I think everything counts a little more than we think.

We are on our way back.

And this - like all trips - happens to you like Annie Dillard’s description of living: like standing under a waterfall. You succumb to the pounding presence, the rush of days, and the inability to capture everything moving above, around, and beyond you.

My mother’s mother tongue was the comfort I dumbly received that I could not create for my own children. I never learned to speak Korean fluently. As my brothers and I grew up in Sicily and having lived through her own struggles with learning English, my mother didn’t want to confuse me by teaching me the language that she counted in her head in, prayed in, sang me to sleep in.

So I think I have wanted to go to Korea since I was born. I have wanted to understand the hum of her words, her wild affinity for blood sausage, and perpetual need to save everything (things, people, etc.) I have wanted to be in a place where my wide face and flat nose are common. I have wanted to be welcomed into some secret society of people who eat raw garlic and actually like it. I have wanted to know if the places where our blood runs have anything to say about who we are now.

On one of the final days of this trip we went to visit the gravesites of my grandparents. My mother was orphaned when she was 5 years old. She was adopted and brought to the states by an older sister when she was 13. In college, (nearly 20 years ago now) I saw photographs of my Korean grandparents for the first time when my mother went to Korea for her only brother’s funeral. She had not been to Korea since before I was born. She came back with photos of 4 aunts I had never met, cousins smiling with grins that looked familiar, but so distant to me.

The gravesites are in a rural region in Korea called Jeollabuk-do. To get there we took a train for an hour and a half and drove another hour and a half. The terrain is full of lush rice-paddies embedded with white cranes high-stepping for rogue fish. In the distance, trees that tumble out of low mountains are eerily shrouded with white vapor and periodic rain storms.

As we drive, I learn that as much as two-thirds of the land surrounding us was owned and governed by my great grandfather whose name I learned on this trip is Yi Gut Hak. In addition to ownership of land, my grandfather built an irrigation pond to help the farmers in this village, gave out food from his home during war-time, paved roads that never existed before to allow for better, safer transit, and built a school for children that otherwise would not have had access to education that still stands today.

I have learned that much of the land my great grandfather owned was lost after his death when his son squandered much of the money in the family on treatments to try to revive himself from a stroke he had when he was 54 years old. My grandfather died when he was 59 years old. His wife, my grandmother, died a year to the day after him when she was 49 years old due to complications with asthma.

My mother is the youngest of 6 siblings: the eldest is the reason this trip happened post-haste. She’s been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and though she is doing well at this point, I didn’t want to miss the chance to meet another part of my family and I didn’t want my mother to regret not trying to go see her. When I met her on my first evening in Korea she said, “I feel like I have known you all my life,” and I have to say, no language barrier is thick enough to block the wave of love I felt from her when she said this.

The fifth eldest is the uncle I have who passed away 20 years ago. He squandered the money the family had left through a gambling addiction and, sadly was unable to afford to claim ownership of land that had been in our family for generations; even denying ownership of significant portions of land already developed in Busan. He has a daughter and son who I have finally met on this trip who (as is the custom) slyly sneak an envelope of cash into my pocket before we part ways. I am told that they especially feel this debt that their father left them with to the family and have continued to be sought out by authorities regarding remaining pockets of land that are available to us.

The fourth eldest is the aunt who adopted my mother (legally, my grandmother but I’ve wavered all my life on what I call her - Halmoni or Imo - Grandmother or Aunt in Korean). For all I know, without this aunt, I would not exist. My mother does not remember her parents’ faces, this aunt is the closest thing to a mother she has ever known. The life of this aunt alone could fill pages but I’ll let it suffice to say that she is a force to be reckoned with and the mother of the cousins I am closest to in my family who live in the states and know what it’s like to answer the question: “What are you?” all your life.

The third eldest is an aunt whose children came to New Jersey where my parents live shortly after my mom returned to Korea for her brother’s funeral. As a college student I remember coming home and being completely mystified as to why all of a sudden I was coming home for holiday dinners with people I had never met. Google Translate wasn’t yet proficient in my particular brand of being and so, when a few of my cousins lived with us during this time I liked their cooking but had little to nothing to say to them.

The second eldest I had never met before this trip. She worked in clothing design and has children and grandchildren that I’ve never met. She, like all my aunts, is warm and inviting, simultaneously enamored of my kids and mildly horrified at their American manners. She, like all my aunts, is very concerned with how much I’m eating, and tries to give me and my children anything she can.

And so we get to the town where my grandfather grew up. We hop out of the car and my mother tells me that when she was here as a little girl she remembers playing in a little house that was made in honor of her grandmother. She remembers her uncle’s house. She remembers a tree she used to climb. What do all these memories mean to someone who can’t remember their parents’ faces? What do they mean to me?

If you have ever been in therapy or spoken with anyone who has you may know the cliché of asking about your earliest memories. Our memories tell us where we can return to know how we got where we are; without them we can only move forward and with them we can attempt to tell ourselves the story of our lives. Our memories are the stepping stones that help us to know where to put our feet as we stumble into our next days. For good or for ill, they help us to plod forward.

