ELLECANADA.COM 89
excerpt
T
HE WINDOW OF THE fifth-
floor hotel room we’d rented for
the weekend bowed towards the
ocean, overlooking Haeundae
Beach. It was mid-October and
there were four of us: the Korean professor
who was my connection at the college, one of
her students, Ummah [my birth mother], and
me. We were in Busan for the annual interna-
tional film festival. Mats of different colours
were folded and piled to one side; later that
night, they’d be our beds. The wood floor
was already starting to warm and the sea was
angry, lunging against and over the straight
barriers, surprising drivers as they tried to
parallel park. It was two months into my time
in Korea, and dusk, so the ashes of a hun-
dred fireplaces swarmed the air and stuck to
people’s hair like flakes of dead skin. Without
daylight savings, autumn in Korea meant extra-
ordinary darkness.
At the time, I didn’t really consider the risk
my mother took in coming on that weekend trip,
but it must have been high. It was the second
occasion we would sleep together the way moth-
ers and daughters in Korea do. It had seemed like
a good idea when, back in Seoul a few weeks
earli er, the professor proposed the small vacation.
When it was happening, though, I was bored by
Korean conversation that kept me apart from
the rest of the group. There was a bag of grapes,
some cherry tomatoes, a cake, but I stayed to the
side of the open room holding a dictionary to my
chest and looking out the window.
But then, unprompted, Ummah told the
story of my birth. When she started, it was to
no one but the unfurnished room. Maybe she
was overcome by the need to tell, knowing
the professor could hear her, that the student
could hear her, and together they could translate
the words to me. Maybe it would be her only
chance. Our only chance. This is how our kin-
ship has always needed to exist—through third
parties. My mother told me about the day I was
born, but we needed strangers to bear witness.
I threw away your clothes, she said before anyone
was paying much attention. The clothes I bought
before you were born. hCOMING
HOME
In an excerpt from her memoir, Older Sister. Not Necessarily
Related., Jenny Heijun Wills reflects on a journey to her
native Korea and building a relationship with her birth mother.