by Frances Cha
I’ve met her a few times now. The first time was in New York, at Hanbin’s graduation from Columbia. Since returning to Korea, Hanbin has ambushed her twice, once by taking me to the airport to greet her on the way back from a gallery sales trip to Hong Kong, the second, arranging for the three of us to have lunch for his birthday at his favorite restaurant at the Reign Hotel. The first time, the only things she said to me were “Oh, hello” and “Goodbye,” answering Hanbin’s questions in the car with monosyllables. The second time, at the lunch, she asked me gentle questions about my family, questions that showed she knew all about me already and I shouldn’t attempt to gentrify myself. “So, how old were you when you last saw your parents?” “And your uncle, he ran a…taxi restaurant?” (with a shudder). And the kicker, “It’s just so wonderful how there are so many opportunities these days for people like you, isn’t it? Our country has become such an encouraging place.”
I could have looked hurt or angry, I know, but I settled on chirpy as my default state a while ago, because I remembered something Ruby said to me once back in New York.
“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”
* * *
—
I STOP BY Joye department store to buy miniature orchids from the flower shop on the first floor. It costs ten times more than the flower market near my apartment, but the pot bears the Joye logo and name. When I meet Hanbin outside the subway station nearest to his house, he sees the shopping bag and says there was no need to buy a gift, but I can tell he approves.
Hanbin’s house is modern and astonishing—all gray slate and glass and slanted roofs—atop a hill in Sungbukdong behind a tall brick wall. When the gate opens for us, my heart drops in an incredulous lurch that takes my breath. He has only told me about the inconveniences, of how cold it can get in the winters, how tourists and journalists tramp about the neighborhood to catch a glimpse beyond the gate, how friends of the house’s famous Dutch architect show up for impromptu calls to examine his first commission in Asia. The architecture reminds me of Japanese museums that I studied in school, all stark lines and muted beauty.
But it’s not until I am standing on the lawn—and what house in Seoul, let alone one in the most coveted arts neighborhood, has a lawn of real grass?—that I realize I almost despise Hanbin right now. Certainly his mother.
The inside of the house seems to be bursting with even more white flowers than the gardens. Heaps of orchids and peonies in unusual arrangements are everywhere and I look at my little pot sadly.
“I will go tell your mother that you are here,” says the man who opened the front door for us. He bows, takes my coat, and hands me a pair of leather slippers from the marble shoe closet. Despite his formal speech to Hanbin, he is dressed casually—just a long-sleeved (striped!) T-shirt and wrinkled khakis, not the suit or uniform I realize I’d been expecting.
“That’s all right—I’ll go up and tell her myself,” says Hanbin. He asks me to wait in the living room to the left of the foyer, then bounds down the hallway to the right.
The living room is cavernous—about the height and size of a basketball court, with groupings of chairs and coffee tables in each corner. In the center is the Ishii fish, the size and color of a baby elephant—a beautiful thing that glistens as I draw near. The art on the walls is also modern Japanese, a mix of Tsunoda, Ohira, and Sakurai. I sit down in the far corner, next to another tiny Ishii the color of an angry cloud.
The man who opened the door brings me some tea on a tray. The tea is a small mauve flower that opens in the water as it steeps. He adjusts the flowers on the coffee table without saying a word, and I realize that Hanbin was right, Mr. Choi the driver would have been a comfort to me if he’d been here, which he’s not.
“Mother’s actually not feeling well so it’ll just be us today,” says Hanbin, coming toward me. “She has a terrible headache and she’s lying down.”
He’s looking at me a little too earnestly as he is saying this, as if he’s forcing himself not to look away. Either he’s lying or he thinks she’s lying and my heart begins pounding loudly. Acid starts to trickle through my veins. He does not say she apologizes for not coming down.
“That’s terrible. I hope she feels better soon.” What else is there to say, really? We stare into our cooling teas, then he clears his throat.
“I’ll show you the gardens while they’re getting lunch ready. Unless you want cake or ddeok? Are you hungry?”
I shake my head and he takes my hand and leads me back outside through the foyer. On the way out, I see two uniformed women peeping at me from a doorway and I jerk my head so that they are not in my line of vision. When we reach the door, the man who opened it for us earlier materializes with our coats.
The gardens stretch around the house, unfolding into a series of miniature landscapes. My favorite is the pine grove in the back, a maze of carefully designed and pruned pine trees. The scent has a calming effect on my nerves.
Through the trees, the view floats up toward us. I can see other massive houses scattered on the hill and the rest of the city sprawled out beneath them.
As Hanbin walks in front of me, stooping beneath low-hanging branches, my heart burns. It is too much, this house, his mother, the art. What was he thinking, bringing me here?
“That’s my grandmother’s house,” Hanbin says, pointing to a white two-story house in the distance. It’s a Western-style house surrounded by rosebushes and more pine trees. His paternal grandmother is on the brink of dementia, and has lately taken to accusing the servants of stealing her money.
“And over there, that’s Ruby’s father’s house,” he says. My head snaps toward where he is pointing, to the right of his grandmother’s house. Even from a distance it looms like a fortress, morose and dark, the gardens a sinister moat. But perhaps it’s because I am seeing it with Ruby’s voice whispering in my head.
