Dreamt I Found You

by Jimin Han

Genres: Asian American; Cultural Heritage

Synopsis

From the critically acclaimed author of The Apology, a contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo & Juliet, in which the cousin of the star-crossed lovers helps them avoid a tragic fate.

When Dahee Shin was nine years old, she made a promise to protect her favorite cousin, Channing, who has always been like a sister to her. Now, at thirty, Dahee has found herself in a Korean American community in a New England beach town, once more running to the rescue of her debt-ridden relative.

Ever the idealist, Channing—who has spent her life haunted by the tragic story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, Korea’s parallel Romeo & Juliet—has fallen in love with Minjae Oh, all the while fending off the advances of powerful, manipulative Kent Cho, a local politician. As Channing and Minjae’s romance blossoms, and as Kent's suspicion and obsession grow, Dahee begins to realize that it may be up to her to make sure her cousin and beloved escape Chunhyang and Mongryong’s doomed end.
 
For fans of Hello Beautiful, Dreamt I Found You is a wondrous, tender retelling of Korea's most classic love story, steeped in the travails of a rigid class system, the power of premonition, and shot through with Korean folklore and magic.

Release date: April 28, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

I was never sure where danger might lie, but I was on the lookout for it. I had just bought a small pouch of compostable dental floss at Duane Reade pharmacy on Sixth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street in New York City at five o’clock and walked outside to discover a white child in a green sweatshirt and jeans, with black-rimmed square glasses on his face. His hand gripped the side bar of an umbrella stroller that had a toddler kicking her legs up, dressed in daisy-print overalls. The boy was no more than four years old. I knew this because I had worked as a teacher’s aide in a preschool once. He and the toddler were directly beside the automatic glass doors. I looked around for an adult. Surely one was nearby. Maybe they had gone to the corner to throw out an item in the trash receptacle; maybe they had dashed up the street to pay for parking.

I couldn’t walk away from those children. People passed us. Some looked at me because I looked at them. The palms of my hands tingled when I got nervous. I wiped my hands on my skirt. To get rid of that feeling, I had to do something, take some sort of action. What should I do? I couldn’t just leave them there.

I asked the little boy about his parents’ whereabouts, but he didn’t answer. He’d probably been told not to speak to strangers. Inside the store, an Asian security guard stood with his back to the window. I wanted to ask him to keep an eye on the children. Anyone could walk off with them at any time. But something stopped me. What if he arrested their parent? Did I want to cause that kind of harm to someone who had stepped away for a second?

Questioning what’s usual was familiar to me. I didn’t know if I could trust my first reaction. I’d emigrated from Seoul with my parents when I was five years old, and we’d moved frequently in the United States so that I’d never been able to establish a solid sense of home. My understanding of what was commonplace and “normal” felt in constant flux. Even my sense of danger was sometimes murky, like right there on the street in the city. What to pay attention to? What to dismiss? Follow the majority of the crowd and leave those children like that or be in the minority and help them?

While I hesitated, out of the groups of people walking by me on the sidewalk that day, a white man in a business suit emerged. For a second, I thought he was the children’s father, but he walked straight toward me. He said, “They’re alone?” As if it was obvious to him that they needed help. He confirmed these children were at risk. I was relieved on the one hand, though now more anxious. I wondered if he had some designs on the children, but he seemed perfectly kind. He offered to go inside and ask the security guard, which I told him might jeopardize the parents.

He nodded. “Good point. I’ll just look around.”

I told him I’d stay there, standing closer to the children now that I had reinforcements. A few seconds later a white woman walked out of the store, met my eyes, and headed straight for the stroller without hesitation. “Your kids?” I asked. She didn’t reply and wheeled the stroller, with the little boy trailing, away so fast no one would have heard the children protest.

I could have left, but I waited for the man. What might he think if he walked out and saw all of us gone? When he finally exited the store, I told him the mother had come and taken the kids with her. He shook his head, mirroring how I felt. Oh well, that was that. We went our separate ways.

I was still thinking about those kids when I reached my apartment. It was a rectangular studio with the bedroom and living area divided by a bookcase. I wished it were at least an L-shape. I didn’t dare hope for a one-bedroom in Manhattan on my teacher’s salary. My upstairs neighbor was dragging something across the floor. That dull heavy sound coming from the ceiling made me go into my tiny bathroom, sit on the toilet seat cover, and phone my cousin Channing.