We head to the gravesite down winding roads that are flanked by steep drop offs into muddy rice paddies. There is no sign at the place to ascend the hill to where my family is buried. There is a kind of overgrown path. My cousin who has been driving us out this way, my aunt from Seattle, my mother and I step out on to the hill as monsoon season in Korea attempts to overtake us.

Four umbrellas scale the hill. At one point, my cousin has to hack at the terrain in order to finally get to an opening in the brush. There in a wide, long field are three graves - half-spheres that rise out of the ground with gray engraved stones in front of them. The first is a great uncle, the second is my great grandfather, and the third is my great great grandmother. The story goes that my great grandfather was born sickly and was revived by his mother’s blood which she gave him by cutting her finger and allowing him to suckle it. His father was dead at the time and so this woman became everything to him, her oldest of 5 sons.

On a slope directly adjacent to this is a half-sphere wrapped with gray decorated slabs and covered in ferns and weeds. This is my grandparents’ grave. Here lie my grandfather, my grandmother (the second of three wives) and the other two wives. Like something out of scripture, the first wife could not bear children, the second “was the most beautiful”, and the third bore one son who the family eventually lost track of.

My mother immediately starts weeding the top of the grave. She has always been one to keep moving when grieving. We all begin to help her being careful to leave the gosari growing on the grave. Gosari is a highly-prized fern that my aunt from Seattle has harvested, processed on the roof of her house in Seattle, and then sent to Korea to profit from all my life. It’s perfectly growing in profuse amounts all around their grave. At some point, my aunt begins to pray as we weed and I feel I understand her even though I could not tell you what she is saying.

The names of all the children are listed on one side of the gravestone. My cousin shows me on the gravestone where my mother’s name is listed. I realize that all my life I have never seen my mother’s Korean name written. The names of the three wives are listed on one side as well but only via their surnames: in essence, Mrs. Song, Mrs. Oh, Mrs. Chu.

On the train ride back my cousin starts looking at our history by dynasty and my aunt from Seattle says she sees no point in recounting history that old. In many ways, this is true. What more can be said about the past the further back you go? When we look for glimmers of greatness in our past we do this because we want to see them glinting from within ourselves. When we look for pain, we do this to try to explain our own.

On some level, this is very real. Studies have shown that increased cortisol levels due to stress in one generation can yield increased baseline adrenal levels in the next. We know that certain types of cancers run definitively in families. Twins run on this side of my family and there are currently three sets of identical twins in this wing of family (including my own brothers). We are the blood we come from.

For my part, I wanted to see and better understand what my relatives have lived through as I muddle through this phase of my life. The whole world is suffering and always has been, but there is something about knowing the mountains my family would have looked up to in the middle of their days. There is merit in some mysterious way to breathing the air of this farmland that holds some part of my genetics in it. I am comforted by walking in the rain that would have drenched them, staring up at the trees that they climbed or sat under, and marveling at a home that still stands from generations ago as a testament to a mother’s love.

What I have been searching for in many ways is intangible; a sense of myself that never came to me because it seems like it was always here in this place waiting to be asked for, searched for, and found. Here are the aunts that have been loving and living their whole lives with the pain of poverty and hope for better lives for their children and grandchildren. Here are the cousins I might have asked for advice when I had no older siblings. Here is the family that attempts to anticipate my every need before I even know I have it. Here is the legacy of a great grandfather who built so much for his community and honored his family fiercely. Here is the place that tells me just how far my mother and her sister had to travel to get all the way to the United States. None of these people are perfect but this, in some way, is more comforting.

On the train heading back to Seoul I ask my aunt from Seattle what she remembers of her mother. She tells me that shortly before she died she remembers that my mom started brushing and braiding her hair because she had become too weak to do so. On the day that my grandmother died she was found with my mother’s braids in her hair.

The thing that I have been looking for and hoping for is and always will be love. Love, I think, is a kind of belonging. Love, says that you can always come home. Love, says that you are never alone. Love, tends to you like a garden - slow, intentional, with full knowledge that many seasons live in one lifetime, and all good things take time. Love does not own you, but it does grow you. Love, is the “inexhaustible abundance” of wild hibiscus teeming from nothing. I have lived long enough to know that I cannot change anyone. But what I want to know in the world, in my family, in the way I live my life and know my friends, is love. I think in many ways this is what we all want to know, the story we are all wanting to be a part of, the legacy I want to leave behind.

Before I walk through the gate at Incheon airport, I watch my mother and her sister say goodbye to their eldest sister. The pain of leaving is almost palpable, like a great rift you could feel your feet start to edge towards. Tears fill their eyes and - to my surprise - fill mine. A gut instinct for stoicism arises. But I think to myself that I have nothing to lose from being soft with these people who I have only just met. I cry as I tell my cousins thank you and Ari blows kisses from my hip. I hug my eldest Aunt and tell her 사랑해요 saranghae-yo, “I love you,” one of my first and only phrases in Korean.

We are on our way home, and from all the way here in the sky I can feel a heart-string tug in her direction. I think it might have been there all along.