Banchan

Ryn doesn’t miss a beat when I tell her that my notebook is missing. “I’m so sorry,” she says evenly. And then, voice lowered conspiratorially, “It’ll appear in four months. Just watch.”

I have searched for the notebook every few days since early August.

For weeks before my trip, even after I bought my plane ticket, my mother did not believe I was going. When she grasped my departure as something solid, she asked for a small book into which she could distill herself.

I procured a pocket-sized black notebook and she filled it with messy hangul, names of her old friends, cryptic instructions for how to track down her cousin without an address or phone number. Go to KBS, her workplace from twenty years ago. 한국방송공사. Ask for her name. If that doesn’t work, call me. I’ll convince them. And then they’ll send you to her office. And then —

And then a miracle happens, I guess. And then I do what is expected of me and suture all the family wounds. I seize the histories that have unraveled in cruel and unfair ways by the midpoints of their black ribbons, and I yank them back into place with the brute force of an American.

She writes me shopping lists to take to the night markets in Seoul. She knows that she cannot begin to describe in English the dried fish and herbs and books I have no way of imagining. And so she settles for the necessary humiliation of sending her mixed daughter to look beseechingly upon the wide faces of the ajjumeoni aunties, to hand over the black book and wait, wringing my hands with the stupid, uncomprehending eyes of a dead fish.

Upside down and hidden in the last pages of the book, my mother writes in English, “Alice in Wonderland.” She crosses out Alice and writes, “Marissa.”

The notebook stays in my purse for restaurant names, phrases of polite necessity and blunt utility, names and dates of paintings, miscellaneous small memories that sing with precision and ephemerality. I fill twenty frenetic pages on day ten when I almost lose my mind. One evening with sunset bouncing rose gold against the inside of the subway car, shadows loping slow and stretching long, I play hangman with you. We snort with suppressed laughter for ten ridiculous bouts. “You’re a wizard, Harry.” And then, “You’re a lizard, Gary.” And, “Gore a snizzard, fairy.” The notebook becomes the most precious thing I own.

Mama asks me to bring it over to her apartment when I return so I can take her day by day through my trip. I do. Sitting on a low chair in her living room, I flip through the pages, trying to summarize. I falter. There’s no real narrative here, just snippets from a strange few weeks.

As if to teach me a lesson, I have managed to lose this notebook and its powerful outlines of where my love comes from, and where my love goes now.

On the plane home, a feeling comes over me. It’s like I haven’t even gone. There was a feeling I thought I would have, having gone to Korea. Some glow of a quest fulfilled. I feel the distant ache of where it should have lived.

But this is not where we start.

We start when my garage burns down.

My bedroom window was ajar and I smelled smoke first without understanding what it was. I turned the fan on to dissolve the metallic heft of it in the room, bemused by the way it persisted. I brushed my teeth naked in the dark. I looked out the frosted window of my bathroom and saw a solid pane of orange. For the moment before I registered meaning, I marveled at the beauty of its color, the warm orange of a sherbet ice cream cone.

What comes next is crisp and short in my memory, a foggy two hours reduced to a curt recitation of facts. The firefighters asked whose name they could write down. Wet pine needles stuck to my calves. I knew it would be me but I entertained a flash of feeling sorry for myself. I waited a second to see if anyone would lift this responsibility out of my hands.

It was just a second. Then, as I always knew I would, I began to speak.

Later, I attempt to scrub the smell of chemical foam and burned plastic out of my skin and hair, smearing ash paste from my feet onto the bathtub. I crawl into bed pitifully. Just then, you message me: Are you awake?

I am. I tell about the sherbet orange square. You are sorry and ask all the right questions. You let me talk for a long time about this little tragedy. Then you tell me Jim is dead.

I am so angry at myself. You must feel all alone out there. No one knows him in Korea but you.

You ask if it’s still okay for me to come, with the fire and the other twenty things you know are weighing on me. I about scream yes at you.

