by Frances Cha
He did not respond when the receptionist asked what day I would be returning for my second session, and I was the one who said we would call to schedule later that week.
* * *
—
IF YOU ASKED me why I married my husband, I would say it was because his mother was dead.
I found out the second time I met him—our first had been a blind date—and when he described his mother’s brain cancer and her daily radiation therapy and metastasis and ultimately her death, surrounded by her children in her hospital bed, he did not see the flash that must have leapt into my eyes. He was bent over his dish of pasta, his face closed in sorrow as he told me of her pain and his, while I listened, electrified.
There was actually another thing that made up my mind that day; the fact that he had chosen a restaurant near my house so it would be convenient for me. I had been on many a blind date at restaurants that were near the man’s work, or near the man’s favorite bar, or, the very worst, near the man’s home. The better he looked on paper, the more selfish he was, that much I knew.
But this man, not only was he kind, but he had a dead mother. If we had a child—and I wanted a baby, a wee creature who would be completely mine—she would not interfere with its upbringing. Nor could she ever take it away from me. It was too good to be true.
You see, I have long understood what most women learn by fire after they are married—that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genes of all women in this country. The bile festers below the surface, dormant but still lurking, until the son becomes of marriageable age; the resentment at being pushed aside, the anger of becoming second in their sons’ affections. It was not just my grandmother; I have seen it time and time again. That is the one storyline of every Korean drama that I recognize and understand, if I do not comprehend much else. So I rose from my torpor and jumped at my chance to avoid it.
That was what was most important to me. At the time.
Miho
I wake up to the sound of rain on our roof. After years of living in soundproof, prewar student apartments in New York, the sound reminds me of my childhood dorm room at the Loring Center. There, my bed was by the window and I would often go to sleep to the sound of rain hitting the pavement. Now, I live on the top floor of a small cheaply built four-story office-tel. The building is called Color House, although the outside is painted gray and the lettering is white. There isn’t a speck of color anywhere across the entire four stories and the rent is dirt cheap, but only on our floor. I didn’t realize the aversion to the number 4 was only an Asian superstition until I went to America, where they have an aversion to the number 13 because of some horror movie with a clown. Or a vampire, I forget. Anyway, the owner can’t hide the fourth floor of a four-story building like you can in tall apartments by just skipping the elevator buttons from three to five, and so I’m one of the small group of girls living in the two tiny apartments on this floor, grateful for the zip code and the subway station two blocks away.
As a child, I could not have imagined that I would one day live in the busiest part of Seoul, with its shimmering skyline and whimsical sculptures that stand guard outside each skyscraper. It is still amazing to me how comfortable people my age look as they walk in and out of marbled lobbies with disposable coffee cups in hand and employee passes dangling from their necks.
My life before I went to New York was a small restaurant in a field of flowers and then an orphanage in the middle of a forest. A provincial arts school in the mountains.
When Sujin wrote to me to come live with her after my New York fellowship ended, I leapt at the suggestion. She had left the Loring Center shortly before I had and we’d corresponded avidly over the years, swapping stories of Seoul and New York. We did not talk about the past much.
Sujin had told me that as office-tels go, hers was very small—usually they are dense high-rises with hundreds of units—and I told her to keep an eye out for a room opening up, so that I could book my plane ticket as soon as she gave the word.
She had been worried that I would be let down after my New York experience, but I told her I love the building, and it’s true. It was built for the unfettered.
It’s mostly girls who live here—apart from a married couple who live in the apartment below us. All day long girls go in and out in clean, pretty outfits. I think I’m the only girl in the entire office-tel who doesn’t wear full makeup or have dyed or permed hair. The first time Ara saw my hair she gasped and she hasn’t been able to stop touching it whenever she sees me. I took it for flattery (usually people in the States would exclaim how much they envied my hair) until I saw her shaking her head sorrowfully at Sujin as she ran her fingers through it. So raw, she wrote in her small notepad.
* * *
—
BECAUSE MY BEDROOM is next to the front door, which is next to the stairs, which echo loudly, each morning I hear the conversation of the married couple downstairs when they leave for the day. They are older, in their thirties, and the husband is desperately affectionate to the wife, who always sounds like she is somewhere far away.
“Wonna, do you want me to pick anything up from the store today?” he asks eagerly. “Are you craving anything in particular?” Three seconds later the wife responds, “What? Oh, whatever,” before they clickety-clack down the loudest stairs in the world.
Sometimes, I see the wife sitting on the steps when I come back late at night from the studio. She never raises her head as I walk past. It’s all very rude but I am used to her.
I listen to the rain a little while longer, trying to remember why I feel more agitated than normal this morning. Then it washes over me—today I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend, Hanbin, for lunch. At his parents’ house.
It is a momentous occasion of epic implications.
His mother will be there, and perhaps—and I can’t spend too long thinking about it as it makes me so anxious—his father too, who is usually busy playing golf or meeting famous people from other countries.
“I want to show you the Ishii, it finally came last week,” Hanbin said last night, when he came to pick me up from my studio at school. It seems indecent, somehow, that someone can just own an Ishii fish sculpture to put in their house, to touch if they want, whenever they want. The only times I have ever seen one were at the Gagosian in New York, from a distance, and at the National Gallery in D.C. after waiting two torturous hours in line with a full bladder because Ruby wanted to see it.
