While the crooked, stained table from the thrift store and the small plates of browning fruit spread across its surface hardly resembled her memories of jesa, Mirae hoped it would suffice. According to TikTok and Wikipedia, the Korean ritual was supposed to help one pay homage to ancestors and receive their blessing and protection in return. But as Mirae constructed the ceremony, she could not help feeling it was incomplete, too false to be effective, and that no amount of direction could teach her to connect to someone from her past.
Mirae wanted to summon her grandmother. She had never met the woman, and this unfamiliarity brought her solace, like a blank canvas on which anything was possible. Halmeoni was a figure she could pin her hopes to, especially now when Mirae sought direction. She was twenty-three, alone, and about to be fired from her very first job as a receptionist because she did not smile enough when interacting with clients. She was not sure how to find a career or a community. Halmeoni’s presence might offer comfort. Maybe she could speak to Mirae, help Mirae configure her life in a way that felt exciting. In her presence, Mirae might feel clarity. Relief.
◆
When Mirae was a child in Ivy, her parents performed jesa. Her mother set up a low glossy wooden table next to their dining one, placing at its center a framed black and white photo of Mirae’s grandfather, a serious man whose jawline and small eye shape Mirae shared. The rest of the table held food on the special dinnerware from the cabinet with the glass doors—a small pyramid of tangerines, fresh white rice, purple and orange striped rice cakes, and a few dried fish. The flames of two tapered white candles flickered from their silver holders set at the table’s back edge.
Mirae and her mother observed from the sidelines while her father spoke to his father’s photo, every now and then kneeling and pressing his forehead against the backs of his hands, folding his body like a clamshell. Mirae understood little of what he said, as her Korean was limited to commands about food, money, and school. The dishes on the table enticed her more than watching her father speak to a man she had never met. An elaborate meal, with japchae and jeon next to Kraft macaroni and cheese and instant mashed potatoes, awaited the family.
Words had ceased between Mirae and her parents since she graduated college last spring. She argued with them during her final weeks of the semester, and they did not attend her graduation. In fact, neither did she. She had nearly failed college, unable to muster interest in assignments and classes. When the academic office’s notice first arrived at her parents’ home, her parents filled her voicemail box with screams and curses. They could not understand that the texts of her psychology classes, a concentration she chose because of its ability to explain how people behaved, puzzled her. Her parents did not see that none of Mirae’s ideas were worth writing in any assignment. Or how in class, Mirae saw others speak and smile and yet could not decipher their code of camaraderie, much less participate in it.
Her parents stopped calling entirely.
In Mirae’s silence with her parents, a question arose: How could people with the DNA closest to her own fail to recognize her? In high school biology, Mirae had learned about recessive traits. Recessive traits like red hair can skip generations because they may hide in a carrier behind a dominant trait. The recessive trait needs another carrier and a bit of luck to be seen. This means that it can sometimes take a few generations to finally make its presence known.
This pattern might elucidate Mirae’s inability to decipher her parents. Perhaps some fundamental part of Mirae was dormant in her parents yet vibrant in a previous generation.
Maybe her traits were not flaws, but something resting, waiting to be coaxed. Something to savor.
◆
Mirae lit the warped and melted down IKEA candles with the matchbook she had swiped from the bar around the corner, and then ignited an incense stick by holding it to the flame. Next, she waved the stick, making a trail of thin smoke. She wondered if her gesture aligned with the videos, if the incense type was correct. Her offerings included overripe oranges, the last ones at the store, a pile of stale rice cakes, and a plastic container of microwavable rice. She always burned her rice in the pot and could not afford a rice cooker. For the image to be placed on the table, Mirae had Googled “Korean woman Japanese occupation” because she did not have a photo of Halmeoni. She was uncertain of Halmeoni’s birth year. The webpage results showed a statue built to commemorate the protests of sexually enslaved Korean women, demanding recognition. Another image of a smiling elderly Korean woman, made up with eyebrow powder and lipstick, wearing a blue, red, and gold hanbok appeared. It became black and white when Mirae printed it at work.
Mirae folded over the print-out’s white borders and placed it on the table’s center. A Getty image as a symbol of Mirae’s past.
