Every family edits itself. Mine had more to cut than most: a collaborator, a disappearance and a child sent abroad and quietly erased. When the actress Ha Young learned this summer that her great-grandfather's name appears on a 1916 roster of a pro-Japanese organization, I read the news from Denmark with a strange calm. My own great-great-grandfather Lee Ha-young is on Korea's official list of pro-Japanese collaborators. The discussion soon widened, reopening a difficult national conversation about inherited shame, family memory and lives entangled with survival, complicity and loss. Standing outside the social pressures that still shape how many Korean families speak about collaboration, secrecy and adoption, I have come to see shame not only as a private burden but as a force that determines what is preserved, what is altered and what is never spoken aloud. Like Lee In-jik and Ahn Sang-ho, my ancestor navigated a chaotic era. Rising from poverty in the 1880s, Lee Ha-young learned English from the American missionary Horace Allen and became the personal interpreter for King Gojong. He