To the Lost and Found Daughter
This essay was part of a collaboration between OA and the VONA Travel Writers of Color Workshop.
You were coming from Hongik University Station, so it wouldn’t have taken you long to get to my school in Mok-dong. You came during my favorite season, when the trees were raining golden, saffron, and crimson leaves. The blanket of these scattered leaves gave me the same sense of comfort as a slightly messy bedroom—it felt lived in.
“Mok” means tree, so it’s no wonder I looked to the trees to help measure my time in South Korea. I arrived to teach English at the tail-end of winter, when the branches were barren and menacing. I started to settle in when the pale pink cherry blossoms exploded. The ginkgo trees were lush, green, and full of cicadas when I turned 28. Their delicate, scalloped leaves erupted in a potent golden hue when I started to consider that my life in Korea might extend beyond the year-long teaching contract.
You came to my school so that I could tell you about the classes you would take over for me while I went back to California for 10 days. I was set to see my whole family for the first time since moving abroad. Despite being away for nearly a year, I pictured the list of typical daughter duties I’d be enlisted to do: go through the mail, follow up with doctors, be the translator at various appointments. Over the previous eight months, I’d grown accustomed to having to take care of only myself, a luxury I had never experienced before moving to Korea.
My school was on the eighth floor of a building that housed a dentist office, an E-Mart, and a food court. I met you between the elevators and the shoe cabinet. You were not the first person who answered my request for a substitute teacher on the Mok-dong Facebook page—I had given my director three other resumés before I gave him yours, but I had a feeling he wanted to go with you because, like me, you were an Asian woman from the United States. Everyone else bowed as you stepped off the elevator, but we greeted each other like Americans, with smiles and a handshake. Your hand was delicate in mine, like a Russian nesting doll settling into the next size up. I showed you where all the outside shoes were kept, and how you could slip on the same plaid slippers that I and the rest of the staff wore. As you listened to my instructions, you were smiling—but there was a sadness in your eyes.
You looked young to me. Perhaps you had just graduated from college, like most of the expats who came to Korea to teach English. My reason for coming was different. I wasn’t there because I didn’t know what to do with my college degree or wanted to live a non-committal life for a few years. When I decided to move, I believed it was a good practical decision, one that gave me financial stability while I finished my graduate degree. Now settled into my new life, I realized I’d moved because I needed an escape.
I had essentially exiled myself from my family. After a lifetime of explaining and translating, assisting and advocating, I wanted to give myself a life where nothing was expected of me. My parents were refugees from Vietnam, the only ones from their families who made it to America. As my siblings and I grew up, my family didn’t have any relatives for support, so as the first fluent and best English speaker of the family, my first-daughter duties were cemented.
When I was eight, my parents took us to snowy mountains and told me to ask how much it would cost to go on the ride, which turned out to be a ski lift. Also at this age, I went to the hospital and answered neurologists’ questions about my brother, who had cerebral palsy. I always felt so uneasy in the gaze of adults, telling them how long and often my brother’s seizures were. Because these were the duties I was born into, they felt inescapable. At times, I was bitter about bearing a weight other kids didn’t have, but then I remembered all my parents’ sacrifices—long days at the nail salon, early mornings working at a fast-food restaurant—and knew I was supposed to feel grateful. When I failed at feeling this gratitude, guilt was all that was left.
For as long as I could remember, I longed to be just another American kid. I didn’t want the responsibility of explaining to my parents about permission slips for field trips, to my teachers that my parents were indeed married but that Vietnamese women don’t take their husband’s last name upon marriage. I constantly felt like a tour guide at home and at school, explaining landscapes that I myself was no expert in.
I finally felt freedom when my parents dropped me off at my dorm to start college. I was so excited for the typical life of a college co-ed, but I also felt crushing guilt about leaving a void that would shift the structure of my family. Who would translate at the neurology appointments? Who would go to the DMV when my parents needed to renew their licenses? Who would make the calls to the phone company to inquire about the too-high bills? To quell the guilt, I put these questions out of my head.
“And while I’d previously thought that accomplishing tasks was how I could repay my parents, you showed me gratitude is not transactional—instead, gratitude is encompassing and complex, and can exist alongside duty.”
