The beloved queen lay dying. No one could cure her. Frightened whispers swirled like ghosts as day after day the queen lay still, and only her most faithful servants were allowed to enter her rooms.

In desperation, the kind called upon two Buddhist monks. They took the pale queen to their hermitage, where they tied one end of a long string around the queen’s tumor, the other to a tree outside. The monks chanted, keeping vigil throughout the night. In the morning, the tumor had disappeared: the tree was withered.

Out of gratitude for this miracle, the king helped the monks expand their small hermitage. Eighteen buildings were harmoniously arranged upon their mountain, where they continued to study the philosophy of Flower Garland at the temple named Haeinsa, Reflection on a Calm Sea.

Nearly twelve hundred years later, I am resting in the courtyard at Haeinsa. The original hermitage once stood on this site, and it is here that the tree took the illness from the queen.

The spiritual descendants of the two monks go about their daily business at the temple: sitting, studying, chanting. With their shaved heads and loose gray clothing, they are identical to those who have lived and worked here since the seventh century.

Mountains, temples, ancient dolmens: I am afloat in the beauty of a culture deeply mysterious to me and, yet, my birthright. This is the heart of my ancestry, with its dark odor of incense; its rhythmic tok, tok, tok of tiny drums; its eighty-four thousand woodblocks containing the Korean Tripitaka, over seven hundred fifty years old and without error, each character carved following one bow to the Buddha.

I must take something from this place, something more meaningful than the plastic tapes of chants, the cheap postcards, the wooden bead bracelets. I must remember what I feel on this day, in this place that swallows me in profuse, deafening color.

I squat to the ground. A small white stone the size of my palm lies next to my feet. It is jagged and dusty, so I wrap it inside a blue handkerchief and place it in my backpack.

I will remember this place, this moment—the blossoming trees, the upturned tile roofs, the way the sun warms my neck—and who I am in this place:

My name is Jeong Kyong-Ah. My family register states the date of my birth, the lunar date January 24, 1972. I am the fifth daughter of Jeong Ho-Joon and the third daughter and fourth child of his second wife, Kang Ahn-Sun. I am the granddaughter of my father’s parents, Jeong Song-Pil and Yi Chin-Hwa. I am the granddaughter of my mother’s parents, Kang Soon-Ok and Pak Ok-Poon. My ancestry includes landowners, scholars, and government officials. I have six siblings. I am citizen of the Republic of Korea. I come from a land of pear fields and streams, where Buddhist temples are hidden in the mountains, where people laugh loudly and honor their dead.

Halfway around the world, I am someone else.

I am Jane Marie Brauer, created September 26, 1972, when I was carried off an airplane onto American soil. My State of Minnesota birth certificate declares my date of birth to be March 8, 1972. I am the younger daughter of Frederick and Margaret Brauer. I am the granddaughter of my father’s parents, Darwin and Doris Brauer. I am the granddaughter of my mother’s parents, Iver and Lourine Reichmann. My ancestors were farmers, factory workers, a sometime Bible salesman. I have one sister; she is my blood sister, adopted with me. I became an American citizen at age five, when I stood before a judge and pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. I come from a land of plains, where Lutheran churches dot the corn fields, where stoicism is stamped into the bones of each generation.

In Minnesota, it is night, and Jane Brauer is missing. She is gone—only a memory in the minds of those who imagine her. Meanwhile, in the mountains of Korea, Jeong Kyong-Ah fills her pockets with stones and blinks hard in the sunlight, as if awakened from a deep sleep, or perhaps a very long fugue

From The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka. Copyright 2003 by the Minnesota Historical Society Press. All rights reserved.