Halmoni loved to smoke, drink, and gamble, and especially loved partaking in all three around a deck of hwatu. Hwatu are small hard plastic cards roughly the size of a matchbook. The backs are a solid, brilliant red, and the faces are decorated with colorful illustrations of animals, flowers, and leaves. They are used to play a game called Godori, or Go-Stop, the goal of which is to match the cards in your hand with the cards laid out on the table. Roses match with roses, chrysanthemums with chrysanthemums, and each set corresponds to a point value. A set of ribbon cards is worth one point, a combination of three bird cards scores five. Five kwang, cards that are marked with a small red circle and the Chinese character for bright, are worth a whopping fifteen. Once you score three points, you can decide whether to “go” and try to collect more money, running the risk of another player overtaking your score, or “stop,” finish the game and collect your earnings.

Most evenings, Halmoni would spread out her green felt blanket, grab her wallet, an ashtray, and a few bottles of soju and beer, and the women would play. Godori is not like other card games with their quiet moments of lead-up, analysis, sly reads, and coolheaded reveals. At least in my family, the games were loud and fast, my godmother, Jaemi, extending her arm a full three feet in the air before slapping her card down full force like a Pog slammer, the red plastic back whipping onto the face of its companion with an epic SMACK. The women would shout “PPEOK!” and “JOH TAH!” after every move, clanking together small silver towers of Korean won that grew and shrank over time.

While the women played hwatu, I played waitress. As a rule, Koreans eat when they drink, snacks collectively known as anju. I would empty bags of dried squid, peanuts, and crackers onto dishes from Halmoni’s kitchen and serve them to my aunts and godmother. I’d bring them more beer and refill their glasses with soju or give them a Korean-style massage, which rather than a squeezing and rubbing of the shoulders is just a steady pounding on the back with the bottom of your clenched fists. When the game ended, the women would tip me from their winnings, and I’d run my greedy fingers over the imprint of Yi Sun-Sin’s bearded face on a hundred-won coin or, if I was lucky, the soaring silver crane of a large five-hundred-won piece.

* * *

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ONCE EVERY VISIT we would see my grandfather, always at the same Chinese restaurant, Choe Young Loo. He was a tall, lean man with a square jaw and gentle but masculine features. When he was younger, he wore his black hair slicked back in a neat pompadour, and looked svelte in colorful neckerchiefs and fitted designer jackets. He was a famous voice actor, known for his role as King Sejong on a popular radio broadcast, and when my mother was young their family was well-off. They were the first on their block to own a color television, and the neighborhood kids used to gather by the fence in their backyard and try to watch it through their living room window.

My grandfather had the looks to be a successful actor on screen but had trouble memorizing lines. As television rose in popularity, his career began to peter out. My mother used to tell me he had what Korean people call a “thin ear”—someone who is too easily swayed by the advice of others. A series of unsound investments saw him lose the family’s savings by the time my mom had finished elementary school.

In an attempt to supplement their income, my grandmother sold homemade jewelry at outdoor markets. On weekdays she cooked large batches of yukgaejang, taking pounds of brisket, bracken root, radishes, garlic, and bean sprouts, and bubbling them into a spicy shredded-beef soup, which she would ladle into small plastic bags and sell to office workers on their lunch breaks.

Eventually, my grandfather left my grandmother for another woman and disowned the family. He only reached back out to his daughters years later to ask them for money. When Halmoni wasn’t looking, my mother used to slip him an envelope after dinner and tell me to keep my mouth shut.

At the Chinese restaurant, Nami Emo would reserve a room with a big table and a gigantic glass lazy Susan on which turned small porcelain pitchers of vinegar and soy sauce with a marble button to ring for service. We’d order decadent jjajangmyeon noodles, dumpling after dumpling served in rich broth, tangsuyuk pork with mushrooms and peppers, and yusanseul, gelatinous sea cucumber with squid, shrimp, and zucchini. Halmoni would chain-smoke at one end of the table, silently watching as her husband caught up with the children he’d walked away from.

On the mezzanine, Seong Young would take me to see a six-foot-long fish tank that housed a baby alligator. It remained there year after year, blinking sleepily, until it grew so big it was unable to step forward even an inch, then disappeared altogether.

* * *

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IN THE COURSE of one of these biannual visitations, at the age of twelve and nearing the peak of debilitating insecurity, I was confronted by a pleasant new discovery: I was pretty in Seoul. Everywhere we went strangers treated me like I was some kind of celebrity. Old ladies in shops would stop my mom to say, “Her face is so small!”

“Why do the ajummas keep saying that?” I asked my mother.

“Korean people like small faces,” she said. “It looks better in pictures. That’s why whenever we take a group photo people are always trying to push their head in the back. LA Kim always pushing my head forward.”

LA Kim was one of my mother’s oldest friends from high school. She was a big, jovial woman and she’d often make a joke out of craning her neck so the depth of field would make her face appear smaller.

“And Korean people like the double eyelid,” my mother added, drawing a line between her eye and brow. I’d never noticed my mother did not have a crease, that the skin was smooth and flat. I scrambled to a mirror to find my reflection.

It was the first time I could remember being happy to have inherited something from my father, whose crooked teeth and too-long dip between nose and mouth I rued constantly. I wanted to grow up to look just like my mother, with perfect, smooth skin and three or four sporadic leg hairs I could just pluck out with a tweezer, but in that moment, what I wanted more than anything was to have the double lid.

“I have it! I have the double lid!”

“Many Korean women have surgery so they can have this one,” she said. “Both Eunmi and Nami Emo had it. But don’t tell them I told you.”

In retrospect, I should have been able to hold up this information to my mother’s obsession with beauty, to her affection for brand labels and all the hours she spent on skin care, and recognize in the source of her attitude a legitimate cultural difference rather than the caprice of her own superficial nagging. Like food, beauty was an integral part of her culture. Nowadays, South Korea has the highest rate of cosmetic surgery in the world, with an estimated one in three women in their twenties having undergone some type of procedure, and the seeds of that circumstance run deep in the language and mores of the country. Every time I ate well or bowed correctly to my elders, my relatives would say, “Aigo yeppeu.” “Yeppeu,” or pretty, was frequently employed as a synonym for good or well-behaved, and this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.