Page 117 of Heart and Seoul (Seoul 1)

“It’s for you,” he says quietly. “Please sit.”

I don’t want to sit. I can’t look at Yujun as well when we’re sitting side by side and I’m afraid that after tonight, I won’t have another chance to stare at him. Everyone will be watching how we look at each other, how close we stand, how we address each other. There will be no more Yujun for me. I will have to call him oppa but not with any kind of flirtation or affection. If I’m to stay here, my tone with Yujun must be tempered with the right amount of respect and the right amount of deference and, most important, the right amount of distance.

“I can’t.” Not tonight. Tonight, he is still my Yujun from Seoul. Tonight, I will stare at him for as long as I can, memorizing the way his eyes crease when he smiles, the placement of each tiny mole, the roundness of his cheeks, the slope of his nose, the long fingers, the prominent veins, the breadth of his shoulders that he thinks can shoulder every burden in the world.

“Okay.” He accepts my strangeness without question. The summer breeze blows across the river. It’s warm and heavy but I still shiver. Yujun reaches out instinctively to warm me, but I step away. Hurt flickers across his face and it’s like a paper cut against my thumb—small but a wound that I’ll recall every day because small wounds can be sharper than the big ones.

“I’m sorry,” I say as the silence turns uncomfortable. “I didn’t want to make that choice, but—”

He holds up his hand. “I know. I know,” he repeats, biting his bottom lip slightly. He breaks his gaze away from mine to stare out across the river. In the dark, even with Seoul’s bright lights bouncing off its surface, the Han looks menacing.

What is he seeing there? The drowning of our hopes? The tears I’ve shed? The ones that swim in his eyes.

Last night, I made a family tree. I put Ellen and Patrick on one side and Wansu and Jonghyung on the other. I held the images up and realized the pictures were the same: two parents and one child. But even if the end point—me—was the same, the start was different, and so while I looked like Wansu and Jonghyung, and Yujun may say pretty words about me being Korean where it counts, I grew up in Iowa. I ate birthday cake instead of seaweed soup. My comfort food was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and not kimchi and rice. Football meant helmets and pads and touchdowns, not pitches and goals.

Last night, I made up my mind to leave. I didn’t come here to hurt anyone. I came here to heal. I suffered all these tiny cuts back home. Small ones from when I was old enough to hear how different I was. How I must smell strange. How my house smelled fishy or my face was flat. How I didn’t belong to my mother. How I wasn’t my dad’s real child. How I knew nothing about my past so how could I have a future? How I wasn’t good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, to have been kept. How leaving me, abandoning me, was the very best option. That last wasn’t a small cut. That was a big one. It was one that hadn’t healed. Perhaps if I returned home to my birthday cake and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then I could go back to living my normal, ordinary life and I would be okay. Then my aching heart would return to normal, but now I’m here in this city that is both familiar and strange next to a man who fills me with so much happiness that I could burst.

Only I don’t get to keep that happiness. I have to shove it into a box and set it aside.

Yujun reaches for the big bag, and a small square box with a red bow fills the palm of his hand. “It’s nothing very big, but I wanted you to have this.”

My hands tremble and I nearly drop it as he sets it in my hands. The red bow goes into my pocket. It’s a keepsake now. I have a moment of worry that I’ll end up being one of those old ladies who has nothing but a houseful of cats and a room filled with mementos—bows, boxes, napkins. If I’m desperate and start to steal used tissues, I’ll know I’ve gone too far.

Yujun waits in silence as I peel back the lid. A gasp escapes me when the jade first comes into view. Intricately carved out of the precious stone, a tiny duck rests on a deep green lotus leaf.

“Ducks mate for life. When one dies, the other pines until its heart stops. A mated pair can’t live apart. They must always swim in the same pond, fly the same path, rest in the same haven.” Yujun lifts the red silk cord out of the box. I lower my head so that Yujun can drape the cord into place. The jade duck drops between my breasts, heavy and comforting.

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