by Frances Cha
When I finally check my phone there are three texts from my husband. “Everything okay?” “Haven’t heard from you in a while, is something wrong?” “How are you feeling?”
I text a quick “Sorry, busy at work. Will call later.” I should have known he’d find a way to interrupt any happy excursion.
On the walk back to the subway station, I try to close my mind to them, but all I can see are babies in their strollers. Just how many babies are there in this city? Aren’t the government and the media always bemoaning how our birth rate is the lowest in the world?
All the strollers look precariously high—the Scandinavian ones that are everywhere these days. I want to yell at the mothers—the babies look like they’re going to fall out! Stop texting and strolling!
A little baby peers up at me from his stroller and scowls while his mom is browsing through an accessories rack on the street. He’s wrapped in a two-tone embroidered cashmere blanket that I recognize from the European baby clothes blogs—it must have cost more than my monthly salary. I give the mom a hard once-over—she looks haggard, even under a full load of makeup.
I don’t want anything to do with boys—I just want a tiny little girl, to dress up in soft, chic beige and pink and gray dresses and bounce in my lap. I wouldn’t get one of those top-heavy strollers but a sturdy one with a big basket on the bottom for when I’d go grocery shopping with her to make her baby food. All-organic porridge with a little bit of meat and mushrooms and beans and carrots. No salt or sugar until she’s at least two. Definitely no cookies or juice or television.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up because I have been dreaming that my baby is sleeping next to me and I have rolled over onto her and she is suffocating. I wake up panting, with sweat coating my back.
I don’t tell my husband about this, of course. I tell no one.
* * *
—
WALKING UP the front steps of my office-tel, I almost collide with a hurtling body. When we both take a step back, I see that it is a girl from upstairs. She’s one of the Loring Center girls who is always ordering food at all hours of the night, the one who has had some kind of massive surgery on her face recently and still has bandages wrapped around her jaw. She apologizes and bows. “That’s okay,” I whisper.
She bows one more time and then bounces away down the stairs, her step light and buoyant despite her face. Where is she going, looking like that?
I turn after her and watch as she skips away down the street. She looks so free. They all do—the gaggle of girls upstairs.
If I had known I would envy children from an orphanage, I would not have lived in so much terror of my grandmother threatening to drop me off at one.
That girl was actually the reason my husband and I came to live here, in this office-tel. My husband and I, before we were married, had visited several real estate agents in the Yeoksam area close to his work. We had been sitting in front of a neighborhood map with the agent when I heard voices behind me talking about the Loring Center. I stopped breathing as I listened with all my being.
Long ago, my grandmother had taken me to one of the Loring Center branches, which was one neighborhood over from ours. She sat me down on the steps and said to think about what I had done wrong that day and whether I deserved to come home with her, or be dropped off like the other children whose parents did not want them. She pointed to a large box that protruded from the wall and said all she needed to do was ring the bell that hung over the box for someone to come and take me in.
The girls who were sitting behind us at the real estate office were talking about their dorm room at the Loring Center in Cheongju, and how having a new place together would be like living there again. They were so naïve, those girls, that they would discuss such a thing in front of a real estate agent.
But to my surprise, the agent who was talking to them was quoting a price that seemed not only reasonable but cheap, and he was promising that the office-tel was new and clean. When the girls had left to follow him to see the room, I asked our agent about the office-tel they had just talked about. “I couldn’t help overhear that conversation,” I said.
“But that’s not really for married couples,” he said, frowning. He had been thinking of more expensive apartments for us when he heard where my husband worked.
“Cheaper is good,” I said. “I want to see that office-tel, please.”
And so we had installed ourselves at Color House, happy about the cheaper rent. And I got to see these girls come and go—perhaps I would have been one of them, once upon a time.
Then perhaps I would have been as free as they are. I would love to be on my own, living with a roommate, ordering noodles at 2 A.M., waking up deliciously alone, with no one to ask what my plan is for the day.
I wish I could invite one or more of them over, but that would require me to possess an entirely different personality. I wish I could tell them that I empathize with them, that we are the same. I want to tell them I was given up by my mother too.
* * *
—
I SUPPOSE that thinking about my mother makes not being able to have a baby all the more difficult. Getting pregnant is not the issue, it’s that these babies keep on dying. I read somewhere that miscarriages are babies self-terminating when they know there will be a problem. It hollows me out, the way that they would rather kill themselves than be born to me.
* * *
—
WHEN I THINK of my mother, I imagine that she is a rich woman—self-made and invincible. I also like to imagine that she is alone and tortured by regret over how she left her baby. Sometimes, if I am in a public space, I look around casually to see if there is a well-dressed woman in expensive sunglasses lurking behind a corner with a hungry expression on her face.
After leaving you, I have never known what it is like to be happy, she says, when she musters up the courage to come talk to me.
When I think of my grandmother, though, I understand my mother for leaving. If I’d had any backbone as a child, I would have run away too.
