Chapter Two
Itaewon. February 15, 2026. 4:02 a.m.
The thing about an officetel at four in the morning is that the radiator pretends to be a person. It clicks the way an older relative clears her throat before saying something unkind. Tonight it had been clicking for forty minutes in a 4/4 time signature, three short and one long, which was, I had decided around 3:48, the same rhythm as the way my mother used to knock on my door in Cupertino when she wanted to come in but was not going to ask permission. Tap-tap-tap-tock. Ji-won-ah. Ji-won-ah. I had not lived in a house with that knock for nine years. Tonight the radiator was doing the knock without irony.
I lay on top of the duvet and did not turn the lamp on. The water-stain fox on the ceiling had been very honest with me earlier and I did not want to make it apologize. There were nine tails. I had counted them in three different orders — left to right, right to left, longest to shortest — and the count had held. The tails fanned in the discolored ring like the petals of a chrysanthemum someone had pressed for a long time in a book they then lost. The fox had no face. Where its face should have been there was the patch of intact white plaster I had stared at for the first three months I lived here without seeing the rest.
Min-ji had texted me twice more. unnie sleep. unnie. SLEEP. Then a single sticker of a small bear holding a brick. I had not replied. I was not going to reply at four a.m. and prove to her that I was still awake when I had told her I was fine. Min-ji from Daegu does not need that ammunition. Min-ji from Daegu remembers everything; she will hold the bear and the brick over my head at a hwesik in 2030.
I had, at some point between the third instant coffee and now, started to think in two languages at once. This happened to me sometimes when I was overtired. The two languages did not, in my head, speak to each other. They sat at separate tables. Right now the English was at the table near the window, where I usually do my catastrophizing — you are going to lose your job, you are going to disgrace your mother, you are going to spend the next decade in therapy explaining that you saw a ghost in a fusion restaurant — and the Korean was at the table near the door, the table where my mother and my grandmother had always sat, where the speech was shorter and the verbs came later and the whole register was a register of let's just look at what happened and not make a fuss about it. The Korean table was saying, in my grandmother's voice with my mother's syntax: 그 사람 얼굴 본 적 있다. I have seen that person's face before.
The English table did not want to talk to the Korean table about that.
The English table wanted to talk about a man named Daniel I had dated my senior year at Stanford who had once, at a party in Palo Alto, told me with great kindness that I had a fascinating face and that he was sorry, he should have said beautiful, but fascinating was what he meant. Fascinating was the word he used, he explained, for faces that looked like maps. The English table now wanted to point out that Daniel had been right, in the very specific way that a man who reads too much Borges in his junior year is sometimes right, and to add: the map had a man on it. The man had been on the map all along. I was now meeting him for the second time.
The Korean table said, in its quieter way: first time. 처음 만났다. It was very firm. 처음 만난 게 아니다.
I rolled onto my side and faced the closet. The closet door was open three centimeters because the rail was warped and the door would not click shut without the help of a wedge of cardboard I had not yet bothered to cut. Inside the closet I could see, faintly, the cuff of the wool coat I had hung up at 12:38 a.m., damp at the elbow from the rain. I could see the boots I had kicked off, splayed on the floor like two dark animals that had given up on the day. I could not see the bottom shelf of the closet from the bed, but I knew what was on it: my grandmother's cedar incense box, which she had given me when I left Daejeon last June with the instruction put this somewhere in the house. She had not specified where. The box was the size of a pencil case. She had not opened it for me. You will know when to, she had said, in the Chungcheong dialect she falls into when she is being either tender or sly. I had not yet known.
I was thinking very hard about the box and trying not to be thinking about the box.
Min-ji texted again. r u awake.
yes.
The phone rang a half-second later. I picked up before the first ring finished.
"Don't be alone," Min-ji said. No greeting. Her voice was thick with sleep, the way it got when she was holding something heavier than the phone. "I'm sending a kakao taxi. Open the building door."
"Min-ji-ya. I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're saying you're fine in the voice I hate. The Cupertino voice."
"There is no Cupertino voice."