We were the same age, born hours apart, and today we turned thirty years old.

“Hey, happy birthday!” I said as soon as she answered. “Did you eat noodles yet?”

Noodles signified long life in Korean culture, I was told. In addition to noodles, Channing grew up eating miyeok guk on her birthday. My parents didn’t follow that tradition. I had lived in rural areas of the States where it had been impossible to find ingredients for this soup.

“Happy birthday, Dahee!” she replied. “I’ll have jjajangmyeon delivered later. You?”

“Same,” I replied.

“Good.” She paused. “I was about to call you. How’s your day going?” Over the years, Channing and I had tried to spend our birthday together, but this year, she was babysitting two boys in East End for the month of August while their parents were away in Europe. She was halfway through the job now.

“You won’t believe someone left two kids alone on the sidewalk—” I said.

“Dahee, was it really that bad?” she said.

“Anything could have happened. It was rush hour. Those kids were scared, I could tell.” This last bit was added for emphasis. Those children hadn’t seemed frightened to me, not visibly anyway. But I knew you couldn’t always tell how stressed a child might be on the inside. I offered her proof I wasn’t the only one concerned. “A man stopped to help. He agreed they shouldn’t have been left alone like that,” I said.

“Parents also need a break, just a few minutes without those kids—”

“Have you done that? Left Edison and Austin by themselves?” Those were the names of the children in her care.

“No, I’m talking about their parents. They needed a break, which is why they hired me.”

“Okay, but you do know you can’t leave those boys alone somewhere, right?” I had to ask because Channing had never had a job like this before, had never been responsible for children.

“How can you even say that?” she said. “You teach little kids at school, but at the end of the day you get to leave. I’m here with them twenty-four seven.” Her voice dropped. “Anyway, I need to talk to you about someone. Let me close the door.”

I waited and then she was back. “I’m having problems with a guy here. I don’t know what to do.”

Channing got approached by men a lot and usually handled them with ease. I was surprised at how rattled she sounded by this one.

“What happened?” I said now.

“Yesterday this man let himself in and was drinking coffee in the kitchen at eight o’clock in the morning.”

“Wait, what?” The palms of my hands tingled.

“The night before, he was in the living room.”

“I don’t understand. Did you leave the door unlocked?”

“No—yes, it’s more complicated than that.”

“Wait, are you going on dates while you’re babysitting the boys?” I asked.

“What? No!”

“Then he’s a random stranger? Did you call the police?”

“That’s the thing, I can’t. He’s close with the boys’ parents. He’s their friend. They gave him the code to the door for emergencies. Everyone knows him; he works for the mayor,” she said.

I was speechless, and then a thought occurred to me. “Do you think the parents told him to check up on you? I deal with parents all the time, and they worry—”

“I doubt it. They talk to the kids every day,” she said.

“What if you changed the code? You know all that tech stuff. You could figure it out.”

“It’s not my house, I wouldn’t do that. There could be a real emergency.”

The tingling in my hands increased. I rubbed my free hand on my shirt. The bathroom floor seemed to tilt. I focused on a single corner of a black tile in the diamond pattern. “Have you told Harabeoji about him?” I asked. Thinking of my grandfather often helped me. At eighty-eight years old, he was younger in spirit than my parents and didn’t make me doubt myself. The sensation in my palms dissipated. The bathroom came back into balance.

“I’ve been meaning to call him. Dad’s in rehab again, so Harabeoji’s alone.”

The phone line went silent, so I wondered if we’d gotten disconnected. “Channing? Are you—” I said.

I heard muffled voices before she returned to the phone. “I have to go. He’s here again.”

“Who’s there?”

“Kent Cho, the guy I’ve been talking about.”

“Do you think he could be dangerous? I can be there in four hours if I leave right now,” I said.

“No, no, it’s fine. It’s more annoying than anything.” There was another pause. “Maybe you’re right. Just to be safe.”

“I’m calling Harabeoji. We’ll come for a few days. If I leave in the morning—” I began.

“I have to go,” she repeated. “Dahee, thank you. You have my location, right?”

I checked my phone and told her I did. Besides attending a few non-essential meetings and setting up my classroom, I had nothing urgent on my to-do list before my teaching job started in September.

