In later years (inevitably, I suppose), my parents considered America to be their only home, and although they possessed the means to do so by the time my mother died in 1991, our family had made only four visits to Korea in 23 years. I didn't really care, one way or the other. Even as a dour teen, I didn't balk at any of the summer trips we took as a family, the alternatives being to mow the neighbors' lawns, whitewash the fence or study. Korea was a good notch above, say, a car trip to family friends upstate or some underground caverns in West Virginia, not so much because of any communing with family but for the food. I loved the fare in the streets and the alleyway carts: the steamed dumplings you could get 10 to the dollar; the sliced rice cakes in sweet-and-spicy sauce; the chilled buckwheat soup noodles Pyongyang-style, chewy to the bite. And then, best of all, were the grand meals we'd have at our relatives' cramped apartments or houses, the dozens of dishes completely covering the low tables they'd set out for us—the men and my father and I sitting at the main table, my mother and sister lodged at one for the women nearer the kitchen, and in the fog of my jet-lagged mind, the only points of clarity amid the oddly accented superfast talk, which I mostly couldn't understand, were all the bracing flavors, the radish kimchi and marinated raw crab and sesame-leaf pancakes. Even my father seemed somewhat overwhelmed by the torrents of native language, intermittently asking people to repeat what they'd said.

And this is how I found myself on my recent trip, out the second night with my father's side of the family at a popular local barbecue restaurant, crouched over a lovely massing of plates and straining to understand everyone's basic queries about my family and work. The barbecue house wasn't a fancy place, but I was looking forward to the meal; I was just getting my appetite back after the 14-hour flight and hadn't seen my relatives in six years. Seated at the long table at the front of the restaurant, I felt almost like a boy again, waiting as I was for my elders to sit down, everyone immediately urging me to begin eating, my cousin's wife worrying aloud that the fresh peppers might be too spicy for my (presumably Westernized) palate.

I could say only a few words in response, my speaking ability in Korean perhaps a 10th as developed as my middling aural comprehension (a lifelong holdover from how I grew up in the language, when my mother spoke to me in Korean and I answered her in English), and after the initial assurances of my high tolerance for spice and recounting the names and ages of my daughters and how long I was planning to stay in Korea, I naturally retreated into the customary table rituals of the barbecue, attending to grilling the meat and whole cloves of garlic, readying the bean paste and the fragrant shoots of chrysanthemum, cupping the fresh lettuce leaf to wrap all of it in, while the others ate heartily and engaged in their lively conversations, not having convened in some months. I was happy for their company and then just as pleased simply to sit there and eat, gleaning what talk I could. And it was only when an older cousin leaned across the table to offer me a shot glass of soju that I remembered my real age, that I was a grown man, a father, a writer even, someone they knew best decades ago and now hardly knew.

Of course, I hardly knew them either, at least in the modern psychological sense of what made them "tick" or who they "really" were. Did it matter? It didn't seem to. There was no awkwardness due to the differences of our language or the brief time we'd spent together during our lives. Somehow all was fine. They were family. And although I'll tender no celebratory gloss, I have to say that there was a certain ease in the gathering that I have rarely felt in my life, a level of comfort drawn, I think, from not having to explain myself in the customary ways, make the necessary distinctions literary and cultural and personal, as I do in my "regular" existence as a teacher and writer and maybe (if there really is such a person) as an Asian-American.

A few days later, I would do this very thing. During a Q.-and-A. session after giving a public lecture, I tried to address the audience's many serious queries and heartfelt comments on biculturalism, on literary legacy and influence, on identity and alienation, and although I was in my element and feeling spirited and most warmly welcomed (several of my mother's high-school classmates had even come, bearing a bouquet of flowers, to honor her), I kept thinking how plainly, deeply satisfying it would be to be back among my cousins and aunts and uncles. With them, at least, I was not a provisional "I", not an ethnic, or outsider, or an artist or intellectual, but simply someone whose connections to others were clear and traceable and unabstracted.

The next night I went to my maternal aunt's house south of the Han River, where my grandmother Halmoni was staying. She was my only living grandparent, in her late 80s, and from recent reports, not doing terribly well. Her back was finally giving way, and she wasn't very mobile; my cousin told me she sometimes crawled to the bathroom rather than ask anyone for help. On my last trip to Seoul, six years previous, she'd been in decent shape, crisscrossing the city alone in buses as she traveled between the homes of her son and daughters. My mother was her first child, and when my mother was dying, Halmoni came to stay with us for a few weeks at our house in upstate New York, preparing food (mostly for us, as my mother wasn't eating much) but spending most of the day sitting with my mother, holding her drawn hand whether she was sleeping or awake. Halmoni went back to Korea earlier than planned (she originally intended to stay until the end), mostly because my mother was worried that she was getting too grim-faced and depressed, which she was. She couldn't bear my mother's steady deterioration and would mutter over and over how unnatural and wrong it was, that a parent should outlive her child.

Now I was nervous about seeing her in a bad state, not only for the sadness of such a sight but for the sake of her own pride. Added to this was the ghostly memory of my mother looming between us—the only way we really knew one another—and as I walked to my aunt's house from the subway stop through the dusty, unswept streets of working-class Seoul, the scent of old open sewers and fry oil from dumpling carts mingling in the humid spring air, I almost wished I could have simply telephoned her my wishes of good health and love.

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