Appeoji (Father)

From the time I understood that I was adopted, my life was permanently marked by abandonment. His abandonment, as it were.

My birth father—or at least the vision of him I’d constructed with fragmented, secondhand memories in broken English—felt eerily familiar. Even from the few pictures of him in the family albums, I recognized a restlessness mirroring my own.

My sister told me that our mother never stopped loving our father. Despite his infidelities, abuse, and even forcing her to relinquish me, she went back. Again and again. Since they met in middle school—in the decades after his death—she’s never looked at another man.

I swore an oath to myself that I would break her cycle. Never cling to someone unrequitedly and undeservedly. Hold fast to my value and wield it like armor against unworthy suitors.

“Mother thinks you and father very similar.” Kyeong-hee says.

Our father was the singer. The photographer. Proud of his physical strength.

“Many tattoos,” she tells me, pointing to the cursive quote on my collarbone. (She’s scared to get one.)

What if the daughter Appeoji relinquished without ever seeing her face, somehow became most like him anyway?

Would he be proud of the legacy he cast aside?

Were it not for his addiction, he might have lived long enough for me to ask.