A calm settled over me, then I felt a flicker of excitement. I’d always idealized East End. Unlike my nomadic parents, who moved every few years, Channing’s family had settled in this town with a large Korean community and put down roots. Her father was my dad’s older brother, so they’d arrived in the United States first and then helped us when we came. Channing had lived in East End until eleventh grade when she’d been forced to move to Boston. Now she was back after fourteen years for this temporary job. If I had a home base anywhere, it was this place.

“Don’t worry, we’ll be there soon,” I told her.

I loved leaving the city. My plan was to drive to Boston to pick up my grandfather and then go together to help Channing in East End. Whenever I mentioned the name of this town to friends, they assumed I meant a region in Long Island, so I had to explain that it was located in New England, about eighty miles south of Boston.

“Never heard of it,” they’d say, as if they doubted it existed.

Maneuvering around the heavy traffic that encircled Manhattan didn’t faze me. Fridays were particularly brutal, but I was ready. I’d driven this route many times. I went so often that the principal at the school where I worked asked me why I didn’t live there. The truth was I couldn’t tell her I was afraid to try. I’d gone to college and graduate school in New York, and one of my professors had recommended me to the principal I worked for now. It was important for me to be certain, to keep risks low and have a steady income.

Channing was the opposite. She didn’t want to be tied down to a job and other people’s rules. I didn’t understand what she did exactly—she was a programmer—but apparently, she was good. Really good. She’d had job offers from Google and SpaceX and other companies, but she preferred to work for equity in friends’ startups, which rarely became successful. She believed in their ideas and wanted to support them rather than be a cog in the wheel of commerce. The problem was she still needed to make money somehow. Her father’s health care was costly, and he couldn’t work anymore. They’d sold everything they’d owned over the years. Even with my parents pitching in each month, Channing was paying more and more for his care and falling behind on bills.

It was mid-afternoon when I turned onto my grandfather’s street. There had been more construction on the highway than usual. He rented the third-floor apartment with my uncle Albert, Channing’s father, so Harabeoji had planted flowers and a small vegetable garden in large clay pots out front. Greens and purples and pinks burst from containers, bordering the facade of the clapboard house. Everywhere he lived benefited from his ability to grow a bounty of food and beauty.

It might seem odd that Channing and I were the ones who looked after our grandfather. Some of it was just practical: My parents moved to Vancouver, Canada, after I went to college and were wrapped up in their import/export business, and Channing’s father was unmoored after his wife died. I heard my parents say he’d lost an astronomical sum of money for investors in a real estate development project and eventually was forced to leave East End. He couldn’t hold down a job after that, constantly going in and out of treatment for alcohol use. My grandfather took care of him and Channing. As Channing and I got older, we tried to take care of our grandfather as best we could.

Harabeoji was special to me. He always said the words I needed to hear. It was never a burden to be with him. I enjoyed his company and worried about him, hoping he was comfortable.

Now, as I neared his apartment, I saw him before he noticed me. I stopped the car a short distance from the driveway and tried to memorize his appearance. He was bent slightly, sweeping debris from the sidewalk with a long common broom. His small navy-blue duffel bag, bearing the round logo of a company Channing had worked at for a couple of months, sat in the walkway with a stocky brown paper bag propped up beside it.

He was six feet tall with jet-black wavy hair that he put some sort of oil into to sweep off his forehead; it made him look like an old-time movie star. He was wearing his tan cotton twill jacket with a two-button strap collar that he’d owned for as long as I could remember. Channing said it was from the 1970s in Korea. Below that, I saw his usual crisply pressed short-sleeve button-down shirt. This one was in that plaid print with pinks and oranges and greens. He ironed his clothes without fail and took such good care of them that he never had to replace them. Below his sharply creased khaki pants, he wore brown leather dockside shoes I’d bought him last Christmas.

He’d made me take a penny for them, so he purchased them from me rather than accepted them as a gift. He said that if you give shoes to someone as a present, then it will allow them to walk out of your life. I told him my parents had bought me my shoes, so did they want me to leave them? He said that was different. So, I pocketed the penny. And I was just glad he liked the shoes enough to wear them.

He was most comfortable tending to his garden and fishing, telling stories about the farm on which he’d grown up. He attributed his knowledge of plants, cooking, weaving, and knitting to his grandmother who raised him. It was as if Channing and I knew her through him. Everything they needed to live, he said, they grew on the farm. What they ate and drank, the clothes they wore. Everything. His description of it felt cozy and reliable.