She is out there somewhere—my mother. Whenever she sees a baby, she is thinking about me.
* * *
—
I HAD NOT even known that all the venomous things my grandmother spewed about my mother abandoning me had been true. I had thought that my mother was with my father overseas as he worked. I did not understand until he came back that my mother had left both of us.
It had been a few weeks after my cousin’s accident that my father came for me at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother had not spoken to me in those weeks—she had also stopped feeding me—she had stopped being at home altogether during the day because she said she could not bear to be in the same house with me. I made my own rice and ate the dried food that tasted bad uncooked.
But when my father came for me—that was one thing to his credit, that he had packed up and left his life in South America with a local woman when he heard about the accident—my grandmother kicked up a fuss you couldn’t believe! She shrieked, she gagged, she threw things and clutched me to her so hard that her nails dug into my neck and I wriggled away and ran to my father, whom I did not even know, calling out, “Father, Father.”
When he took me to his new apartment in Seoul, he said that we were both starting over. That we could be happy now.
* * *
—
IT’S PAST 1 A.M. and I’m stooped over the toilet bowl again.
My morning sickness only comes at night, rearing its head after my husband has already gone to sleep. It’s mostly in my throat—it feels like I’m going to throw up every few minutes but I never do, then I feel ravenous, but when I go through the list of things to eat in the house, I want to throw up again.
Something not agreeing with you, baby? I want to ask as I gingerly touch my lower stomach. Was it the ice
cream? The noodles? They’re the only things I can bring myself to eat these days and the reason why my stomach looks like I’m five months pregnant instead of two. I’ve taken to wearing drapey, shapeless dresses to try to mask my protruding belly—but I’m sure the razor eyes at work will notice before long. My fists clench when I think about what they’ll say—and it’ll be even worse if I lose this one too. Not that they knew about the other miscarriages—they just gave me hell last time for calling in sick for three days in a row.
Currently, in my New Product Development role, my immediate boss is a thirty-seven-year-old unmarried woman whom I almost feel sorry for every time we have team night. The minute dinner starts, the talk always turns to why no one has married her.
“Why don’t we go around the table and offer some theories for Miss Chun?” Department Head Lee says once the meat order has been placed by Chief Cho. “Chief Cho, what do you think?”
Then the men take turns dissecting her height (too tall), her education (too threatening), her personality (too strong), her clothes (too dark), and start offering advice about how to attract a man (incorporate cute mannerisms in speech).
Throughout it all, she titters and jokes along with them about her shortcomings. “I know, I really need to tone down my first impression,” she says with a pained, toothy smile. All night, she tries desperately to seem like a good sport.
The ones who pay for the ravages of the firing squad are of course us, her underlings. The next day, she will invariably scream at us for “unacceptable work,” and make us stay at the office well into the night with her. She’s happy at the office—there’s no one to go home to. But even if she wasn’t such a sour bitch, her complete ineptitude would keep me from feeling sorry for her. The only reason she continues to get promoted is because she stays past 11 P.M. most nights and broadcasts it loudly the next day, with us as witnesses. Management pegs her as “loyal.”
I have no desire to stay past midnight every night for a company that treats me like an ant to be crushed by the heel of a shoe. But those who do, the ones with no families, those are the ones that get ahead. The career woman I imagine my mother to be—she is probably one of them too.
I know it’s too early for the baby to be kicking—or for me to feel it kicking, anyway—but I could swear that I feel a gentle movement just under my belly button. I place my hand there and listen and wait. For what, I have not a shred of an idea.
“Please stay,” I whisper. “Please, please stay.”
Miho
I often wonder where I would be today, if my aunt and uncle had not decided they couldn’t keep me anymore.
They might have continued to raise me, if my cousin Kyunghee had not been so smart. She was five years older than I was, and from the fifth grade, she had exhibited flaring signs of intelligence that her teachers—even in our forlorn, sleepy school in the middle of the reed fields—were quick to single out and praise. Kyunghee can do long division in her head, Kyunghee can sketch a startling still life from memory, Kyunghee can memorize every king in Korean history. I was proud of her too, my gifted cousin, and my favorite thing to do was take my sketchbook and sit under the big tree outside my aunt and uncle’s restaurant and draw while she did her homework beside me, her lip curled in concentration as she worked slowly through her textbook. “Don’t get your fingers all dirty,” she’d say sometimes when she looked up from her homework, because even back then, I preferred to smudge out all of the edges in my drawings with my fingers. I don’t work with pencils much anymore, but when I do, they remind me of her.
Kyunghee did not notice me much. Her brain was always puzzling out things that interested her and she did not care for friends of her own. My aunt and uncle generally left me alone as well. They ran a “taxi food hall” for taxi drivers that served three varieties of hangover stews and simple side dishes. It was probably the cheapest restaurant in our town, on the edge of a patchy field of wildflowers, and we lived in two rooms at the back of the restaurant.