"There is, unnie. It's the voice that says I'm fine, I'm fine like you're closing a checkout register. It's the voice you used when your appendix was about to rupture sophomore year. I remember the story. Lola told me at orientation."
I had told the appendix story exactly once, at our first hwesik together, fifteen months ago. Min-ji files things. Min-ji files things the way her mother, an accountant in Daegu, files receipts.
"I'm not having my appendix out tonight."
"Open the door. I'll be there in twenty."
I did not say no. I said okay and hung up and lay there with the phone hot in my hand and watched the fox on the ceiling, and felt — distinct and small as a coin under the tongue — a sweetness rise in me for Min-ji, the kind of sweetness a person can only feel for a friend who has decided to drive at four a.m. into a neighborhood she dislikes because she does not believe you. I did not deserve Min-ji. I knew this in the way I had known, in the alcove with the celadon vase, that the vase was old.
I got up to make coffee.
The water in the kettle took ninety seconds to boil. I stood with one hand on the counter and counted the seconds with my own pulse. My pulse, for whatever reason, was running a hair faster than the seconds, so I lost a beat every fifteen, and by the time the kettle whistled I had been counting in a private cheat-time of my own, the way I had counted Sunday school hymns in elementary in California so that I could pretend along with the white kids that I knew the words.
The instant coffee, when I poured the water, smelled of two things — the cheap chocolate-coded grocery brand and, underneath, sharper, the back of my grandmother's house. The herb closet. The folding screen. Hyang. It came up through the steam with the particular insistence of an idea that has decided to insist whether or not it is wanted, and I lifted the mug away from my face and set it down on the counter and put both hands flat on the laminate and waited for the kitchen to be a kitchen again.
It took six breaths.
The kitchen was a kitchen again. The coffee was still coffee. The fox on the ceiling was twelve feet away in another room and I did not have to acknowledge it. I drank half the mug standing up, leaning against the counter the way my father used to lean against the kitchen counter in Cupertino reading the Korea Daily in his bathrobe, and I had the brief odd thought that I had never seen my father lean against this counter, this specific counter, in this particular apartment, and yet the body-knowledge of leaning was so exact that the counter felt like his counter. Aboji's counter. I was leaning, was the thing. I was leaning the way he leaned.
I would later think about this — the lean, the smell, the cheat-time of the kettle — as the small evidence I had been collecting for years without filing. The body knew things the mind had not yet been authorized to know. The body had been remembering ahead of me my whole life and waiting, patiently, for me to catch up.
The intercom buzzed at twenty-three minutes past four.
"Unnie." Min-ji's voice through the speaker was tinny and tired and a little defiant. "Buzz me in. I'm freezing."
I buzzed her in. I went and unlocked the door and left it ajar and went back to the counter and started a second mug for her. By the time she came up the four flights — she always took the stairs, some Daegu thing about elevators in old buildings — I had a second mug ready and the radiator-knock had given up its impression of my mother and was, mercifully, only a radiator again.
Min-ji came in without taking her shoes off all the way. She left them at a forty-five-degree angle, half-on her feet, in the entry, which is the Korean way of saying I am only here for a minute and I am also not leaving. Her face had no makeup on it for the first time in maybe four months. Without the eyeliner her eyes looked younger, and her face was the face I imagined her mother had at the same age, the face under all the faces.
She did not say anything for a while. She took the mug. She walked past me to the living-room rug and sat down with her back against the foot of the sofa, knees up, the way teenage girls sit when they're about to tell each other something. She patted the rug beside her with her free hand. I sat. The rug was the cheap one with the dark green geometric pattern I had bought my second week, when I was still pretending I was furnishing a permanent home.
"Unnie." She took a sip. She held the mug under her chin. "I have to tell you something and I need you to not get mad at me."
"I won't get mad."
"You will. You always do. You get this little flat face."
"I don't have a flat face."
"You're doing it now."
I unflattened the face. The face unflattened reluctantly, the way an umbrella does in a wind.
Min-ji watched me for a second. Then she said, very evenly, in Korean: "Unnie. In this country, you don't get to choose what's already chosen you. You can only choose how slowly you let it happen."
