by Frances Cha
I don’t know why this news shocked me so, but I fashioned my lips into a teasing smile and joked, “You’re getting married? I guess I’ll be seeing you even more often!”
“That’s why I was so pissed,” continued Bruce, as if he didn’t hear me. “I don’t want her brother’s girlfriend there at the dinner—my mother would have a stroke on the spot if she thought someone like her could become an in-law of our family. As if things aren’t going to be difficult enough. But Miae is adamant that her brother will get so upset if we leave the girlfriend out.”
“Why is it such a long way off?” she asked. “Three months? Where is it going to be?”
“I booked a private room at Seul-kuk, at the Reign Hotel,” said Bruce. “Her mom’s been so damn aggressive in this whole process and my parents finally said yes. That’s just the first night that both my parents are free. They’re putting it off as long as possible too. And honestly, the reason this is happening at all is because my mom went to a fortune-teller. Apparently Miae is supposed to be an ideal daughter-in-law and wife and mother. Oh God.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Stop with the misery already,” said the girl in a chiding voice. “Your parents have to meet Miae’s family sooner or later.”
Bruce groaned and fiddled with the strap of his shiny watch.
“At least they’re respectable,” she said after a pause. “It could be much worse.”
Just from the tone of her voice, I could tell she was referring to me.
* * *
—
AS A MATTER of fact, I know all about respectability. My older sister, Haena, married into some wealth.
She graduated from a top women’s university in Seoul with a degree in early childhood education, which is the only thing that made her marriage possible. At the wedding, which was held at one of the most expensive hotels in Seoul, the groom’s side had more than eight hundred guests, mostly men in black suits and animal-patterned Ferragamo ties bearing their gifts of cash in white envelopes. His family had to hire fake guests to fill our side, so it didn’t look like they were marrying down.
She’s been divorced now for a year, and she has yet to tell our mother.
Her ex-husband, Jaesang, has been playing along with the farce by coming to our house for a day for the big festivals, Chuseok and Lunar New Year, but recently he’s been putting Haena in a panic by refusing to attend the weddings of any of our relatives. The pride of our mother’s widowed life is showing off her rich son-in-law.
Jaesang’s parents know about the divorce and are apparently torn, weighing the public shame of it all against the immediate urge to look for a better second wife for their son. They only met my mother twice throughout the entirety of the two-year marriage, and there is no danger of them telling her.
Haena got to stay in the Gangnam apartment, which is still in Jaesang’s name. It remains strategically scattered with his things for when our mother visits bearing baskets of food she’s cooked for her beloved son-in-law.
“It’s the only thing I can do for him,” our mother says whenever Haena protests that Jaesang barely eats at home. “It is my way of protecting you.” So Haena just takes the food.
* * *
—
IT WAS ON one of those days last year after yet another frustrating phone call with my mother about Haena (“Kyuri-ya, what do you think I should buy Jaesang for his birthday? Make sure you send your present early and write a card”) that I invited the two girls across the hall from me to have a drink. I had been meaning to talk to them for some time before I finally got around to it.
It says something about my frame of mind that I wanted to talk to them at all. Neither of them was particularly interesting to look at, nor did they seem to have interesting jobs or relevant hobbies or anything like that. No, what struck me each time I saw them was how close they were—how companionable and comfortable they were with each other. The giddy girl with the square face and the furtive girl with the pale face is how I thought of them. If they were together, their arms were linked, and I would see them around the neighborhood, eating at one of the corner vendors together or buying soju at the convenience store, the square-faced one always loud, both of them radiating tenderness. Sometimes they would leave their front door wide open to air out their apartment and I would see them lounging around in their pajamas, Pale Face playing with Square Face’s hair as they dozed watching dramas. “Like sisters,” I caught myself thinking in a melancholy way.
My own sister and I do not feature much in each other’s lives except to align ourselves on one goal—to shelter our mother as much as we can.
* * *
—
I KNEW JAESANG had quite a reputation at room salons for years before Haena found out about his “girlfriend.” Three years ago, I’d seen him doing something particularly disgusting at a room salon in Gangseo where I was working at the time. That was before I had my double jaw surgery, and the salon I worked at was one that had a connecting hotel upstairs.
I’d entered the room behind the other girls and saw Jaesang sitting in the far corner. I fled before he saw me and sought out the madam, who sent me home for the night because I was so nervous and she didn’t want a scene. She later went in and introduced herself to Jaesang, pampered him into feeling extra-special all night, and made him promise to phone ahead every time he came so that I wouldn’t accidentally be sent into his room. “I can’t have one of our girls unhappy,” she said to me, pinching my cheek. It made me want to puke, the way that she pretended to care about me when she kept me in such a state of ghastly anxiety every night about how much money I was bringing in.
