But at twenty-four, I was curious so I swabbed my cheek and sent off the kit. A few weeks later, the envelope of results returned noting that I was 98.2 percent Korean and 1.8 percent Japanese. There were no genetic warnings and no pings to anyone else’s results. I was slightly disappointed. I didn’t want to admit it, but I think I was hoping there would be some long-lost relative. I’d once read that two adopted siblings found each other—one in America and one in France. Having a French sister would be awesome. I’ve always wanted to visit. However, that was not the case for me so I buried my expectations in the box of “things better forgotten” along with my dad’s dream that I’d be some kind of super athlete and my mom’s fantasy that I could be the next Gillian Flynn.

The real-life truth is that I’m clumsy, spend my days fact-checking and editing, and have a greater chance of winning the lottery than finding information about my biological family. And it’s not that I care to know about the people who abandoned me on a street corner in Seoul twenty-five years ago. I’m just . . . curious about whether I have siblings. Maybe aunts and uncles. I grew up as an only child of an only child. Mom’s mother passed away fourteen years ago and it’s been the two of us against the world ever since Mom kicked Dad out.

Knowing I had extended family would be cool—or, at least, that’s how I justified it in my mind. And when nothing came of it, when there were no notices in my inbox, when the weeks of silence turned into months and then a year, I’d essentially forgotten about it.

Until that one morning, three months ago, when an email had popped up between the half dozen newsletters I didn’t remember subscribing to and the spam that somehow finds its way to my inbox despite the so-called filter. It took a moment for me to register that the subject line was in Hangul instead of some odd mass of characters designed to get around the spam block.

I’d copied and pasted the characters into the translation website but the English text made little sense. After some research, I’d discovered that the Western machine translation was inaccurate and misleading. In sum, I wasn’t to rely on it.

But I didn’t know any human translator. I lived in Des Moines, Iowa, a place so homogenous that my adoption likely increased the Asian population in the city by an entire percentage point.

This was before I ran into Boyoung at the coffee shop near my office. After I did get to know her, it didn’t seem right to whip out the email upon our first meeting or even our sixth one. Hey, new girl from across the ocean, we barely know each other but can I use you to translate this email? It seemed rude so I never asked, never felt like asking . . . until now.