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Forty-nine letters were discovered after an unknowable number had been trashed or forgotten. In Buddhist tradition, forty-nine is the number of days a soul wanders the earth for answers before the afterlife.
There is a Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most.
Children have no concept that every moment comes to end, but rather feel as though their suffering, at present, will last for an eternity.
She said to me, about the trouble with reincarnation, “What universe must God create for these souls to meet again and resolve their obligations?”
“When you age, wrinkles don’t make you older. They make you look more like yourself,” she warned me. “Everything comes to the surface eventually.”
She recalled the Jeju spring hills, covered in tracts of yellow canola—golden and mystical as the fragrant blooms traveled down and across field upon field. The volcano crater in the backdrop was striking against the closer azaleas, the profusion of cherry blossoms springing from white to pink, orange to red. Cooking competitions sprouted at the ports, programs to enrich prayers for harvest, and from her memory of the farms, riding lessons with native horses, known for their larger heads and thick necks, coats of chestnut, cream, sorrel, some silver-gray with a long mane, and others with
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Languages, as they open you, can also allow you to close. When I felt myself running toward seclusion, I heard my grandmother and my great-grandfather urging me to try—and how much harder one must try when learning to love. She never asked me to speak but to understand, rather than endure to forgive, and never to sacrifice, only to let go.
“Forgiveness doesn’t need a reason. It doesn’t follow a logical thought, so it frees you from having to be reasonable.”
“You can say whatever you want—if you reckon with it.” Joy asked me to be relentlessly forgiving and magnanimous toward all conditions of human life, and equally toward those of my own. She encouraged me to look closely, and said poetry would teach me how to pay attention and show me how to care. I must choose love over any other thing. Then, the world would open up for me. “Do you see now?” she asked me. “That’s why a poem is more than just words—it’s why poets have everything.”
But there must be a difference between having a life and being a life. The first one, I can let go. The second, I can’t ever let go—no matter what. Maybe that’s the good news. Whether or not I keep living, I am life.”
The world is a fun place. We are not born to win or lose against others. I am here to be happy for myself.
An elephant does not think its trunk is heavy. If that is one’s (destiny, fate) and (responsibility), there is no weight, but rather, importance.
In any suffering, happiness is crouched inside. We just don’t know where good and bad reside.
What I had meant to say in the kitchen was that I had loved fish since I was little—white bite, crispy skin. I had been waiting for it so long that the picture of soft flesh decomposed and left bones for a fossil. When I had argued in the kitchen, I was arguing about what was lost to me. Like how I could not read the letters because of the old water stains that had spread ink across the bottom of the page. The problem was not the damage but the cause. I recognized the tears my younger self had wept while touching the shapes on the paper.
“You have forty-nine letters.” She collected her things and led me down the stairs and outside the tower. “When you die, your soul wanders the earth for answers before the afterlife.” Da Hee checked for rain before she put her umbrella in her canvas bag. “This transition between life and death takes forty-nine days,” she said to me. “It means this is your work.”
“You know my grandmothers,” I said, and pointed at my nose, a habit I had picked up when I lived in Japan. “I’m an accumulation of their lives. Whatever I say or do now can give relief to the past—and to them. I don’t believe they’re ever gone.”
“My parents didn’t give me happiness,” I said. “But they set me free. They gave me freedom.”
Yes, but don’t tire yourself. (Because you can quit whenever you want.) But think of it as a challenge to your own courage, and for now, do all that you can.
They say a person has so unique a set of meanings we ought to be incapable of understanding each other, yet we speak and teach as if by magic.
When you have a daughter, you’ll think of me and say that’s how it must have felt then. But you don’t have to forgive me because you are my daughter. You don’t have to do anything for me, okay? I was born to do everything for you.”
