The young girl is at the Gimpo airport. It’s the biggest place she’s ever been in. She sees a man kiss a woman on the mouth. Stunned, she thinks, “Gross.”  

People walk with purpose here, carrying their belongings on their backs, pulling luggage on wheels, and performing the side-bending walk induced by a duffle bag too full to carry on one shoulder. 

This place is thrumming with anticipation, hope, and dread. She hears people talking in languages that she has never heard; languages she does not know. The young girl observes people hug in greetings or in goodbyes. The smell of salty tears, the heady fragrance of flower bouquets, and the stink of unwashed feet overwhelms the young girl’s senses. 

The young girl is being told that she will go on a plane ride; she’ll get to travel to another place and cross over the Pacific Ocean. She has never been anywhere except here.

“Can I come back?” she asks. The young girl is told she can. 

The plane is bigger than any room in any house she’s ever been in. Three aisles of seats. A giant white pull-down screen for a movie. Headphone jack in the armrests, and a little container with a flapping lid that she sees people use for their cigarettes. It is full of young kids like her, all dressed in the same clothes with ugly shoes that should be worn with pants, not dresses. On her left wrist, there’s a tag with her name and a series of numbers that she can’t read because it’s not in her language. 

The escort tells her it is her name on the wrist tag. All of the other young passengers have these tags on their left wrists, even the babies.

After enduring a movie she can not understand, she and the other young passengers are released from the confinement of their seats. They finally get to run in circles around the middle aisle, burning off their confusion and boredom. 

The older passengers on the plane smile warmly at them as they giggle and play chase. The young girl expects a scolding from an adult or an order to be quiet but that is not what she encounters. Instead she feels like they are trying to reassure her with their gentle eyes and even gentler smiles.

Then she passes out in her seat only to be shaken awake by the escort. “We are here. Get up,” the escort says. The kids who are dressed the same are collected by the escorts. The escorts are checking the young passengers’ tags, directing them to go here and there and double- and triple-checking their clipboards. 

The young girl is confused. She wants to go back to sleep. She wants a snack. She wants something to drink. Maybe, she thinks, she should use the bathroom, too. 

But there are no snacks or drinks or bathroom trips. Instead, the escorts are smoothing everyone’s hair, and wiping off the imagined dirt from their faces with white handkerchiefs, and brushing the crumbs off their wrinkled clothes.  

The escort guides her to a man and woman with faces so radiant it makes her think she is a prize. The escort tells the young girl that these are her new parents. This is her new home. And this country is where she will now live.

The young girl doesn’t understand. She tells the escort she wants to go back home. The escort becomes very still. Anguish fills her face, her gaze falling down to the floor. The extravagant swoop of her black hair hides her eyes, only her pursed lips visible.

She kneels down to the young girl and says, “You cannot go back.”

There’s a burning sensation in the young girl’s heart; her throat feels like someone is choking her. Her vision blurs as the tears build.  

Someone lied to her. The young girl cannot go back. She is far from home. 

The young girl sees all the escorts from the plane gather themselves and leave. “They are leaving me,” she thinks. She is left in this space that is not her home. With no language. With no familiar faces.

***

The woman is waiting for their child. The man and the woman have crossed three state lines to travel to the closest international airport, SeaTac. The most important international flight of their lives is arriving in the early morning hours. Because of this, they decided to travel the day before and stay in a modest hotel close to the international airport. They will wake up early in the morning, nervous, excited, and sad. They cannot be late. Their most precious cargo is on that plane.

The woman has packed a suitcase full of little kid’s clothes of varying sizes, toys, and toiletries.

She will love this child like the child she was unable to conceive and carry in her own womb. The man and the woman tried and tried, anticipating cries from babies so small that the man could carry them in one arm; the woman would need to use both arms. The future growth of tiny limbs into bigger bodies that would bear weight to walk around their home. The clumsy stumble towards the couple’s eager, open arms as they gleefully wait to hear, “Ma ma and Da da.” And they would have laughed, cooed, and whispered,  “Yes. That’s right. We are Ma ma. We are Da da. We love you.”

But those imagined moments are no more. The doctor told them so. Different doctors in different cities. The same answer, always. 

So here they are; the man, the woman, creating a family through legal documents. Money. Lots and lots of money. And time. Limited time.  

“My gawd,” the woman thinks. “At last.” 

The woman was scared they wouldn’t be allowed to get a child. They are old. But they qualified to adopt. Just a bigger child. An older child. Not a baby. She will now become a mother. That’s all she wants. 

So they wait along with another dozen or so couples at the airport. They are all waiting to create families. The couples all watch as the children dressed the same come off the plane, the escorts corralling them. Names are being called. Little heads turn towards the sounds. The man and the woman are waiting to hear the name that they have given to their daughter.  

”Oh, there she is,” the woman says. 

The woman tugs on the man’s arm. Her heart pounds. She holds her breath and wonders why she is breathless. She’s been waiting for days, months, years. All the paperwork. All the grief. And the endless waiting.

The man has his fancy camera. He is capturing the moment they have been waiting for: the day the couple becomes a family.

The woman wants to rush to the child. To embrace, hold, nuzzle into the child’s hair, breathe in her scent, and look into the child’s eyes. She wants to say, “I am your mom. This is your dad. We’ve been waiting for you. We already love you.”

But the escort stops her with a hand motion. The woman watches the escort stoop to the child’s eye level and speak to the young girl in a language she can only presume is the daughter’s original language: Korean. The woman sees her daughter crying and feels an immediate urge to comfort her. The escort motions for the woman to come to the young girl. 

The escort says to the woman, “She is tired. But happy.” 

They approach their daughter. Only her tightly curled fingers give her away.

She hears, “Naomi. Naomi.” They bend to her level. She follows their movements with her eyes. 

She looks at the woman and says, “Omma?”  Then looks at the man and says, “Appa?” 

Naomi did not know at that time that the woman and the man would never forget the words she first spoke. Because to them, it did not matter what language they first heard the words they so desired. 

They embrace her stiff body. Naomi feels their damp skin, smelling of cigarettes, and senses their world is being put into place from the broken pieces of her reality.