In this moment, I should be. As my aunt –or should I say mother– is serving me dinner together with Uncle Suro.

My aunt, Jessie Kim, Kim Suro’s wife, is suffering from a major trauma. They lost their daughter Jennie in a car accident a year before they met me. She became a mute after she lost her one and only daughter. It was devastating for her husband, losing both his daughter and his wife in different ways.  But that was until I came into their lives.

The day I met Aunt Jessie was when I was begging for a work at one of their sites, for a job as a construction worker. I was desperate at the time, knowing full well that as a woman, being accepted would be close to a miracle.

I exited the small built-up office they had at the site with dismay when someone grabbed the wrist of my almost malnourished body.

It was Aunt Jessie. She hugged me tightly in an illusion that I was her daughter. Continuously calling me in a name that wasn’t mine, I told her that she was mistaken. It was also on that day when I first met Uncle Suro. Uncle Suro, who saw where his wife was, ran to where we were, shock completely all over his face. At the time I didn’t know exactly why he had that face, but now I knew. It was because it was the first time after the accident that Aunt Jessie spoke.

That day was the day when Aunt Jessie has fully realized her daughter’s death. I was the trigger, as they said. It took a few weeks before she finally accepted it. The unexpected thing was, she asked people to look for me, telling people she wanted to see me again.

Finding me was easy for them. They had the ability to do that in a city as big as Seoul. They had the money. They had the people to look for me. The day they found