Of course I never told Haena. My normally levelheaded sister behaved like a fool when she found out about the girlfriend, who worked at a Samseongdong room salon. But the divorce wasn’t really because she kicked up a fuss. Jaesang wasn’t in love with that girl or anything. He had just fallen out of love with Haena at that point and didn’t feel the need to endure her agony of heartbreak. And our family wasn’t one that would make him think twice about divorcing her.
* * *
—
THESE DAYS, it’s nice to finally be working at a “10 percent”—a salon that supposedly employs the prettiest 10 percent of girls in the industry—where the madam isn’t blatantly pushing us to have sex with clients for “round 2.” There is still pressure to bring in money, but it’s slightly more civilized. Whenever I get angry at Madam, the other girls whisper at me that she’s not that bad, and to remember other madams of my past. We’ve all suffered under those far more treacherous.
* * *
—
OUR MOTHER HAS secrets too, only they are the harmless kind.
“Kyuri, the secret ingredient I put in every side dish is a few drops of Chinese plum sauce,” she says, sweat forming in the deep wrinkles of her forehead as she fries anchovies with crushed peanuts and plum syrup. “You can put it in anything and it is so good for health!”
Whenever I travel home to Jeonju, I watch her toss them in the frying pan with her feeble wrists. She never lets me near the stove. The result is that Haena and I don’t know how to cook a single dish, not even rice in the rice cooker.
“You will both have a better life than a housewife daughter-in-law,” she said to us growing up. “I would rather you not know how to cook at all.”
Her body has been shutting down since our father died. She had to give up her corner at the market, where she’s sold slabs of tofu for the past thirty-five years. They found and removed two large tumors in her right breast two years ago. They were benign but of alarming size. She’s hovering dangerously on the edge of diabetes and her bones have started to crumble. Her left hand had an infection six months ago and is still swollen like a sponge. I massage it for hours whenever I make the trip to see her, and am taking her in for a surgeon consultatio
n next month, the earliest I could get an appointment at the SeoLim Hospital.
* * *
—
SUJIN ALWAYS LIKES to say that I am the first real filial child she has ever met, and Ara nods vehemently in agreement. “Who knew a room salon girl would be the daughter of the century?” Sujin says. It’s because I told her that I did not buy any of the bags I own, and that I do not have any money because I send it all to my mother.
* * *
—
MY MOTHER CALLS me hyo-nyeo—filial daughter—and strokes my hair with so much love it breaks my heart. But sometimes, she has spells when she shakes with anger toward me.
“There is no greater sorrow than not getting married!” she says. “The thought of you alone in life, no children, that is what is making me old and sick.”
I tell her I am meeting scores of men at the office where she thinks I work as a secretary. It’s just a matter of finding the right one.
“Isn’t that why you suffered so much pain with your surgery?” she says, stabbing her finger into my cheek. “What is the point of having a beautiful face if you don’t know how to use it?”
* * *
—
EVEN AS A GIRL, I knew the only chance I had was to change my face. When I looked into the mirror, I knew everything in it had to change, even before a fortune-teller told me so.
When I finally awoke the evening of my jaw surgery and the anesthesia began to wear off, I started screaming from the pain, but my mouth would not open and no sound came out. After hours of persistent agony, the only thing I could think was how I wanted to kill myself to stop it—I tried to find a balcony to jump from and when I couldn’t, frantically searched for anything sharp or glass; a belt to hang on a showerhead. They told me later that I had not even made it to the door of my hospital room. My mother held me during the night as I wept, soaking the bandages that encased my face.
I am terrified of her dying. When my mind wanders, I think about her tumors spreading poison throughout her body.
* * *
—
THE OTHER DAY at my clinic, I finally saw the actual girl that I modeled my face after: Candy, the lead singer from that girl group Charming. She was sitting in the waiting room when I walked in, slumped in the corner with hair spilling messily out of a black cap.
I went to sit beside her because I wanted to see how clear the likeness was. I’d brought in photos of Candy’s face when I had my first consultations with Dr. Shim. She has a slight upturned bump at the end of her nose that makes her so uniquely, startlingly beautiful. Dr. Shim was the surgeon who gave it to her, which is the reason I had come to him.
Up close, I saw that her eyes were streaked with red, as if she had been crying, and she had ugly spots on her chin. She hasn’t been having a good year, with all those rumors flying about how she has been bullying Xuna, the new girl in their group, and that she’s busy running around with a new boyfriend and missing rehearsals. The comments on Internet portal sites have been merciless and torrential.
Sensing my staring, she pulled her cap down lower and started twisting her rings—a slender gold band on each of her ten fingers.
When the nurse called her name and she stood up to walk in, she turned to look at me and our eyes met, as if she could hear what I was thinking.
I wanted to reach over and shake her by the shoulders. Stop running around like a fool, I wanted to say. You have so much and you can do anything you want.