She stuck the end of the incense stick in a small bowl filled with some soil from her potted snake plant, as she did not have any sand, and poured some soju in the apartment’s only shot glass that read “There’s too much blood in my alcohol system,” gifted by her roommate last year. Fortunately her roommate was absent tonight, leaving Mirae with the ability to ask Halmeoni questions in privacy: What am I supposed to do? Do I have any skills? What is my purpose? Mirae knew little of Halmeoni’s life: she was a teenager during the Korean War, when she lost her parents and suffered a strenuous journey to Busan and back with her sister, had two sons and two daughters, and died at twenty-three, swept downwards by a strong river current while washing her family’s clothes. Mirae also hoped that this moment in time, when she was the age of Halmeoni when Halmeoni died, also created a link between them.
Mirae made a gesture, offering the drink to the picture on her table. The soju smelled of vinegary fruit when she emptied the glass in the soil. Poisoning a plant as part of an ancestral ceremony.
Mirae could not help but laugh.
Another way the ceremony was incorrect: Mirae was not a son. Traditionally, the eldest son in the family conducted jesa. Mirae was breaking one convention in order to observe another one.
She removed the folded paper with the translation of the chant from her jeans pocket. According to one person’s website, a white man married to a Korean woman, the chant was supposed to include the details of today’s lunar year and the date of her grandparent’s death. Another website explained that you only needed to declare the food was for the ancestor’s enjoyment, bow, and then clear the table until the next Korean holiday, when you would continue to appease the ancestors with more delectable offerings in order to win their protection and blessing. Mirae had compromised, guessing at what was true.
She cleared her throat, and read.
Now, on the seventh year of tiger, ninth month whose first date is the first day of rat, nineteenth day of the ninth day of monkey, Mirae Yoon dare call upon her grandmother, mother of her mother. I eternally love you, and I cannot forget your mercy as great as the sky. Thus, I prepared several dishes, and I humbly offer them.
The diction felt foreign and solid in her mouth, like a rock. Mirae did not know how to love someone she had never met. She also did not feel mercy from this person, whose face she had never even glimpsed. Still. Her grandmother, someone her mother referenced as a frustrated woman, offered Mirae the most hope of anyone in her family.
Mirae kneeled and pressed her face against the backs of her hands that rested on the apartment’s dirty floor, trying to suppress the oncoming sneeze triggered by dust. She closed her eyes, as she recalled her father had done in this deep bow. At that moment, he had looked so peaceful, as if he didn’t need anything more than a bow before ghosts, the reward for his years of stress and labor. Mirae wondered if an outsider might detect piousness. Reverence. She was not sure she felt this. In fact, Mirae was certain that she was a fool. Her ancestors would not respond; her mock ceremony was an insult. Mirae unfolded herself and stood, ready to eat the pitiful oranges and the stale rice cakes. In all the preparation, she had not eaten breakfast. Her stomach was empty, but perhaps this was fitting: to approach her grandmother, whose blessing she craved, in a state of hunger.
As she reached for one of the fruits, a blast of cold air swiped at the back of her neck. When she turned, a small woman in a pale blue hanbok stood with her hands in fists, face taut with concern, hair pinned at the base of her neck. Mirae vacillated between fear and shock, heart beating in her throat. The woman studied Mirae’s table. And then she studied Mirae.
Though the brow was wrinkled, its prominence, along with the wide smooth cheeks that made the face as clear and open as a plate, resembled her mother.
“Halmeoni?” Mirae said.
Her grandmother scanned Mirae’s living room and began to tremble. Halmeoni snuck quick glances behind her as if searching for an exit while attempting to keep Mirae in her frame of view. The wide skirt of Halmeoni’s hanbok rustled as if supported by tulle. Mirae wondered how Halmeoni saw her—a thin girl with sad food on a cheap table in a messy apartment.
Halmeoni straightened her back, stood tall, and fixed her gaze on Mirae, who caught her breath. The moment had arrived: Mirae would be embraced. She would feel grounded rather than on the cusp of disappearing. She would feel a safe connection to someone who shared her blood.