I don’t know where it came from—that drive of Kyunghee’s. She lived for praise and she was relentless in her studies. While I loafed around and watched the TV that was on for the customers, she would sit in the corner and finish her homework as soon as she got home, and when she did not understand a problem, she would walk to school early and find any teacher or staff person and ask until they showed her the answer. Needless to say, the grown-ups all loved her for this. My aunt and uncle did not know how to help her, but they were grateful to her for being so self-sufficient.
“I don’t know who she gets it from,” they said, shaking their heads proudly when customers would notice her studying and inevitably remark upon it.
In contrast, I was terrible at school. The only class I liked somewhat was art, but even in art class I struggled with following the very precise directions. I dreaded math, I dreaded Korean, science bewildered me, and sociology I thought was absurd. “This comes from her mother’s side of the family,” I heard my aunt say often to my uncle. She made no effort to hide her dislike of my mother, who my aunt said had made an alcoholic of my father. My parents had gambled, they drank, they fought, and finally they borrowed money from my aunt and uncle and went off somewhere—together or separately, nobody knew.
They did not hold my parents against me, however, my aunt and uncle. If they’d had a second, slower daughter of their own I think they would have treated her the same way they treated me. Kyunghee was their sun and that was a very natural thing.
When I was in fourth grade, and Kyunghee in the third year of middle school, her teacher came home with Kyunghee and me one day and said that Kyunghee should apply for the accelerated science high school.
“She will almost certainly be accepted if she has just a little direction, a little push,” said her teacher, a solemn young woman with harsh bangs and owlish eyes. “She does, however, need to start preparing immediately for the test if you decide to do this.”
Preparation meant tutoring, and tutoring meant money and the restaurant had not been doing well for a long time. More and more, I had not been able to watch TV because my aunt and uncle turned it off when there were no customers, to save electricity.
* * *
—
“SO THAT’S WHEN they sent you to an orphanage?” Ruby asked incredulously. They were all amazed as they listened to my story. Ruby, Hanbin, their friend Minwoo, and I were at a small, crowded izakaya on St. Marks Place, eating yakitori and drinking shochu. Ruby and Minwoo were fascinated and rapt, while Hanbin was expressionless.
“Well it sounds bad when you say it that way,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever told this story to friends. I did have to write a personal essay for my scholarship application, and had to touch on a few of the points in my interview with the committee that ultimately sent me to New York, but this was different. This was like taking a shower in the middle of the room with everyone watching.
“How else would you say it?” Ruby asked.
* * *
—
I DO NOT REMEMBER what they said to me about going to the Loring Center. I don’t think I protested. I suppose it must have been difficult for me in the beginning. I do not remember. Or, to be more accurate, I have put a great deal of effort into not remembering. And now, I really do think I was fine.
For my first few months, my aunt and uncle still came to visit me every few weeks. Kyunghee came with them once and looked around and did not say much. She was too busy to come after that. My aunt would bring large containers of food and sometimes ice cream and sometimes they would take me somewhere in the car—mostly to the stationery store, where I was allowed to pick out what I wanted. I usually picked fluorescent gel pens, the ones from Japan that cost over two thousand won each and never developed scabs on the points. I knew they felt bad and I tried to show them all the best parts of the Center—the toddler classroom was bright and neat and the toddl
ers were cute to look at when they were not crying, and we even had a small, colorful library of English books that Miss Loring had put together herself. Other than in the infant and toddler rooms, there were only girls at the Center. The older boys were sent to other Centers around the country. The older girls—there were four of us in the same age range—had our own large room with our own cubbies and beds and desks and a TV, which we were always fighting about. And Miss Loring had decided to dedicate a room to art when she discovered I liked drawing. It had been a staff meeting room with a long table and plastic chairs, but now there were tin buckets of colored pencils and paints and large sheets of recycled paper stacked on the shelves. While the other girls went to the local public school, Miss Loring arranged for me to attend a small experimental arts school later on, when it became time for me to enter middle school.
* * *
—
“DID YOU MISS HOME?” asked Ruby. “When I first went to boarding school, I couldn’t eat for weeks.”
“That’s because you didn’t like the food,” said Minwoo as he bit into a delicately grilled chicken wing. “I remember your driver had to bring you Japanese food from Boston every few days.”
“Even that was terrible,” said Ruby, rolling her eyes. “I hate Boston Asian food. But anyways.”
* * *
—
I DON’T THINK I missed “home” much. There wasn’t much to miss. During the last few months that I lived there, my aunt had taken to agonizing by herself in the afternoon, when, often, there would be no customers. Her hair covering her face, she would weep over the cutting board as she chopped vegetables, salting the carrots and squash with her tears. Kyunghee avoided coming home at all, burning all-nighters in the study carrel that she rented by the month, while my uncle would often disappear, saying that he was going to drum up some business. The air was thick with stress. I did not realize until recently that my aunt’s weepiness could also have stemmed from her condition.