“And don’t worry, Mr. Choi will be there too,” he said when he saw my face. He was referring to his mother’s driver, who has picked us up several times before and has always been very polite to me. I looked at him in utter exasperation, my handsome, confident, clueless boy, who thinks that his family’s elderly driver pottering about his national treasure of a house would be the source of any comfort.
I stood up. “I need to go back to my work,” I said. We were in the empty café downstairs because I don’t allow him in my actual studio. He hasn’t seen anything I’ve been working on in the year that I have been back in Korea.
“Can I come see?” he said. “It’s so ridiculous that you won’t show me.”
I shook my head and frowned.
“No, not now,” I said. “Besides, my studio mate is there working too and she will get so upset if anyone else comes in.”
This was a lie, as the girl who shared my studio left months ago for a new fellowship at another university. And even if she had still been here, she would have loved nothing more than a chance to gossip with a good-looking older guy with lots of questions. She had been so chatty while she was working—she usually worked on fluorescent reproductions of Silla Dynasty crowns and belts that required no thinking, apparently—that I had been on the verge of complaining to the department head when she told me she’d been offered the fellowship, which awarded ten million won
more than what we got at our current university. She had bragged with intent to sting, but when I understood she’d be leaving immediately, I enveloped her in such a heartfelt hug that she was visibly discomfited.
“I will see you tomorrow,” I said to Hanbin firmly.
“I’ll pick you up at your apartment?” he asked. He knew I didn’t like him coming to the office-tel either. I don’t want him around the other girls, especially my roommate.
“No, that’s silly. Let’s just meet at Gyeongbokgung and you can pick me up there. Why would you come all the way down south? It’s a waste of time.”
Hanbin sighed and took my hand.
“You drive me nuts,” he said. “I must be a sick masochist, drawn to this.”
I don’t say anything because it must be true. He was that way with Ruby too, before me.
* * *
—
IN THE LIVING ROOM, my painfully plastic roommate, Kyuri, is watching her favorite drama. It’s clear from her makeup and hair that she hasn’t gone to sleep yet from the night before. In her lap, she’s caressing a red lambskin jumbo Chanel bag like it’s a puppy, while staring at the TV with bloodshot, unseeing eyes. This is odd behavior—usually she keeps her bags covered and enshrined in her closet, rarely taking them out unless there’s some pressing occasion.
“That’s pretty,” I say, eyeing the bag as I make myself a cup of coffee. “Was it another present?”
“Yeah, it’s from my gaming company CEO,” Kyuri says without taking her eyes off the TV. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”
Kyuri keeps a meticulous log of her presents and how much she sells them for, so that she doesn’t lose track of who gave her what. She has an arrangement with one of the luxury resale shops at the corner of Rodeo Drive in Apgujeong—they know she’ll hand the bags over to them completely new, and she knows she’s getting the best price in the neighborhood for them. And sometimes, when she has to see a client who’s been asking about his present, she’ll run and borrow a bag from the store for a night—they always have every kind in stock, the kinds that clients give their girls anyway. She tends to ask for the same exact one from all her men so that it’s less confusing to keep track of them, and she can just keep one and sell the rest that come in.
I know that anyone who is remotely respectable would die of horror before they would be seen with her. But she makes a lot of money and saves a lot of it too, unlike other room salon girls apparently—or anyone our age for that matter—and it’s hard not to respect her for that. Kyuri doesn’t drink Starbucks.
As roommates go, she and I get along pretty well, but mostly it’s because we don’t see each other too much. During the day I’m usually at the studio and she leaves for the salon and then work in the late afternoon. When she comes home I’m either still in the studio or asleep.
The one time we almost got into a fight was a few months ago, when we were drinking together on the weekend and she accused me of feeling superior to her because I was pretty without having surgery.
“You know, you’re just lucky that your kind of face is trendy these days,” she said, her eyes clouded over from anger and too much drink. “But you don’t have to be such a condescending snob about surgery.”
When I protested that I didn’t know what she was talking about, she fired off examples of criticisms I had voiced when we were watching dramas together.
“That was about Jeon Seul! You agreed with me!” I said. “You said her new nose looked like Michael Jackson’s!”
“No, I know,” she said, slumping onto her side. “I know what you think. You’re a stuck-up bitch.”
She fell asleep on the table and I was so vexed I didn’t even move her to her bed. The next morning, she didn’t remember our spat and came to my room to ask if I had an ice pack—in the night she had fallen off the chair and bruised her expensive face.
* * *
—
BUT I DO have to admit I feel a pinch of pride when someone asks if I have had surgery and I can say no. Our department head has gone so far as to make me promise not to cut my hair, which is really torturously unmanageable now that it hits my waist. Whenever I talk about cutting it off, department chair be damned, Hanbin gathers it in his hands and starts speaking to it tenderly as if it is a threatened child. “I won’t let her do it, don’t you worry,” he croons. And Kyuri hasn’t even read the articles and reviews of my work that unfailingly describe me as “the naturally beautiful artist-in-residence.”
