Birds migrate in the winter. They follow the sun, from Eastern Russia and Alaska down through Korea to Australia and New Zealand. Korea is a stop on the Asian-Australasian Flyway.

During the Korean War, wetlands rich in mollusks and worms extended from Korea into China. In Pusan, at low tide, miles of mudflats were full of mollusks, clams, and conches. On those mudflats, Halmoni walked with Mom—only eight years old—who held her younger brother’s hand. Mom was the one whose body would remember.

An entire colony of birds can sense a disturbance en masse, all rising together in response to one member’s distress. They float up in the air in what zoologists call a “panic” or sometimes a “dread.” The sparrows in the yard rose when Dad’s van backfired. In Korea, an automobile was an unattainable luxury.

Our brains are closer to birds’ brains than we realize. Both have a hypothalamus, which performs similar functions: hormones from the pituitary gland regulate temperature, hunger, thirst, fatigue, sleep, and circadian rhythms, as well as attachment and maternal instinct.

There is a German word for the restlessness that birds feel when they want to fly: Zugunruhe. Scientists can cause it in caged birds by using lamps to mimic seasonal changes. Even with nowhere to go, the birds try to migrate. They flutter at one corner of the cage, all while facing south, a place they cannot reach.

A blackcap raised in a basement in Munich never sees the sky. Still, it grows restless at the right week in autumn and leans southwest. Its hormones rise. It eats more and lays down fat for a journey it does not know. In an Emlen funnel, a paper cone recording the bird’s hops in ink, the captive leaves marks showing where it wants to go. The ink points south. The bird does not know the cage is the world.

Mom’s walk across the mudflats was not a bird migration; it was a push, like a flock rising when a hawk passes. There was no pull of a moving sun, no territory waiting in the south, no warm food laid down by an ancestor—only leaving, and then staying. Something gets passed from a body that has walked this path. When Mom was eight, she held her younger brother’s hand. By the time she had a son to run to, the walk was already decades old, yet her body kept running it. She did the dishes before bed, checked the doors twice, and when a car backfired, Mom went still in the kitchen, pausing longer than the sound lasted.

Some researchers say cortisol regulation runs in the blood. A body holds what came before. I remember the house I grew up in. I can see Halmoni washing dried soybeans, soaking them overnight, and boiling them in a worn iron gamasot. Steam rose from the sokuri, bamboo frayed at the edges. The heavy wooden jeolgu pounded cooked beans. Her hands formed the paste into cakes. She fermented soy along the walls of her storehouse in Pyongyang, tying bricks with straw. The smell was pungent and savory throughout a house I had never seen. It never existed during my lifetime. A son can still point toward a homeland he never saw. He points anyway. Ink records a bird’s feet on paper.

Halmoni carried han. The Korean word for what is carried in the chest until it must be admitted is hwa-byung: fire illness. It appears in the DSM-5’s appendix as a Korean-Cambodian syndrome, while han—the deeper grief—remains unlisted.

Hwa-byung, fire illness, shows up as a heat in Halmoni’s chest, rising in the middle of the night. She shakes, strikes herself with a fist, and clutches her pillow. Palpitations. Insomnia. A woman who endured what could not be spoken, who lost children. Han is the sorrow of a peninsula colonized and then severed, the kind of sorrow that needed a name. A peninsula severed in 1953: families cut in half and a border that has deepened. The migration that was supposed to happen, north to south, south to north, toward Halmoni’s brick house, has run inside the chest of three generations. Zugunruhe points at a horizon. Hwa-byung is what stays in the chest when there is nowhere left to point.

The hypothalamus passes the fire down. It goes from mother to daughter, to son. A fire sparked by history.

We didn’t know it when we lived there, but years later, men in coveralls and yellow hard hats would clear our grove of dead avocado trees and demolish our house. They began by tearing out the walls and floors, collapsing sheetrock and stucco, and carting away broken fixtures and hastily shredded carpet. Some workers dismantled the frame, salvaging the beams and posts, before a bulldozer leveled the foundation and dump trucks carted away the concrete and wood debris. They approached each eucalyptus one by one, sawing off the limbs, felling the tall trunks, and, finally, uprooting the stumps with an excavator.

They dredged the creek with a backhoe, ripping free waterlogged cottonwood branches, stones, and dead roots. The insects, salamanders, frogs, and occasional fish escaped to the valley’s marshes. The crew dug a deep pit in the field, lined it with gravel, and diverted the creek into it, creating a reservoir.