When I pulled the car back on the road, he lifted his head in my direction, and I saw that he had spotted me. He raised his hand high, and I felt an immense feeling of relief. It was always the same, and I knew it had to do with how safe he made me feel, as if each time he was pulling me up out of that deep hollow in my yard I fell into once when I was a child.

“Channing needs us for moral support,” my grandfather said as we merged onto the highway. It was approximately a two-hour trip to East End this time of day.

“She also needs us to cook and do laundry,” I replied.

His face creased into all kinds of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and he gave a laugh that burst first as a big breath before the sound emerged.

“Channing will be all right,” he said.

“She’s always all right,” I replied. “She gets to be in East End! The beach, the seafood. Who wouldn’t want to be there? It’s us I’m worried about.”

He laughed again. “Summer always makes me think of that town.”

“Glad she got this job. The last one she had was five months ago.” I signaled to move into the passing lane. East End had been Harabeoji’s home for ten years, so he knew the people there, the old ones anyway. His friend Mr. Yun had recommended Channing for this babysitting position because he’d heard from Harabeoji that my cousin needed work.

“You mean more than a year. I helped her sell some of her things to pay off credit cards. She was evicted from her apartment before she started this East End job,” he said.

My foot pressed down on the accelerator. “Typical Channing to keep that information from me. Thought she still had her apartment,” I said. “Is there anything else she didn’t tell me? Is she trying to get back together with what’s-his-name in Fall River?”

Harabeoji put his hand out toward the dashboard, which made me realize I was accelerating. I apologized and slowed the car down to the speed limit.

“No, no, she didn’t want to worry you. She doesn’t lie. She leaves things out sometimes, you know that,” he said.

I tried to remember when we’d talked about her apartment. Harabeoji was right. Channing had never told me she wasn’t evicted.

“It’s going to be all right,” he continued. “She’ll get back on her feet. She needs a reason for being.”

I wondered how they’d managed in his apartment with my uncle in a one-bedroom that they shared. Channing must have slept on the couch in the small living room with the kitchenette.

“It’s never been this bad before,” I said now, tapping the steering wheel with my fingers. This job in East End was more important than ever. She had to finish it to get paid so she could go back to Boston and get her own place.

My grandfather took out a white handkerchief from his jacket pocket and began wiping the console between us. Then he carefully folded the square cloth and put it into his left pocket. The right side had at least one more clean one in it. The left was for the ones he’d already used.

“The two of you are very different. Love has always been part of Channing’s way of looking at life,” Harabeoji said.

I told him about the man Channing had mentioned and added, “It’s a stretch. He sounds like a menace, but maybe it’s bad manners. Just ring the doorbell. Then again maybe this Kent Cho is the one she’s been searching for. If I remember correctly, Chunhyang doesn’t like Mongryong at first in that Korean folktale Channing loves so much. It’s an enemies-to-lovers story.”

Harabeoji cleared his throat, then he said, “That’s not quite right. Not enemy. They didn’t know each other. That name, Kent Cho, I’ve heard of him. He’s a good man, helps the Korean community, works for the mayor.”

My grandfather’s words reassured me. I eased my grip on the steering wheel. “Yes, that’s the guy. Channing said something about the mayor. A steady job and being a good person aren’t at the top of Channing’s list for the man of her dreams,” I said.

“Can’t change the way you feel,” he replied. “She has good instincts, like you. You both do. You have to trust them.”

“Eomma says Channing and I aren’t like our family from Namwon. We’re too blunt. But you’re from Namwon and you’re direct. My parents never say what they mean—I guess they’re like people from Namwon then.” I looked in my rearview and returned to the driving lane.

“You’re more like your mother than you think. You don’t like conflict, Dahee,” he said. “You never have. You go out of your way to avoid it. That’s not direct. Channing just says what she wants.”

“See? But Channing is more from Namwon than I am. Both her parents were from there. My mom is not.”

Harabeoji laughed. Then he reached into his right jacket pocket and handed me a ginger candy. It was my favorite. I unwrapped it and popped it into my mouth.

We drove in easy silence for a while until he spoke again. “I brought some Korean squash for the Yuns and should bring something more,” he said. He told me he planned to stay with his friends in East End in their house while I was with Channing and the children she was babysitting.

