My grandfather had the looks to be a successful actor on screen but had trouble memorizing lines. As television rose in popularity, his career began to peter out. My mother used to tell me he had what Korean people call a “thin ear”—someone who is too easily swayed by the advice of others. A series of unsound investments saw him lose the family’s savings by the time my mom had finished elementary school.

In an attempt to supplement their income, my grandmother sold homemade jewelry at outdoor markets. On weekdays she cooked large batches of yukgaejang, taking pounds of brisket, bracken root, radishes, garlic, and bean sprouts, and bubbling them into a spicy shredded-beef soup, which she would ladle into small plastic bags and sell to office workers on their lunch breaks.

Eventually, my grandfather left my grandmother for another woman and disowned the family. He only reached back out to his daughters years later to ask them for money. When Halmoni wasn’t looking, my mother used to slip him an envelope after dinner and tell me to keep my mouth shut.

At the Chinese restaurant, Nami Emo would reserve a room with a big table and a gigantic glass lazy Susan on which turned small porcelain pitchers of vinegar and soy sauce with a marble button to ring for service. We’d order decadent jjajangmyeon noodles, dumpling after dumpling served in rich broth, tangsuyuk pork with mushrooms and peppers, and yusanseul, gelatinous sea cucumber with squid, shrimp, and zucchini. Halmoni would chain-smoke at one end of the table, silently watching as her husband caught up with the children he’d walked away from.

On the mezzanine, Seong Young would take me to see a six-foot-long fish tank that housed a baby alligator. It remained there year after year, blinking sleepily, until it grew so big it was unable to step forward even an inch, then disappeared altogether.

In the course of one of these biannual visitations, at the age of twelve and nearing the peak of debilitating insecurity, I was confronted by a pleasant new discovery: I was pretty in Seoul. Everywhere we went strangers treated me like I was some kind of celebrity. Old ladies in shops would stop my mom to say, “Her face is so small!”

“Why do the ajummas keep saying that?” I asked my mother.

“Korean people like small faces,” she said. “It looks better in pictures. That’s why whenever we take a group photo people are always trying to push their head in the back. LA Kim always pushing my head forward.”

LA Kim was one of my mother’s oldest friends from high school. She was a big, jovial woman and she’d often make a joke out of craning her neck so the depth of field would make her face appear smaller.

“And Korean people like the double eyelid,” my mother added, drawing a line between her eye and brow. I’d never noticed my mother did not have a crease, that the skin was smooth and flat. I scrambled to a mirror to find my reflection.

It was the first time I could remember being happy to have inherited something from my father, whose crooked teeth and too-long dip between nose and mouth I rued constantly. I wanted to grow up to look just like my mother, with perfect, smooth skin and three or four sporadic leg hairs I could just pluck out with a tweezer, but in that moment, what I wanted more than anything was to have the double lid.

“I have it! I have the double lid!”

“Many Korean women have surgery so they can have this one,” she said. “Both Eunmi and Nami Emo had it. But don’t tell them I told you.”

In retrospect, I should have been able to hold up this information to my mother’s obsession with beauty, to her affection for brand labels and all the hours she spent on skin care, and recognize in the source of her attitude a legitimate cultural difference rather than the caprice of her own superficial nagging. Like food, beauty was an integral part of her culture. Nowadays, South Korea has the highest rate of cosmetic surgery in the world, with an estimated one in three women in their twenties having undergone some type of procedure, and the seeds of that circumstance run deep in the language and mores of the country. Every time I ate well or bowed correctly to my elders, my relatives would say, “Aigo yeppeu.” “Yeppeu,” or pretty, was frequently employed as a synonym for good or well-behaved, and this fusion of moral and aesthetic approval was an early introduction to the value of beauty and the rewards it had in store.