She said it the way she said things she had been rehearsing. The way a person says the line they wrote in the car. I did not, for the first beat, recognize what she had said as a sentence; my ear caught the rhythm and the cadence and the choice of verb and only then unpacked the meaning.
"Where did you read that," I said.
"I didn't read it. My grandmother used to say it." She did not look at me. She looked into her mug. "She said it about my aunt when my aunt got the shinbyeong. She said it to my mother on the day I was born. My mom told me she said it to me when I left for Seoul, but I don't remember." She paused. "I'm saying it to you because you came back here. From America. You came back here and you don't know why and I think you should consider, unnie, that it's not because of the job."
I drank my coffee.
"Min-ji-ya," I said, after a minute. "I love you. I do not believe in the shinbyeong."
She looked at me then. Her eyes were very steady. They had the same eyes my mother's eyes had when my mother was telling me a thing she was certain about and had already decided not to fight me on. She lifted one shoulder.
"Okay, unnie."
"I mean it. I am a Stanford graduate. I am a — "
"Okay, unnie."
" — twenty-six-year-old A&R who has had a long night and is talking to a vocal coach about whether folk religion is real."
"Okay."
The radiator clicked. Tap-tap-tap-tock.
I drank my coffee.
After a long time Min-ji said, almost to herself, "He was looking at you, though."
"He dropped a glass."
"He dropped a glass because he was looking at you."
"He had a cramp in his hand."
"Unnie."
"It was a cramp."
She shook her head, slow and patient. She set her mug down on the rug between us. She reached over and tugged the cuff of my hoodie sleeve — the most minor thing, a one-second thing, the body-grammar of a friend who has decided that whatever you say does not matter, the affection will land regardless — and she said, "Okay. Okay, unnie. Cramp. Sleep now. I'll lie on your couch."
I did not argue. I lay on the bed in my clothes. Min-ji lay on the couch with her arm thrown over her eyes. The radiator clicked. The fox on the ceiling kept its faceless face. After a while Min-ji said, in the murmur of someone halfway under, "Do you want me to leave the lamp on, unnie."
"No."
"Sure?"
"Sure."
I closed my eyes.
The slope was there waiting.
It was always there waiting, the way a piece of furniture in a familiar house is always waiting, but tonight the slope was sharper than it had been before. The pines were knife-edge clear. The pebbles in the path were individual pebbles, not the smudge of pebble-ness I usually got. I could feel, through the soles of feet I did not technically own, the cold of the rock under a thin pair of cotton boots. Beoseon. The word for the sock arrived in my mind ahead of the visual, which was strange, because I had never owned a pair of beoseon, and the word beoseon in my mouth had always been the word for the costume thing tourists rented at Gyeongbokgung. Tonight it was the word for the thing on my feet. It was a normal word. Beoseon.
The sky was the bruise sky. Three days old. The color of an old plum. The two moons — only one was a moon, the other was the pearl, the apricot-pit pearl I had told myself last night I had imagined — were where they had been all the nights of my life. The pearl was waiting. The pearl was always waiting, which was, I now understood without anyone saying so, the entire purpose of the pearl.
The woman in white was standing where she always stood, with her back to me, her hair the black river I had described to a college therapist when I was twenty and trying to explain the nightmare in a vocabulary that had not made the therapist look frightened. The hair came down past her waist. The hair was tied at the end with a ribbon. The ribbon was white. The ribbon was the same white as the dress. The dress was — I knew the word now, the way I had known beoseon — a sobok, mourning hanbok, the long white robe and the wide sash and the underskirt and the layers, and the layers were a comfort and a weight and a thing I had worn before.
She turned.
She had turned every night this winter, but tonight, for the first time, she turned all the way. She did not glance over her shoulder and stop, the way she had on Valentine's Day, the way she had on New Year's, the way she had on the night I signed the JL contract. She turned all the way.
She had my face.