“Your squash are the best gift,” I replied, but I knew he believed it wasn’t enough, and it was a good excuse for me to get clam cakes. Plus, we knew Channing didn’t cook, so picking up some food would serve multiple purposes.

The first clam cake stand we headed toward had closed. The second place, too. A bad omen I refused to acknowledge about the changes in the region.

I patted my grandfather’s hand as we stopped at a fruit stand, comforting myself as much as him. There would be time to get clam cakes, just not today. Nothing could bring down my mood. I told him the Yuns would be glad to have fresh peaches.

When we opened the car doors, the sound of seagulls, wind, and surf flooded our ears. We climbed out into the salty smell of the ocean and humid air. The Atlantic was pungent and thick with sea life. It had been a while since I’d been this close to it, and I had forgotten how the ocean could wrap the land with its briny arms.

If Channing ran toward the future, I hid in the past. My grandfather said he understood why his son had chosen East End when he moved to the States from South Korea. It reminded him of Busan, the city by the sea. Both my uncle and my father had spent much of their teenage years on the coast when their parents moved from Namwon, which was farther inland.

On our drives toward East End from whichever town we lived in at the time, my father would talk about his school days, and my mother would add in her memories of trips with her family to the eastern shore of the Korean peninsula. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if they were talking about Busan or East End. I’d get mixed up as I fell asleep in the back seat on the long car ride.

As Harabeoji and I officially arrived in East End, I rolled down the window and turned off the air-conditioning. I smelled buttered shrimp and lobster from a restaurant nearby, late afternoon jasmine, sweet pea, Clethra that Harabeoji had pointed out but had trouble pronouncing until I searched for it on the internet and helped him. I spotted some blue violets waving in the sunlight on sand and seagrass. We coasted to a stop at a traffic light. A sign welcomed us to East End. It had faded black letters on a simple wooden placard secured to wooden posts on each side, white with a scroll at the top in imitation of a piece of parchment.

On Middle Street, there were people walking along the sidewalk, going into the stores and cafés. A Black woman and a Latino man walked along, the man pushing a baby in a stroller. A variety of teenagers piled into a Jeep parked by the curb. An Asian man walked a trio of pugs on a leash across the street. I took it all in and felt my body relax.

At a stoplight, Harabeoji pointed to a white man who held the door to a bright yellow storefront, ushering in two small white children. “Good to see Mrs. Ku’s bakery doing well.”

“Should we stop?” I asked as the light turned green. “I could find parking.”

Harabeoji shook his head. “I’m sure she’s closing soon. We’ll try another day. Let’s get to Channing.”

She was standing in Sandpiper Lane after we navigated a maze of side streets minutes later. My cousin was easy to recognize, her tall, thin figure similar to Harabeoji. In a black shirt above dark gray sweatpants, she reminded me of how Harabeoji had told us when we were children not to wear white, as if he believed dressing in white meant someone was going to die. He’d drummed it into us often enough that I felt apprehensive about wearing it, and so apparently did Channing.

The gold necklace at her collar glinted. Her thick black hair hovered just below her chin. She took scissors to it regularly, and without much effort, she still managed to get a few layers in there, so it was shaped around her face. She’d never changed it as long as I’d known her. It accentuated her long neck and high cheekbones. Mostly, I knew she valued how it required little effort to maintain. No hair ties or even a brush needed. She combed it with her fingers.

Her hand was up, pushing her bangs to the side, shielding her eyes. She seemed swayed by an intense wind, leaning one way and then the other. The young sweet gum trees by a house to my left didn’t seem affected. What was she looking at beyond us? In my rearview mirror the sun was bright.

“Stop!” Harabeoji shouted. I hit the brake and lurched forward; my grandfather’s arm below my neck kept me from slamming into the steering wheel. Channing had both hands on the green hood. In the split second I’d looked in the rearview mirror, we’d reached her. But what was she doing in the street?

I opened the window and yelled at her to get out of the way. Another car could hit us while we were stopped. She looked confused. She had dark crescents under her eyes, like bruises. There had been stretches in her life when she didn’t sleep enough, which produced patches like that, but these were the worst I’d seen. She had the same gold rosette earrings she wore as a child. She never took them off even when she replaced other jewelry. She pushed her hair out of her eyes again and backed away. My own long hair was always in a ponytail and held off from my face. Seeing how her bangs had grown made me reach back and tighten the band around mine as if my hair were in danger of affecting my vision.
. . .