I didn’t have the tools then to question the beginnings of my complicated desire for whiteness. In Eugene, I was one of just a few mixed-race kids at my school and most people thought of me as Asian. I felt awkward and undesirable, and no one ever complimented my appearance. In Seoul, most Koreans assumed I was Caucasian, until my mother stood beside me and they could see the half of her fused to me, and I made sense. Suddenly, my “exotic” look was something to be celebrated.

Later in the week this glamorous realization would reach new heights of validation when Eunmi took us all to visit the Korean Folk Village, a living museum south of Seoul. Replicas of old-fashioned thatched-roof houses hugged its dirt roads, along which hundreds of hangari were strewn, red chiles beside them drying on woven mats, actors in traditional clothing here and there impersonating the peasants and royalty of the Joseon dynasty.

That day there happened to be a production of a K-drama period piece shooting. In between takes, the director noticed me and sent over his assistant. My mom nodded politely and took a business card, then erupted into laughter with her sisters.

“What did he say, Umma?”

“He asked me what your talents were.”

Visions of life as a Korean idol flashed before me. My future six-pack gyrating in choreographed unison with four other K-idols in matching designer crop tops, the cartoon bubbles popping into the frame of my talk show appearances, throngs of teenagers congregating around my approaching limousine.

“What did you say?”

“I said you don’t even speak Korean, and we live in America.”

“I could learn Korean! Mom! If I stayed in Korea, I could be famous!”

“You could never be famous here, because you could never be anyone’s doll,” she said. My mother wrapped an arm around me and pulled my body toward her hip. A wedding party slowly passed in colorful traditional garb. The groom wore a maroon gwanbok and a stiff black hat of bamboo and horsehair fitted with thin silk flaps that hung from the sides. His bride was in blue and red, an elaborate silk topcoat over her hanbok with long sleeves that she kept connected in front of her like a muff. Her cheeks were painted with red circles.

“You don’t even like it when Mommy tells you to wear a hat.”

That was Mom, always seeing ten steps ahead. In an instant, she could envision a lifetime of loneliness and regimen, crews of men and women picking at my hair and face, choosing my clothes, instructing me on what to say, how to move, and what to eat. She knew what was best: to take the card and walk away.

Just like that, my hopes of living as a Korean idol were squashed, but for a short time I was pretty in Seoul, maybe even enough to have a shot at minor celebrity. If it wasn’t for my mother, I might have wound up just like the pet alligator at the Chinese restaurant. Caged and gawked at in its luxurious confinement, unceremoniously disposed of as soon as it’s too old to fit in the tank.

My time with all these women and my cousin was like a perfect dream, but the reverie ended when Halmoni passed away. I was fourteen and in school when it happened, so I stayed behind when my mother flew to be with her mother at the hospital. Halmoni died the day my mother arrived, as if she had been waiting for her, waiting to be surrounded by all three of her daughters. In her bedroom she had wrapped the preparations for her funeral in a silk cloth. The outfit she wanted to be cremated in, the framed photograph she wanted displayed on her casket, money for the expenses.

When my mom returned from the funeral, she was devastated. She let out this distinctly Korean wail and kept calling out, “Umma, Umma,” crumpled on the living room floor, her head heaving sobs into my father’s lap as he sat on the couch and wept with her. I was afraid of my mother then, and I watched my parents shyly from afar, the same way I had watched my mother and her mother in Halmoni’s room. I’d never seen my mother’s emotions so unabashedly on display. Never seen her without control, like a child. I couldn’t comprehend then the depth of her sorrow the way I do now. I was not yet on the other side, had not crossed over as she had into the realm of profound loss. I didn’t think about the guilt she might have felt for all the years spent away from her mother, for leaving Korea behind. I didn’t know the comforting words she probably longed for the way I long for them now. I didn’t know then the type of effort it can take to simply move.

Instead I could only think of the last words my grandmother said to me before we returned home to America.

“You used to be such a little chickenshit,” she said. “You never let me wipe your asshole.” Then she let out a loud cackle, spanked me on the butt, and gave me a bony hug goodbye.