by Min Jin Lee
Kim closed his eyes, wanting her to open the thin paper door to his room. She could slip off her dress the way the whore had done and put her mouth over him. He would pull her up to him and tuck her into his body. He would make love to her and wish for his death, because his life would have been perfect at that moment. Kim could envision her small breasts, pale stomach and legs, the shadow of her pubis. He grew hard again and laughed quietly, thinking that he was like a boy tonight, because he felt he could do it again and again and never have enough. Hansu was wrong to think that a pretty whore would take his mind off Kyunghee; in fact, he wanted her more now, far more than he ever had. He had tasted something sweet and cool tonight, and now he wanted an immense tubful of it—enough to bathe deeply in its refreshment.
Kim rubbed himself and fell asleep with his glasses on.
In the morning, Kim rose before the others and went to work without having breakfast. That evening, as he walked home, he noticed a pair of slight shoulders pushing a confection cart down the street. He ran to catch up with her.
“Let me.”
“Oh, hello.” Kyunghee smiled in relief. “We were worried about you this morning when you were gone. We didn’t see you last night. Did you eat today?”
“I’m all right. You don’t need to worry about me.”
He noticed that the stack of bags used to pack up the candies were all gone. “You’re out of bags. You did well today?”
She nodded, smiling again. “I sold everything, but the price of black sugar has gone up again. Maybe I can make jellies. They require less sugar. I need to find some new recipes.” Kyunghee stopped walking to wipe her brow with the back of her hand.
Kim took the cart from her to push it.
“Is Sunja at home already?” he asked.
Kyunghee nodded, looking worried.
“What’s the matter, Sister?”
“I’m hoping there won’t be a fight tonight. My husband’s being too hard on everyone lately. Also, he’s—” She didn’t want to say any more. Yoseb’s health was declining precipitously, but he was unfortunately well enough to feel the horrible discomfort of his burns and injuries. Every little thing upset him, and when he was angry, he never held back anymore. His poor hearing made him shout, a thing he had never done before the war.
“It’s about the boys’ school. You know.”
Kim nodded. Yoseb had been telling Sunja that the boys had to go to a Korean school in the neighborhood because the family had to be ready to go back. The boys had to learn Korean. Hansu was telling Sunja the opposite. Sunja couldn’t say anything, but everyone knew it was a terrible time to return.
The road to their house was empty. As the sun set, the dusk gave off a muted gray-and-pink light.
“It’s nice when it’s quiet,” she said.
“Yes.” Kim grasped the cart handle a little tighter.
Strands of her bun had come loose, and Kyunghee smoothed her hair behind her ears. Even at the end of a long workday, there was still something so clean and bright in her expression; it could not be defiled.
“Last night, he yelled at her again about the schools. My husband means well. He’s also in a lot of pain. Noa wants to go to Japanese school. He wants to go to Waseda University. Can you imagine? Such a big school like that!” She smiled, feeling proud of his grand dream. “And, well, Mozasu never wants to go to school at all.” She laughed. “Of course, it isn’t clear when we can return now, but the boys need to learn how to read and write. Don’t you think?” Kyunghee found herself crying, but couldn’t explain why.
From his coat pocket, Kim dug out a handkerchief that he used to clean his glasses and gave it to her.
“There are so many things we can’t control,” he said.
She nodded.
“Do you want to go home?”
Without looking at his face, she said, “I can’t believe my parents are dead. In my dreams, they seem alive. I’d like to see them again.”
“But you can’t go back now. It’s dangerous. When things get better—”
“Do you think that will be soon?”
“Well, you know how we are.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Koreans. We argue. Every man thinks he’s smarter than the next. I suppose whoever is in charge will fight very hard to keep his power.” He repeated only what Hansu had told him, because Hansu was right, especially when it came to seeing the worst in people—in this, he was always right.
“So you’re not a communist, then?” she asked.
“What?”
“You go to those political meetings. I thought if you went to them, then perhaps they’re not so bad. And they’re against the Japanese government, and they want to reunify the country, right? I mean, aren’t the Americans trying to break up the country? I hear things at the market from the others, but it’s hard to know what to believe. My husband said that the communists are a bad lot; they’re the ones who shot our parents. You know, my father smiled at everyone. He always did good things.”
Kyunghee could not understand why her parents were killed. Her father had been the third son, so his plot had been very small. Had the communists killed all the landowners? Even the insignificant ones? She was curious as to what Kim thought, too, because he was a good man and knew a lot about the world.
Kim leaned in to the cart, and he looked at her carefully, wanting to comfort her. He knew she was looking to him for advice, and it made him feel important. With a woman like this by him, he wondered if he would even care about politics anymore.
“Are there different kinds of communists?” she asked.
“I think so. I don’t know if I’m a communist. I am against the Japanese taking over Korea again, and I don’t want the Russians and the Chinese to control Korea, either. Or the Americans. I wonder why Korea can’t be left alone.”
