“It’s just for us,” Kye said.

Why was this woman here? Didn’t she miss her husband? Wasn’t it odd for a sixty-something-year-old woman to leave her home in Georgia to come live with us for more than a month without any compensation? I wasn’t sure if I was on to something or just being paranoid or, worse, jealous that this woman was a better caretaker for my mother than I was. How self-obsessed was I to begrudge a woman who had selflessly volunteered to help?

As her medication took ever greater hold, my mother became drowsy and colorless and it became increasingly difficult to communicate. She began to slip into her native tongue, which made my father especially crazy. She had spoken fluent English for nearly thirty years and it was shocking when she began to forget to translate, to exclude us. At times it even felt like Kye was taking advantage of it, responding back in Korean and ignoring my father’s pleas to speak in English.

When we visited with the pain doctor, I caught myself trying to haggle the numbers down, afraid that if they upped her dosage, she’d fade from us even more. Are you sure your breakthrough pain is really a six and not more of a four? With my spiral notebook pressed against my chest, part of me wanted to withhold the tallies I’d recorded, the number of times we’d had to administer liquid hydrocodone on top of her 25 mcg/day Fentanyl patch. It’s not as bad as it looks, I wanted to insist. I did not want her to be in pain, but I also did not want to lose her completely.

The doctor could sense my frustration and prescribed a small dosage of Adderall to help counteract the effects of the painkillers. The first time she took it, she was filled with so much energy we had to physically restrain her to keep her from cleaning the house. For a short while it felt like I had my mother back. The next time we were alone together, I took the opportunity to bring up how I was feeling about Kye.

“She does so much for me,” my mother said, her voice quivering. “No one has ever done for me what she has. Michelle-ah, she even wipes my ass.”

I want to wipe your ass, I wanted to say, realizing it was ridiculous.

“Kye had a very hard life,” she said. “Kye’s father was a playboy. When he left Kye’s mother for a new mistress, he made that mistress raise her. Then when he met even another woman, he abandoned both of them. That mistress woman raised Kye her whole life and never told her she wasn’t her real mother. But Kye knew, because she heard rumors from all of the peoples around town. So then, when the mistress woman got the cancer, Kye took care of her until she died. Even on her deathbed, she never told Kye she wasn’t her real mother, and Kye never told her she already knew.

“And you know she is Woody’s second wife, and his children never really accepted her because she was an affair,” my mother added. “Even though they’ve been married for over twenty years now, his children are still cruel to her because of what they feel she did to their mother. She told me one time they made her so upset she had to go to a mental hospital.”

* * *

—

THE NEXT MORNING, Kye prepared soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. She cracked open the top of a shell and held out the rest of the egg for my mother to eat with a spoon. The yellow yolk floated atop its silky, translucent membrane. It looked mostly raw.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.

I’d always preferred my eggs with a runny yolk, but my mother’s illness had made me increasingly paranoid. Food poisoning was no longer a rite of passage. It was a gamble we couldn’t afford. Kye ignored me, her gaze focused on cracking the shell of her own egg.

“I’m just worried because her immune system is weak,” I added. “I don’t want her to get sick.”

Kye squinted at me like a smudge on a lens. She let out a soft scoff. “This is how we eat this one in Korea,” she said. My mother sat silently beside her like an obedient pet. I waited for her to come to my defense but she was silent, holding her egg in both hands, clouded over.

What a cruel twist of fate, I thought, my face reddening as I fought back the tears. I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone full. Someone whole. For a long time I had tried to belong in America, wanted and wished for it more than anything, but in that moment all I wanted was to be accepted as a Korean by two people who refused to claim me. You are not one of us, Kye seemed to say. And you will never really understand what it is she needs, no matter how perfect you try to be.

9

Where Are We Going?

“You’re going on a journey and you have five animals,” Eunmi said.

“A lion.

“A horse.

“A cow.

“A monkey.

“And a lamb.”

We were seated outside on a café terrace and she was teaching me a game she’d learned from a coworker. On the journey there were four stops where you had to give up one of the animals; in the end you could only keep one.

It was the first time I’d been in Seoul since Halmoni died. I was nineteen, in between my freshman and sophomore years at Bryn Mawr, and I’d enrolled in a summer language program at Yonsei University. I was staying with Eunmi Emo for six weeks.

I’d never traveled to Korea without my mother. For the first time it was just Eunmi and me in the apartment I’d grown up visiting. Us and the obnoxious white toy poodle she’d adopted and named Leon, because when combined with the family name, Yi Leon sounds like the Korean word for come here.

I slept in Nami’s old bedroom; by then she had married Emo Boo and they’d moved to another apartment a few blocks away. Seong Young was in San Francisco pursuing a job in graphic design. Halmoni’s room remained exactly as it had been, the door kept shut. The once-bustling apartment felt empty at first, but over the course of six weeks transformed into a jubilant bachelor pad. At night Eunmi Emo would phone in orders for Korean fried chicken and a growler of Cass draft beer. We’d sink our teeth into the crackly skin, hot oil gushing triumphantly from its double-fried crust as we broke into the glistening dark meat, and finished with a cold crunch of the pickled cubes of white radish that came with every delivery.

After dinner, we’d tuck our legs under the low table in the living room and Eunmi would help me with my Korean homework. On weekends we would sit in cafés and fancy bakeries on Garosu-gil and people-watch. Young women with perfect blowouts and designer handbags passing arm in arm with equally perfect-looking men, 90 percent of whom all seemed to have the same haircut.

“Which one do you give up first?” Eunmi asked.

“Definitely the lion,” I said. “It would eat the other animals.”

Eunmi nodded in agreement. She had a baby face, rounder and fuller than her sisters’. She dressed modestly in khaki capris and a thin white cardigan.

It was July, and we’d ordered patbingsu to share to stave off the humidity. This rendition was far more elaborate than the homespun efforts of my childhood, its base a perfect soft powder of snow slathered in sweet red beans and garnished with pristinely cut strawberries, perfect squares of ripe mango, and little cushions of multicolored rice cakes. A fine web of condensed milk drizzled over the sides, and vanilla soft serve towered high on top.