Four years later, our house and 30 acres of surrounding land were part of an 18-hole golf course adjacent to single-family tract housing priced for upper-middle-class families. The duplexes, all stucco with red, cylindrical shingles, clustered around the reservoir. Landscapers planted non-native green reeds at the edge of the reservoir. From any point after the 9th hole, golfers could enjoy an unobstructed view of the ocean below the Mesa.

The house had the same chipped white paint as the barn beside it. It was a place for people who did not matter. No one considered it a town, just an overpass above the freeway, endless dry fields to the east, and rolling hills overgrown with trees and brush on our side to the west. Though we could not see it, we weren’t more than a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. A chaos of eucalyptus and manzanita surrounded the property. Each tower was surrounded by pods, bark, and thick piles of scythes, shielding us from the sun and suffocating us in menthol dust. We called it the Mesa. It was unincorporated and secluded: sandy hills covered with eucalyptus trees and ice plant, with dilapidated houses, barns, mobile homes, and trailers, each with a shallow well and septic tank, unlike the valley or the beach, with their hotels, townhomes, and bungalows.

An abandoned fruit stand marked our driveway. Behind the fruit stand, an aluminum gate, an orchard of avocado trees, a barn, and finally, our home. We had a dirt driveway. Trees surrounded the property: eucalyptus to the north and south, sycamore trees along the hillside to the west, and avocado trees to the east. The orchard was once a dependable business, and the former owner sold avocados, nuts, and fruit from a roadside stand. Since then, the grove went barren; an outbreak of sun blight killed all the trees. Dad bought the house, barn, orchard, and fruit stand for a pittance. Instead of replanting trees or tearing down the stand’s frame, he kept everything as it was: trees no longer bearing fruit. They grasped upward, desperately through the dry dirt and mat of curved leaves.

A creek ran in front of that house under a simple bridge, 2x4 boards across I-beams connecting two concrete slabs. Sycamore and dogwood grew along the banks, followed by tall, dry grass. Patches of burdock rose so dark they appeared burnt, vestiges of a fire that never happened. Green watercress shoots settled along the edges of the creek. A breeze gathered in the dogwood, wound through the tiny white flowers, then over the brush and the grass.

Halmoni squatted with her hips at her heels, one hand folded behind her back, the other holding a lit cigarette to her mouth. She barely exhaled–ash fell into an empty RC Cola can.

Ya iruwa, saekki-ya!

She waved her hand toward her side.

Neh, halmoni?

She pointed to the edge of the creek with her cigarette, wide-eyed. She grinned with her mouth open, her teeth gray and yellow.

Juh durumi jom bwa!

The crane’s legs bent so that its knees faced behind it. It was taller than I was. Purposeful but tentative, a step, another, three black toes digging under the surface of the mud, then the others following. It dipped its beak into the water, its eye a dead black disc.

Yaaaaa!

A loud crack. Dad started his white Chevy van, with its rusted-through back panels and asthmatic engine. It backfired, spilling smoke from the exhaust. The crane’s wings rose instantly, and the yellow and black beak pointed into the air. Its wings heaved downward once, then fluttered, and the crane slowly lifted into the air. We saw it make its way up into the sky, then glide out of view, disappearing from our world.

The first place I lived was a house in Nipomo, California. It was on a plateau overgrown with eucalyptus in a place for people who did not matter. No one considered it a town, just an overpass on the freeway, endless dry fields to the east, and rolling overgrown hills on our side to the west. Though we could not see it from where we lived, just above the dunes and fog, we weren’t more than a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. But we could only see the dense eucalyptus trees that grew around us. Each tower was surrounded by pods, bark, and thick piles of scythes, shielding us from the sun and suffocating us in menthol dust. We called it the Mesa.

The previous owners of our farm planted a persimmon tree that grew to be about twenty feet tall by the time we moved in. Each fall into the winter, its branches filled with the fleshy golden fruit. Unripe, they were bitter with tannin, but when they ripened and darkened, Halmoni and I picked the persimmons using a long stick and a potato sack, using the stick to break the stems and the sack to break the fall. When we missed, their shells split against the packed dirt. We buried the damaged ones in the compost bin, but never deep enough. At night, raccoons hissed and chattered as they fought over the fruit.

