Simple Heart

1

I came from darkness.
Darkness trapped in the intangible frame of eternity, of stagnant time—that is my origin. Without direction, without knowing where I was to go, I drifted alone. What form did I take then—a hard, round seed; a tendril of smoke? Perhaps a mutable substance tumbling down or blowing away at the slightest reverberation, or even a formless pinch of energy.
In darkness I was formed and tearing the darkness apart I was born. I have no parents, or parents’ parents, who related tales of prophetic dreams when I was in the womb or remembered the sound of my cry when I came into the world, or relatives or neighbors who photographed the moment when I first crawled, sat, stood, spoke. I don’t have family records detailing the personal information of my parents, a birth certificate bearing my official date and time of birth, or medical records from the hospital where I was born, either. In their place are documents put together to ensure a smooth adoption process: an improvised single-person family record, adoption agreement signed by a stand-in guardian, international certificate of vaccination, travel permit, invoice for adoptive parents’ coordinator to interpret and help the process along, receipt for the adoption agency fee (physical disabilities qualified for a discount, so I must have cost the full fee as a non-disabled child). Perhaps these records are still kept somewhere in Korea at an adoption agency or a government organization that oversees adoption.
Had someone kept my umbilical cord? When the question arises, sometimes my hands find themselves gently feeling around my belly button. But my belly button is but a vestige of my birth mother, incapable of recreating a single fingertip of hers. Ineffectual evidence, symbol without distinction, closed passageway . . . Her looks and impressions, scent and touch, tone and voice, her expression when she laughs or cries, her sleeping habits and complexes—I do not know these things, and it will be impossible to obtain such information in the future as well.
She, too, is a darkness to me.

——

Last June, I thought of her for the first time in a long while.
I was lying on an exam table at a small obstetrician’s clinic in downtown Paris, looking up at the tiny movement on the ultrasound screen until my eyes hurt. Parts joined together that were presumed to be head, torso, and limbs wiggled on the screen. The silver-haired doctor, who introduced herself as Docteur Joubet, offered a word of congratulations and told me that it had been nine weeks since this new life came to me. Joubet said, “Did you know a fertilized egg goes through tens of billions of years of evolutionary process in roughly 280 days? The single-cell fertilized egg divides continually as it becomes an amphibian, reptile, mammal, and the most physiologically complex mammal, the human. You’re at nine weeks, so three weeks from now all the organs, including the genitals, will be fully formed. This is when the clay is molded, so to speak. You must be careful.”
That was the moment my birth mother came to mind. I thought of her even though I had no memory of her, and this thought led to a yearning to see her. The shape of this yearning was unexpectedly large, round, and elaborate. It was a little bit baffling because in the past I had been curious about her and even wanted to find her, but never with this sense of yearning.
I left the clinic but instead of heading home I took a walk along a nearby footpath. A row of tall trees stood along the path, leaves intricately connecting to form a green canopy as I thought about the life I held within me. I placed two possible options on either side of an imaginary scale and tried to measure them as accurately as I could. Sunlight filtered through the canopy of leaves overhead, casting a radial pattern of light. I stopped and threw my head back to gaze up at the undulating leaves. The trees stretched up toward the sky, and beyond the sky was the universe.
Universe.
Wooju.
I said “universe” to myself once again in Korean. The disquiet leading up to the moment dissipated, leaving only the name Wooju. It would not be difficult for the French to pronounce, and the universe, which held everything in existence, was the farthest thing from an indeterminate darkness. There was no need for deliberation. Or rather, I was done deliberating. This little life inside me—its fragile, freshly formed heart circulating blood through its body to increase the production of cells and undertaking the evolutionary process at miraculous speed—was given the name Wooju. I thought, I must remember this moment. Which way the wind was blowing, what color the leaves were, what the clouds looked like before they scattered—I will remember and tell Wooju when the child obtains language. From now on, I must remember every moment. I am the intermediary between Wooju and the world, the harbinger of their existence to the people of this world, and witness-bound to testify to their process of growing up. I will never neglect these roles and I will never let Wooju contemplate such things as darkness.
Under the trees on the footpath that day, this vow became the sole certainty of my life.