She neither anticipated the lunge nor the speed of Halmeoni’s movements. Halmeoni grabbed Mirae’s shoulders and shook Mirae so hard that her neck cracked and popped, which it did anyway from stress, but now sounded like a child playing on bubble wrap. Mirae’s lungs felt full. Her forehead pulsed, and she considered that this spirit had come to extinguish her. In reflex, Mirae gripped Halmeoni’s forearms and tried to unfasten them. The two of them spun in half circles as if in a dance instead of in a struggle. Halmeoni had enormous strength for a woman a head shorter than Mirae. For a ghost. Mirae pushed Halmeoni’s chest, burning her palms. This spirit felt like fire. She had managed to steady her head and neck by leaning forward, grounding her stance. And just when Mirae felt like she was releasing herself from the spirit’s hold, the animals began.
Halmeoni let go of Mirae and stepped backwards, bumping into the jesa table and knocking its dishes to the floor. Her figure transformed into a pacing, snarling tiger with a lustrous coat of fur and prominent fangs. The tiger seemed enormous, larger than an elephant, simply because of how it moved in the small living room. Mirae considered that it was hungry and would lunge. She tried to scream but emitted a faint cry. As Mirae edged towards the front door, the tiger vanished. In its place, a large black Labrador stood on its hind legs and barked. Mirae’s throat tightened, her arms trembling. Was this creature still Halmeoni? Was this dog alive? She was not sure what it wanted. What all of this meant.
The spirit continued to morph: a brown bear arrived. A humongous white rabbit. An upright lizard. A white crane identical to the one her mother drew for her as a child.
Mirae wanted to flee but her body cemented, forcing her to see the culmination of this carousel of animals. Tears streamed down her face.
The latest creature, this crane, now spread its wings.
“Halmeoni, is it still you? Have you come to help me?” Mirae’s voice sounded frail, reed-thin. For a moment, she was unsure if it was audible, communicating across a generation or a dimension.
The bird elevated itself until its wings braced the ceiling and then discharged for Mirae, whose legs sparked alive. Mirae ran towards the far living room wall, and the bird crashed into the floor lamp and bookshelf, toppling them and scattering light bulb glass and books. Mirae’s chest thrummed. She was exhilarated and afraid. This was all a mistake. She was not sure if she could escape this bird, if it would relent until she was dead. She should have fled the apartment sooner, cursing herself for another poor decision, another fallen domino in this series that comprised her life.
As the bird collected itself, Mirae weighed her options: Leaving the apartment. Obtaining a weapon. Calling the police. Mirae was unsure if she needed to kill this bird that was some iteration of her grandmother, but she did not know how; her grandmother was already dead. The bird opened its wings once more. Mirae ran for the door again, bumping a side table and knocking over two plants. Their ceramic pots crashed, glazed shards surrounding her feet. Mirae fumbled with the doorknob, her shaking hand slick with sweat. The bird flew towards Mirae again, and she met its gaze. Mirae had always wondered about her last thoughts before death. Her parents warned her they would be filled with shame because of her college performance. Mirae did not feel shame now. She only thought of how she and her mother had once sat side by side while her mother drew a crane and told Mirae a story about the crane’s ability to disguise itself as a human. How Halmeoni had told her mother this creature visited the world during times of peace. A sighting of one was considered good luck.
The bird coughed and spasmed. It swerved to the other side of the room and collapsed on the jesa table, already askew. The bird grew still. The table was now crushed, the rice container smushed, plates cracked. The oranges rolled away.
The bird vanished, and her grandmother’s body appeared. She lay on her stomach, head turned to her left. Breathing seemed like an unreasonable expectation, but Mirae could not imagine any other indicator that Halmeoni’s spirit might be unbroken. Mirae regained her own breath as she slid down the door and placed her palms on the floor. She did not want her grandmother’s spirit to be in pain, but she did not want to be attacked. Maybe relief had finally come; perhaps the return of her grandmother’s body meant Mirae was safe once and for all.
Mirae pressed her hands harder against the floor to help her remember, despite Halmeoni’s presence, she was still in her home on the seventh year of tiger, ninth month whose first date is the first day of rat, nineteenth day of the ninth day of monkey.
