Korea is not presented here as a setting for an extended present-day journey; it enters the story through memory and correspondence. The place gives shape to Benjamin Ellison and Fiona’s past intimacy, and to the racial difference that made their relationship vulnerable to scrutiny. Those recollections also connect Benjamin’s military service to the secret family history his children later discover.

A Place Recovered Through Letters

Fiona looks back on the time she and Benjamin spent in Korea in letters addressed to him. She recalls that she had romanticized that period, but that her work as a nurse now feels like work. Her letter also explains why she is reconsidering a suggestion that they meet in New York: Benjamin has family obligations, and the prospect of seeing him is too painful. Korea therefore appears not as a neutral backdrop but as a remembered period of closeness whose return to the present carries longing and difficulty.

Fiona’s correspondence gives the recollection an intimate, partial form. The reader encounters Korea through what she chooses to tell Benjamin, including her feelings about their separation and the pressures surrounding their relationship. Her writing shifts between personal news—her mother’s hospitalization and her work—and memories of the two of them, placing private desire alongside family responsibility and grief.

Seoul and the Need for Secrecy

A later letter returns specifically to Seoul. Fiona describes remembering how she and Benjamin had to sneak around there. She says that it was when they had to hide, or when someone looked at them crossly, that she became conscious of their difference. The detail makes secrecy more than a circumstance of their romance: it is the condition through which the surrounding world forces their difference into view.

The memory is uncertain in form: Fiona cannot tell whether it came to her in a dream or as a thought. That hesitation keeps the past from appearing as a settled account. Seoul resurfaces as an image that she cannot entirely separate from the experience of being watched, while her letter-writing offers a way to approach that memory without resolving its pain.

Intimacy, Prejudice, and Family History

Fiona’s recollection of Korea is sharpened by what she later encounters in Benjamin’s country. After seeing him again, she apologizes for her brother-in-law’s bigotry and admits that she had mistakenly thought the stares and comments they faced belonged only to the soldiers of the war. Her correction broadens the meaning of the Korean memories: prejudice was not confined to the wartime setting, and the hostility she experienced later makes her earlier assumptions impossible to sustain.

The letters also reveal the personal stakes of the relationship. Fiona writes of missing Benjamin and recalls their physical intimacy, while acknowledging how painful it is to continue corresponding after learning that he expects another child. Her account of their time in Korea thus sits beside the consequences of his existing family life rather than outside it. The romance is remembered tenderly, but it cannot be detached from concealment, separation, and the obligations that keep the two apart.

The Past Behind a Family Secret

The Korean memories gain further significance when Benjamin’s children learn that their father had an affair while he was in the army and that they have another sister. Korea is one of the places through which that earlier relationship becomes legible: Fiona’s letters preserve a connection that family life had not openly acknowledged. The discovery turns private correspondence into evidence of a history extending beyond the children’s knowledge of their father.

The novel’s movement between the letters and the later discovery also changes the reader’s understanding of Korea’s role. It is at once a remembered place of intimacy, a setting where racial difference required concealment, and part of the backstory to a consequential family revelation. Rather than supplying a comprehensive portrait of the country, these recollections show how a place persists in the lives of people who carry its secrets and memories elsewhere.