The day I found out that Wooju had come to me, I received another email from a Korean woman called Seoyeong.
When I returned to my place that evening, I sank back on the couch and opened my email like always. Seoyeong’s name immediately caught my eye. She had first emailed me a week before, introducing herself as a woman of twenty-nine who had made several independent films since college, where she had studied film. She had an idea for a documentary with me—French adoptee from Korea, theater actor, playwright—as the main character.
She had written:

I came across your interview one year ago. It was around that time I happened to hear that the old woman who runs a restaurant on the ground floor of my building once fostered a child soon to be adopted overseas. The experience opened my eyes to the fact that all my life I’d been ignorant of adoption or that adoptees existed. That might have been why I couldn’t stop thinking about you, Nana. I kept thinking and thinking, and a script about you formed in my head.
This is what I have in mind so far: visiting the places you passed through in Korea before you were adopted in France; looking for the people you came across; and finding out the meaning of your former name, Munju. As you know, Korean names have their own meaning, which is hard to infer just by the lettering or pronunciation. Nana, if it’s not too forward of me, I’d like to ask what you think of working on this film with me in Korea.

At the time I thought that the offer was in no way realizable. Putting my life in Paris on hold and going to Korea to be in a film by an amateur director whose work wasn’t vouched for was as foolish as playing a game in which the only outcome is guaranteed defeat. It made me laugh. Still, I kept thinking about the email. A few days later, I sent a one-line reply asking why the interest in the name of an adoptee like me. This second email was probably the answer to that question.

The interview Seoyeong mentioned had taken place a year before, when I visited Korea for the first time in thirty-four years to attend an NGO program for overseas adoptees. I had heard that the main purpose of the program was to help adoptees find their birth families and organize reunions.
I suppose the interview request came to me because out of the fifteen adoptees I was the only one who hadn’t found my family by the time the two-week program approached the halfway point. Besides, my Korean was fluent compared to that of the other adoptees. I had always been exposed to the language even after I left, so I was able to speak, listen, read, and write without much struggle. When I was young, Henri and Lisa bought me Korean storybooks and animated films, and as I grew older I watched Korean TV dramas and films I found on my own. I also did a language exchange in college with Kihyun, a Korean architecture student, for nearly four years. Kihyun had advised that I had to know hanja to master advanced Korean, so I taught myself the Chinese characters commonly used in Korean with a text-book I picked up at a used bookstore.
The interview had taken place on the second Tuesday of August on the second floor of a café in Gwanghwamun, Seoul. I was as forthcoming as I could be in describing the circumstances before and surrounding my adoption. The railroad tracks. The train conductor who saved me. What he looked like and my guess at his age. The atmosphere in the train conductor’s house where I lived for a year and went by the name Munju. The name of the orphanage I was sent to after. And finally, I pulled out the passport I had kept with me since I boarded the plane to France thirty-four years before and opened it to the photo page. The passport was a rush job done right before my adoption, and I had brought it to offer all the clues I had to someone out there who might remember me. The journalist, who was typing away on her laptop, looked up and smiled at me.
“I’m sure you have more stories to tell . . . What’s your life in France like?” she asked. “You’ve returned to your homeland after a long time. I’d love to know what your experience in Seoul has been like too.”
I gazed at the journalist. While she couldn’t have known that I had pinned every last bit of hope I had on this interview, in that moment I felt an uncontrollable swell of disappointment wash over me. Disappointment, or maybe something closer to antagonism.
After the interview, the journalist left for another engagement.
As the sun went down and night grew deep, I sat motionless at the café, looking out the window. The rows of tents in Gwanghwamun Square sank into darkness. I knew from French news reports whom the tents were erected for us to never forget. It rained on the evening I saw the breaking news that the Sewol ferry had sunk, resulting in the deaths of 304 people, 250 of whom were high school students. Even a long, hot shower couldn’t warm the chills in my body. My loneliness grew as I recalled that evening. I pictured a shipwreck survivor lost at sea with no one sent to find her—this person began to act out my loneliness. It was an old habit of mine, turning a real- life situation into a theatrical scene, conjuring an actor from my imagination, and projecting my loneliness onto her. This projection was of my loneliness but at the same time it was not mine alone, and in this way its depths were not too daunting.
I read the interview just once. The article was published in a magazine just before I left Korea, so I was able to receive it by post. As I’d predicted, the three-page article was more about my life now than my life before I was adopted. A French cultural foundation playwriting award that I had received not long before was played up quite a bit. The passport photo I had asked them to run didn’t make it into the spread. Based on the photograph taken at the café in Gwanghwamun, it was impossible to tell that I had once been a child who was abandoned on the train tracks or that I had gone by the name Munju. I had staked every last bit of hope in me that the person who had named me Munju and my birth mother would read the story and reach out, but I never heard from either of them.
I gazed at the computer screen for a good long while, then checked the box next to Seoyeong’s email and hit delete. I didn’t know Seoyeong, and I didn’t know anything about the hours she’d spent thinking about Munju. The hours between the moment she happened to read about me in a magazine, let her imagination rise, and sketch out a documentary—the shape, texture, and substance of those hours were in a realm unknown to me.
I tried to close the laptop, but my hand did not comply. Don’t be so dramatic, I said to myself. I could always delete Seoyeong’s email after reading her response to my question. I logged back in, recovered the email I’d just deleted, and slowly read the contents.
If I hadn’t recovered Seoyeong’s email, if I hadn’t participated in her documentary, I would have gone about my life without ever having known the people I met in Korea, and that life would have been like a book with the most important pages missing. Empty . . . unimaginably so. Whatever I am in the present, I could never return to who I was before I knew them.