You send me money and in the note, you write, “If you send this back, we’re in a fight.”

I laugh, and then I cry.

That’s not even where we start.

We start when we get in an argument on our first date about the scale of suffering in the United States. I feel married to American suffering. I am loyal to its specificity. It is not the same as developing world suffering. It is not even the same as other kinds of developed world suffering. I argue with you strategically, getting you to agree to small truths, building to larger truths. You interrupt my gradual escalation with a wide stroke: what you saw when you studied at the Repin Academy in Russia. I ridicule your simplicity to your face. You do not wilt. You still kiss me by the fire in the back of the bar three hours later. Carefully, I open my eyes to tiny slits to see your eyelashes lay closed against your cheek.

In New York on a rainy August day, I tell my ex about the Russia thing. His face retains some golden Californian freckle, long plane of bottom lip, wrists still the most familiar in the world to me after my own. We fell in love ten years ago, talking for hours on the phone every night, so amazed to have found one another. How improbable. How wonderful. It was summer when I took the train to visit his home for the first time, and he retrieved me in his father’s pickup. I stuck my head fully out the window to see the stars. Millions of stars, sky half white with them. He extended a hand to my body, just starting to be brave around me. “Drive safely!” I cawed. “Hands at ten and two!” Some CD played. Above the din, I heard him say, “Twelve and leg.” My sweet needle in a haystack.

Now we survey each other distantly across the bar table. Outside, the rain sputters. I say foolishly, “Is it really that bad over there?” He says that of course it is. He offers some brutal anecdotes. I say, “Fuck. I think I owe someone an apology.”

When I come back to Portland, the first time I see you is at the Tannery, where I wait for you in all black on the patio. You’re late. It’s okay. I’m reading a book I bought at Strand about Basquiat. I love Basquiat although it is obvious to love Basquiat. Your art is very different from his, but you share a certain irreverent, hyper-alive quality. I allow myself to speculate that you may love him for this reason, but when I float the idea, you say off-puttingly that you don’t get Basquiat. I add it to the list of infinite things I get that you don’t get. Against all better judgment, your contrariness delights me. I am sure of my taste and sure of yours, too. I feel in these moments the satisfying crunch of verifying nuance in the world. To hold more than two complex realities! I want to shout from rooftops. That is what it feels like to be loved by you!

When I see you at the airport in Busan, you begin as the top of a tall head in the crowd, which burbles between us. You emerge clear and still. I think about running to you, but this seems a little much. After all, the last time we were together at an airport, I was openly weeping as you walked away from me in the security line. There is such a thing as balance over time.

I knew that I would have to tell you I loved you before you left the States. This is a very simple imperative that I have always obeyed: when you love someone, you tell them. Even when it seems like a very bad idea. Courage was invented for this purpose. All other applications of courage are just fortunate coincidences.

I did not want to wait until the last moment. I knew you would have to think about what to say in response to me, and I did not want to set you up for a situation where a crying girl tells you she loves you and you are so shellshocked that you freeze. I did not want to mastermind my own disappointment. But here we are anyway.

When we approach the ticket booth in the airport, the man behind the desk asks, “Where are you two going?”

The security line is just around the corner. I had hoped for a longer walk. I begin to cry. I pull your face to mine and try to say it. I say some pretty things and muster a pathetic, “I…adore you.”

I have fucked it up.

You say some pretty things to me.

And then you go.

I will stay until you can’t see me anymore. You look absurd. You are wearing a parka onto a June airplane so it doesn’t take up room in your suitcase. Slung over one shoulder is a very expensive portable easel, custom adjusted to your height. You bear an overstuffed backpack and a painting shoved into a mailing tube. You look like you should have a parrot on your shoulder.

I hate crying and I am still crying. As you move through the security line, you turn around every few minutes to see where I am. Your face looks so open and young — relief relaxes your eyes when you light upon me, and this precious, subtle gesture makes me cry even harder.

