Chapter Six
Itaewon, then Yongsan International Clinic. February 24, 2026. 7:11 a.m.
I woke in my own bed without remembering how the bed had arrived under me.
This is, I had decided over the course of fifteen hours of patchy half-sleep yesterday and last night, the second-most disorienting kind of waking, the kind where the body has done its commute home without consulting the mind. The first-most disorienting kind is the kind where the mind has gone somewhere four hundred years away and the body has stayed in a parking-level Genesis. I had now been in possession of a personal taxonomy of disorienting wakings for thirty-six hours. I was, on the strength of this taxonomy alone, considering applying to graduate school.
The bedroom in my Itaewon officetel was dim. The blackout curtain, which I had bought at Daiso for nine thousand won the second week I moved in, had done its honest mid-market work and held the morning out at the rim of the window so that the gray Tuesday light came in only at the edges. I lay on my back and watched the water-stain fox on the ceiling and counted, in two different orders, that all nine tails were where they had been on the night I had met the chairman of my company at a hwesik above the river. Nine still. Nothing had grown a tenth. The fox, on the strength of this count, was apparently no more a fox today than it had been ten days ago.
I did not, for the long second after waking, remember the order of events that had brought me back to this ceiling.
I sat up.
I sat up and the body did the small inventory it does after a strange night, which is to say my left hand went to the back of my neck, where a hand had been; and my right hand went to the meat of my thumb, where last Saturday I had wanted, very badly, to see a small white seam of a scar that I had not been allowed to see; and my feet, both feet, hooked themselves over the edge of the bed and found the cold linoleum and registered, with the small affirmative shock of cold linoleum after a winter night, that I had socks on. I was wearing the gray cashmere socks my grandmother had pressed into my hands at the Daejeon bus terminal at Chuseok. I did not remember putting the socks on. I did not remember coming home.
I remembered the hanok.
I remembered the hanok the way you remember a movie you saw on a transatlantic flight in your twenties — vividly, in two-second flashes, with the dialogue muddled and the lighting hyper-saturated and the structural arc lost in the sense that some large thing had happened in it. I remembered a folding screen. I remembered a fox. I remembered the steady hum of the ondol under my hip. I remembered Yi-jun saying his name in a voice that sounded like a man swearing on a Bible he had been raised in.
Seo Yi-jun. I am thirty-two. I am also one thousand and forty-three.
I sat on the edge of the bed and said it aloud, into the small dim morning, in the same flat Korean he had used. The sentence in my mouth did not, in any way, sound like a sentence a sane adult woman in Itaewon could say to a doctor.
I had an appointment with a doctor.
I had made the appointment from the back of a black Genesis on the way home from Bukchon yesterday afternoon — Tuesday, technically; we had left the hanok at one in the afternoon after I had eaten the bowl of patjuk he had made me, the red-bean porridge of convalescents and small children, and after he had asked me four times if I wanted his driver to take me to a hospital and I had said no four times, and then I had said take me home please, and the driver had taken me home, and Yi-jun had not come with us. He had stayed at the gate of the hanok. He had stood at the gate of the hanok with the same flat dignified posture a man uses to be left, and the small bow he had bowed as the Genesis pulled away had been the bow of a man who would have liked to follow the car but who understood, at some longer time-scale than thirty-six hours, why he could not. I had watched him in the side mirror until the car turned the corner. I had watched the gray Bukchon wall close over the spot where he had been the way water closes over a thrown stone. Then I had taken out my phone with hands that were not, exactly, the hands of the woman who had texted Min-ji this same phone at four a.m. on the morning of the fifteenth, and I had typed Yongsan International Clinic appointment availability tomorrow morning, and I had let the booking app do its automated dance, and I had selected the 9:30 a.m. slot for a Dr. M. Roh, MD, board-certified in psychiatry and internal medicine, and I had paid the eighty-five-thousand-won booking fee with the JL company card and not looked at the receipt.