“So I’m supposed to have lunch with Hanbin’s mother at their house today,” I tell Kyuri, against my better judgment. “Not sure what I’m going to wear.”
Kyuri sits up straight, her red eyes suddenly aglitter.
“Really? I thought she hated you!” she says.
I make a face.
“Well, it might not happen, but that’s the plan, anyway. Do you think my black long-sleeved dress is too…black?” I ask, sipping my coffee.
She shakes her head. “It’s not the fact that it’s black—didn’t you buy it at the market in Itaewon? You have to wear something really expensive. It’s more about your attitude when you wear it. You have to have that confidence you get from wearing something that costs too much.”
Kyuri gets up and slings the Chanel bag over her shoulder like she’s going out.
“You can borrow something of mine! Let me check what I have right now.”
For her work clothes, Kyuri uses a clothing rental store that specializes in room salon girls. This means a lot of short skirts and tight polyester dresses. I highly doubt she’ll have anything I will want to wear, but when I follow her into her room, she pulls three surprisingly demure dresses from her closet that still have Joye department store tags attached.
I run my fingers over a high-necked cobalt sheath in admiration. Whose taste is this? Certainly not Kyuri’s. She doesn’t offer an explanation though, and I don’t ask.
“I think this one is perfect,” she says, holding up an olive silk dress with cap sleeves and a chiffon belt. “It’s got color and sleeves.”
I take it from her and hold it up in the mirror, and I have to admit, the dress looks beautiful. I read the price tag and shudder. “No way, what if I spill something on this?”
She wrinkles her perfect, upturned nose. “That’s okay—this is really important! I want you to marry Im Ga-yoon’s son and introduce me to celebrities all the time.”
She doesn’t see the horror on my face as she gives me the dress on the hanger.
“Just try it on while I go wash my face. I have to start getting ready for my skin appointment,” she says and heads for her bathroom.
I laugh because I know that she will put on a full face of makeup just to have the nurses at the dermatologist’s wash it all off for her facials and treatments. Meanwhile, she shudders at my freckles and general lack of skin care, for refusing to implement her ten-step regimen twice a day. Sujin loves to compare the latest face masks and serums with her—Kyuri has what seems like a hundred bottles and jars on her vanity—but I barely remember to wash my face before going to sleep.
Slipping out of my pajamas, I try on the dress and am buttoning up the back when she returns, her face damp and shiny, and helps me fasten it. “Don’t you love it?” she asks before sitting at her vanity. “It looks amazing on you,” she says with approval, looking at me through the mirror over her collection of vials and face masks of all shapes and sizes. She pulls her hair back with a fluffy band and starts her ritual by applying drops of serum on her skin with her fingertips. Then she takes out a small syringe and pumps a honey-colored fluid over her face.
“What’s that?” I ask. I am always fascinated by how much time she spends on skin care.
“Ampoule with stem-cell extract,” she says matter-of-factly. “My skin is so dry this morning because I drank so much yesterday. This ampoule is just to tide me
over until I get the full treatment at the clinic. You know, you should go with me this morning, so that you’ll look your best for his mom. I can probably squeeze you in because I’m such a favorite customer.”
I’m tempted, because Kyuri’s skin gleams like pure glass right now, but the thought of lying still on a spa table flares my anxiety. I shake my head. She sighs at the look on my face and then starts applying tiny dots of eye cream with her fourth finger.
“So this is why you’ve been so jittery,” she says. “You know, I was going to make you drink this weekend to cheer up. It’s been so depressing around here because of your nervous energy, you know that? Now, what about this Bottega to go with the dress?” She pulls out an intricately woven bag from her closet and pushes it into my hands.
* * *
—
HANBIN’S MOTHER, or Im Ga-yoon, as the rest of the country knows her, was one of “the Triumvirate” of the 1970s—three Miss Koreas turned actresses that starred in most of the movies, dramas, and commercials during that decade. She was the oldest of the three and the most prolific, with an iconic role as a nun turned femme fatale in the hit series My Name Is Star. They used to say that you couldn’t spot a car on the road in the entire country when My Name Is Star was on. After a brief but damaging affair with her younger costar, she disappeared from the public eye for a few years until it came out that she had secretly married the younger son of the KS Group, a second-tier conglomerate that manufactured water tanks and heaters. And a decade after that, she opened an art gallery near Gyeongbokgung Palace and reinvented herself as the first dealer to bridge the celebrity world and the art world in Korea. Celebrities flocked to her to decorate their homes, and it’s been conjectured that she’s made more money than her father-in-law.
All these things I found out by reading obsessively about Hanbin’s family online and in the gossip pages of women’s magazines. The titles of the articles ranged from “Im Ga-yoon and Husband Snap Up Land on Jeju Island” to “Is Im Ga-yoon’s Gallery Inflating Prices to Celebrities?” and “KS Group Whistle-Blower’s Accusations: Will Im Ga-yoon’s Brother-in-Law Go to Jail?” Usually they were accompanied by paparazzi shots of Im Ga-yoon in snowy furs and sunglasses emerging from a car outside her gallery.