During every picking, Halmoni immediately cut one in half and fed me bites of the pulpy, syrupy flesh. We avoided the astringent shell, which we knew would numb and dry our mouths. She set a few in a dark cupboard for us to eat later. We peeled and tied the rest in pairs with strong twine, hanging chains in the kitchen window. On the second day, we moved them into the barn, leaving them suspended in the dark and returning every day for a month to massage their drying flesh. We knew they were ready when they became stiff to the touch and coated with sweet white dust. The kotgahm were gelatinous, chewy, and sweet with a bright flavor like candy. No, they were better than any candy.

The Korean word for the dried treat was kohtgam, 곶감. It is also the Korean word for the bogeyman, the mythical creature that comes for children who misbehave or annoy their parents. In an old fable set in a quiet village in the mountains, a mother hushed her young boy by warning him that a tiger would eat him if he did not stop crying. A Siberian tiger heard the threat and considered eating the child to end the annoying racket. Before the tiger could pounce through the door, the mother told her son, Here is a kotgahm, handing him the sweet, and he stopped crying. Listening but unable to see inside, the tiger noticed that, while the threat of a tiger didn’t stop the boy’s crying, the danger of a kotgahm did. He wondered what a kotgahm was, seeing how it was so much more fearsome and horrible than the threat of a tiger that it could quiet the child. The tiger imagined the most unimaginable horror and, terrifying himself, ran to hide in the woods.

The word kotgahm came to represent not only the dried persimmon but began to refer to a creature more dangerous and terrifying than a tiger, a man who came to take them away to meet a mysterious, unspecified, even worse fate. In effect, the word didn’t refer to a treat, but instead, a man waiting to commit the most unimaginable horror a tiger a little child could imagine.

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Second grade was children pulling their eyelids back, imitating my accent, and then wrestling me to the ground, punching me in the arms and legs until I wept. Or it was our teacher, Mrs. Jackson, calling on me and forcing me to project English words through the classroom; my classmates laughed as she became increasingly exasperated with the sound and shape of my words. “I’m scared,” I wanted to say. 

The bell rang, and we lined up for lunch: a cardboard tray, green beans soaking through one corner, instant mashed potatoes, overcooked meat in gravy, flecks of gristle and fat, a yellowed orange wedge, and milk in a waxed carton. It tasted of English, each word redolent with faintly sour milk. Languages have their flavors: Korean tasted of sesame oil, garlic, and boiled beansprouts on my tongue. I stuttered, but only when I spoke English. The flavor was so acrid on my tongue that it broke and halted the words before tasting them, never allowing them to escape my mouth entirely. My stomach gurgled, full of milk. When no one looked, I stuffed as much lunch as possible into the empty carton. 

I walked home from the bus stop when the sun was most potent. Our driveway was unpaved and covered with gravel and eucalyptus pods. I passed what used to be an avocado grove, a forest of skeletons killed by sunblight. Nothing grew there except a few rows of peppers and garlic in raised beds.
A breeze passed, carrying a flurry of dandelion plumes that floated and surrounded me. The chickens squawked and ruffled as I passed the coop; a mouse’s tail disappeared into the salt and pepper hen’s throat. She swallowed, puffed her chest, then slowly scratched her feet as a show for the other hens. 

무서워

무 =  mu

서 = seo 

워 = woh

I watched out my bedroom window as halmoni made her way to the hens. She deftly grabbed the salt and pepper and wrung her neck. Halmoni dropped her to the ground, and she ran about, wings thrashing, her mouth wide open and lolling as her head swung like a bell. Maybe this was what made someone say, “무서워.” Or it was the chicken as it scalded, feathers coming out in handfuls, the lacerating, ripping sound, knife cutting through skin, through meat, through bones, scaled feet sticking out of a tall pot. It was the partially digested mouse in the trash with the chicken’s viscera: fur wet, its body crushed and flattened. Or it was the meat sitting on my plate, black grill marks like cigarette burns. Maybe 무서워 was just a way of saying, “I’m scared,” but it was a particular kind of fear. It was the amber and black rings of a wasp, the wings making a mechanical buzzing hiss as it made its way to the flesh of your lips. It was also the skin coming off a dead snake, the jagged white necklace of bones underneath. Or it was the cat in the road, its hind legs smashed by a wheel, blood dripping out of its mouth as it made its last futile movements, trying to drag its body off the road, its intestines hanging out of its burst belly. It was when Halmoni told me how the soldiers picked up babies, swinging them by their legs to smash their heads against walls. 

I thought that Korea was the only place where children died. And that Mom and Dad traveled here for me to be born. Here, soldiers didn’t smash babies against the walls in an alleyway or, if they couldn’t bother, leave them in a trash heap without a blanket.

“무서워,” I thought in the dark as I tried to sleep.