Because a name is a house, Seoyeong’s second email began.
I think our names are a kind of house where our identity or sense of self reside. People forget everything so quickly here. I truly believe that remembering a name is how we pay our respects to the forgotten worlds.
Identity. Sense of self. House. Respect. Seoyeong’s choice of words caught my attention. “Caught my attention” does not nearly describe their effect. I had yearned for these words more ardently than anything in life. Before long, I was sitting straight up on my sofa, concentrating on Seoyeong’s email.
It appeared Seoyeong’s project was already well underway. The synopsis and even the sequence were already set, the staff assembled and the agreement signed with her university, which had a strong film program that rented relatively new camera and lens models. She couldn’t cover my travel expenses or pay me well, but she’d attached photos of the free accommodation I would have over the two to three months of shooting. I clicked on the image files. Pictures of a small living room, bedroom, and the view from the window popped up, one after the other.
This is the place I rent. It’s not fancy, as you can see, but it’ll be comfortable for one person. Besides, you get a view of Namsan Tower lit up at night, Seoyeong said.
As I looked through the photos, hazy memories of the train conductor’s house, which had been sort of a foster home for me, emerged. A weathered hanok at the end of an alley. When it rained, the smell of wood seeped into every corner of the house, suffusing the air with a spicy, mint-like scent. A rainy day also meant getting to eat a brownish-purple dumpling-shaped treat. The train conductor’s mother would click her tongue disapprovingly at me every time our eyes met, but when we were sitting under the awning and sharing the treat to the sound of rain, she was as affectionate as if she were my real grandmother. Ground sweet red bean was spooned into the pocket of dough, fried in oil, and sprinkled with sugar. I couldn’t remember the name of that dish, and once I left Korea I never saw it again. But the taste of it had been lingering on the tip of my tongue for a few days. I believed a bite of that treat, which I couldn’t possibly find in France, would instantly cure the nausea that plagued me at all hours of the day. I was of course aware that flying long-distance at the beginning of a pregnancy just to satisfy a craving was not a rational decision, and that I had to be careful like the doctor said.
At that point, I should have deleted Seoyeong’s email or sent a standard rejection letter. But I did not. Instead, I remembered something I’d read in a brochure on Korea: Many pregnant women return to their parents’ home for a while to eat well and prepare for the delivery—and prepared myself to be swayed. But more than anything, the possibility of finding the train conductor or his mother, however remote, overwhelmed all the unfavorable aspects of the journey. It contained hope—that if I could find out the meaning of “Munju” and shed just a little more light on my origins, I’d be able to welcome Wooju into the world with more confidence.