My mother says that all of our family’s troubles can be traced back to the water ghost that Grandmother saw when she was pregnant with her last child, my First Uncle.
Grandmother was doing the washing at the neighborhood pond when she saw her. My mother was nine and looking after my aunts—First Aunt was seven at the time, Second was five, and Third was three. In Grandmother’s belly, First Uncle slept and waited, growing eyes and fingernails.
My aunts giggled at the sight of the water ghost, thinking she was one of their neighbors playing a joke. The ghost watched them silently from the center of the pond, the lower half of her face hidden below the surface of the water.
But Grandmother knew that water ghosts were the spirits of drowned, disgraced women, and that she would drink up the entire pond if they left her alone. She shooed her away, shaking her basket of laundry at her, until the ghost’s long, dripping hair and bloated half-moon of a face disappeared beneath the waters.
Three days later, Grandmother drowned in her sleep. The ghost’s curse welled up inside her like a blister, and when it burst, First Uncle drank it greedily, until Grandmother’s stomach was so swollen and hard it looked like a melon, and pond water rushed into her lungs in a swampish swell of algae. My mother woke up to her gurgles and gasps and ran for the village doctor, but he was too late.
A local shaman offered to put a blessing on the house, to forbid the ghost from ever returning, but Grandfather, enraged in his grief at losing both his wife and his first son, threw a chair at her, breaking all four of its legs. He was a modern man, a professor of science, and he would not be fooled by the superstitions of old women, he swore.
The water ghost never showed herself again, but her curse was indelible. From then on, my mother said, bad luck followed the family, even when they moved to the States after Grandfather got a job teaching in a cold, gray town called Rochester, in New York. They were the only Korean family for miles. The only other Asian people in town were the Chens, who owned Golden Palace, its lone Chinese restaurant. During that first year in Rochester, they went to Golden Palace almost every night, in search of the spicy, salty flavors that tasted close to what they had known in Korea. 
Grandfather married the oldest Chen daughter, a woman several years younger than him named Faye, who had a high, clear soprano. Faye was kind to the girls and taught them how to cook and how to pluck their eyebrows so that they would be arched like butterfly wings, not many-bristled like caterpillars. She sang to them when they couldn’t sleep at night, the sound of her voice the last thing they heard before they drifted off. But the ghost choked her in her sleep too, wrapping her watery hands around her throat and squeezing her voice out like toothpaste.
Afterwards, Grandfather aged twenty more years, became a man with ash in his cheeks and frost in his hair. He paid his daughters no mind as the curse claimed them, one after another.
First Aunt, the smartest of the family, bound for Cornell on a scholarship to study physics, got into a boyfriend’s car one night after a party, a night slick with rain. He was drunk and she knew better, but she was afraid to ask him to slow down or to let her drive instead. The car leaped into a river. She pounded on the doors, but they were sealed shut from the pressure. In the murk of the water, she could no longer see her boyfriend’s face. She finally crawled out through a half-opened window, bobbing up to the surface like a wine cork, before collapsing on the banks of the river. When she woke up in the hospital, she was unable to spell her name, let alone remember the coefficient for the speed of light. For the rest of her life, she heard the voices of others as though she were still trapped inside that car—muffled and slow.
Second Aunt married a handsome man she met at church, a man whose narrow nose, chiseled jaw, and broad shoulders made her the envy of the congregation. On their honeymoon in the Caribbean, they went out for a boat ride and a passing mermaid was so taken with his features that she arced out of the water and dragged him down into the blue-green waters, a muscled souvenir. Second Aunt gathered her skirts in her hand and leaped in after them, sinking like a furious stone.
Third Aunt grew up heavy-shouldered and heavy-browed, wearing her weighty sorrow like it was an iron jacket. She married a man who she thought might alleviate her sadness, a man of easy laughter and easy money who promised her a life of comfort. Two years into their marriage, after trying and failing repeatedly for a child, her belly finally swelled with promise. But when she gave birth, the hoped-for baby was nothing but a small sliver of blue sea-glass, smooth and cool to the touch, with sharp edges that cut her inner thighs. Third Aunt and her husband buried the sliver in their backyard, and she cried for ten days straight. Her tears flooded the house, so salty they burned her skin and ate through the furniture and floorboards. Her husband, armed with a bucket, bailed the waters out of their house almost as fast as she could make them, but eventually, worn out from the effort, he let himself float away on the rising tide of her tears, pushed out by the currents of a sorrow he would never understand.
As for my mother, her share of the curse was meeting my father, she told me. He was a man of science and numbers, just like her own father had been—an economics professor. He had wavy, yellow hair that she never got used to. He got a job teaching in a part of the country he described to her as “the breadbasket of America,” and she agreed to come with him when she heard the town was landlocked, far from the lakes to the north. When they arrived, she was astounded to see seas of rustling wheat around their new house, the same color as her husband’s hair.
She learned to bake bread, host faculty dinners, smile and say “Yes” when her husband’s colleagues asked her if she spoke English, or “Thank you” when they complimented her on how good her English was. She learned to look away when he began to have affairs with students, girls with names like Jennifer and Melissa and Molly and Sue.
I was born with my mother’s dark, curious eyes and my father’s hair, but my mother prayed every night that it would darken with time, to look more like hers. She taught me words in Korean, trying to counter the speed with which I would someday learn to reject them and, in turn, reject her.
She missed her mother and sisters, the house in Korea she had known for only the first ten years of her life, and the rain and heat of monsoon season, which had been her favorite time of year as a child. Summers in the Midwest were too dry, with white-hot, stretched-thin skies that never knew relief in the form of rain.
At night she dreamt of endless waves of wheat, their dry, golden sheen. She dreamt of setting the fields on fire. How they would catch light and burn, a sea of matches, while the smoke curled into the air like portents, spelling out the names and faces of all the women in her family, and all the women before them too, the ones she would never know.

Gina Chung is a Brooklyn-based Korean American writer and MFA fiction candidate at The New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Catapult, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, F(r)iction, Fugue, Wigleaf, Waxwing, Split Lip Magazine, Jellyfish Review, the VIDA Review, and LIT Magazine. Her stories have been recognized by the Black Warrior Review Contest, the Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, the CRAFT Elements Contest, and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest and named Longform Fiction Pick of the Week. Find her at gina-chung.com.