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“It wasn’t alive.” I’d seen the same video going around social media. Soy sauce was poured onto a dead squid and the thing rose up and danced in the bowl because of some chemical reaction between the salt in the condiment making contact with the cephalopod, but from the reaction to the video, you’d think a fish massacre was taking place on the table.
“It was Japanese,” Boyoung murmurs.
“What?”
“She said it was a Japanese video,” Kelly says with exasperation. “There isn’t one Asian country, but Jeff is sort of right. You don’t speak Korean, do you?”
Next to me, Boyoung stiffens. “Do you?”
“No.”
And my friend visibly relaxes. I pat her shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ve never understood a word you said to anyone on the phone.” Not that I’ve heard her talk all that often, but sometimes she’s spoken to someone in Korean. I don’t know if they all speak as quickly as she does, but I couldn’t even begin to tell where the sentences began or ended.
“How would you get around? How would you order something to eat or find a bathroom?” Kelly asks.
“All good questions,” I say.
“And?” my friend prompts.
“The subway has signs in English,” Boyoung pipes up in my defense. “And in tourist spots there are helpers who speak English and Chinese. Many restaurants have English menus, and in Itaewon, there are many, what do you say, expats?”
Jeff claps his hands. “Maybe we should all go.”
“To where?” Kelly wonders.
“Korea,” Jeff says. It’s his turn to be irritated. “We can all go and then you guys can’t call me ignorant anymore.”
“I don’t have the money for that,” Kelly laments, sliding halfway down the booth seat until only her shoulders are above the table. “Isn’t it expensive, Boyoung?”
“No. Food is cheap or expensive depending on where you go. It is the same with places to live. There are poor places in Seoul and rich places, too.”
“What’s it like there?” Jeff wonders. We all lean forward.
Boyoung is quiet for a long time before she says, “Beautiful.”
And some free-floating piece of my heart slides into place with an audible click.
* * *
• • •
IT WAS A month after I’d gotten the Hey sport text that I signed up for the DNA matching service. Kelly had come to work and announced that she was one-sixteenth Inuit based on her DNA test results and that she might have second cousins who lived in Canada. She was excited about this and told me I should sign up and find out what I was made of, at least for health reasons. I once told her that filling out doctor’s forms at a clinic took no time because I didn’t have to answer any of the family history questions. When I was a kid, Mom had suggested I undergo genetic testing but Dad balked because it was too expensive. After the divorce, Mom had other things on her mind and never followed up.
But at twenty-four, I was curious so I swabbed my cheek and sent off the kit. A few weeks later, the envelope of results returned noting that I was 98.2 percent Korean and 1.8 percent Japanese. There were no genetic warnings and no pings to anyone else’s results. I was slightly disappointed. I didn’t want to admit it, but I think I was hoping there would be some long-lost relative. I’d once read that two adopted siblings found each other—one in America and one in France. Having a French sister would be awesome. I’ve always wanted to visit. However, that was not the case for me so I buried my expectations in the box of “things better forgotten” along with my dad’s dream that I’d be some kind of super athlete and my mom’s fantasy that I could be the next Gillian Flynn.
The real-life truth is that I’m clumsy, spend my days fact-checking and editing, and have a greater chance of winning the lottery than finding information about my biological family. And it’s not that I care to know about the people who abandoned me on a street corner in Seoul twenty-five years ago. I’m just . . . curious about whether I have siblings. Maybe aunts and uncles. I grew up as an only child of an only child. Mom’s mother passed away fourteen years ago and it’s been the two of us against the world ever since Mom kicked Dad out.
Knowing I had extended family would be cool—or, at least, that’s how I justified it in my mind. And when nothing came of it, when there were no notices in my inbox, when the weeks of silence turned into months and then a year, I’d essentially forgotten about it.
Until that one morning, three months ago, when an email had popped up between the half dozen newsletters I didn’t remember subscribing to and the spam that somehow finds its way to my inbox despite the so-called filter. It took a moment for me to register that the subject line was in Hangul instead of some odd mass of characters designed to get around the spam block.
