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.

II

The Village of Shaman Women : Rooms, Unlettered Eyes, Kneeling Bodies at the Table

The woman who no longer speaks to me, my father’s mother, had no room of her own.

She lived alone with her husband in a house of ample size: four rooms, a living room, and even an attic floor. Her vanity stood neatly in one corner of the bedroom she shared with her husband. Along the long wall of that same room stood a mother-of-pearl wardrobe, vast and elongated, almost excessive in its grandeur. It was inlaid with silver and deep blue-black light, and whenever I dried my hair before the mirror of her vanity, that glittering wardrobe would appear behind me in the glass, reflected and reflected again, stretching farther and farther away, twice as long, three times as long, endless and faint.

For the woman who no longer speaks to me, who had no room of her own, the large dining table in the living room, meant for an extended family, sometimes became her desk. So did the small table in the corner of the kitchen, where garlic could be peeled. Or perhaps all those tables had, in truth, always been hers. Only she never seemed to think of them that way.

One of the rooms was a guest room kept for the eldest son and his wife when they came to visit. Another was a guest room for the second son and his wife. The last remaining room was a tiny room with the air of a study, filled with books her husband had collected and read, or books her sons had collected and read—though I suspect they mostly belonged to the second son, since of the three children, two sons and one daughter, he alone had passed through ordinary schooling and gone on to a regular university. Alongside the books were stored various odds and ends.

In my memory, that room was terribly cold. It did not feel like a room meant for a person to remain in. And yet, at times, I loved it deeply: the paper smell of books published long ago, the old shapes of type, the printed textures and sensibilities of a time no longer easily found in bookstores. Books that may have belonged to my father, or to my father’s father, I could not know, were packed tightly onto the shelves.

It never occurred to me, not naturally, that any of the books in that room might have been read by the woman who no longer speaks to me.

I was young, but I vaguely remember my mother telling me that the woman could not read.

The woman could not read.

The woman could not read.

The woman could not read, and yet her husband was a teacher who taught children at an elementary school. In the final years before his retirement, he became vice principal, and even received a certificate of commendation from a certain president. I was only a child, but if my memory serves me, the man in the photograph I saw was probably President Kim.

Mr. Kim had once been one of the central figures of the democratization movement. In 1980, under the new military regime, he was falsely accused in a fabricated conspiracy case, unjustly sentenced to death, and imprisoned for six years. After his early release, he forgave the former president and dictator who had put him in prison, Mr. 290,000 won (Mr. 215 dollars or Mr. 165 euros, based on the exchange rate as of May 2026), and, with the people’s support, became president himself. Later, as president, he placed a medal around the neck of the woman’s husband. Photographs of that moment, and of the two men shaking hands, hung in a small corner of the living room of the house where she lived, beside the certificate of commendation.

In that house there was also, besides those photographs, a carpet embroidered with two great tigers. It hung on one wall of a guest room, large enough to fill the wall entirely. I do not remember whether the carpet was set inside a large woven frame, or whether the carpet itself simply hung there. In the room with the tiger carpet, I often took drowsy afternoon naps, the ondol (온돌) floor heated warmly beneath me. When a thick cotton quilt was spread on the floor and I lay with my back against the full warmth of it, the faces of the tigers, seen through my half-closed eyes, seemed to shimmer with rising heat.

While I slept like that, the woman who no longer speaks to me, my mother, the woman’s other daughter-in-law, and the woman’s daughter worked busily in the kitchen, preparing food.

Then my mother would open the door, switch on the pale ceiling light all at once, and wake me in a voice both tender and commanding, telling me it was time to get up, come out, and eat. I would go into the living room and sit at the living-room table, which may, after all, have been the woman’s table, where the meal had been laid out in abundance.

There, the other family members would already be gathered. And even then, the living-room table, which may have been the woman’s table, was being used by the men, the woman’s husband, her eldest son, her second son, and the eldest son of her eldest son, as a main beam, as an altar, as the structure that held up and received their hunger.

Beside it, in a corner, a folding table that was not ordinarily brought out would be opened. Around that table sat the women of the family and the younger children: my younger sister and I, and the second daughter of the woman’s eldest daughter-in-law. There, we spooned seaweed soup into our mouths, or picked the flesh from dried yellow corvina.