From Chapter 3 "A Man on the Road"

There is a particular evening in my memory when the purple dusk came violently. I was a child of seven. A gentleman in a fedora hat walked in through our gate, the blue gate that hadn't let in any man for a whole year. He walked in against the shifting light Of the dusk, tailed by an old man pulling a cart full of fruit. He walked without hesitation, in his double-breasted beige suit, past the flower bed along the wall where summer flowers had gone and only some chrysanthemums stood, waiting for the first frost to flower.

The stranger walked into the house of ours he had no claim on and called our names. As if touched by lightning, brother and sister rushed out and held on to the stranger's arms, calling him "apa." Father! Without a tinge of shame, they claimed the stranger as their father! I watched him squeezing them in his arms and messing up their hair with his hands. Then he finally looked at me, hanging onto mother and said, "She must be my baby girl!" I stepped behind mother's skirt. "She's now ugly seven, apa," brother said, explaining why his baby girl, a little Miss Korea, wasn't as pretty as he had remembered. Father nodded and smiled.