Abandoned supposings: A letter to my non-father’s silence
Winner of the 2024 Annie Dillard Prize (Nonfiction)
“Maybe my thinking has been wrong all along. Maybe silence is not something to interact with, to be filled in, but rather to let wash over you, to exist within.”
—Victoria Chang, Dear Memory
Father:
I have never heard your voice, other than in the conversations that neither occurred nor are likely to occur, yet pain to speak in constrained whispers. I have never seen your face, other than in the subtle, mysterious ways that distinguish my features from yours. Am I imagining those eyes turning outward, those cheekbones nudged higher? A blurred portrait placed between libations of 막걸리 and rice.
I later learned that shortly before I first re-met mother – at three in the afternoon on April 23, 2010 – she had called you many times. Told you that I had found her, and was back in Korea. Asked you to come see me, just once, with or without her.
According to mother’s memory, you said that you could not be bothered. You did not share why, but based on what I know about you, I suspect it is because you had already bothered enough with too many women, who gave you too many children, who called too many times to request far too much of your attention. The last time mother tried to reach you, a woman whose voice she did not recognize picked up, said to not call again, and cut the line.
One day in 2017, long after I had returned from Korea to Minnesota, I discovered that your number was still saved to my Samsung Galaxy phone. My phone was linked to my Kakao messenger account. My Kakao account was synced to my phone contacts so that one day, without warning, I saw your profile. On it, instead of your face, was that of a small girl, with a nose shaped very much like mine – round and wide at the base, firmly planted. I did not know whether it was wise, to look or not to look. What right did you have to suddenly appear, daring me to erase the one whom, given all available evidence, you chose to keep instead?
I might have forgiven you for discarding me (could I say, with certainty, that I would have chosen differently?). I might have excused your tantrums (who am I to condemn the only trait I know to have inherited from you?). I might even have overlooked your emotional abuse toward mother, had you at least decided that I was worth the time to meet (does that make me desperate?). I might have forgiven you if even one of these things were true. You made forgiveness impossible when, faced with a choice, you refused to see me even once.
I honestly believe I would have met you anywhere. I would have taken the most inconvenient bus to make our arrangement the most convenient for you. I would have donned black sweatpants and a hoodie, sunglasses and a bandana, waiting in a dank alley in the middle of the night, feet rocking atop strewn trash and leaflets advertising underage 노래방 도우미, worried that I’d be stood up like a debtor to a loan shark who didn’t want their money back. Like that, I would have waited. I would have waited for you anywhere, even if I hated myself for it, just to be able to say that I had tried.
This was not supposed to be a letter enslaved to anger. This was supposed to be magnanimous. A gesture of mercy and compassion, to show you that ultimately,you mean nothing to me(you must mean something if I say “you mean nothing to me”)you have human worth(but do you?) you have humanity worth considering, despite your dehumanizing decisions. You areworthless and therefore aren’t worth the oxygen involved to communicate to you beyond what is therapeutic to me(what is therapeutic if it does not also involve pain?)proof that I have healed(I don’t even believe that) not worth thinking, or feeling, or writing, much about (that I do believe). You were not supposed to take up much more than this. You were not supposed to take up anything at all.
* * *
Mother was nineteen when she met you. Stumbling upon your motel room one day with a friend who secretly adored you, they both were surprised to find the room empty, its occupant gone for weekend reserves training. The friend who had a crush on you left, and it was during mother’s subsequent loitering that she stumbled upon a notebook lying open on the bedside table. Curious, she picked it up, discovering it to be a journal addressed to your parents. She did not know then that they were deceased. From the first few pages, she could tell you were living a hard life. Shivering, she spotted an electric blanket nearby. She turned it on, wrapped herself in it and promptly fell asleep on your bedroom floor.
At some point the door opened, jarring her awake. A man entered, wearing worn jeans. He gathered himself only enough to ask aloud why a woman he did not know was sleeping on his floor.
As mother told me twenty-four years later, on May 25, 2010: 그때 아빠가 엄마를 처음 본 순간에 뿅 갔는가봐. It was in the moment he first saw me, that your father fell deeply in love.
