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reasonable,
dongmu
.”
    I was as intimate with Myeonghui as I had ever been in the time we knew each other. Along the winding river path, I breached the distance between us to brush her wrist, as if touching her would help me recover the order that she was for me. Everything about her was what my family wasn’t: relentlessly formal, a clarity to her quietness that helped me hear her heavy skirt sway like a bell. I wonder what she meant to me, if she had mattered to me only because I knew her family’s ties to Japan would have enraged my
abeoji,
whose own
abeoji
had been murdered by Japanese colonialists. Anyone with Japanese associations was considered unsafe, suspicious.
    Again, she moved out of my reach. Only she was betrayed by her eager left foot skipping ahead of her eager right, her breath catching in a rhythm common to those who had come from Japan, the trace of the past echoing on her tongue.
    That night there was no family, no committee duties, no small group studies, and few words spoken between us, which meant fewer lies to protect each other and our families. There was only the time given us. We avoided the occasional passing bike, a drunk man stumbling home. The distant conversations of other strollersmurmured around us like restless ocean waves, overlapped and blurred into each other, until for a moment I heard only our small voices ballooning in the emptiness.
    â€œYou’re so lovely,” I said. It was true, though in the dark she was a faint outline, an occasional flash of skin so bone white her arms gleamed. You didn’t have to see beauty to know it was there.
    She said, “You’re so quiet tonight . . . so strange . . .”
    I turned toward her voice. She sensed the fine difference between my normal quiet and brooding, and knew me without knowing anything about me.
    â€œWe’ve known each other so long now, and it seems wrong that we know so little about each other. You feel so unreal in the dark, as if you were never there.”
    â€œNo, no,
ireobseubnida
.” She laughed, her hair flying in the air as she shook her head. “We have time.”
    She swung her slender arms from side to side, her faith in the future intact. Again that pause, and in it began the kinds of silent conversations that none of us dared to have with each other. In those imagined conversations, she told me what it meant to have Japanese soil in her. I confessed what I feared might be happening to my family.
    I watched her whirl and embrace the moon’s silhouette, and for the first time I thought she must carry with her an unlived life and the sadness of her family.
    I asked, “How did it feel on . . . on the last day of your life?”
    â€œ
Dongmu!
You’re so morbid, thinking about death already.”
    â€œI don’t mean dying—not exactly. But when your family . . . left. Being dead, but not dead. Only . . . gone.”
    Her hands dropped and her voice took on a clipped formality. “I don’t understand you today.”
    I thought about all the things that could go wrong when you tried to cross into China.
    I said, “Too much of us can’t be measured. When Abeoji plays the piano, each time he plays, the phrasing is more or less the same. Recognizable, is what I mean. You can listen to one recording and compare it to another, but it’s the same composition. It’s not like people—we’re so different from moment to moment that we wouldn’t be recognizable if we didn’t have this body and voice, these enormous fingerprints.”
    I kept speaking nonsense, anything to defend myself from my thoughts. Were traitors actually traitors, or were they wronged, betrayed, or just unlucky? My laugh grew into painful, unstrung sounds.
    Myeonghui pulled away. “Someone might hear,” she said with the same pleasant, even tone.
    Without warning, she added, “
Dongmu,
don’t do