It is slow going. Your line snakes around for its final turn before you hit the X-rays. We are closer now than we’ve been for the entire hour you’ve stood in line, me shoved up against a metal barricade behind a very tall eastern European couple.

“Hello,” you say to me.

“So, I obviously love you,” I hear myself say, and your expression is inscrutable. Then you begin to push your way through the crowd back out to me. A hundred people move out of the way, watching the whole thing unfold but pretending not to. Your metal easel clangs at your side and I somehow make it to the beginning of the line where I failed to say goodbye to you once before.

We find each other and you kiss me and I am dizzy. The sensation of coming together feels like a lightning strike or a collision of atoms. Your hands are in my hair. Your face is warmer than it has ever felt when we’ve kissed a thousand times before. Maybe it is the love. Maybe it is the parka.

When I finally tell you to catch your flight, the crowd graciously pushes you to the front of the line. You disappear through the furthest security checkpoint. After trying to keep track of you for so long, you vanish from my vision in an anticlimactic puff.

So that’s it. I wipe my face with both hands and attempt to breathe evenly. That’s it. That’s okay. That was good.

You call me.

“Where are you? I can’t see you anymore.”

I look around. “Hold on.”

I see a vantage point but it is beyond where laypeople are allowed to go, behind some red tape and a fence. It is a space that leads to a very official and very secret TSA-only area. I begin to run. I am a gazelle! I hop the red tape, come skidding to a halt in the middle of the corridor.

And — yes. Beyond the crowd, beyond the metal detectors, there you are in your stupid parka.

You tell me that you love me and I tell you that you have to go.

We have decided to walk up to Gamcheon from the subway station. We should not have done this. The streets begin to slant really just straight up, sidewalks crumbling under the unreasonable angles. A bus crammed with tourists huffs in the heat, and the people inside stare at us with pity. I plan to think of my life in increments of one patch of shade at a time. At some point, I just look at you and scream.

I let myself become distracted by the markets overflowing with watermelon and fresh pong-pong, the puffed rice discs of my childhood. The telephone wires are strange and skeletal in the neighborhoods that begin to stack on top of each other like a village of dollhouses hastily put away by a child. We become lost and follow staircases straight up into the alleyways, hoping for a shortcut. Sometimes the stairs have railings made of metal pipe. Sometimes not. They narrow behind the houses, dwindling to dead ends like dried tribituaries.

Though sometimes shabby, the apartments warble quietly with life. The neighbors slice open plastic barrels and milk jugs to fill with soil, growing hot gochu peppers, Chinese eggplants, perilla leaves. A dusty cat winds itself around our ankles and flirtatiously slinks off.

This is the city my mother visited the weekend her mother died. She was on a school trip. She recalls the candy-colored houses — back then, in the sixties, the paint was new. They saw the magnificent fish market, ate bad food at the hostel. Before mama left, my grandmother’s last words were, “The weather can change quickly in Busan because it is on the sea. Pack layers.”

When she returned, her father came to meet her in front of the house. “What are you doing?” she asked him. “Where’s umma?”

She doesn’t remember what happened next except that umma was not inside. She was dead. She was being cremated. Her ashes would go to a Buddhist temple in Seoul and we don’t know where those ashes are anymore.

I stopped by my mother’s apartment on the morning I flew to Korea to pick up the gifts she wanted me to give her friends. The gesture was important, and the items were sad — a Winnie the Pooh tee-shirt covered in cat hair, an ancient rosary, loose leaf green tea, letters. The bag was cumbersome and heavy. “Mom, I don’t have room for all of this.”

She snapped, “You knew I was sending you with gifts.”

“Yes,” I resisted. “But green tea? This mediocre green tea imported from Japan to Portland? In Korea, they have beautiful green tea.”

It was just that she already had green tea and could not buy anything else, I know. This Oriental supermarket green tea was the nicest thing she had to offer and I was cruel for no good reason.

