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Jules’s head swivels around. “What?”
“I need a translator. How much would it cost me to rent you out for the next”—I check the clock—“four hours?”
Jules’s eyes narrow. “A hundred thousand won an hour.”
“Too much. What about twenty thousand?”
“And we use cabs, not the metro.”
“Done.” I might be better off paying Jules the hundred dollars an hour she asked for, but it’s ninety degrees out and walking between subway stops doesn’t appeal to me either. It’s money well spent. At least I’m doing something.
“Fine. Let me get an extra battery charger. My phone’s almost dead.” She speeds out of the kitchen.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what you need to translate?” I shout after her.
“Who cares? You’re paying me and I’m getting out of the house. It’s a win. Besides”—her voice becomes somewhat muffled—“it’s about the women, right? The ones in the pictures?”
Jules is smarter than I realized. She appears at the top of the stairs. “Are we going or what?”
I jump to attention. “We’re going.” I run and get my own phone.
Jules doesn’t ask a single question during the cab ride to my father’s last home, and I find that disinterest almost comforting. I don’t have to explain myself to her. She’s along for the ride and the money.
Her silence doesn’t last for long. When the driver drops us off, she immediately says, “You were born here? That explains a lot.”
“I wasn’t. It’s where my dad last lived. I figured I’d go back and ask questions from the people who came to his funeral. It’s a place to start.”
“Okay. I didn’t mean to be rude. It seemed to fit. This isn’t a great place in Seoul, and if you were adopted, it’s because your mom couldn’t afford to keep you, right? Or she came from a super-religious family where she would’ve, like, died or something.”
Jules’s observation gives me pause. I never thought my mother’s life would be in danger if she got pregnant, but that could happen, couldn’t it?
“My father lived here before he died. I don’t know if my mother did. That’s what we’re here to find out.” Jules is right. If this is where I was born, it does explain a lot.
We pick our way past the loose rock, up the path toward the small building that had once sheltered my father.
“Why do you want to know about your birth family so bad? What are you going to find? That your parents are superrich and you’re going to live that crazy-rich Asian life? Or you’re secretly royalty? They don’t have that here in Korea. That’s Japan. And Thailand. And maybe a few other Asian countries.”
I swallow a sigh. So much for not explaining myself. “No. I never thought any of that.”
“Then what?”
I rub the soft spot between my eyes and wonder if I shouldn’t be the one earning the money for having to endure Jules. “I don’t know, okay? I never gave my birth parents much thought because I was left on the street. I had a better chance of winning the lottery than finding them. But my coworkers were getting DNA testing done, and I thought, why not, and when I researched the tests, there was this one that had an adoption matching service and so I went with that one. I forgot about it. Then there was this data breach and I had Lee Jonghyun’s contact information. Suddenly, I had expectations. I had to know.”
I omit mention of my adoptive dad’s remarriage, new son, and death. They weren’t the impetus for this hunt. They weren’t.
“But what is it that you have to know?” Jules presses.
I let out a long sigh. “When you look at yourself in the mirror, who do you see?”
“Me.”
“Who do you take after? Your mom or your dad?”
“Mom,” Jules answers immediately. “I have her eyes and face and basically everything. Also her limp hair.” She pulls at a hank of her blond locks. “It’s so fine, I might as be wearing corn silk on my head. It’s irritating. What’s the big deal about looking like your family anyway? It’s not like my parents were supermodels.”
“One of my first memories is being in the grocery store and someone who hadn’t seen my mom in a while comes up to her and asks whose kid is she watching. My mom answers, ‘Mine,’ and the other woman laughs like Mom had made a joke. So many times, the first words out of her mouth to explain that I belonged to her were that I was adopted.”
And then I come here and I still have to explain where I’m from, only this time for other reasons.
“And finding your dad or mom is going to make you what? Feel like you belong?”
“I don’t know.” I start walking again.
Jules hurries to catch up and peppers me with a few more questions, which I refuse to answer because I don’t know. I just don’t know. Finally, Jules runs out of steam and I send a thank-you to the universe because I was very close to throttling the blonde in the middle of a Seoul alleyway, and given the prevalence of CCTV cameras in this city, I would be caught and thrown in prison and then never, ever get the chance to find my mother or eat gimbap with Yujun again.