I had then, in the back of the Genesis, opened a second tab on the booking app and made a second appointment. The second appointment was at 11:15 a.m. with a Dr. J. Lim, KMHC-licensed, trauma, dissociation, identity. The Yongsan International Clinic had been pleased to confirm that Dr. Roh and Dr. Lim worked out of the same fourth-floor suite and that the consult fee for a same-morning psychiatric pairing was discounted by twelve percent.
I had then opened a third tab and gone to United.com and pulled up the Tuesday-evening ICN-SFO non-stop. I had looked at it for a long minute. I had not booked it. I had closed the tab.
I had, after that, simply sat in the car and looked at the back of the driver's head, and the driver, who I would later learn was a Mr. Joh who had been driving Yi-jun for fourteen years, had said exactly two sentences for the entire forty-eight-minute trip home through Tuesday-afternoon traffic. The two sentences were:
"Han Ji-won-ssi. Please tell me when you would like the temperature higher."
And, ten minutes later, as we crossed Banpo Bridge with the gray Han River beneath us and the gray sky above it and the small dirty snow blowing sideways across the lanes:
"He will be all right."
I had not asked the second sentence to be said. I had said thank you in the small careful gyopo Korean I used with strangers and the driver had nodded once, the small Korean elder-driver nod, and we had not spoken again.
I sat on the edge of the bed at 7:11 a.m. on Tuesday morning and I thought about the driver. I thought about the precision with which he had said he will be all right. The Korean had been jondaetmal. The Korean had been the jal gyesil geomnida form, which is the form one uses to give reassurance to a person who is leaving a thing they care about behind. The driver had used the form a son might use to a mother walking out of a hospital ward where the husband still lay sleeping. The driver had used it to me. The driver had decided, somewhere in his forehead, on the basis of forty-eight minutes of side-mirror observation, that I was a person who was walking out of a hospital ward.
I stood up.
I made coffee. I made the instant Maxim coffee in the small chipped mug my brother had bought me at a Niketown the spring of his sophomore year of high school, which had a faded swoosh and the wrong-spelled word just do it I across one side. I had carried this mug across the Pacific in the duffel bag I had refused to check, because mothers are not the only people in a family who carry talismans. I drank the coffee very black and very hot and I burnt the tip of my tongue and the burnt-tongue feeling, oddly, was the first thing in thirty-six hours that had been one hundred percent a thing my body had earned by itself, without supernatural assistance. I welcomed it. I welcomed it the way one welcomes a cold morning when one has been feverish.
I showered.
I dressed in the most uncompromising work-adjacent outfit I owned: black wool trousers, the white Equipment shirt my mother had bought me at the Stanford Shopping Center the week before commencement, the gray Theory blazer that smelled now faintly of green fig and faintly of fear and faintly of an unfamiliar new third smell I had not yet identified and that I had refused, in the bathroom mirror, to identify. I pinned my hair at the nape. I put on the small jade studs that had been my grandmother's and that I had been wearing every day since I had moved to Seoul. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. The face in the bathroom mirror looked at me back. The face had — I noticed this with the small detached interest a Stanford English major learns to bring to her own face in adversity — the same gyopo bone structure it had always had, and the same Cupertino-orthodontia mouth, and the same eyes that had once made a white boy named Daniel use the word fascinating, and the face was, in some respect I could not specify, no longer entirely mine to wear.
The face had a tenant.
I closed the bathroom door behind me. I picked up my bag. I went to the clinic.
The Yongsan International Clinic was on the fourth floor of a glass building two blocks from Itaewon Station. It had been designed for expats and for moneyed Koreans who wanted to be seen at a clinic with an English-language frontage. The lobby had a Nespresso machine and a stack of Monocle magazines and a single orchid in a celadon pot that had been chosen, I suspected, by the same brand consultant who had picked our JL-white walls. The receptionist greeted me in English, and I responded in Korean, and she switched to Korean with the small recalibrating smile of a woman who was paid in part for the speed of her calibration.
Dr. Roh was a Korean man in his late forties with the soft sloped shoulders of a former orchestra cellist and the expensive Lobb-style brogues of a man who had decided in his thirties to stop dressing like a doctor. He took my blood pressure. He looked at my eyes. He held a small light at varying distances and watched the pupils. He pressed his thumbs gently into the sides of my neck. He had me follow a finger left and right with my eyes and then up and down. He took blood — four vials — and asked me, with his eyes still on the syringe, what had brought me in.