“Go,” she huffed. “Pack layers. The weather changes quickly in Busan.”

But now that I’m in Busan, the weather doesn’t change at all, no matter how close to the sea we get or how high we climb or what time it is.

We reach the village, kind of. You have followed signs for a temple, and we creep inside, slip our shoes off. The dharma room is the size of a postage stamp, floored with soft laminate made to look like wood. It bears scuffs and valleys in places and has been swept exceedingly well. The altar takes up the entire north wall, a gold Buddha winking celestially upon us as we perspire and adjust our knees on prayer mats. My mother claims to have ears like the Buddha’s, and looking upon this statue, I see it. This room is connected by a screen door to the kitchen. You begin to meditate, a task I find impossible. I peer through the screen. The monks are watching soccer.

Kun sunim, a nun with a shaved head, notices us and brings a fan into the room for us. I whisper gamsahamnida and she smiles mysteriously and pads back into the kitchen. I hear a faint clinking of metal chopsticks. She returns with two silver bowls filled with watermelon, water, and ice. She nods sweetly at us and says in English, “Eat.” The water is syrupy with pulp. On the aftertaste, I detect green onion. This happens to me at home when I share cutting boards, no matter how well I scrub. The flavor is familiar and comforting.

Eventually, we give our thanks and take our leave. I bow. My mother instructed me to bow deeply to elders and sunim. She made me practice three times in her living room, each time squawking that I wasn’t going low enough. She should be able to see the backs of my ears, which do not look like the Buddha’s.

We find another temple a stone’s throw away in the middle of a hiking trail. Koreans do not give up and throw things away. The roofs in the shantytown part of Gamcheon are covered in plastic tarps on their third or fourth use. Strips of linoleum flooring are stapled to the parts that need more reinforcement, sun baking wounds into the plastic that split and crack. The walls in the village from which stubborn succulents eke lightward are reconstituted roof tiles, stacked on top of each other like phyllo dough.

Here at the temple in the woods, cement is used as a quick fix to fill in cobblestones and hold errant roof tiles in place.

We sit on the steps and you begin to paint.

The main living quarters are in a separate building across the courtyard. It is paneled in blue glass, and through it, I can see an idiosyncratic stack of electronics boxes.

A monk in plainclothes emerges and I have the sense that we are trespassing. I do as my mother would wish. I stand and bow deeply. He bows back. He brings a hose around and begins to water the plants, and when I go to the well to drink from a large wooden spoon, I see the moisture hang off the Chinese eggplant in plump pearls.

In the restaurant, we bicker. It is just a hypothetical debate, the likes of which we have all the time, but eventually it feels like an attack on my very being.

I tell you what it feels like to be let down, and you challenge me.

“Our sense of reality doesn’t exist to anyone else. What we feel in that intense, burning way only exists to us. It’s hard to get others to buy in.”

I cross my arms. Relativity is a tedious place for a philosophical conversation to veer.

“Right, but we’ve developed communication and the ability to conceive of and describe the abstract. I can only assume that the ache to be understood is some kind of survival imperative.” My voice is flat.

You sigh. “It’s like you’re talking about two roads and I’m proposing a spaceship.”

I tear into the steamed bun, dip it in soy sauce and vinegar. It is a little gluey but essentially like eating a cloud. “I reject the spaceship. I know how fucking good it feels to have someone walk down the right road with you.”

I understand your point and I even agree with it. You’re trying to say that it’s troublesome to be too attached to the outcome when you decide you need something specific from someone. You’re trying, actually, to protect me from being disappointed by others.

But you say instead, “Emotions are temporary.”

I could barf. “We deserve to be treated as if our emotions are real. And I would argue that they are reality constitutive.”

Your shoulders slump. “Of course. I covet my emotions because they allow me to feel love. I covet my whims because they allow me to feel passion.”