Her grandmother groaned as she peeled herself from the floor, adjusting her disheveled hair and rubbing a growing bump on her forehead. It must have been where she hit the table as a bird. Mirae was suddenly awash in guilt. This woman, her grandmother, was hurt. But the guilt became resentment. After all, Halmeoni had attacked without provocation, first as herself, then as a bird.
“Why did you attack me?” Mirae asked from her seat at the door, trying to steady her shaking voice.
Halmeoni murmured words Mirae could not understand while adjusting herself to sit upright. She tilted her head to one side and then to the next, cracking her neck in the way of Mirae’s mother and of Mirae.
“I called you for help,” Mirae said, trying once more to elicit some rationale from this spirit.
“You’ve never called before,” Halmeoni said. Her voice, contrary to her movements and attacks, was light and melodious, a voice to greet the morning.
Halmeoni’s response was true. Perhaps the attacks were Mirae’s punishment for ignoring her ancestors. True to their family, instead of expressing pride and jubilation when someone attempted a feat for the first time, they chastised one another for taking the action much too late.
“And I was scared,” Halmeoni went on. “I do not know you. I do not know this time and place.”
“So you wanted to hurt me?” Mirae didn’t understand the connection between Halmeoni’s fear and the violence.
“I wanted to protect myself,” she said.
“From me?”
“It’s always something. You can’t ever be sure. Anyway, I stopped. Because when you thought of your mother and the drawing, I recognized you.”
Mirae’s frame felt heavy. Her breath felt small. Halmeoni had responded to her foreign surroundings by attacking them.
◆
As a child, Mirae’s family frequently moved, following her father’s military assignments. Each environment posed a series of threats, which Mirae managed to thwart by attacking first. At school, she pushed children on the playground and in line at the cafeteria. When she was older, she mocked her classmates’ weight or hair or stains on their clothes, shouting as she followed them down the hallway. In the fifth city, Washington D.C., Mirae had reduced her vitriol. She wanted to make friends. But only then, her family announced their departure, and rows of students she never got to know emitted a chorus of goodbye.
In college, everyone was new. Mirae managed to see people regularly, chatting in dorms late at night, shopping for pillows together. But as the semesters passed, the inevitability of leaving and beginning somewhere new loomed. Mirae began to wander the grounds instead of attend class, skipped the dining hall and ate ramen late at night. Everyone else seemed to have somewhere to go when they all had to leave this place. They were going to soar, while Mirae wasn’t even sure which way was up.
◆
Halmeoni picked up the plate’s broken pieces and set them on top of the crushed jesa table. She found the broom in the hallway closet and returned to sweep the glass. Her movements were slow and deliberate. The sweeping formed a soft, metered sound. Mirae wondered how many times Halmeoni must have swept up fragments of chaos, assembling and reassembling a life.
Mirae bent to pick up a rice cake and remembered that Halmeoni stopped attacking only when Mirae thought of her mother. Perhaps some part of her hadn’t skipped a generation but had maintained a throughline, a sturdy path to follow.
Halmeoni straightened a picture frame on the wall.
“Well?” Halmeoni asked.
Mirae widened her eyes in confusion, rice cake in hand.
“You reach out, wanting guidance. And me? Did you remember?”
“Are—are you okay?” Mirae asked.
“I don’t like making a mess,” Halmeoni said. “Don’t you know that?”
“I’ve never met you,” Mirae said, feeling defensive once more.
Halmeoni began to laugh. She picked up an orange and examined it.
“Always buying the wrong ones,” she said. “Like your mother.”
She was right. Mirae was like her mother.
“I’ll buy the right ones next time,” Mirae said. “I promise.”
“Don’t forget,” Halmeoni said.
Mirae scanned her apartment, her next few hours occupied. She righted the lamp and found a trash bag for all the debris. Plant soil coated the shot glass, except for the words “too much.” Halmeoni swept and instructed Mirae to hold the trash bag open. She emptied the pan inside. Then Mirae reached for an orange in the living room corner while Halmeoni found a spear of plate beneath the table. She seemed determined to stay in this dimension of time to help clean this mess, the result of their first reunion.