She had my face on a body that was younger than my body. She had my face with darker hair and a hairline drawn lower on the forehead than my hairline and the cheekbones higher than mine and the lips slightly fuller, the lips a Joseon portrait painter would have called the lips of a girl raised on rice — and underneath all of it she had my face. My exact mouth. My exact left eyelid, which had a fold half a millimeter deeper than the right and had been a thing the makeup artists at JL had pointed out to me on my second week. Unnie has the asymmetry. The girl in white had the asymmetry. She was, the way a younger sister is a sister, me.
She opened her mouth.
She had been opening her mouth in this dream for twenty years and I had never, in twenty years, heard what came out. Tonight, the breath came first — a small white cloud in the cold air, the breath of someone who has been holding the next word in her chest a long time — and then the word came after the breath, in the old consonants, in the consonants I had heard underneath the Noksapyeong overpass.
The word was a name.
The name was not Korean. The name was older than Korean. The name had the shape of a syllable that belonged to a script I had never seen written down, and it landed in the center of my chest the way the heel of a hand lands on a bruise when the doctor is checking whether the bruise hurts.
It hurt.
It hurt in a way I had no word for. It hurt in the way a thing hurts when you have been carrying it your whole life without knowing where you were carrying it from.
I tried to say I don't know that name.
She heard me. She heard me before I had organized the sounds. She heard me as breath. She did the thing my mother does — there is, I had always thought, no other person in the world who does this, and the girl in the white sobok did it now — she tipped her head to one side, three degrees, the way my mother tips her head when I am being slow about something obvious. Aigo, this child.
She said the name a second time. More gently.
She lifted one hand.
Her hand — I will say this very carefully, because I am going to have to remember this later — her hand was wrapped at the wrist with a strip of the same white cloth as the dress. Mourning. Not bandage. Mourning. The cloth was tied in a knot I had seen my grandmother tie around an offering bowl at a memorial in Daejeon when I was nine. The knot had been a knot I'd watched her tie and then asked her about, and she had said, in the Chungcheong way, don't ask, child, and gone back to setting the table for the ancestors. The knot was a knot for the dead.
The girl in the white sobok had the knot on her wrist.
She held the hand out to me.
She said the name a third time, the way a person who is about to lose patience with the syllabary of someone else's hearing says a name a third time. Slow. The first consonant softened. The vowel held.
She said: Da-eun-ah.
I woke up.
I woke up in my bed in my hoodie with my face wet and my left hand pressed flat to my own collarbone, the way she had been holding her hand out to me, and the radiator was clicking 4/4 again and the fox on the ceiling had nine tails and Min-ji was sitting up on the couch looking at me with the expression of a person who had been watching me for a while.
She did not say anything.
After a long minute I said, "Min-ji-ya."
"Unnie."
"What's my name."
She did not blink. She did not laugh. She did not make the face she made when I said something that was a joke. She set her mug down. She came over to the bed. She sat on the edge of the bed and she took my left hand in both of hers and she held it the way her mother probably held things she did not want to drop.
"Han Ji-won," she said. "Unnie. You're Han Ji-won."
"Okay," I said.
"Han Ji-won. Born June fifteenth nineteen ninety-nine. JL Entertainment A&R. From Cupertino. Daughter of Han Soo-yeon and Han Jae-hyuk. Lola from Stanford. My unnie."
"Okay."
"Han Ji-won."
"Okay. Min-ji-ya. Okay."
She held my hand a long time. She did not ask what I had dreamed. She did not ask why I had asked. She did the thing the Korean table at my kitchen does, the small Korean thing that has always saved me when the English table is about to make a fuss — she said the obvious out loud, and she kept saying it, and she did not stop saying it until the room was, again, the room.
Outside, the sky over Itaewon-ro began to do the dirty-blue thing it does at dawn in February, the blue that is not yet a color so much as the rumor of one.
I lay back. Min-ji did not let go of my hand. The radiator clicked. The fox kept watching.
I did not yet have language for what had been done to me, but the body had begun, quietly, to send the mind a memo.
The memo said: the woman in white is me.
The memo said: the man in the suit knows.
The memo said, in the voice of a girl I had never met and had always been: Da-eun-ah.
I closed my eyes again. This time the slope was not waiting. This time there was only the dark, and Min-ji's hand, and the small grace of someone who had decided, without being asked, to stay.