I do not smile, although I soften internally. “So.”

“How many times have I reached out for help in the thick of it and a week later think, ‘What the fuck was I doing?’ I just needed to let the course of the feeling run.”

“I dunno,” I say, undercutting myself. “I lived repressed for such a long time. I made my feelings so secondary and insignificant that now I’m trying to feel entitled to them. It can be dangerous to feel things in isolation.”

You let your ideas process, turning them in your mind from every angle, depersonalizing.

I look across the the room at a three-quarter angle away from you, see the families with shopping bags and men in suits clinking glasses of Hite, the stairs wending in red to the right.

“Unassume your defensive position,” you say, reaching for me. You pull me by my thigh back toward you.

I let myself be dragged, unable to settle my thoughts. “I hate this conversation.”

We are at the coffeeshop between our apartment and the Seomyeon subway station, like every morning.

“Is cadmium red very rare?” I ask.

“Yeah.” You sketch me with faraway eyes, reducing me to intersecting shapes and contrast. You scribble my hair graphite black, everything adjusting in relation to this darkest point on the page. “You really notice when you start to mix colors with white. The color stays so strong with a true cadmium or cobalt, but a synthetic mixed with white eggshells right away.”

I smile, ruining the composition of your drawing. “Thank you. I’m so glad to know that.”

You adjust. “I would ask myself why my colors weren’t turning out, and finally I learned.”

I lose my mind on day ten and tell you to leave the apartment. You do. I am both so relieved to be alone and so sad that you left. My sister and I talk all the time about how difficult we are to love: prickly, unintentionally manipulative, a flair for the dramatic. We yearn to be seen but we conceal our desires with ruthless aplomb.

Sometimes I think that you try to communicate how you are sorry are about what’s happening in my life by drawing me and conspicuously leaving the sketches out. I cannot be sure that this is your intention. Just before you leave, you draw me standing with one toe pointed, doing dishes. I take my time to look through the stack. The lines are so fluid and easy, so unlike me. But there I am, my little elbow, the little curve of my thigh.

I know that I have forced you out and that I shouldn’t have done that.

An hour passes and I have created an entire universe out of my sadness. My mood has developed tones and a birthplace and subplots. I think of building an architectural model out of toothpicks. I add another, then another. The structure looms tall and fragile in front of me.

I hear the door open and I am shocked to see that you have come back.

You’ve brought me my most favorite things: a cream puff, kimbap, a watermelon from the market carried by plastic twine. You take your shoes off at the door. I have put on red lipstick in your absence and I must look like a child wearing her mother’s clothes, gaping at you. You almost say something but the watermelon slips from its cords and cracks on the floor. It starts bleeding pink goo, covering an astonishing amount of ground with its pith and rind. You look defeated, say something self deprecating.

The residue will stay sticky in the kitchen for days no matter how often we wipe, insisting that it did happen, that someone really did love me this much.

It is December first and another terrible thing has happened. It is almost a joke. I fatigue telling people bad news about my life. I worry they will think I am lying. Again, Marissa? Another crisis?

I know, I want to tell them. I imagine myself at age forty, a grey streak running through my black hair, skin very well moisturized, snipping the long stems of yellow tulips for a bouquet. My youth was so difficult, I will tell my sophisticated friends with a laugh in my throat. I almost died thrice a year. Quelle désastre!

The truth is, of course, that if you have bad luck for your entire life on earth so far, you will probably continue to have bad luck forever.

So I am basically on a lifelong quest to stop burdening people with information. Even the people closest to me know just fragments. You, for instance, do not know what happened this December. You would be funny and matter-of-fact. You are often the only person I ever want to tell. You are not weak or fearful or even reverent. I live in fear of the day you become sheepish and unsure. Most eventually do.

My friends take me to dinner on the night it happens and my mother calls me. Her voice is cottony with dehydration, a low, rough croak. “Please come,” she says to me. “It’s bad.”

