I

Lettering written on the wall of a hotel in Paris, Nancy, or on the wall of a hotel in Berlin’s Tiergarten: My land is small, I want to die at sea.

I am watching K excitedly tell us that they have been commissioned to make a radio drama that quotes Dictee, the last and most influential work by the Korean American writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. According to K, Dictee is a book written primarily in French, Latin, and English, with Korean and Chinese characters appearing from time to time; through its fragmented languages and words, it gathers and reweaves the memories and traumas of the colonial era and of the generations before and after the war, channeling them through several female figures.

While K was in the middle of unfolding this long explanation to us, I was recording my mother’s voice on my phone as she sat at the table. We had mostly been asking her to recount, perhaps even more lengthily than K, the stories her mother remembered of her own mother’s mother. The main subject was how her mother’s mother’s mother’s husband—that is, her mother’s mother’s father—had first been met, and how the marriage came about.

Then the story shifted. She said that the father of her mother’s mother’s mother’s husband had gone to Japan for work, and that the family had lived on the money he sent back from time to time. When he grew old, his body weakened badly, and, just before he died, he returned to his hometown, Y, where he lived again beside his family for a short while before dying. It was the colonial period, when Japan occupied and ruled Korea, and in those days many men crossed over to Japan to labor, earn money, and remit it to the families they had left behind in Korea. My mother said that he probably started another family in Japan as well, adding that such things were common then.

As soon as my mother finished speaking, I began telling them about a dream I had the day before. On a Japanese-style futon mattress there were tangerines. Strangely, the mattress had caved in so deeply beneath them—as though the tangerines were not fruit at all but immensely heavy bricks—that the sight seized my gaze with unusual force. I explained that the dream had in fact felt like reading, much too late—so late that “late” itself was no longer the word for it—a bundle of letters: letters that had failed to arrive at the correct address, yet had also never made their way back to the sender.

The feeling was perhaps similar to what I felt the first time I saw, on my laptop screen, a photograph in some war archive—an image taken by an American military photographer of a Japanese woman during the Korean War. No, no, that is not quite right. It may have been closer to what I felt when I visited F’s mother’s house—which had once been F’s mother’s mother’s house—and saw, for the first time, photographs of a mother holding a newborn; a child who could only have been F, perhaps six years old, wearing what looked like a furry hat dyed in the colors of the German flag; a young woman seated on a swing; and a black-haired adolescent with hair so long it seemed almost endless.