I had rehearsed this, in the shower.
"I have been experiencing," I said, in the small clear adult Korean I had practiced, "episodes of brief disorientation. I have had what I think is, possibly, a vasovagal syncope at work two days ago. I would like to rule out, as you would in any thorough work-up, the standard list — anemia, low blood sugar, postural hypotension, carbon monoxide exposure, hyperventilation. I would also like to consider whether any prescription medication I am on could be contributing." I named the SSRI my doctor in Mountain View had put me on for the half-year after my mother's diagnosis four years ago and that I had tapered off eighteen months ago. "There is none active. I drink moderate alcohol — I had three soju ten days ago at a work event. I sleep four to six hours. I do not use other substances. My family history is unremarkable except for hypertension on my father's side."
Dr. Roh listened with the quiet of a man who had been listened to by patients who needed listening, and who knew how to give it back. He set the syringe down. He labeled the vials. He folded his hands on his desk.
He said, "Han-ssi. I have been a doctor twenty-one years. May I tell you what I think you are doing."
"Please."
"You have written, for me, a very good intake. The intake is so good that the part of me that has been a doctor twenty-one years would like to thank you for it." He smiled. The smile was kind, in the way a Korean doctor of his generation could be kind. "And the part of me that has been a doctor twenty-one years would also like to ask whether the writing of the intake is the part of the visit you would like to focus on."
"I don't follow."
"You have ruled out, before sitting down in this chair, every condition you came in to consult on. You arrived with the differential already done. You ordered the labs in the order I would have ordered them. You named your own SSRI history and the taper date." He looked at his hands. "I will run the labs. The labs will, with very high probability, come back unremarkable. May I propose, for the next thirty minutes, that we use the time differently."
"How differently."
"You are scheduled to see Dr. Lim at eleven-fifteen."
"I am."
"Would you like me to call Dr. Lim's office and ask if she can take you now. I will sit in if you wish. Or I will leave you with her alone, if you prefer. I have run, today, a list of labs and a neurological screen. Either is appropriate. I would like, however, to suggest that the useful exam this morning is the one Dr. Lim will give you."
I sat in the chair across from Dr. Roh and I thought about the driver, Mr. Joh. I thought about the way Mr. Joh had said he will be all right at the speed of a thing one has said before. I thought about the form. Jal gyesil geomnida. The doctor was using a different form on me. The doctor was using gwaenchanha-sigesseoyo, the you will be okay form, in his eyes if not in his mouth. The doctor had been a doctor twenty-one years and he was not, in this Tuesday-morning consult, being a doctor. He was being a different thing.
"Yes," I said. "Please call Dr. Lim."
He nodded. He picked up the desk phone. He spoke, briefly, in Korean. He hung up. He stood. He walked me to the door of the consulting room and held it open for me with the small Joseon-coded courtesy of a man whose father had taught him, in a sterner decade, that one held doors for women whether or not the women wanted doors held. I let him.
"Han-ssi."
"Yes."
"I will say one thing as your physician of forty-five minutes."
"Please."
"The body does not lie. The body sometimes uses a language that is not the language the mind has been taught. If the mind cannot translate, do not punish the body for speaking."
I looked at him.
He gave a small bow. He went back into the consulting room and closed the door behind him.
I stood in the corridor with my bag and the slight humming small-bone-vibration in my chest that I had been mistaking, for thirty-six hours, for fear.
Dr. Lim's office was three doors down on the same corridor.
Dr. Lim was a Korean woman in her early sixties with iron-gray hair cut into the kind of severe bob a Seoul woman of her generation chose only after she had decided, at some point in her late forties, never to perform youth for anyone again. She wore a navy suit and a single pearl on a thin chain. Her office had a print of a Park Soo-keun on the wall — the rural mother-and-daughter one — and a celadon teapot on a low side table and a small stuffed white tiger about the size of a fist on her bookcase, which I would, two weeks later, learn she had had since residency.
