Page 51 of Heart and Seoul (Seoul 1)

YUJUN: Dinner tomorrow night?

Of course he’s not sending me a booty call. This is a guy who carried my suitcase up a thousand steps—or what seemed like a thousand steps. Besides, for someone like him, there are plenty of women willing to warm his bed. There were women at the airport who tripped over their luggage when he smiled. Why he has an interest in me is a mystery, but I’m not going to question it. Why do that to my self-esteem?

ME: Ye—

I stop before the last letter. What am I actually doing here? Just because Yujun is decent and gorgeous and kind and has dimples deep enough to get lost in doesn’t actually mean I should dive in. The warnings of my friend and flatmates weren’t issued because they want to stop me from being happy but rather because they don’t want me to get hurt. Yujun is a distraction—a sweet, wonderful distraction—but the point of this trip is to find my biological family. That’s what I came here to do. Not run around with a rich boy who thinks it’s cute to play tour guide, no matter how wonderful he is. Damn. I press the back button angrily.

ME: I’m sorry but I have plans. Thank you. For everything.

YUJUN: If your plans fall through, the view of Seoul from Namsan Tower is amazing. Daebak, we Koreans would say.

I’d seen that needle-pointed tower on nearly every travel site I’d visited as I was buying my tickets and getting ready to come here. It was even in a K-drama I’d watched with Boyoung, so turning down a visit to the tower, which is top of my list to visit, is very sad.

ME: Thanks

It’s sufficiently terse that I don’t get a reply. Not even an attempted one where the three dots appear, causing you to hold your breath in anticipation. I plug in my phone, climb into bed, and try not to be upset that Yujun took my rejection to heart. The audacity of him to respect my wishes!

I get no sleep. I’m mad that I turned Yujun down. I’m mad I don’t know more Hangul. I’m mad my dad died before I got here. I didn’t even get an opportunity to curse him out for abandoning me. I didn’t hear his excuses about being poor and unprepared for fatherhood. I didn’t get to tell him how it didn’t matter that he gave me away because I lived a good life—am currently living a good life. I was robbed of that and it pisses me off.

I roll out of bed at dawn with scratchy eyes and a sore throat. The bathroom mirror says I should go back to bed for at least five days, but I know if I lie down again, I will want to text Yujun, spam email Kim Jihye, and basically do all the things that aren’t good for me. I have to get out of the house. I don my single Sunday dress and toss a cardigan around my shoulders. I’m halfway down the walk when I realize I’ve forgotten the strawberry candies. I dart back into the house and stuff the box into my purse.

I wander down one alley and then another, avoiding the main six-lane road and keeping to the small passages where it’s easy to forget that I’m in a city of millions. Seoul in the early morning is quiet. There aren’t many cars on the streets and the city feels like it’s still sleeping. Metal gates are rolled down, covering store windows. The lights are off inside cafés and coffee shops. A few people stream in and out of the occasional twenty-four-hour convenience store carrying small plastic sacks of goods. Some are even sipping coffee from to-go cups. I’d like to go inside and get my own coffee but I don’t think I’d know how to run a machine or communicate with a clerk, so I keep walking.

I haven’t paid much attention to the city itself since I arrived. I’ve scouted the area around the place I’m staying and it’s a mix of mid-rise buildings filled with restaurants, cosmetic stores, and other small businesses. There always seem to be a lot of people walking with purpose. In the underground subway tunnels, there’s another city, with vendors selling hot foods, umbrellas, socks, and shoes. Music drifts out from the stores like a conveyor-belt radio station. Move down one storefront and you get a different song.

The other thing that strikes me about the city is how clean it is. There are no empty cups or napkins or cigarette butts lining the streets. The garbage cans aren’t overflowing. For a big city, it doesn’t feel as massive as it should. It reminds me of home in some ways. There aren’t the towering high-rises of Chicago or New York. On this side of the river the building heights are limited. The skyscrapers are to the south, whereas here, the taller buildings can’t be much more than twenty or thirty floors. I read in one of my searches that this is because the old palaces are here and city zoning laws limit how high the buildings can get. Everyone deserves to see the palaces. I want to visit one. You can’t see what they look like from the outside, as tall walls surround the entire grounds, and it’s partly because they’re hidden that my curiosity is piqued. After I hunt down these five women, then I’ll go.

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