My nanny holds the battered giraffe figurine out to me. What’s this one called?

Giraffe, I answer. Every six-year-old knows what a giraffe is: a long-necked, savanna-dwelling  steed plated in wet brown flagstones. But she shakes her head, sunlight slanting over her  silvering curls.

In Korean, she says, 기린.

기린, my little sister crows in agreement.

My nanny shakes her head again. How could your  동생 understand and not you?

I turn the words over in my mind, carving them into the unshaped celestial mush of my brain. 기린, gi-rin. Giraffe. 동생, dong-saeng. Younger sibling. She used to point at me from her high  chair and call for me: 언니, 언니, struggling against the buckled strap holding her down. Eon-ni,  eon-ni. Big sister, big sister.

In my earliest years, I accumulate new words like days and nights. 잘 먹겠습니다, thanking  someone for food. 안녕히 주무세요, hoping that they sleep well. I learn “chopsticks” and “dog”  and “spinach” from family dinners. I learn the “Happy Birthday” song seated on one of my grandmother’s plastic-wrapped chairs, pinching my cousin’s elbow before he can blow out the  candles on someone else’s cake. I learn 사랑해, sarang-hae. I love you.

One day, I learn 병원, byeong-won. Hospital. Hurtling after it like arrows finding flesh come 수술 and 폐. Surgery and lung. I learn my grandfather’s full name for the first time in all my  twelve years of living and understanding, and then I learn the word for grave. 무덤, mu-deom.  People I don’t recognize lay him deep in the ground and shovel dirt on top. Lilies crunch like  bony fingers underneath someone’s dress shoe. All at once, I am only twelve years old and he is  buried and I can never understand enough. 사랑해, read all of my birthday cards.

He’s the one who named me 성은, Sung-eun, the combined first halves of each of my parents’  names. It means “graceful star”. But I am the first half of a girl I’m still translating: a collision of  worlds, a pockmarked example, an aging daughter who is the youngest she will ever be again. I  am 언니, I am 동생, I am the scion and the reaped fruit. I am trying to understand enough to get by. And someday they will display my picture in front of the child who inherited my resemblance, sunlight slanting over her like memory.

What's this one called?

She will have an answer by then.