At her bidding you swore to keep this accidental encounter a secret. For some time, you did not see her again, whether by intention or by accident. But something about her must have taken you. Perhaps it was as simple as a beautiful woman several years your junior cannot just forgettably appear on your bedroom floor. A few weeks later you ran into her again, and within days you two had moved in together, squeezing into a one-room at an inn across the street. While she did not disclose this directly, it is probable that during this time she had run away from home, and was clinging to what little she could grasp of her new surroundings. My mother, a map who did not know how to read itself, stumbling upon a compass that offered not direction, but something she desired even more – the unspoken permission to stay still.
Maybe it was your warmth she appreciated the most. A shelter against the searing winds and pelting snows of what had become her young adulthood. Maybe it was the days, turning to weeks and months, that you would come home to the dinner she had prepared for you, “playing house,” as she called it. Maybe it was neither of these things. I cannot tell because I was not there, though my presence would be felt soon enough.
One thing I know for certain: she did not appreciate your temper. The way it instantly darkened a room. The way you shouted, shoved and shattered your way through, demolishing her innocence as equally as her agency.
그냥 때리고 물건 던지고 … 그니까 나이가 어리니까 자기 성나는데로 다 하는거야. He would hit and throw things … he was young and just did whatever his anger led him to do.
Despite your anger and abuse, or maybe because of it, she made you a constant, daily choice. She was in love, a love possibly fueled even more by fierce opposition from her mother, my 외할머니, who declared her too young to move in with a man she barely knew. Mother could not disagree, but for reasons I still do not fully understand, she also could not return home.
Soon, whether by passive choice or active accident, you both fell into a routine. You would come home, stressed and aching after a long day laying tile at public bath houses. She would make you dinner, ask about your day. Each day you would tell her you were too tired to talk. “Let’s just sleep, let’s sleep,” you would say. When you treated her well, you treated her really well, she told me. When you treated her poorly, violence took over, and mother, faced with limited choices, chose to endure it.
When she became pregnant with me, you were already living together for a number of months. During that time, she said, you moved together at least once. I do not know exactly how much time you spent with her. I do not know how committed you were to making her happy. I do not know exactly how volatile and abusive and dangerous you were as a partner. How many times a week did you hit her? How loud would you shout? How many corners, closets and makeshift hiding caves did you force her to run to? I might have the audacity to ask these questions, if we were ever to meet. Maybe you know that, too. If that is the case, I could understand why meeting me would seem unappealing. It seems, based on what mother told me that day in 2010, that you have not changed much at all.
놓을때 다 됐는데 너희 큰엄마가 와가지고 말을 했어. On the day you were ready to be born, your aunt came over to check on me. 자기 큰형수를 불렀어, 불러서 말했어. 아 나올 기미가 있다고. She called her husband and told him that the baby was about to come out. 그래서 병원갔는데 그때 돈도 없었어. So we all went to the hospital. I had no money at the time. 갔는데 수술해야된대. When I arrived, the doctors said I needed surgery. 아가 거꾸로 앉았다고. They said you were reversed in my womb.
7월달이라는거는 엄마가 기억해 근데 날짜는 잘 모르겠어. 여름이야. 87년 여름. It was summer. 1987 July, but I can’t remember the exact day. 병원에서 수술했어. 그런데 돈이 없었어. 그 당시에 돈이 100만원 넘었어. I had the surgery, but I didn’t have money and needed one million won. 돈을 못줬어. 그래가지고, 하여튼간에, 그냥 퇴원했어. 돈 나중에 준다하고. 퇴원해서 왔는데, 돈이 없잖아. I couldn’t give them anything, so I said I would pay them later and just went home like that, because I had no money.
I was curious how much money mother would have needed – and that you, as my father, could theoretically have saved – to pay for my birth. That year, one million Korean won was equivalent to 1,200 U.S. dollars. The average monthly Korean urban income that year was 612,000 won, or 868 U.S. dollars. This means that to cover her hospital expenses mother would have needed a month and a half’s average wages. Both of you combined were earning far less.