“But you just said, we quarrel. I suppose it’s like when two grannies have a dispute, and the villagers constantly whisper in their ears about the wickedness of the other one. If the grannies want to have any peace, they have to forget everyone else and remember that they used to be friends.”
“I think we should put you in charge,” he said, pushing the cart toward the house. Even if it was just this brief walk, he felt happy to be with her, but of course, it made him want more. He’d gone to those meetings to get out of the house, because sometimes being near her was too much. He lived in that house because he needed to see her every day. He loved her. This would never change, he thought. His situation was impossible.
Only a few paces from home, the two walked slowly, murmuring this and that about their day, content and only a little less shy. He would continue to suffer with love.
10
Osaka, January 1953
Worried about money, Sunja had woken up in the middle of the night to make candies to sell. When Yangjin noticed that her daughter wasn’t in bed, she went to the kitchen.
“You don’t sleep anymore,” Yangjin said. “You’ll get sick if you don’t sleep.”
“Umma, I’m fine. You should go back to bed.”
“I’m old. I don’t need to sleep so much,” Yangjin said, putting on her apron.
Sunja was trying to make extra money for Noa’s tutoring fees. He had failed his first attempt at the Waseda exams by a few points, and he felt certain that he’d be able to pass on his next try if he could be tutored in mathematics. The fees for the tutors were exorbitant. The women had been trying to earn more so Noa could leave his job as a bookkeeper to study full time, but it was difficult enough to manage their household costs and Yoseb’s medical bills on his salary and their earnings from selling food. Each week, Kim gave them money for his room and board. He had tried to add to Noa’s tutoring fund, but Yoseb forbade the women from taking any more than what was a reasonable sum. Yoseb would not allow Sunja to accept any money from Hansu for Noa’s schooling.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” Yangjin asked.
Sunja nodded, layin
g a clean cloth over the large chunks of black sugar to muffle the sound of the mortar and pestle.
Yangjin was exhausted herself. In three years, she’d turn sixty. When she was a girl, she’d believed that she could work harder than anyone under any circumstances, but she no longer felt that way. Lately, Yangjin felt tired and impatient; small things bothered her. Aging was supposed to make you more patient, but in her case, she felt angrier. Sometimes, when a customer complained about the small size of the portions, she wanted to tell him off. Lately, what upset her most was her daughter’s impossible silence. Yangjin wanted to shake her.
The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, and the electric lights emitted a steady light. Against the papered walls, the two bare lightbulbs attached to the ceiling by their electric cords made stark shadows, resembling two lonely gourds hanging from leafless vines.
“I still think about our girls,” Yangjin said.
“Dokhee and Bokhee? Didn’t they find work in China?”
“I shouldn’t have let them go with that smooth-talking woman from Seoul. But the girls were so excited about traveling to Manchuria and earning money. They promised to return when they made enough to buy the boardinghouse. They were good girls.”
Sunja nodded, recalling their sweetness. She didn’t know people like that anymore. It seemed as if the occupation and the war had changed everyone, and now the war in Korea was making things worse. Once-tenderhearted people seemed wary and tough. There was innocence left only in the smallest children.
“At the market, I hear that the girls who went to work in factories were taken somewhere else, and they had to do terrible, terrible things with Japanese soldiers.” Yangjin paused, still confounded. “Do you think this can be true?”
Sunja had heard the same stories, and Hansu had warned her on more than one occasion of the Korean recruiters, working for the Japanese army, falsely promising good jobs, but she didn’t want her mother to worry any more. Sunja ground the sugar as finely as she could.
“What if the girls were taken? For that?” Yangjin asked.
“Umma, we don’t know,” Sunja whispered. She lit the fire in the stove and poured sugar and water into the pan.
“That’s what happened. I just feel it.” Yangjin nodded to herself. “Your appa—it would make him so sad that we lost our boardinghouse—aigoo. And now this fighting in Korea. We can’t go back yet because the army would take Noa and Mozasu. Isn’t that right?”
Sunja nodded. She could not let her sons become soldiers.
Yangjin shivered. The draft seeping through the kitchen window stung her dry, brown skin, and she tucked a towel around the sill. Yangjin pulled her shabby cotton vest tightly over her nightclothes. She started to crush sugar for the next batch while Sunja watched the bubbling pot on the low flame.
Sunja stirred the pot as the sugar caramelized. Busan seemed like another life compared to Osaka; Yeongdo, their little rocky island, stayed impossibly fresh and sunny in her memory, though she hadn’t been back in twenty years. When Isak had tried to explain heaven, she had imagined her hometown as paradise—a clear, shimmering beauty. Even the memory of the moon and stars in Korea seemed different than the cold moon here; no matter how much people complained about how bad things were back home, it was difficult for Sunja to imagine anything but the bright, sturdy house that her father had taken care of so well by the green, glassy sea, the bountiful garden that had given them watermelons, lettuces, and squash, and the open-air market that never ran out of anything delicious. When she was there, she had not loved it enough.