She did not, when I came in, ask me what was wrong. She asked me if I would like tea. I said yes. She poured a small celadon cup of barley tea from the celadon pot and handed it to me. The cup was warm in my fingers in the way a brass cup had been warm in my fingers in a hanok by a brazier in Bukchon yesterday and in a wayside shrine four hundred and three winters ago, and I held the cup tightly, the way you hold a cup when a cup is doing the work of holding you, and Dr. Lim watched me hold the cup, and her face did not move.
"Han-ssi," she said. "Dr. Roh said you had given a remarkably thorough intake. Would you like to give me the same intake."
"No."
"All right."
"I would like — " I drank from the cup. The tea was bitter the way good barley tea should be. "I would like to ask you a clinical question. As a clinician. As a person who has been doing this thirty years."
"Thirty-six."
"Thirty-six."
She waited.
I said: "I would like to know what the standard differential is for a patient who reports — " I stopped. I was reading the inside of my own mouth before the words came out, the way I had been doing this for thirty-six hours, and I did not know which words I was allowed to say in the navy-suit-Park-Soo-keun-pearl-on-a-thin-chain register of Dr. Lim's office. I tried again. "What is the differential for a young woman in her late twenties who reports an unfamiliar but vivid sensory memory she cannot otherwise account for, accompanied by a brief loss of consciousness, in a setting of acute emotional stress."
"In English, dissociative amnesia or a depersonalization-derealization episode. In Korean, singyung-jeongsin-byeong-ui range. Plus, of course, the organic differentials Dr. Roh is ruling out as we sit here." She did not consult a note. "Plus, in this country, in this practice, in this office, with the patients I see — I would include, before any of those, shinbyeong."
The word landed in the small porcelain room with the weight of a coin dropped into a wishing well.
Shinbyeong. Spirit-sickness. The call of the gods to a person they want as a mudang.
"You include it on a differential."
"I have included it on the differential of every female patient I have seen since 1989."
"As an actual differential."
"As an actual differential. With a positive predictive value, in this practice, of roughly four percent for younger patients with maternal-line Korean heritage and unexplained somatic symptoms." She set her own cup down. "And of roughly fourteen percent when the patient has presented at the door of a clinical psychiatrist on a Tuesday morning at ten past eleven, dressed in her work clothes, having pre-arranged a same-morning psychiatric pairing with my colleague Dr. Roh."
I sat with the tea cup in my hands.
"How," I said.
"How do I know."
"How do you treat it."
Dr. Lim regarded me. Her face was the face of a woman who had treated, by my rough math, somewhere in the region of forty-five thousand women across her career; her face had become, by the application of those forty-five thousand cases, very nearly an expressionless face, the way the faces of the old ferry captains used to be on the Mokpo route — a face from which weather had been carefully removed.
She said, "If you have any maternal-line elders living, you call them today. You ask them whether anyone in the family was called. If yes, you sit with that elder until she has told you what she knows. If no — or if she will not say — you come back to me. I will refer you to a Korea-licensed mudang of my acquaintance, who does not charge for first consultations. There are six in Seoul I would refer to. There is one in Busan. There is one in Daejeon."
She wrote a phone number on a small card and slid it across the desk.
"And in the meantime."
"In the meantime you do not faint in any place where there is asphalt. You eat. You sleep. You do not drive. You stay near a person, ideally a person of your own gender, who will catch you if you go again."
"I have a friend."
"Then ask her."
"And — " I drank the rest of the tea. "And if I — if I —"
"Yes."
"If I have already been caught."
Dr. Lim looked at me a long moment. She did not, I noticed, ask the obvious follow-up question. She did not ask by whom. The not-asking was the not-asking of a clinician who had decided to allow a patient to have a thing in her life the clinician did not need named on a Tuesday morning.
"If you have already been caught," she said, "you will eat. You will sleep. You will not drive. You will, before the next fainting, decide whether the catcher is a person you wish to be caught by, or a person you wish to step aside from. That decision is the only treatment I can prescribe. The other prescriptions exist to keep you upright long enough to make the first one."
