I thought I’d eaten my share of Korean food. We didn’t have a lot of common words, but by this point I had been to K-town in New York plenty of times and had even, as a child, been to Korea. She took me to lunch at a very nice, bustling neighborhood restaurant somewhere in Seoul’s rambling vastness. She looked like my mother, but both sharper, all planes and angles, and gentler, as if those edges were softened. Even then, she was small and fine boned with incredibly pronounced cheekbones and a mole the size of a dime near her chin. My aunt was and still is a wonderful and kind woman, possessed of equal parts warmth of spirit and a kind of flinty determination to survive. My mom, the youngest of nine, left me in the care of her eldest sister while she went to a business meeting. I had a responsibility, unspoken, to prove I hadn’t forgotten where my people came from and that my parents were raising me right. It didn’t matter that I didn’t speak the language. It didn’t matter that the only Koreans I saw in my suburban Florida community were related to me. In other words, I was no longer afforded the privilege of being the ignorant American cousin. I understood the filial piety I owed them as my elders and my mother’s elders. I understood the obligation I had to the aunts and uncles who stayed behind so my mother could get an American education.
I had been before, but was now newly a teenager and finally aware of all the expectations that weighed on me as a gyopo-a Korean raised overseas. When I was thirteen or maybe fourteen, I went to Korea with my family.
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