There’s some days that tell you that coincidences are more than just that.

Friday nights – 불금 – are meant for playing, especially while on vacation. But then the not so great Seoul tap water makes your stomach tap out and you find yourself in a taxi going home a few 노래방 (Korean karaoke) hours earlier than expected.

But then a chance conversation with a second uncle leads him to lean down in front of the bookshelf to pull out a thin beige book with hanja (Korean Chinese characters) written all over it. It’s the annual family magazine (journal really), with news from the hundreds if not thousands that make up the 여주씨이 family (Yeo-ju-ssi Lee’s). We’re the Miryang branch of the lot from a small rural town north of the southeastern coast, making up for locational obscurity with a chip on the shoulder mentality that led to success for the family.

One, the uncle that I’m staying with, graduated from Korean National University to become a journalist, and one of his side pursuits became writing a long news article about my grandfather’s life. And here I was, unaware of its existence. Pages about his life, told in his words in a nondescript family journal that I had no idea about.

I thumb through the text and a few pages later, there’s a memorial written of my grandfather written by my grandfather’s younger brother, the last of the three brothers of our branch of the Lee family. He and his wife, a sprightly grandmother of over 65 who appears to have walked out of the fitness tips section of the Korean AARP magazine, live in Busan, the second-largest city of Korea that’s not too far from the family hometown.

Earlier that day, everyone sat at the same dinner table – the same grandparents, their two daughters and son, some of their grandkids,

and me.

Ostensibly, the whole family had reunited, some from three hours away by train, because I was in town. The journalist uncle told me that his father had been disappointed that I wasn’t coming to visit him yet and decided to take it into his own hands and bring the family to me.

Reality wasn’t that simple, at least from my outsiders point of view. We spent the afternoon at his (elder?) daughter’s new house in Paju, about a half hour northwest of Seoul, and apparently it was the first time anyone else in the family had been able to visit.

The excuse to visit me was just as much an excuse for everyone to gather; it’s safe to say that there’s less than a handful of times that’s going to happen for this branch of the family. There’s times where I was the center of attention as the guest, others on the outermost fringes, trying not to be the intruder. It’s an almost out-of-body experience sometimes, knowing that this is your family, but still, no one here is closer than second aunt or second cousin.

Going further, there’s dozens of these family branches if you go further up the tree; yet only one in America—the only one that could fully understand this email even.

Yet as I open the pages of this family book—now in my bag for between-class reading at work—it’s me who can’t read it. The family register lists hundreds of Korean names, phone numbers, and addresses, yet my father’s is one of the few in English. It’s a simple reminder that the rest of the family isn’t out of place; it’s me, the Korean-American from across the ocean, that’s the black sheep.