ME: All clear.

MOM: Thank goodness. Bring your charger with you wherever you go. I love you.

ME: I love you, too.

It’s not until I hit send that I realize I didn’t mention Lee Jonghyung’s funeral, but also, Mom didn’t ask. It’s possible that she doesn’t want to know that information. Perhaps she’s pretending I’m on some cultural exchange visit that has nothing to do with searching for my biological parents. I flop onto my back and stare at the ceiling. If that’s how Mom is dealing with this trip, then I’m definitely right to keep the information regarding the five women to myself. It’s not as if Ellen, all the way back in Iowa, can help me here in Seoul.

There’s one person who can, though. I call Boyoung.

“Pictures?” my friend screeches.

“Five of them,” I confirm. “It’s him—my dad—and five women.”

“Five?”

The stunned silence on Boyoung’s end erodes some of my excitement and forces me to acknowledge that Lee Jonghyung was kind of a jerk. He’d hooked up with five women all around the same time and they could all potentially be the woman who gave birth to me. It’s like I won the bad-dad lottery twice.

“I know. It’s a lot.”

“No. I didn’t mean it like that,” my friend apologizes, which is silly.

“I want to find all of them, but I will need your help.”

“Of course,” she responds immediately. “Should we meet?”

“Yes.” I sit up in excitement and look around for my clothes. With Boyoung’s help, this won’t be the impossible task that Anna suggested it would be.

“I can’t today, but tomorrow. Let’s meet for lunch. I’ll come to you and we can grab a bite to eat nearby.”

“Sounds perfect,” I lie. I’d forgotten Boyoung has a family here in Korea. She’s not at my beck and call. “In the meantime, I’ll make friends with my new flatmates.”

“Oh, Hara, wait,” Boyoung calls out as I’m about to disconnect.

“What is it?”

“I wouldn’t say anything about those pictures to anyone. Or why you’re here. People might view you differently if they know you are adopted. There’s nothing wrong with it, obviously, but some people are old-fashioned,” she tries to explain.

“Right. I remember.” We actually had this conversation back home. Boyoung has said that people in Korea are working to make it more acceptable, but the cultural focus on bloodlines puts adoptees somewhere on the social scale above drug dealers and sex addicts, but only by a little. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration.

But the assumption is that there is something wrong with the abandoned kids, else why would they be abandoned? And even if the child isn’t flawed, the parents must be, because true, decent human beings wouldn’t give up their child, regardless of their circumstances. It’s not so different back home. I overheard one of Ellen’s friends say that Ellen was so brave to adopt because you just didn’t know what you’d get. I even read stories about adopted children being given away like animals that the adoptive parents had tired of. It was called rehoming, a hideous, awful practice that should be illegal but apparently isn’t. So was South Korea any different? It will change, Boyoung claimed, and there are even important, powerful people who are trying to make that happen. Laws had been enacted, but the government can’t change the hearts and minds of people.