"That is — "
"I know it is a great deal to put on a young woman in a navy office on a Tuesday morning."
"It is."
"It is, however, the prescription."
I took the card. I slid the card into the inner pocket of the gray Theory blazer, alongside the green ribbon of the JL notebook, which had — somehow, by means I had not investigated — made it from the carpet of an elevator into my coat pocket and now into my office handbag. I stood. I bowed. She did not stand. She bowed her head a half-inch from her seated position, which was the bow she gave to patients she was, on the basis of thirty-six years, taking seriously.
At the door I turned back.
"Doctor."
"Yes."
"You said if maternal-line elders. My grandmother."
"Yes."
"What — what should I expect."
She thought about it.
"Han-ssi. I have done this thirty-six years. I cannot tell you what to expect from another woman's grandmother. I can tell you that I have seen, in this office, hundreds of young women like you call their grandmothers for the first time as adults, and almost all of them have been told, at the start of the phone call, I have been waiting for you to call."
"Thank you."
"You are welcome. Han-ssi."
"Yes."
"Eat first. Then call."
I ate first.
I ate at the small kimbap place across the street from the clinic — the same plastic-stool same-counter place that had been there since 2009, which my mother had told me to eat at if I was ever near the Yongsan clinic. I ate tuna kimbap and a small bowl of odeng broth and a slice of yellow danmuji, and the food sat in my stomach in the way food is supposed to sit, and I felt — for the first time in three days — hunger giving way to fullness in the way a person becomes the right shape inside her own clothes.
Then I walked to the Itaewon Station back exit and sat on the small bench by the Coffee Bean and called my grandmother.
She picked up on the first ring.
"Halmoni."
"Granddaughter."
"Halmoni — "
"Did you eat anything strange last night, Ji-won-ah."
I did not, at first, register the question. I had readied an apology — an opening about how I had not called for three weeks, about how work had been busy, about how I had been thinking of her. The apology was in my mouth. The apology had not asked her about food.
"Halmoni."
"Last night, Ji-won-ah. Or yesterday. Or the day before. Did you eat anything strange. Anything you do not normally eat. Anything cooked by hands that were not the hands of a stall woman or a restaurant cook." She used the Chungcheong dialect she had used for me since I was small, where the syllables ran a beat slower than Seoul speech and the verbs came out softer at the edge. "Anything cooked by a man. Anything cooked by a man in his own kitchen. Anything cooked by a man in his own kitchen for you and no other person."
I sat on the small bench by the Coffee Bean and I felt the morning sun, the first sun of February that had any color to it, fall on the back of my left hand.
"Patjuk," I said.
"Patjuk."
"Yes."
"Red-bean."
"Yes."
"With pine nuts. Or without."
"With."
"Three pine nuts on top."
"Three."
She did not speak for a long second.
"Granddaughter."
"Yes, halmoni."
"You will come down to Daejeon this weekend. Saturday. Take the KTX. The 9:13. I will meet you at the station. I will make you the bone soup the way your mother's mother made it. Do you have a place to stay tonight."
"Yes, halmoni."
"With your friend."
"With my friend."
"The girl from Daegu."
"Yes."
"Good. Stay with her tonight. Stay with her tomorrow. I will see you Saturday."
"Halmoni."
"Yes."
"Halmoni — who is he."
She made the small old-woman sound she made at the end of a long sentence she had been holding for many years. It was the sound a person makes when she has been carrying water in cupped palms for a very long time and is about to set the cup down. It was not a sigh. It was not a tut. It was a small Chungcheong consonant cluster I do not have the orthography for, that meant all right, all right.
"He is the man we have been waiting for, granddaughter."
"Halmoni — "
"You will come Saturday. I will tell you on the porch. The porch is the right place. The phone is the wrong place."
"Halmoni."
"Yes."
"Halmoni, am I —"
I could not finish the sentence. I had not, in my mother's pronunciation or in my own, ever asked an adult woman to tell me what I was. I had asked, when I was small, what I was supposed to be. I had asked, in middle school, what I was supposed to do. I had not, in twenty-six years, asked what I was. My mouth could not, on the small bench across from a Coffee Bean in Itaewon, find the verb.