I have left the booth inside which my friends hang their coats and sit cocooned in dark fabric. I am crouched in the furthest corner of the restaurant by the door. I waver. “I can’t,” I say finally. My car is obliterated, towed by a vulgar but kind twentysomething named Nathan to my driveway, where it molders and drips even now.

“I haven’t slept in days,” she says. I trust she hasn’t. I have studied symptoms like this in graduate school, and in particular I have watched them needle my mother for two decades; restlessness was one of the first aberrations I observed over the long course of her unraveling. As a child, I would creep downstairs, unnerved at the ghostly way she perched on a stool and read under lamps whose brightness she coveted to the point of removing their lampshades and blinding herself. This is what manic episodes do to the brain.

I say, “I’m sorry.” I ask her to explain how she feels.

I listen silently, categorizing her feelings into action items, and I notice I am crying. I cower in the corner of the warm restaurant. I study the vintage prints on the wall and try to regulate my breathing so as not to make a scene.

I return to the table when she is finished and begin to cry harder. “She has to go to the hospital but I can’t take her.” My breathing has become a worrisome staccato. “She might be having another stroke.” A breath. “She is so poor and alone that no one can buy her nail clippers, so her toenails have grown to the point that they’re infected. They hurt.” I feel lightheaded and far from my own body. “She didn’t want to bother me.”

There is nothing anyone can say to console me.

The server comes by and is alarmed to see the state I’m in. “I’m sorry,” I joke, laughing. I wipe my face and order another drink.

After four months, I find my notebook. It occurs to me that I might be the luckiest girl on earth.

Mama and I fight in the supermarket over how much wine she buys. “It’s for my neighbors,” she lies to my face. Then, “This is why I wanted you to wait in the car.”

But I am the one who drove her, and I will be the one to carry the groceries, and when she does not have enough money, I will be the one to pay for it. When the people in the store look at her dirty coat and slippers, I will be the one to follow her like a wraith, casting my normalcy and palatability over her like a protective net. American girl accent, American credit card at the ready. How could I wait in the car?

“You know, Marissa,” she says, pushing the cart three paces ahead of me. “You think I’m more fragile than I am. But I have always needed to be independent.”

She yearns to run free. She came to America alone, figured everything out on her own, stayed here alone after all the abuse and the divorce. She was independent, proud, wild. She had to be. In its fiercest and most stubborn form, I see my own independence perfectly mirrored in hers.

The trouble, of course, is that now she is exactly as fragile as I think she is. I defer decisions that would clip her wings, putting off long hospitalizations or care facilities. Then she falls in the middle of the night, breaking her collarbone in secret, only asking to be taken to the hospital when it does not heal after six horrific days. Am I killing her by preserving her autonomy? Would she even want to live if I took her autonomy away? Am I killing her?

And so mama is going to buy the wine anyway. “Fifteen dollars is so expensive,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Marissa!” she shrieks. Like they always do, the people around us stare. “Why do you have to ruin everything?” She pushes the cart into the frozen food aisle, where her dusty feet and coat are illuminated by a tunnel of white light.

“Because I love to ruin things,” I say dully.

Mama’s apartment smells fetid and cold. I almost choke. She is asleep at five in the afternoon and I have brought a pathetic Christmas tree in the trunk of a borrowed car.

It is dumping rain. I’m coming from a tree lot pitched at the vegetable stand across the intersection. The five foot firs are going for sixty dollars. I scoff. This is why so many sit unsold eight days before Christmas. This is a poor neighborhood.

The vegetable stand is my third and final stop of the night. I am looking for something small, under twenty dollars, jolly. I am unwilling to believe this is too much to ask for.

Tucked underneath a tent, I find a sad tree, two feet tall. It is worse than Charlie Brown’s. It looks, actually, like a tree got fucked up in something and the industrious vegetable stand folks hacked the top off to salvage a sale. In the fluorescent spotlight, I can see that the bottom branches are dry and brown. Still, it smells like a dream and I can carry it by myself. The lot is empty, so I take it inside, ask, “Is this even for sale?”