I also knew that Korea was in societal upheaval at the time, on the cusp of transitioning to its first democratically elected president. On July 9, the week before I was born, 1.6 million Koreans attended the funeral of Lee Han-Yeol, a university student who died after being struck by a tear gas grenade as he protested the military dictatorship of President 전두환. The following month, The New York Times reported that Korea’s slowing wage growth put “the young women who work for the lowest wages … in the worst conditions.”
Against this backdrop, it is easier for me to understand: You were trying. Mother was trying. But can you blame me for asking: Why didn’t one of you try harder? And between the two, why wasn’t it you?
결국에는 기저귀 사고, 뭐 사고 했는데. 대충 준비해서 엄마가 한 3개월인가 4개월인가 하여튼간, 니 키웠어. After I left the hospital with you in my arms, I bought diapers and a few other things I would need for the next few months. Like that, I raised you.
Was father there? I asked.
응. 같이 살면서 키웠지. Yes, we lived and raised you together. 그리고 엄마 아까 친구가 니 업어줬다 했잖아 엄마가 시장갈때 엄마 친구가 니 업어줬다했잖아. And my friend that you met a few weeks ago, she would hoist you up on her shoulders for piggyback rides whenever I went to the market.
Did father give me piggyback rides, too? I asked, nervous to know the answer.
아빠도 업어줬지. Yes, your dad did, too. 몇개월 키웠는데 마지막에 엄마랑 아빠가 너무 사이가 안좋았어. 안 좋아가지고 헤어지게 됐어. 내가 나왔어. After some months of raising you, our relationship wasn’t good, so we broke up and I moved out. 그때 그래가지고 작은 아빠 집에 조금 있었어. I took you to his younger brother’s house and you stayed there for some time. 그런데 작은 아빠집에 조금 있다가, 보러갔어. 엄마가 보러가긴 갔는데 니가 막 울더라고. I went to see you once after you stayed there, and you were crying so much. 니 별명이 뭔지 알어? 모르지? 니 별명 똥개. 똥개야 똥개. Did you know what your nickname was? It was ddongkae.
Mother smiled as she repeated the word. Unable to visualize it, I asked her to write it down. More than a decade later my Korean wife would tell me that 똥개, meaning mutt, was actually a term of endearment – a talisman to ward off the evil spirits that would otherwise be tempted to take me prematurely. Mother even said as much: 그러면 오래 산다고. I did that so that you would live long.
It was during that visit to her brother-in-law’s house, washing me in a bathtub not her own, wrapping me inside blankets not her own, feeding me a liquid that was not her own, that the seeds of a decision, both her own and not fully her own, were planted. I know where my mother was on that day. What I do not know, and what I would like to find out, is quite simple: Where were you?
* * *
Mother told me all of this with an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone propped in front of her – the result of several weeks of negotiation to secure her permission to be recorded. With my intermediate-at-best Korean and no translator in honor of her request, I was not about to leave the accuracy of my origin story to chance. Still, it felt awkward, almost opportunistic, to be interviewing my own mother like a detached reporter, monitoring sound levels on my Marantz PMD-661 inside a cheap, glossy love motel in Daegu.
As she spoke I would often interject to ask follow-up questions in rushed, sputtering and aimless Korean. On several occasions I missed entire portions of what she had said, salvaged only by my recognition of the last few words and a follow-up question to buy more time. Sometimes, when the mood felt too heavy, I would pause the recorder for us to weep together over all the time we had lost. Had you been there,father, it would have been all of us together.
Within her testimony lies one fact that I cannot refute: For a time, you chose to raise me with her. This means that you didn’t leave at the first news of my existence, and with it, the financial black hole that was sure to come. It also means that for a brief time, you still chose to be my father. Should I be grateful?
It was only when I re-listened to the recording fourteen years later that I realized: mother had asked me, in that embarrassing motel room so long ago, to not think of myself as abandoned. We loved you, I heard her say, as if for the first time. We both did.
The word “both” is implied – Korean being a high-context language, the subject so often missing. She was speaking of you, father, in a way that I had failed to grasp in the moment. It was something I missed even in 2014, when a Korean friend in Wisconsin had transcribed my entire interview into a sixteen-page document that, inexplicably, I later failed to read.