We stand there, saying nothing, until he’s the one who starts walking back first.
After lunch—a painfully awkward affair served in a spectacular sunlit dining room by two silent men—I ask Hanbin to drop me off at my studio. He doesn’t protest, although I know he wanted to see a movie, and in the car we are both quiet.
“Can I come in?” he asks again when he pulls up in front of the art studios on the university campus.
“Absolutely not,” I say, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek before getting out of the car. “I don’t know why you keep asking.”
Scowling, he drives away.
* * *
—
IN THE STUDIO, I feel the great wash of relief I always feel when I walk in through the door. Tying my hair back, I head into the bathroom to change into my work clothes and hang Kyuri’s dress carefully on the door.
The terrible drumming in my heart subsides as I pick up my small chisels and sit down at my workstation. The scene that I have been trying to bring to form—the picture that’s so clear in my head—is that of a night sea with a girl on a boat. Her long hair covering her face, she’s leaning forward over the water, wearing a sheer nightgown and a blood-red ruby ring on her left ring finger. She is riveted by something in the water.
Last week, I started to carve her out of plaster. Her face was the easiest part—it’s the hair that will take the longest. I think I will make the sea out of ostrich feathers and the boat will be a real boat—a wooden rowboat, I am thinking, with faded red paint.
After a few hours of carving, I have to set the chisels aside to start working on a watercolor of the same scene. I just want a rendering of what I had in my head before I forget anything, although such loss is hard to imagine. This is going to be the sixth in my latest Ruby series. The other five pieces—paintings and sculptures—are sitting in the back of my studio, in the shadows. They were pathetic manifestations of what I had in my head, of course,
but they are as finished as they can be for now.
* * *
—
IN A SHOE BOX somewhere under my bed is a stack of black-and-white photographs—my first Ruby series, if I choose to think about it that way. My favorite shows Ruby in a white fur coat, a preposterous thing of shorn mink with cream silk lining and a matching hat. She is standing on our school library steps (how I miss winter in New York!), snow piled up on either side of her, lights glowing in the windows. Underneath the coat, she is wearing a knee-length ink black dress, stockings, and precarious high heels. She looks happy, her eyes crinkled in a rare, crooked smile.
We were on our way to a gallery opening that evening and we had stopped by the library to see if they had any books on the featured artist—a German painter who specialized in neon-tinted birch trees. “All we need to read is the introduction,” she said authoritatively as she ran a finger along the spine of the book we found in the European wing. “That’s all you need,” she said. When she found the book, she skimmed the introduction twice and made me memorize the titles of three of the artist’s most noted works.
Hanbin picked us up that night in front of the library. Or did we meet him at the gallery? He picked us up most nights, anyway, and he was certainly there for that particular exhibition. He bought a painting for Ruby and surprised her with it for her birthday a month later. It was the cheapest one at the exhibition, he whispered to me at her party. She loved that painting so much—a fluorescent forest of birches, streaked with shocking pink and yellow, in a thick gold frame inscribed with her name. RUBY SO-WON LEE.
I wonder where the painting is now, maybe up on a wall at her father’s house, or in some closet crowded with skeletons.
* * *
—
THERE WAS a short article about Ruby’s younger brother in the news the other day—the American news, not Korean news. His exotic car rental start-up had just received funding from the second-biggest venture capital firm in San Francisco. I found this puzzling for many reasons—why would Mu-cheon need funding at all, why was he trying to work on something as insignificant as a car rental company in America, in English no less, and what happened to law school?
But when I asked Hanbin about it, he just shrugged and said, “Why not?” which effectively stopped any further line of conjecturing. Hanbin did say that he thought the funding thing was more about publicity than about actual need, and that the Silicon Valley investors probably needed Mu-cheon’s connections more than Mu-cheon needed them. An illegitimate son is still an heir, potent and wary, a prize to be carefully wooed over long periods of time.
* * *
—
WHEN I THINK about Ruby, I remember her best just lounging on her white sofa in her Tribeca apartment, caressing a piece of jewelry she had bought that day, surrounded by impossibly beautiful things. She was a born collector with a devastating eye, who could make harmony out of the myriad pieces she purchased. We would walk into an antiques store and she would home in on seemingly incongruous, heart-poundingly extravagant knickknacks—a century-old ebony jewelry box encrusted with uncut gemstones, gold-edged teacups from Russia, a woebegone nineteenth-century doll with ash blond curls and a wardrobe of miniature, exquisite dresses—but when they came home to her apartment they looked as if they had been grown there, sown from other seeds of beauty. Her apartment nourished a part of me I didn’t know I had—a desolate craving to touch and see and luxuriate in objects.
The thing about her was that she knew I was entranced by her things, but she didn’t mind. I was already firmly categorized in her mind as an artist, a creator and lover of beauty. My worshipping of her taste fed her vanity as a collector.
“Just because you buy a bunch of expensive things doesn’t mean you have a collection,” she said contemptuously once while reading an article in the Times about the latest spending habits of the new rich in China.