The brown teenage girl behind the register is beautiful, kind, and she raises her eyebrows at the thing in my hand. “There are free branches out the back but I think that one must be for sale. Ten dollars or something. Go back out and see if you can’t find Thomas.”

I do. I am completely alone. I am so broke and hopeless and soggy that when I think about paying ten dollars for this mangy shrub, I almost walk off the lot. The only thing that stops me is the prospect of having to talk to the cops. I imagine a gaggle of Portland’s finest arresting me for stealing the worst Christmas tree on the block, my chin jutting up at them like a kid, hissing, “I simply do not give a fuck.”

I wait. I find Thomas. When I ask if the tree is free or what, he tries to give it the ol’ salesman spin. “It’s $12.99, but I can part with it for $10.”

I try very hard not to roll my eyes because I know that Thomas is just hoping I buy the goddamn tree. I unfold ten damp dollars and say, “I can do that.”

On my way out, I grab a handful of the free pine branches to feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. I take this show on the road to my mother’s cat piss apartment.

I feel like a complete fool.

I begin to screw the piteous tree into a stand I found two years ago in a free pile, and the trunk is so small that it is nearly impossible for me to center. At the slightest touch, it tilts and eventually falls into a discomfiting pile of twigs. I lean it against a bookshelf and put my hands in my pockets.

On the couch, a bag of the dried fish I bought in Korea glints at me in its stiff cellophane. Mama has been eating it slowly, savoring a taste she has waited twenty years to try again.

I stay for three hours, grocery shopping, cleaning, making a list of things to do. I will call a new agency to solicit in-home care. I will call her social worker to ask what can be done. I will call a doctor to beg for a refill of a prescription she cannot live without. I will call PG&E to beg for them to leave her electricity on. I will go home and take a shower.

The next day, I wake up and decide to pick up the summertime film I just had developed. I wait until I get to my coffeeshop to open the envelope. The first ten photos contain my last day in Korea. I am in just one clear shot. I asked you to take a photo of me on the steps of a small building at Gyeongbokgung Palace. In it, I hold up the bag of dried fish, freshly wrapped by the aunties at the market so my suitcase wouldn’t smell. “This will be the most Korean photo of me,” I say dryly.

I am drenched in rain, hair curling like a Brillo pad in the humidity, buttons of my skirt twisted grubbily to the side. My head is inclined toward the fish in a way that is supposed to be ironic. I have tried to keep a straight face, but you can see a smirk begin on the corners of my lips. My eyes look sad and distant, worried about how to say goodbye to you, worried about what happens next.

You snap the photo obligingly and hand the camera back to me. I loop an arm around your waist and you loop an arm around mine and we set off toward the pond where my mother used to watch swans as a kid. I love walking with you like this. Very early on, we learned to negotiate our bodies together into this perfect stride, unwilling to bear even the distance of walking hand in hand. You are much taller than me, so sometimes the first few steps are clunky, but we always find our pace and keep it.

Mama doesn’t give me many details, but she does say this: as a child, when the Han River froze over, she would strap on her ice skates and just fucking go.

I’ve only ever skated on lakes and rinks. A river is different. Your objective is clear. You are here to clear as much ground as you can. And you’re a kid. You don’t worry about skinned knees or the hour of sunset. You just go. You go as fast as you can.

I see mama clearly, aged eight or nine, small for her age, the brightest girl in her year. Dark hair loose and long, hands in woolen mittens. I see her flying across the ice, knees strong, legs capable of hitting the subtle angles needed for speed and slowing and turning. So cold in Seoul that her snub nose must have run with snot, skin buzzing with that electric feeling it gets when it’s so cold but your blood runs hot and alive. I see her. She is safe. She has five hours before dinner. She is free.