The last time I stood before my grandfather's grave, in the spring of 1989, it had been newly dug. My uncle had driven my father and me to Yong-In City, one hour south of Seoul, so that we could pay our respects. I remember the fog burning off to reveal the new season bursting forth in blooms of wild cherry and persimmon all around us on the hillside. And yet, there was a depleted quality at the site. The burial ground was a three-meter-wide amphitheater carved out of the steep face of the hillside. The fresh earth was laid bare, dark and loamy, roughly cut roots jutting out from the sheer wall of dirt. In the center of the dugout, the mound beneath which my grandfather was interred showed the first wispy filaments of baby grass. There was no headstone as yet. My father, ashen-faced on the 10-minute hike up the steep hill, was on the verge of tears, finally seeing where his father lay. I wanted to feel the same pinch of loss, the same onrush of sadness. But I couldn't. Our family left Korea for America when I wasn't yet three, and since then I'd spent perhaps five hours total in my grandfather's presence. All I knew of him was that he'd lost his hardware business in Pyongyang to the communists on the eve of the Korean War, and when my father knelt low and bowed solemnly, the reflection I saw of my grandfather's face—the high forehead, the burnished cheeks—was drawn not from any memory of life but from the somber black-and-white picture of him that hung prominently in my childhood home, a photograph that always strangely surprised me in that it never changed.

I pictured that image once more when I visited his grave in May. I was in Korea to visit my family, particularly to see my ailing maternal grandmother, and to do some research for my next novel. I had come once again with my uncle, a professor of business, but this time with his two sons as well, one of whom was just back from a year of precollege language study in San Diego. Our mood as we climbed up the hill was expansive, jocular, my uncle describing the many changes in the surrounding hillsides, my cousins constantly checking their mobile phones for messages from their girlfriends, and it seemed we were more on a picnicking hike than a dutiful visit to our ancestral dead. But as we ascended the gravelly path, the talk quieted (the incline severe enough that we were huffing by the end); the last measure, steeper still, routing us through the mounded graves of strangers. Finally, at the end of a narrow deer path that snaked through a lonely copse of trees, there came an opening, and we emerged onto the same burial landing I had visited 14 years ago. To my surprise, there were two mounds instead of one and now a black granite headstone centered between, etched on the faces and sides with Chinese characters. I asked about the second mound and my uncle said that my grandmother and stepgrandmother had been exhumed from their resting places in Seoul and moved here some years before to join my grandfather.

"What is all the writing?" I asked. We were crouched by the black slab of rock.

"It's your grandfather's name. Your grandmothers' names are here," he said, pointing them out.

"And what about all these other characters?"

"These are his children. Here's your father. Here are your other uncles, then me, and your aunt. And here are the names of our spouses. This one is your mother's."

"My mother's?"

I touched the unfamiliar language sharply carved into the stone, almost saying her name aloud. She died a few years after my grandfather did, of stomach cancer.

"I didn't know it was done this way."

"Oh yes," my uncle said. "Everyone is here."

I kept thinking back on that phrase during the rest of my stay in Seoul: Everyone is here. As uttered by my uncle, it was a simple answer to a simple question, a matter of fact and literal record. And so it was. And yet, the more I thought about the notion, the more it began to belie a straightforward accounting. For I realized how differently than I my uncle and his sons viewed that dark stone, how the names to them comprised the natural array of their lives, like the primordial fix of the planets. To me, raised away in the States, the listing seemed more remarkable than that, some spectral alignment, anomalous and wonderful.

For in our immigrant family of four, we were all we ever had. In the town where we lived (a small northern suburb of New York City), we were one of a handful of nonwhite families. Every great once in a while, there would be an uncle or aunt passing through New York, and my father and I would drive down and pick them up at John F. Kennedy International Airport, and they'd stay a few days or a week. In the evenings, my parents would chatter at the dinner table with special fervor about all the reports from Seoul. They'd talk for hours after the meal, over fruit and tea and maybe even some tumblers of Johnnie Walker, though no one ever drank very much. They didn't need to. My parents were generally happy, easygoing people, but in their first years in America, I would say they didn't always allow themselves (unconsciously, I'm sure) the full measure of emotions, perhaps because they felt outside of and flustered by all the strangeness of their new world, and it was only when "home" made its return that they seemed truly enlivened. In my bedroom down the hall from the living room, I could hear the sudden vibrancy of their talk, the now unfettered laughter, the playful taunts, the high sarcasm, and then the silent moments of seriousness when I'd perk up from my half sleep because of word of someone's money trouble or illness.

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