I understood what she meant though. Her eye wasn’t exactly a gift, but more of an instinct, as natural to her as melancholia, or distrust.
* * *
—
I MET THEM all in New York—Ruby, Hanbin, their group of friends. It had been an unfathomable step for me, going to New York to start a program at SVA. It was my first time on a plane, my first time out of the country, my first time stepping out from under the umbrella of the Loring Center, my first time following a star. Among other shocks, I had been bewildered to find so many Koreans so at home in the streets and cafés and stores of New York—and in the hallways and classrooms of SVA—for whom studying abroad and traveling back and forth by themselves were commonplace occurrences. For some, it was something they had been doing since they were children.
I was there on a SeoLim visual arts scholarship, a fact that Ruby found amusing when she interviewed me for a job at her gallery. I didn’t understand why she laughed until another girl who was there on the same scholarship told me months later that Ruby’s father was Lim Jun Myeong, the CEO of SeoLim Group and one of the most famous men in Korea. Ruby and her brother Mu-cheon were younger than his other children by more than two decades, and so it was rumored that Lady Lim was not their mother and they were illegitimate by way of a receptionist in a SeoLim office building.
I’d responded to an ad on the bulletin board in our department building—a forlorn, empty square occasionally punctuated by ads for babysitting jobs posted by our cash-strapped professors. I’d needed a job desperately—the scholarship covered my tuition, my room and board, and the plane fare but not much else—and an ad in Korean looked like a lifeline. I plucked it off the board and retreated to my room to study it.
It was remarkable not only for its contents but for its appearance—gold-foil-pressed script on thick olive-colored paper—which looked more like a wedding invitation than a student flyer.
“Art Assistant Wanted for New Gallery Opening” was the header, and underneath, in smaller script, it said, “Thorough knowledge of contemporary art and fluency in Korean and English a plus.”
I imagine there wasn’t much competition for the job, but I was ecstatic when she hired me along with four other girls from various universities throughout the city. I was put in charge of designing the gallery’s catalogs, flyers, and postcards. The printing costs alone astounded me but she paid them without even glancing at the bills I would nervously hand over.
For nearly three weeks, our small group worked into the night, Ruby and I usually staying the latest as I would help her with anything she needed, even running out to bring back coffee and croissants, all bought on Ruby’s credit card, of course. The other girls tried to befriend her, but she would only respond coolly and monosyllabically to anything that wasn’t work-related, and this bred resentment. I didn’t realize until later that these girls all came from wealthy families and didn’t need the money like I did—they took the jobs so that they could meet Ruby.
Sometimes, I would just stare at her as she was working. She cut a striking figure, no matter what she was doing. She wore only lipstick and no other makeup, although I suspected she had had her eyeliner tattooed, and her clothes were always a marvel, consistently stunning in both style and cut in unusual color combinations. She had a low voice and a rare smile, which sometimes flashed across her face like a comet.
“The dean loves her because of all the donations her father made,” said one of the Parsons girls after Ruby asked us to work on Sunday morning. “And he only made them because she didn’t get into Stanford like everyone else in their family.”
“I heard it was the biggest disgrace—even all the cousins-in-laws’ neighbors get in if they’re connected to the SeoLim family,” said another girl, who went to Tisch. “Then apparently she wanted to go to Yale, but her boyfriend’s ex is going there so she threw a fit and decided to come here.”
“No, no, it was because of a huge drug bust at Ashby,” said the first girl, flipping her hair. “She was sup
posed to get kicked out, but they let her graduate because her dad donated a new gym. My cousin goes to Ashby and she said it cost twenty million dollars and it’s outfitted with all the latest SeoLim technology.”
Ruby came in and glanced around the room until she saw me. “Miho, can you come help with these flyers?” Without a word to anyone else she stalked back out immediately and I could see the other girls’ dissatisfaction printed on their faces. Which pleased me, because they had been ignoring me once they discovered I was on scholarship and hadn’t gone to a boarding school in America.
“I’ve never heard of it,” said another SVA girl when I told her the name of my public middle school in Korea. “Which neighborhood is it in again?” And when I told her it was in Cheongju, her eyebrows bounced sky high before she turned swiftly back to her phone.
But I didn’t care, and it wasn’t like I could have lied about my schools anyway. For all its millions of people, Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else. That’s just the way it is in this country, and the reason why people ask a series of rapid-fire questions the minute they meet you. Which neighborhood do you live in? Where did you go to school? Where do you work? Do you know so-and-so? They pinpoint where you are on the national scale of status, then spit you out in a heartbeat.
* * *
—
THE THING ABOUT Ruby was, it wasn’t only me or other Koreans who found her fascinating. I would be sitting with her in a coffee shop or even a library and people would just steal glances at her the entire time. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was—the sheen of her skin and her eclectic, expensive clothes or stony expression, I did not know. But it was only the most oblivious of men who would try to talk to her. Once, we were eating dinner in a new salad place near her apartment when a man approached her. He looked foreign—Italian?—and he was young and slickly dressed in a well-cut suit, clearly a finance type stepping out for a quick take-out dinner to eat at his desk. He had been looking in our direction while standing in line, and after he had picked up his bag of food, he came and stood by our table.