Moving to another country brought back the euphoria of a newfound freedom. I indulged in my nocturnal instincts and went to nearby cafés at 10 p.m. with my laptop and wrote past midnight. I said yes to every social invitation since I had no one to ask permission from. The almost 6,000 miles between us made it impossible for my parents to turn to me for things that regular trips home always kept me tethered to. In Korea, I levitated from the possibility of who I could be. But with my family visit looming, I felt like I was crashing back down to earth.
I noticed the sadness in your eyes because it felt like the same sadness I had. I recognized your cautious demeanor and wilted shoulders, and I wondered if you also felt bound by a debt you could never repay.
After you slipped on your plaid slippers, I took you on a short tour. We walked down a narrow hallway. Across the hall was the small library. At the end of the hall was what could generously be called the gym, where students played “Sharks and Minnows” or “Mother May I?”
I turned to ask if you had any questions. You quickly shook your head no. You seemed nervous, as if it might have been your first teaching job. I wanted to reassure you, tell you that you would be great and not to worry. But then I remembered that I was just a stranger to you, and my words might come across as hollow.
We then came to my empty classroom. I showed you my students’ reading and math books stacked up in the orange cabinets. My students’ artwork covered the walls like wallpaper. Above my desk were notes from my students with drawings of bunnies with big eyes thanking me for being a good teacher.
There wasn’t much else to show you, so I asked, “Where are you from?”
“I’m from Maryland,” you replied. “I came here to be with my family.”
I was confused. “What do you mean, ‘be with your family’?”
“I was adopted by a white family in the United States, and I came here because I found my birth family. I’m living with them here.”
I didn’t know how to respond, but you filled the silence.
“I’m never going back to Maryland,” you said. “I felt so alone there with my adopted family. I felt smothered and neglected at the same time.”
I wondered why you were revealing so much about yourself to me. Maybe you had sensed in me a familiarity, that I would understand the conflicting feelings of having two families, two countries, two separate lives. I could indeed relate to the duality, to always be navigating two worlds.
You told me you were one of 10 daughters, and I began to build a narrative about how you must have felt about being adopted—angry, bitter, unwanted. But there was no trace of those feelings when you said that even though you were born to a poor family in Korea, you might have had a better life living with them than you had with your family in Maryland. You wanted to get a job to help your birth parents financially and teach your younger sisters English. Your birth parents gave you a life, no matter how sad it was at times, and you wanted to repay them.
There are many words for “duty” in Vietnamese. There’s "nhiệm vụ,” which is more about fulfilling a duty that is assigned to you. "Bổn phận” is your share of responsibility in your family. “Trả hiếu” is closer to what I feel because “trả” is “pay” and “hiếu” is “filial piety,” and the sum of those two words is greater than its parts. In Korean, there’s “hyodo,” which also means filial piety. The way it’s written out (“孝”), the symbol for parent is on top of the symbol for child, embedding in the word the image of a child holding up a parent.
All these years later, I’m not sure there’s a single word you and I could have settled on because even the word “duty” doesn’t describe the innate and compulsive desire to repay our parents that we both seemed to share. But on that day, I felt it was something we could both understand. However, instead of running away from your familial duty like I was, you were running toward it. Despite our opposite trajectories, we were both in Korea for the same reason: to understand who we were because of our families’ decisions, but also to figure out who we were without them. And while I’d previously thought that accomplishing tasks was how I could repay my parents, you showed me gratitude is not transactional—instead, gratitude is encompassing and complex, and can exist alongside duty.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “This is way too much information.”
“It’s OK.” I said, wanting to match your vulnerability. “Sometimes, we just need to get things off our chest.”
Initially, I thought I was the one making space for you, but you gave me a place for my sadness. We stood side-by-side in my empty classroom, looking out the ceiling-to-floor windows that faced Omok-ro, the main road in Mok-dong. We watched buses and cars zipping east and west. People hustling to their next subway stop. And leaves detaching from branches to slowly make their descent back down to earth.
About the Author
Maggie Thach Morshed is a former award-winning sports journalist whose byline has appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other newspapers across the country. Her most recent writing revolves around identity, immigration, and assimilation. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Full Grown People, Parks and Point, Undomesticated and other outlets. She is working on a memoir about how living and teaching English in South Korea helped connect her to her Vietnamese roots.
Read Maggie’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
This essay was part of a collaboration between OA and the VONA Travel Writers of Color Workshop.
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Header photo by Jonah Pettrich.
