I set down the knife and called my wife into the room, because inside the base of that chair, wrapped in a faded silk ribbon, was a photograph of a young Korean woman, a bundle of letters in two languages, and a small jade pendant, and my wife looked at me, puzzled, because none of us knew this woman.
My wife sat down as we opened the letters.
Her father, during the war in Korea, had fallen in love with a young Korean woman, and though the war and the times had torn them apart forever, he had carried that first great love with him, tenderly, in secret, his whole life.
The letters told a bittersweet story across seventy years. As a young soldier, my father-in-law had met and loved a Korean woman named Mi-cha. Their love was real and deep, but the war, and the impossible circumstances, and the prejudices of the era, had made a life together impossible. When he shipped home, they were parted, forever, and both went on to marry others and build separate lives.
But they had never quite let go. For years, in secret, they had written to each other, a tender correspondence between two people who had loved and lost, each wishing the other happiness, sharing the joys and sorrows of their separate lives across an ocean.
His letter, written late in life, read: Mi-cha was my first love, and the war took her from me, as it took so much. I loved my wife truly, do not mistake me, and I gave her my whole life. But a corner of my heart always belonged to a girl in Korea I could not keep. We wrote as friends all these years, two old souls who understood. I kept her letters close because they were a piece of my youth, and of a love the world would not allow. No harm in it. Just an old mans tender memory.
My wife read the letters, and far from being troubled, she was moved, understanding this gentle, faithful man more deeply, seeing the whole of his heart.
We wrote to Mi-cha, if she still lived. Her granddaughter answered. Mi-cha had passed a year before, but she had spoken often, tenderly, of the American soldier she loved in her youth, and her family was moved to know he had kept her memory close to the end.
The two families, connected now by an old, impossible love, exchanged photographs and stories, honoring two people who loved across a divide the world would not let them cross.
I cleared out a quiet mans little house, and I found the first love the war took from him, kept tenderly beneath his chair for seventy years. He gave his life fully to his wife, but he never forgot the girl in Korea. It was not a betrayal. It was the tender memory of a young love lost to war. My wife understands her father better now, the depth and faithfulness of his heart. He loved, and lost, and remembered. That is all. And it is beautiful.