On the day I chose to read it, September 27, 2023, I replayed the recording in front of my Korean wife. Out of curiosity, she pulled up my friend’s transcription and, noticing several gaps, instinctively began filling them in. It was on that evening, at my kitchen table in Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, in my home you will never visit, that I heard mother’s recorded voice say something that I had not remembered at all.
아빠도 생각많이하고 느그 아빠도 생각 많이햇어. Your father also thought about how we gave you away. He thought about it a lot.
How could I have missed this, I thought to myself. This might have changed things.
생각하면 뭐할거고 생각해도 아무 소용 없잖아. But whenever the thought came, he’d say, thinking isn’t going to help, there’s nothing we can do about it.
Where is she going with this?
그러니까 생각 하지말자, 이렇게 됐지. 잊어버리자, 이러고 산거지. So we ended up just saying, let’s not think about it, let’s just forget it, and that’s kind of how we lived on.
What is 잊어버리자, 이러고 산거지 supposed to mean, really?
내가 왜 이렇게 버려졌을까 생각하지 말고.. 그냥 우리 엄마가 더 좋은 환경에서 더 나를 이렇게 … 하라고 크라고 보냈는갑다. 이렇게 생각해. So please don’t think of it as, “Why did my mother give birth to me only to throw me away?” Think of it as your mother wanting a better environment for you … so she sent you away.
A few days after re-discovering the words that made me question whether I should continue to disdain you, I attended a poetry workshop for people like me, with incomplete histories like mine, born of fathers with flaws not altogether different from yours. It was the first day of October 2023, inside a stucco building called the Minnesota Humanities Center. We wrote and wept together as artists who shared a single truth: our second families were completed through the splintering of our first.
Before our time together came to a close, we spent the final thirty minutes writing poetry. One of the prompts was: Write a poem beginning with the word “suppose.” This single word, derived from the Old French suposer – to place – gave me both the literary and emotional opening I needed to engage with you in an honest way.
To suppose, I remembered, is a transitive verb, an action word that’s usually paired with a direct object. How was I supposed to address a direct object, I wrote, when all I had were indirect:
● accounts: fragments, interviews, hearsay, transcriptions, notes of notes of notes. layered amalgamations. putty to fill cracks and fissures. redactions, blackouts, whiteouts, crossouts, revisions, scribbles, typos, tears and stains, PDF scans, A4 papers
● memories: formed by feelings formed by experiences formed by memories. inherently circular, flowing in and out of reliability and unreliability, certainty and suspicion, closure and re-opening, cessation and creation
● openings and closings: your phone number, but held by mother; language to speak to you, but only in fragments; access to me, but rejected by you; a right to see me, but one you do not feel you have the right to exercise?
It was inside this room, among forty others with black hair like mine, whose origin stories all contain blacked-out redactions like mine, together writing in black-covered notebooks like mine, that you spoke to me for the first time. The speaking was both through me and not through me, executed through fingers that moved not necessarily because of you, or for you, or with you, but potentially all of those things and potentially none of them. It was not as if you spoke to me audibly. There was no voice in my head, no tablets on which to document the descending words of Yahweh. I wouldn’t have known your voice anyway, to generate it.
What was generative was the act of remembering something I had stored long ago, in my body, perhaps in the permanent cramp between my neck and right upper shoulder, the right knee that has not stopped cracking since seventh grade, the twitching of my eyes, or in the permanent shingles virus that slumbers in my lower spine until jarred awake by unregulated stress. Perhaps what was stored in all of these places was not you, but the absence of you. Perhaps in this way, you were stored in none of these places but also in all of them. Perhaps I had only begun to identify where, whether in my body or not, you had gone.
I returned home from the workshop in a daze, and replayed a clip from the recording that had been haunting me all week. All this time, mother had been telling me something different, something more. I had simply not been paying enough attention. Blame it on my Korean. Blame it on my spite. Wherever or to whomever the blame is due, I had the right to miss this.
