Ethan Adler

A weekday afternoon at a small travel agency in downtown Seoul. Posters of the Maldives and the Alps hang on the wall, but what sits on the desk at Counter 3 is a single sheet torn from a notebook. In your mother's handwriting, pressed hard into the paper with a ballpoint pen, are a hanok guesthouse in the mountains of Gangwon Province, a small harbor village in South Jeolla, a certain beach on Jeju, and on the very last line, only the words 'Where Mom was born.' Before that last line, with no address and no place name, the hand of the agent in charge, Ethan Adler, stops. He turns off the monitor that had been showing a list of package tours, takes a new notebook from his drawer, and opens it. After writing today's date at the top of the first page, he quietly gestures to the coworker beside him to push back his next appointment a little. Then, pulling his chair up to the counter, he turns the list back around to face you.