Korean heritage

Korean heritage is a central cultural and relational inheritance in the story, shaping the romance between Daeshim and Nyia Crosland, the eight-year absence that follows their separation, and the eventual formation of Daeshim’s relationship with Trey. It is presented not as a fixed label but as something taught, translated, defended, and carried across a divided family.

Origins and Family Tension

Daeshim’s Korean heritage is inseparable from the traditional Korean family values that govern his parents’ expectations. While he and Nyia are students at North Carolina Central University, he warns her that his parents need time to adjust to his dating someone who does not completely understand his culture. His reluctance to introduce her makes culture a source of uncertainty within their relationship, and Nyia suspects that his hesitation about marriage is connected to his family. The possibility of a future together is therefore constrained not only by Daeshim’s personal indecision but also by the family rules he has inherited.

Nyia responds to that difference through effort rather than rejection. After meeting Daeshim, she takes an online class during the summer to learn about Korean culture and its customs. She does not force him to bring her before his parents, but prepares herself in case he eventually does so. Her willingness to study the culture demonstrates that Korean heritage enters the relationship as a possible bridge, even while Daeshim’s family treats cultural difference as a potential obstacle to interracial romance.

The relationship begins at North Carolina Central University, where Nyia is entering the nursing program and Daeshim is a forensic science major two years ahead of her. His first approach in the nursing building leads to a whirlwind romance, and the Korean word he uses for her, later explained as meaning beautiful, becomes an intimate nickname. Their shared life includes concerts, films, poetry slams, and quiet dinners at his apartment. The heritage that later becomes associated with family prohibition is initially encountered through affection, language, and personal intimacy.

Preservation Through Absence

When Daeshim abruptly cuts ties with Nyia and transfers schools, Korean heritage becomes something she must preserve without his presence. He changes all his phone numbers and disappears from social media, leaving no reliable way for her to tell him that she is pregnant. The separation lasts eight years, and Daeshim does not know that he has a son whose mahogany eyes and midnight-black hair resemble his own.

Nyia refuses to let Daeshim’s absence erase that part of Trey’s identity. She tells Trey everything she knows about his father and makes sure he learns about his Korean heritage. She also hires a tutor to teach both of them the Korean language, using the additional money earned from extra shifts at Chantel Fifty to support the lessons. In this household, Korean is not merely a reminder of an absent man; it is a deliberate inheritance passed to a child who has been denied direct contact with his father.

Nyia later speaks Korean and English at home as soon as Trey is old enough to understand, ensuring that he becomes fluent in his father’s language. Her bilingual household turns memory into routine. The language allows Trey to possess a part of Daeshim that cannot be taken away by changed numbers, vanished accounts, or the silence surrounding the separation. It also shows Nyia reconstructing a connection between father and son before Daeshim has any opportunity to participate in it.

The story repeatedly places Korean expressions beside English explanations. Daeshim uses Korean with Ricky Graham in casual conversation, and Ricky complains that he cannot understand him; Daeshim admits that he speaks it partly because he knows Ricky dislikes it. In more intimate moments, Daeshim speaks Korean to Nyia while translating his meaning into English, telling her that he is glad he finally found her and never forgot her. The code-switching can therefore be playful, romantic, or emotionally serious, depending on the listener and the circumstance.

Trey as the Living Inheritance

Trey embodies the continuity of Korean heritage across the gap between Daeshim and Nyia. His physical resemblance to Daeshim first makes the absent father visible in memory: Trey has the same mahogany-colored eyes and midnight-black hair, although Trey’s hair curls slightly at the ends while Daeshim’s is straight. Nyia’s teaching gives that resemblance a cultural dimension, allowing Trey to know not only what his father looks like but also the language and heritage connected to him.

When Daeshim learns that Trey is eight years old and is his son, his understanding of the lost years changes immediately. He realizes that he missed the pregnancy and the milestones of Trey’s early life. Nyia explains that Trey was happy, that he knows about Daeshim and his culture, and that speaking the language became second nature to him. Her account makes clear that she has protected Trey from turning paternal absence into cultural absence.

Daeshim encounters the material record of that inheritance in Nyia’s home. The walls contain ultrasound images and photographs documenting Trey’s crawling, first steps, first teeth, daycare, preschool, kindergarten, and first days of school. One photograph shows Trey with his face covered in orange puree from carrots and sweet potatoes. Daeshim studies each image and recognizes how much time he has lost, then voices his awe at how much Trey resembles him. The photographs, like the language lessons, function as an archive of a family history from which Daeshim has been excluded.

At their first family dinner, Nyia tells Daeshim about hearing Trey’s heartbeat, her uneventful pregnancy, and giving birth alone because her father would not enter the room. She shows Daeshim videos of Trey learning to crawl and walk and saying his first words, and he asks her to send the videos to him. She also gives him an extra ultrasound picture, which he folds and places in his wallet. The object becomes a portable piece of the son and heritage he missed, while the videos begin to transfer the family archive directly to him.

Reconnection With Daeshim’s Family

Korean heritage becomes a test of whether the reunited family can acknowledge one another. Daeshim’s parents eventually visit to meet their grandson after receiving a message from their son. During the conversation, they ask whether Trey is really Daeshim’s child. Daeshim answers firmly that Trey is his, refusing to let doubt or parental authority reopen the exclusion that already cost him eight years.

Nyia then speaks directly to Mr. and Mrs. Kwon in Korean. She assures them that she has never spoken ill of Daeshim to Trey and explains that Trey has always known about his father and his culture. Her fluency gives her an active voice within the family conversation: she is not merely an outsider asking to be accepted, but the person who has preserved the cultural connection the Kwon family feared might be lost. She can address them in their language while defending the care she has provided to their grandson.

The phone is passed to Trey, who greets his grandparents in Korean with caution and excitement. His participation completes the transmission that began with Nyia’s lessons and home practice. He is not simply being introduced as Daeshim’s biological son; he is entering the family through a language he already knows. Daeshim responds with pride as he listens to Trey speak, making the child’s bilingual identity a visible sign that Nyia has maintained, rather than weakened, his connection to Korean heritage.

The contrast between Daeshim’s parents’ earlier opposition and this later contact gives heritage a double meaning. It once helped enforce separation by making Nyia’s difference seem threatening, but it later provides the means of communication through which Trey can meet his grandparents. The same cultural inheritance that contributed to the rupture is transformed into a resource for family repair.

Significance

Korean heritage organizes the story’s treatment of absence, care, and second chances. Daeshim’s family invokes tradition as a boundary around acceptable intimacy, and his failure to resist that pressure produces the separation from Nyia. Nyia, however, turns heritage into an act of care: she studies Korean culture, teaches Trey the language, speaks both Korean and English at home, and preserves knowledge of Daeshim even when she cannot contact him.

The heritage also complicates the idea of belonging. Trey grows up in Nyia’s North Carolina household, yet his identity is not confined to the place where he lives or the parent who raises him. Through language, photographs, stories, and later conversation with the Kwons, he inherits a transgenerational connection that has survived the adults’ failures. Korean heritage thus becomes both memory and future possibility: a record of what was lost, and a practical means by which Daeshim, Nyia, and Trey begin to live as a family.