근데 아빠는 좀 기다려. As for your father, wait a little longer. 아빠가 아직 마음의 문을 안열었어. The door to his heart still hasn’t opened. 왜냐면은 니를 보고 싶어하고 하기는 하는데 받아들이기 좀 겁이 나는가봐. 두려운가봐. He wants to see you, but I think he’s afraid to accept reality.
그래가지고 이 앞에 니 만나러 가기전에 전화를 했었어 사실은 통화를 했었는데 아빠가… 나설 자격이 없다고 하더라고. Right before I met you for the first time, your father and I spoke over the phone. 니앞에 나타날 자격이 없다고 하더라고 He said he didn’t deserve to appear in front of you. 끊긴다하니까 그러면은 엄마가 그때 토요일날 바쁘게 전화했는데 주말에 엄마가 일할때 바빴어. It was a Saturday and I worked during the weekends, I was really busy. 그래서 월요일날 통화하자 했는데 엄마가 막상 전화하니까 안받아. 피해. So I said, let’s talk on Monday, and when I called then he didn’t answer, avoiding it.
그러니까 엄마가 지금 시간을 주는거야. 주가지고 나중에 좀 있다가 만나. I am trying to give him some time, so give it a little longer to meet him. 안그러면 정 안되면 니하고 엄마하고 가. If he’s still not ready then, we can always just go together to see him. 급하게 생각하지 말고. 아빠도 마음의 준비를 해야되잖아. Please don’t feel rushed. Your father also needs time to prepare his heart.
니 생각치도 않았는데 니가 아빠 찾는다 하니까 아빠도 좀 많이 놀래는가봐. 자기가 내가 버렸는데 내가 나타날 자격이 있나 … 그런식으로 말을해. You have to remember, he was shocked because he never thought you would come searching for him. He told me – I abandoned him, what right do I have to appear in front of him? 그리고 지금 가정이 있잖아. 그러니까 지금 사실 좀 두려운가봐. 두려운것도 있어. 걱정되는것도 있을꺼고 시간이 지나면은 조금 괜찮아질꺼 같아. He also has a family now. I think he’s afraid. There’s definitely fear and worries. I think things will get a bit better with time.
아빠가 정 니 안보고 싶다고 해도 서운하게 생각하지마. So even though he says he doesn’t want to meet you, don’t feel disappointed. 그거는 아빠가 니를 안보고 싶어서 안나타나는게 아니고 니한테 미안해서 못 나타나는 거야. It’s not that he doesn’t want to see you. It’s because he feels sorry about what he did to you.
* * *
Suppose, then, that I am the coward. The one who silences by calling the other a coward first. Suppose I have not been ready, either. Suppose I also needed time for the door of my heart to open. Suppose, even if you were the one to call me over and over again, begging for just one chance to see you, I also would have cut the line. Suppose this is less about you and more about the power of choosing whether to see you fall to your knees before me, washing the floor with sins you have no ability to recompense – all just to give me the satisfaction of seeing you suffer. The power to tell you, through your one-time lover as intermediary, that even if you are ready now, I will never be. Suppose, even if my heart softens, and only seconds remain before you are gone, I exercise the right to repeat your very words: you have no right to appear in front of me. Suppose your silence says less about the man you are, and more about the man I am becoming.
Nik Chang Hoon 임창훈 is a transracial Korean adoptee, memoirist, and poet based in Minneapolis. His work explores how transracial adoption unfolds as an ongoing experience that is generationally violent, emotionally traumatic, and physically embedded into the body. His poetry has appeared in The Plentitudes (Winter 2025 issue) and the Blue Earth Review (Runner-Up, 2024 Minnesota BIPOC Emerging Writer Award), and was a finalist in the 2024 MAYDAY Micro-chapbook Contest. His creative nonfiction has been recognized by The Iowa Review (Finalist, 2024 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction). He is a 2024 alum of the Bread Loaf, Kenyon Review and Tin House writers workshops, as well as the The Loft Literary Center’s Year-Long Writing Project in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir. Learn more about Nik and his work at nikchanghoon.com.