I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.
Wonna
My grandmother died last year, in a hospital for the senile in Suwon. She was alone when she died—that is, no family members were with her—and the old woman in the next bed was the one who told the nurse to remove the body because it was starting to smell.
When I heard the news I became so distressed I had to leave work and go home to lie down.
My father was the one who had called to let me know. “You don’t have to go to the funeral,” he said. When I was a child, and then when I was older, I used to daydream about her dying. I told my father I had no intention of going to the funeral.
My father and I had never really spoken about the years I lived with her as a child, when he was working abroad. Sometimes, one of us would obliquely refer to her things—“He looks like the dog your grandmother brought home one day when I was in middle school” or “That shed looks like the outhouse at Grandmother’s house”—but these were comments to which neither of us expected a reply.
My husband came home early that day. My father must have called him at work. He came into the bedroom, where I was lying with my eyes open, and he sat down next to me and took me by the hand.
I don’t know what he thought I was feeling. He knew that I had spent my childhood in the care of my grandmother, and also that I never talked about her and had never once gone to see her. So he must have understood something. But I cannot possibly discuss my memories with him. I can picture his round, well-meaning face puckering up in sympathy, and I would have to get up and leave.
“I have experienced terrible events in my life as well, you know,” he said to me when he was first trying to ask questions about my childhood and I would just look at the floor and not respond. He was talking about the death of his mother, which I am sure was very sad and scarred him to a sympathy-inducing degree, but he would not understand what I went through living with my grandmother. Most people have no capacity for comprehending true darkness, and then they try to fix it anyway.
He is a person who expects people to be kind because he is kind. When he drinks or watches a movie, he will say sentimental things that will make me embarrassed for him. If we are in a group setting, I become deeply ashamed. I married him because I was tired and it was already too late for me, even though I was still so young.
* * *
—
AT NIGHT, when my husband is sleeping next to me, I often become so claustrophobic that I have to walk downstairs and go sit on the top step of the front stairs of our office-tel. Our street is so full of life at night that it wipes my thoughts clean.
If it is a weekday, the girls who live above me usually start trickling home around 11 P.M. They look so quiet and cold no matter the weather and they nod at me and whisper hello under their breath. Sometimes I say hello back and sometimes I look away. They don’t know that I have been waiting for them to come home.
On weekends, I occasionally catch them on their way out. But the best is when I hear them knocking on each other’s doors to borrow makeup or order fried chicken together at strange hours of the day.
Until they come home, I sit on the stoop and watch passersby. During the day ours is an ugly street, washed out and dusty with trash piled up and cars honking and trying to park in odd corners, but at night, the bars light up brilliantly with neon signs and flashing televisions. In the summer, they set up blue plastic tables and stools outside and I can hear parts of people’s conversations as they drink. Usually they are sharing anecdotes about the last time they drank together. Sometimes, men talk about the women they are seeing and vice versa, but a lot of times, conversation is about TV shows. It is astounding, how much people talk about TV.
Perhaps it’s because I spent most of my childhood without one—my grandmother smashed her television in one of her rages—but I still don’t know how to talk about dramas or actors, nor do I understand jokes from those reality shows. My husband thought this was charming when we first met and he would always try to work it into conversations somehow until I asked him to stop. Everyone who heard that small fact about me, though, assumed it was because my parents were focused on education—apparently there are many young parents these days who don’t allow televisions in the house because of their children. I understand how reality TV can damage your brain, because the way they replay the same punch line scenes with the laugh tracks
over and over is enough to make one go mad. But when they hear the name of the provincial university I graduated from, they look at each other as if to say, See, this is why progressive parenting is risky.
* * *
—
IT’S NOT an original thought perhaps, but I think people watch so much TV because life would otherwise be unbearable. Unless you are born into a chaebol family or your parents were the fantastically lucky few who purchased land in Gangnam decades ago, you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn’t even enough to buy a house or pay for childcare, and you sit at a desk until your spine twists, and your boss is somehow incompetent and a workaholic at the same time and at the end of the day you have to drink to bear it all.
But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.
* * *
—
UNTIL I WAS EIGHT, I lived with my grandmother in a small stone house in Namyangju, northeast of Seoul. It had a low stone wall that ran around it, an outhouse with a leaky roof, and a pair of raised urns by the front door that my grandmother used to keep goldfish.
My grandmother slept in her room and I slept in the living room, on the floor next to a small white statue of the Virgin Mary, who had tears of blood painted down her cheeks. At night, when the rest of the world was asleep, the statue would seem to glow as it stared down at me, with the tears turning black. When my grandmother’s prayer group from church would meet at the house, she would sometimes tell the story of how I once tried to scrub the blood off the Virgin’s cheeks with a kitchen brush, and she’d had to get the tears repainted.
