death or marriage to an American.

War Bride

It is the spring of 1987, my sophomore year of high school, and I am sitting in history class. A boy named Ian is sitting behind me, whispering my name. I try to ignore him because his comments are often vaguely sexual, drawing attention to my developing body, but at the same time he is one of the smart kids in my school and sometimes my ally against the tide of ignorance that I face daily. This time he says something that catches me off guard.

“Hey, Grace? Was your mom a war bride?” He says it in a slightly mocking tone. I don’t respond. He asks again, “Was your mom a war bride?”

I don’t understand the question and mull over in my head how my mother could be a war bride when the Korean War was in the 50s but my parents married in 1971.

“I heard that she was,” he says.

I want to put the question to rest, so I say, “My mom’s from Korea, not Vietnam.” I do not yet realize that Korea is still at war.

My parents met in Busan sometime around 1969, after my father finished his tour of duty in Vietnam. A year later, they were planning to get married. There are other things one could say about their circumstances. My mother had a child already, and she wanted him to have a father. My father had a wife already, but she was infertile, and he wanted to raise a child. My parents looked at each other with so much yearning for the things that they had lost or been denied, they began to see hope for fulfilling an impossible hunger.

Imo once told me stories about when my mother was pregnant with me. My mother was full of desire back then, but most things she wanted were so big and beyond her reach that it was hard to translate them into words, so she asked for the nameable things she knew she could get. She would say to my aunt, “Eonni, cook for me please.” My aunt had already made tremendous sacrifices in the name of familial duty, so when my mother made such a simple request, my aunt was happy to oblige. Of all the things my mother could have eaten, she singled out one dish in particular. “Eonni, please make me some nokdu-juk.” She ordered the mung bean porridge almost every day and if my aunt suggested that she should eat something else, my mother insisted, “But nokdu-juk is what baby wants to eat.” Even when my mother wasn’t pregnant, she had a habit of seeking out her craving and overindulging in that one thing. The problem was that no matter how much she consumed, she was never satisfied.

She lived in a house of her own, as a single mother raising my then 6-year-old brother against the odds. In those days, and still today, sex outside of marriage was such a serious transgression of Korean cultural norms for women that the men in their families would sometimes forge adoption papers to send away children born to single mothers. Women who carried the physical evidence of their sexual deviance—in the form of children and pregnancies—were pushed to the margins of society. My mother was no exception. The only women Koreans despised more than the single mothers were the women who “mixed flesh with foreigners” because they were whores and traitors too.

Despite the constant reminders that she was condemning her child to a future of misery, my mother would not let go of my brother. Instead, she became determined to make a home for him in America, and my father was about to make that dream a reality. Although her impending marriage to my father was a relief to my aunt and grandmother, it did not earn my mother any modicum of respect from other Koreans.

My father’s promises of a life far away, where she could start over, offered her some solace. His very presence was a reminder of brighter days to come, but for most of their early relationship, he lived in the States while she waited in Korea. My father had important matters to attend to back home, namely, divorcing his first wife so that he could marry my mother. To keep her spirits up, my mother sometimes went to the beauty salon, but her preference for Western hairstyles and clothing marked her as a Yankee’s girlfriend. One day after having her hair set in a flip, she was walking home, her bouncing hair and clicking heels adding a special jauntiness to her stride. A man called after her and followed her down the street. “Hey! Hey! Miss Korea! Where are you going?” He caught up with her, got close enough to put his lips to her ear, and whispered the words, “Who do you think you are?” The story, as my mother told it to me, ended there, but in my mind this episode led to another. Maybe he spat in her hair or grabbed her arm and pushed her to the ground. Maybe he raped her to reclaim Korean territory from the Americans. Maybe this rape caused the pregnancy right before me, the one that my mother aborted, after which my father beat her until her eardrums broke. My imaginings were fueled by violent memories from my childhood of the conflict between my parents, which I sometimes witnessed or heard about. Even more so, they were fueled by the hundreds of violent images I had absorbed through my research of Korean women who were sexual companions of U.S. military personnel, and they intruded upon the fantasy of my beautiful young mother enjoying her salon-styled hair.

She became lonely while she was pregnant and waiting for my father to come back to Korea. I wonder if she hadn’t also started to fear that he was like so many other American soldiers who never returned, whose only trace was the trail of children left in their wake. During this time, she called on my aunt to visit frequently. Whenever Imo came, she massaged my mother’s feet, brushed her hair, and rubbed ointment on her belly. Over a game of cards, one day, my mother told her sister a secret that would have shocked any Korean who might have been eavesdropping: “I hope this baby is a girl.” My mother had already given birth to a boy and that fact gave her permission to wish that the second child be a girl. Besides, this baby was going to grow up American, and my mother had gotten the notion that women could do great things in America.

As I grew inside her, so did her loneliness. Whenever it was time for my aunt to leave, my mother became desperate. She would hide her sister’s shoes and plead. “Please stay a little longer, Eonni. Please. You don’t have to leave right now.” Their separations became more and more fraught, and the following year, when my mother was about to board a plane to America with my brother and me, it was my aunt who begged my mother not to go. The scene played out at the end of each summer whenever we went back to visit.

My final and most enduring childhood memory of Korea was that of being at a boarding gate at Gimhae International Airport in 1976, the air thick with cigarette smoke and steamy summer haze, and seeing my aunt drop to her knees, cling to my mother’s arm, and wail the words, “little sister.” “Dong-seng-aaah! Dong-seng-aaah! Dong-seng-aaah-aaah . . . Aaah aaah . . .”

Imo in her hanbok, getting dragged across the floor. My mother, mortified and breaking free. Imo grabbing handfuls of her short permed hair. Imo with her voice trembling. “Gaji-mara. Dong-seng-ah, gaji-mara.” “Don’t go.” She feared the worst—that my mother would become lost to her forever. ²