Page 22 of The Way Back Home

I park my car on the shoulder, next to a rusted guardrail, and sit there a moment, second-guessing the address again. The registration going back to some property up here that hasn’t changed hands in decades according to the records I dug up. I don’t know what I expected. A house or some elderly relative who’d blink at me through a screen door and ask what I want with the Cha boy. I didn’t expect a hiking trail.

I get out anyway, lock the car, and start up the path in my button-up and slacks because I didn’t think to bring anything else, because every stop on this search feels like it should be treated with a little decency even when I have no idea what I’m walking into. Within ten minutes sweat soaks through the collar and down the middle of my back, my dress shoes slipping on loose dirt, the incline steeper than it looked from the road. Cicadas scream out of the trees on either side. I keep going, telling myself it can’t be much further, and only stopping once to catch my breath against the trunk of a pine, palm pressed flat against the bark, lungs heaving.

When the trail levels out at the top I don’t see a house. I see graves.

They spread across a clearing cut into the hillside, mounded and grass-covered, each one fronted by a stone marker, some new and polished, some so old that the moss has crept into the carved characters and softened them. A family site like the ones dotting hills all over this country, tucked away from the roads, visited twice a year if the descendants remember to come.

I stand there a minute, catching the last of my breath, watching the morning light spill over the ridge and spill golden light across the grass. Then I start walking between the mounds, reading the names carved into each stone, because there’s nothing else to do and some part of me thinks maybe I’ll find something here that leads me somewhere useful.

The dates go back generations. A man who died in 1951, another in 1938, wives and sons listed beneath husbands and fathers in smaller script, the family tree laid out in stone instead of paper. I crouch in front of one marker with fresher edges, a woman who died only twenty years ago, and beside her name a string of children’s names, some crossed off with a different date carved beneath, infants who didn’t survive their first winter. I read them all. I don’t know why. Maybe because it feels disrespectful not to, walking through a place like this and only looking for one name among the rest.

I pause on one stone smaller than most, tucked at the edge of the plot like it was added after the rest, and the age carved beneath the name makes me take a short breath. Twenty-one.

I remember Ryowoon telling me once, the two of us sitting on the breakwater near the harbor with our feet hanging over the edge, passing a bag of shrimp chips between us, talking about his grand uncle who died with a handful of other college kids in the Gwangju uprising. It took them years to find his body after the military cleared out. His bones tossed into a field along with fifty others. A legacy of family loss and trauma on both sides, he said.

I crouch in front of the stone now, twenty years later, helplessness creeping up my throat. I trace the carved characters with two fingers, not touching, following the shape of them in the air above the stone. A boy who never got older than twenty-one, who died for something that mattered, whose death still rippled forward through a family that kept breaking under its own weight long after he was gone.

I keep looking, moving through the rest of the plot, checking every stone for the one name I actually came here hoping to find. Jin Ryujin. There’s nothing. She has no grave here, no marker with her name and a date that would tell me when, or how, or whether she’s even gone at all. Just the family she came from, laid out in the dirt in careful rows, generations of people who lived and suffered and died in this small corner of the country while their daughter vanished from the record. The end of a family that went out with a sigh.

I sit down on a flat stone near the edge of the clearing, elbows on my knees, and look out at the view. From up here you can see clear down into the valley, rooftops and rice fields stitched together under the morning haze. It’s so beautiful it almost seems cruel, given everything I know about the people buried under this hill.

I sit there a long while until the sun climbs higher and the cicadas quiet down, and then I get up, brush the dirt off my slacks, and start back down the trail with nothing gained except a name to cross off my list.

I come back the next morning.

I stop at the market on my way out of town and buy flowers, a few different kinds, and then I stop again for rice and side dishes, banchan packed into little containers, a bottle of soju I have no intention of drinking myself. I fill a backpack until it’s straining at the zipper and drive back out to the gravel road, back up the same trail, sweating through a t-shirt this time.

At the top I lay the flowers out first, one bunch at every marker, working my way down the rows the same way I read the names the day before. Then I unpack the food, setting bowls in front of each grave, arranging the side dishes the way my mother taught me. I pour a little of the soju out over the ground in front of the older graves, the ones from a generation that would’ve wanted it, and bow at each one in turn, forehead nearly touching the grass, holding the position a beat longer at the smaller stone, the one that says twenty-one.

I don’t know if any of this matters to people who’ve been gone this long. I don’t know if it matters to Ryowoon’s mother’s family the way it might matter to my own ancestors if I did this for them. But it feels wrong to have found this place and to just walk away. Somebody needs to remember them.

When I finish I sit with them a while, the food cooling in its containers, the flowers already starting to wilt a little in the heat. Then I pack up the empty bowls, sling the backpack over one shoulder, and head back down the hill.

There’s still no grave for his mother, still no answer to where she might have gone or whether Ryowoon ever found her himself, wherever he ended up. But I feel steadier walking away this time than I did the day before, like I did something that needed doing even if it doesn’t bring me one step closer to him.

Tomorrow it’s Gwangju. Then Naju, if that turns up nothing too.

I get back in the car, wipe the sweat off the back of my neck, and pull the crumpled list out of the glove box to cross off one more name.

10 Years Old

Mrs. Nam’s ointment stings worse than the actual punch that split my lip open, and I yelp when she presses the cotton swab against it, jerking my head back.

“Sit still,” she snaps, grabbing my chin and hauling me back into place. “You want it to scar, keep squirming.”

Beside me Ryowoon snickers, his eye is swollen up so bad it’s already turning the color of a bruised plum, a long scrape down one forearm still oozing where his shirt tore clean through at the shoulder. He looks like he got run over by something, but he’s grinning like a demon, rocking back on his heels in the low light of the courtyard while Mrs. Nam moves between us with her little tin of ointment and her endless supply of scolding.

“Don’t laugh at him,” she says without even looking at Ryowoon, reaching over to swat him on the good side of his head. “You look worse than he does.”

“I feel great,” Ryowoon says, and I can’t help it, I laugh too, even though it makes my lip throb and I taste blood again where the cut reopens.

Twenty minutes ago I’d been on my way to the market alone when Deukho and his friends showed up. Deukho’s from the school over the hill, two grades up, and he’s been particularly fond of picking on me for most of last year. I don’t know why I make a specially attractive target to him, but he finds reasons to shove me on the way to the market, to knock my school bag out of my hands, to call me names. He usually waits until Ryowoon isn’t around because Ryowoon’s the only kid on this side of town nobody wants to mess with, not since he split Jiho’s lip open last spring over a completely different, honestly kind of dumb, argument about whose top spins longer.

Today Ryowoon wasn’t around at first. His mom needed help carrying the laundry to and from the washing station up by the mountain trail, which gave Deukho the perfect opportunity to corner me with his three friends, backing me up against the wall by the bike racks. My stomach dropped when I realized there was nowhere to go, the way Deukho grabbed the front of my shirt and said something about how dirty charity case kids don’t belong walking around like they own the street.

I got one hit in, I want that on record, I got my fist into his stomach before his friend grabbed my arm and yanked it behind my back hard enough to make me yell. Then somebody’s foot caught me behind the knee and I went down onto the gravel, and I remember thinking distantly that this is going to leave a mark I’ll have to explain to my mom.

Then Ryowoon showed up.