Fifty-five years ago, a young man walked through a forest on a now lost spiritual plane. I imagine that his subconscious was trying to send him a message—that this dream was fated to have symbolic importance. I’ll say that the forest was filled with plum trees, what our last name means when represented by hanja.¹ The plums are just about to ripen, as though they’re growing in early June.

The young man caught sight of a massive dragon’s head poking above the leaves. Its ungainly, boxy shape was bright red and had chunks of white teeth that parted at the sight of him. He rushed to defend himself, scanning the eerily untrodden dirt ground; apart from twigs, the best weapons around were rocks. He picked up the largest one, the size of a dinner plate and with the texture of a serrated fossil, and threw it as hard as he could. At some point while the rock was midair, the young man somehow realized it was a turtle—perhaps a head poked out—and it made a strange gong, gong sound as it flew.

The person who first told me this story about a dream my grandfather had was my dad,when I was nine years old, and he presented it as if it was an ordinary folktale. No lens to scrutinize my grandfather’s personality or what he thought about our family and its potential legacy. The dream floats around in a part of my brain labeled “well, that’s interesting.” A story destined to be a one-off at parties and getting-to-know-you games. My dad offers a bit of a laugh at the end whenever the rock-bell-turtle, his namesake, comes up, but he never offered up any interpretation for it.

I can imagine my grandmother, closing the screen door after she finished watering the plants on their tiny balcony in Seoul, sitting down with her husband to hard boiled tea eggs and leftover banchan.² He awkwardly retells his dream in a language I can’t speak, in a generational cadence I can’t capture, as he peels eggshells. “Dragon turtle” or “bell dragon” would be too much, wouldn’t it? My grandmother taking the peeled eggs from him, slicing them open. Yes, I agree. It could be “Jongku,” as in “bell turtle.” Old-fashioned, but we won’t be able to think of anything more fitting. My grandfather nods; the matter is settled in a couple of sentences. This dream, I believe, was indisputable even to my strong-willed grandmother. It was a divine sign, equal parts Christian vision and Korean pagan superstition that pregnancy dreams are somehow insightful.

There are three things that happened between me and my grandfather alone that we never spoke about again. First, the title cards of Sleeping Beauty (1959)—all pastel illuminated lettering on top of rich Technicolor jewel tones—passed by on a TV screen lit by summer twilight, as we sat on his couch about a foot apart. There isn’t any dialogue or narration during the first two minutes, just the undulating chorus song “Once Upon a Dream:”

I know you / That gleam in your eyes is so familiar, a gleam / And I know it’s true / That visions are seldom all they seem / But if I know you / I know what you’ll do / You’ll love me at once / The way you did once upon a dream... ³

My eyes flicked to the side and I saw movement in the doorway. My dad and grandmother had come home, and apples were falling out of their bags—I rushed to pick them up. We probably started Sleeping Beauty because my grandfather might have said it was his favorite Disney movie. We never finished watching it.

Second, I lost my copy of The Phantom Tollbooth one afternoon. Every suitcase was full of clothes, and my knees were starting to feel sore from rubbing against wood swollen by humidity. I heard a dismembered voice saying something, yet I didn’t piece together that it was my grandfather’s until I walked into the living room and saw him sitting in his armchair. He held The Phantom Tollbooth up at eye level, elbows bent at a 30 degree angle, and he was reading the words as if they were staccato notes. He offered an apologetic smile, and nodded as I took it and went back to my room. I’d like to think he was reading this section:

“They all rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went.” Milo remembered the many times he’d done the very same thing; and, as hard as he tried, there were even things on his own street that he couldn’t remember.⁴

Third, he brought me to the airport bookstore so he could pick out a book to improve his English, and purchased Charlotte’s Web because I told him it was one of my favorites in first grade. I had initially said no to signing the title page, not seeing any point in doing so, but obliged after he insisted. My loopy, cramped, seventh-grade cursive handwriting in pencil was next to the picture of Wilbur the pig doing a backflip. He got through about half of the book, and told me so during a weekly family call in eighth grade. I hope he didn’t reach the second-to-last chapter to see Charlotte’s fate.

No one was with her when she died. ⁵

One of the first Korean words I was ever taught was hananim, or God. My grandparents usually ended every FaceTime with “we’ll pray for you tonight.” If I was with them in person, they often took my hand while saying a blessing for the whole table. Prayers, including ones that I didn’t quite understand, made me feel connected to our family as a unit and to the Lord—not to any individual.

A year after my grandfather’s passing, I learned his favorite hymn was “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” My dad said, “oh, you didn’t know that?” the same way he responded when he offhandedly mentioned that my grandfather was a politician who used to come home drunk after long government dinners. My parents and I sat down on the anniversary of the exact day, papers and knicknacks shoved to the back third of the table for this impromptu commemoration. My parents sang in Korean and their voices coalesced into united sound waves. I sang in English, worried I would overpower them or that I wasn’t striking the right tone.

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth / Thine own dear presence to cheer and
to guide; / strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow: / blessings all mine,
with ten thousand beside! ⁶

I wrote a poem for my grandfather before we visited his ashes, a speech about visiting those ashes, and a series of short stories inspired by him. Each piece has reached similar conclusions about my unearned love and grief. I still believe in those conclusions, although it gets difficult to feel viscerally committed to them when I keep mining memories for writing content. How many new epiphanies can be reached through telling facets of the same experience? When will there be enough acts of penance to make up for the guilt?

For so long, I thought the referential nature of my dad’s name showed my grandfather’s sense of humor, a penchant to indulge a little bit of absurdity. In thinking about the imagery of the story, I now see my grandfather as he could have seen himself: a righteous David against Goliath, loved and chosen by God before he was primed for success. A David who was desperate enough to throw a random object at a supposed enemy without instruction, who was mercifully woken up before seeing how it all ended. Tender enough to use his fingers to comb his granddaughter’s hair, firm enough to clutch a gun with a cartographer’s hand. For a man to name his son after the improbability of being saved is to embrace uncertainty with audacity, with faith.