At the start of the Korean War, my father ran away from home in order to work for the GIs. He wanted adventure and freedom. Or maybe he was heartbroken that his father had married a new wife, leaving his true mother up north. Whatever reason, he took advantage of his new life, no longer the son of a rich man. He learned English, worked the black market, hocking Marlboros and razors. Even a lieutenant from Connecticut offered to adopt him and take him to the U.S. But after several months working with the Americans, my dad was informed that his father was waiting outside for him. My grandfather waited many hours into the night, standing in the dirt street beside the camp until his son finally came out to meet him. They’d been estranged for all this time, but a father is still your father, no matter how much you disapprove of him or his wife.

“We’ve lost your sister. Come help me find her,” he told his son. The two of them left together at once. She’d been lost for a while and wasn’t found for another year.

After finding his sister, who was panhandling along the Han River with all the other lost children, my dad traveled north to retrieve his mom and other siblings. Kaesong, his ancestral hometown, changed hands from north to south almost daily, as foreign powers drew and redrew the line that would cleave the country in half. After safely installing his family in Seoul, my dad left again to work for the GIs until the war’s end.

“How were so many children lost?” I ask him.

Millions of refugees fled south. Small hands could slip out from their parents’ hold as a frightened mass moved in the dark. The trains were stuffed with people, children held to the bosom, pushed toward the windows. Keep them from suffocating, but don’t let them fall out! People riding the tops of trains, trying not to slip off. So many kids dropped to the ground, like jettisoned cargo, leaving a wake of small bodies along either side. The cries of mothers and the desperate leaping off of roofs to join their babies. Everyone knew in which direction to keep going at least.

“All roads lead to Seoul,” my father says to me, though he is speaking mostly to himself, to his past. “Remember your hometown and your father’s name. Maybe your family will find you someday.”

My father lost his hometown and has no desire to see it again. One of the two times I’ve seen him cry was at the 38th parallel when he visited almost 40 years after he was exiled. His father is dead, and so is his mother, and even the kid sister whom he found, having agreed to a temporary ceasefire with his father in order to bring her home.

I know my father’s name, the one he was born with and the American one he chose for himself, mostly for business purposes. I have no hometown, except for the metaphorical one given to me by my parents — the beautiful and sad glimpse they provide of my heritage. And he’s right, I remember these few things and no matter how far I go, how quickly I fall and lose my way, my family always finds me someday. And though he doesn’t explicitly say it, has never said “I love you” in my memory, the story he shares with me is weighted with it. It is both a declaration of love for his father, his sister, and for me as well as instruction on how to love. Even if it is closer to duty than affection, it is a love nonetheless that he is inspiring in me, for my lost siblings, my estranged father, my unreachable homeland.