My grandmother, who had been raising daughters of daughters for sixty years, said the verb for me. She said it in the Chungcheong dialect, which meant what are you the soft way — not as accusation but as offered shape, the way a tailor lifts a length of fabric and asks the woman, what are you, sleeves or skirt.
"You are mine," she said. "You are your mother's. You are your grandmother's. You are the one of us who came back."
"Halmoni — "
"Saturday, Ji-won-ah. You will eat the soup. You will sit on the porch. You will tell me his name. I will tell you the rest."
"Halmoni, his name is — "
"Saturday."
"Halmoni — "
"Saturday."
The line clicked.
I sat on the bench with the phone hot in my hand for a long minute. The sun was on the back of my hand. The kimbap was warm in my stomach. The card with Dr. Lim's mudang-referral phone number was in the inner pocket of the gray Theory blazer with the green ribbon of my JL notebook and with, I now noticed, a small folded square of mulberry paper that had not been in any of my pockets yesterday morning — that had been, I understood, placed there at some point during the four hours I had slept on a couch in a Bukchon hanok by a man who knew which pocket of which blazer a junior A&R would, in panic, check.
I unfolded it.
The paper had two columns of small cinnabar Joseon brush-strokes on it. I could not read them. I knew, with the body-knowing I had been refusing to know with for ten days, that the strokes spelled my own name twice, once in the way Han Ji-won is spelled and once in the way Yun Da-eun is spelled, and that the small dot of darker cinnabar at the foot of the paper was a thumbprint, and that the thumbprint had been pressed by a hand whose thumb, last Saturday, had been cut by a wineglass and had not, on Tuesday, scarred.
I refolded the paper. I put it back. I stood up. I walked down the stairs into Itaewon Station to take Line 6 to Mapo, where Min-ji lived in a one-room walk-up on a side street off Hapjeong with a landlord who let her keep a small cactus on the windowsill.
On the train, between Noksapyeong and Samgakji, the carriage went briefly dark — the small routine outage that happens on Line 6 sometimes, of no consequence, lasting four seconds — and in the four seconds of dark I saw, perfectly and very calmly, the slope of pine and rock with the two moons in the sky, and the woman in white with the knot of mourning on her wrist standing twenty paces ahead of me, and the woman did not turn around, and the woman said, in the small Chungcheong-tinged Joseon that my grandmother had used at the end of a phone call, Granddaughter. The kettle is on. Come inside.
The lights came back. The Line 6 train made the small recovery hum a train makes. The Korean man across the aisle from me looked up from his phone, then back down. The young woman two seats over adjusted her earbuds. I sat with my hands folded over my bag and the sentence in my mouth tasted, for the first time in twenty-six years, like a sentence I knew the answer to.
I texted Min-ji.
coming over. need bed. need food. need you to not say i told you so for first 3 hours.
She wrote back inside fifteen seconds.
i love you. door's open. soju in fridge. no told u so for 4 hours. one hour extra free of charge bc you sound like shit. unnie.
I leaned my head against the train window and closed my eyes.
I did not sleep. I did not, exactly, dream. I held the green ribbon of the JL notebook through the wool of the blazer, and I held the thought of my grandmother on her porch in Daejeon, and I held the thought of the kettle on a brass kettle on a brazier in a Bukchon hanok where a man with no scar on his thumb had brewed me barley tea at three in the afternoon yesterday, and I let the train carry me. The three thoughts sat at three different tables in my head, English at the window, Korean at the door, and a third table — a Chungcheong table, set with my grandmother's chipped white porcelain and a low brazier and a small celadon dish of cinnabar — at the back of the room.
The third table had not been there the day before yesterday.
The third table had been waiting, the way the slope had been waiting, the way the chair inside the chair inside my chest had been waiting. I did not, on Line 6 between Samgakji and Hyochang Park, sit at the third table. But I let my eye, for the first time, see that the third table was set, and that one of the two cushions at the third table had been laid out for somebody else.
I closed my eyes.
I did not sleep.
The train carried me on.