I’d forgotten that part. In traditional Korean culture, the funerals are very speedy. For a person to be buried three days after death was not unusual, in fact, it was perfect timing.

Koreans do not embalm the dead like Americans, so things couldn’t drag out for months like they did when my paternal grandmother died. Embalming gave me the willies, and I shivered at the mere memory of my grandmother’s made-up, leathery face in the coffin. I’d been so sure she was going to sit straight up like in a horror movie. At least my mom was returning my texts, for once.

My grandpa and grandma had visited a few times over my childhood, but the language barrier between us was huge. My Korean was… not good, to say the least. I could order food, ask for a bathroom, sing a few songs, and recite a few children’s poems. Writing a letter of any sort would be really challenging and require a lot of Google translate.

I also had no idea if writing a letter to them was the right thing to do culturally or personally, or if it was just another example of my mom blowing me off. Still, if I was writing a letter, I could get help from other Korean speakers I knew that would help me communicate what I needed to say. And maybe, just maybe, I could ask my grandparents for advice about my mom. Even though they’d lived on different continents for a long time, they raised her. Surely, they would know how to approach her.

Well, if I’d ever been to Seoul, maybe I’d know that mom. It was easy for her to negotiate the traditional and modern aspects of a culture she’d been born into, but I was just floundering around blindly. My mom wasn’t exactly forthcoming with information about anything, let alone her parents. It was all very strange.

It wasn’t a great conversation with her, but when I looked back up at the PowerPoint of the class I was sitting in, I still felt a tiny bit better. My mom and I had a conversation. That was something.

This lecture though… I yawned. I used to be so good at school. Now, however, it just wasn’t interesting to me. At all.

I was sitting in music theory. The professor, a woman with a thick eastern European accent, was describing the ways in which the Avant Guard composer, Erik Satie, was different from other members of his general genre. She was barely intelligible and extraordinarily boring. I honestly didn’t care if Satie was a precursor to Debussy or not. This was not a worthwhile use of my time. This was supposed to be a music theory class, not a history of music class, anyway. I decided just to download the homework later. I excused myself.

In the still of the building’s hallway, I sunk down to the ground and reopened my laptop. I could at least use this hour to get something done that I cared about. Erik Satie just didn’t quite cut it.

Ryan had a great relationship with his family. It made me jealous. Just the night before, he’d told me all about how his whole family would gather for holidays in the suburbs of Dallas. They had all sorts of cute traditions and family dishes and memories together.

His mom and dad were divorced, too, but they put their differences aside for him and Ian. That must be nice. My parents hadn’t even seen each other since their divorce was finalized. When they did communicate, it was through lawyers. I shook my head at the thought of them being civil at holidays. I wasn’t dreaming of cordial, just civil. It would never happen.

I wrote the letter in English and would now need to translate it, but I thought it sounded ok. Even if I received no reply, at least I could say I’d tried. Even if they deleted it as soon as they read it, I wouldn’t be any worse off than I was before. We had no relationship today, so if we had no relationship tomorrow, I couldn’t complain. After seeing what Ryan had with his family, I was too jealous not to try.