The news reports from back home were so horrific—cholera, starvation, and soldiers who kidnapped your sons, even little boys—that their meager life in Osaka and their pathetic attempts to scrounge up enough money to send Noa to college seemed luxurious in contrast. At least they were together. At least they could work toward something better. The war in Korea roused commerce in Japan, and there were more jobs to be had by all. At least here, the Americans were still in charge, so the women were able to find sugar and wheat. Although Yoseb prohibited Sunja from taking money from Hansu, when Kim found any of the scarce ingredients the women needed through his connections, the women knew enough not to ask too many questions or to talk about it with Yoseb.
As soon as the taffy cooled on the metal pan, the women worked quickly to cut the candy into neat squares.
“Dokhee used to tease me about the sloppy way I cut onions,” Sunja said, smiling. “And she couldn’t bear how slowly I washed the rice pots. And every morning when I would clean the floors, she would say without fail, ‘Always use two rags to clean the floors. First, sweep, then wipe with a clean rag, and then wipe it again with a fresh one!’ Dokhee was the cleanest person I have ever met.” As she spoke the words, Sunja could recall Dokhee’s round and simple face growing somber while giving instructions. Her expressions, mannerisms, and voice were equally vivid, and Sunja, who did not pray often, prayed to God in her heart for the girls. She prayed that they were not taken for the soldiers. Isak used to say that we could not know why some suffered more than others; he said we should never hasten to judgment when others endured agony. Why was she spared and not them? she wondered. Why was she in this kitchen with her mother when so many were starving back home? Isak used to say that God had a plan, and Sunja believed this could be so, but it gave her little consolation now, thinking of the girls. Those girls had been more innocent than her sons when they were very little.
When Sunja looked up from her task, her mother was weeping.
“Those girls lost their mother, then their father. I should’ve done more for them. Tried to help them get married, but we had no money. A woman’s lot is to suffer. We must suffer.”
Sunja sensed that her mother was right that the girls had been tricked. They were likely dead now. She put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Her mother’s hair was nearly all gray, and during the day, she wore the old-fashioned bun at the base of her neck. It was night, and her mother’s gray, scant braid hung down her back. The years of outdoor work had creased her brown oval face with deep grooves on her forehead and around her mouth. For as long as she could remember, her mother had been the first to rise and the last to go to bed; even when the girls had worked with them, her mother had worked as hard as the younger one. Never one to talk much, as she’d gotten older her mother had a lot more to say, but Sunja never seemed to know what to say to her.
“Umma, remember digging up the potatoes with appa? Appa’s beautiful potatoes. They were fat and white and so good when you baked them in the ashes. I haven’t had a good potato like that since—”
Yangjin smiled. There had been happier times. Her daughter had not forgotten Hoonie, who had been a wonderful father to her. So many of their babies had died, but they’d had Sunja. She had her still.
“At least the boys are safe. Maybe that’s why we’re here. Yes.” Yangjin paused. “Maybe that’s why we’re here.” Her face brightened. “You know, your Mozasu is such a funny one. Yesterday, he said he wants to live in America and wear a suit and hat like in the movies. He said he wants to have five sons!”
Sunja laughed, because that sounded like Mozasu.
“America? What did you say?”
“I told him it’s okay as long as he visited me with his five sons!”
The kitchen smelled of caramel, and the women worked nimbly until sunlight filled the house.
School was a misery. Mozasu was thirteen and tall for his age. With broad shoulders and well-muscled arms, he appeared more manly than some of his teachers. Because he could not read or write at grade level—despite Noa’s prodigious efforts to teach him kanji—Mozasu had been placed in a class full of ten-year-olds. Mozasu spoke Japanese just as well as his peers; if anything, he had tremendous verbal facility, which served him well in his regular battles with the older children. In arithmetic, he could keep up with the class, but writing and reading Japanese lamed him brutally. His teachers called him a Korean fool, and Mozasu
was biding his time so he could be done with this hell. In spite of the war and all their academic privations, Noa had finished high school, and whenever he wasn’t working, he was studying for his college entrance examinations. He never left the house without an exam study book and one of his old English-language novels, which he bought from the bookseller.
Six days a week, Noa worked for Hoji-san, the cheerful Japanese who owned most of the houses in their neighborhood. It was rumored that Hoji-san was in fact part burakumin or Korean, but no one said too much about his shameful blood, since he was everyone’s landlord. It was possible that the vicious rumor that he was not pure Japanese could have been started by an unhappy tenant, but Hoji-san did not seem to care. As his bookkeeper and secretary, Noa kept Hoji-san’s ledgers in excellent order and wrote letters to the municipal offices in beautiful Japanese on his behalf. Despite his smiles and jokes, Hoji-san was ruthless when it came to getting his rent money. He paid Noa very little, but Noa did not complain. He could’ve made more money working for Koreans in the pachinko business or in yakiniku restaurants, but Noa didn’t want that. He wanted to work in a Japanese office and have a desk job. Like nearly all Japanese business owners, Hoji-san would not normally hire Koreans, but Hoji-san’s nephew was Noa’s high school teacher, and Hoji-san, a man who knew how to find bargains, hired his nephew’s most brilliant pupil.
