by Min Jin Lee
The penalties incurred for the mistakes you made had to be paid out in full to the members of your family. But she didn’t believe that she could ever discharge these sums.
At noon, Mozasu came to get her. They were going to pick up Solomon at his school to take him to get his alien registration card. Koreans born in Japan after 1952 had to report to their local ward office on their fourteenth birthday to request permission to stay in Japan. Every three years, Solomon would have to do this again unless he left Japan for good.
As soon as she got in the car, Mozasu reminded her to put on her seat belt. Etsuko was still thinking about Hana. Before she’d left, she had phoned the doctor, and the procedure was scheduled for the end of the week.
Mozasu took her hand. Etsuko thought his face had strength to it; there was power in his straight neck. She hadn’t known many Koreans before him, but she imagined that his squared-off facial features were traditionally Korean—his wide jawbone, straight white teeth, thick black hair, and the shallow-set, narrow, smiling eyes. He had a lean, slack body that reminded her of metal. When he made love to her, he was serious, almost as if he was angry, and she found that this gave her intense pleasure. His physical movements were deliberate and forceful, and she wanted to surrender to them. Whenever she read about something or someone Korean, she wondered what Korea was like. Mozasu’s deceased father, a Christian minister, was from the North, and his mother, who’d had a confection business, had come from the South. His plainspoken mother was so humble in her manner and dress that she could be mistaken for a modest housekeeper rather than the mother of a millionaire pachinko parlor owner.
Mozasu was holding a wrapped present, the size of a block of tofu. She recognized the silver foil paper from his favorite jewelry store.
“Is that for Solomon?”
“No. It’s for you.”
“Ehh? Why?”
It was a gold-and-diamond watch nestled in a dark red velvet box.
“It’s a mistress watch. I bought it last week, and I showed it to Kuboda-san, the new night floor manager, and he said that these fancy watches are what you give to your mistress because they cost the same as a diamond ring but you can’t give a ring to your mistress since you’re already married.”
He raised his eyebrows with amusement.
Etsuko checked to see if the glass partition separating them from the driver was closed all the way; it was. Her skin flushed with heat.
“Make him stop the car.”
“What’s the matter?”
Etsuko pulled her hand away. She wanted to say that she wasn’t his mistress, but instead, she burst into tears.
“Why? Why are you crying? Every year for the past three years, I bring you a diamond ring—each one bigger than the one before it—and you say no to me. I go back to the jeweler, and he and I have to get drunk. Nothing has changed for me.” He sighed. “You are the one who says no. Refuses the pachinko yakuza.”
“You’re not yakuza.”
“I am not yakuza. But everyone thinks Koreans are gangsters.”
“None of that matters to me. It’s my family.”
Mozasu looked out the window, and when he spotted his son, Mozasu waved at him.
The car stopped, and Solomon got in the front passenger seat. The glass partition opened, and he stuck his head through to say hi. Etsuko reached over to straighten the rumpled collar of his white dress shirt.
“Arigato very much,” he said. They often mixed up words in different languages as a joke. He dropped back into his seat and closed the glass partition so he could talk with the driver, Yamamoto-san, about the previous night’s Tigers game. The Tigers had an American manager this year, and Solomon was hopeful for the season. Yamamoto was not so optimistic.
Mozasu picked up her left wrist gently and clasped the watch on it.
“You’re a funny woman. I bought you a gift. Just say thanks. I never meant that you were a—”
The bridge of her nose hurt, and she thought she would start crying again.
“Hana called. She’s coming to Yokohama. Today.”
“Is she okay?” He looked surprised.
Etsuko went to Hokkaido twice yearly to see her children. Mozasu had never met them.
“Maybe she can go to Solomon’s party. See the famous singer,” Mozasu said.
“I don’t know if she likes Hiromi-san,” she replied. Etsuko had no idea if Hana liked pop music. As a child, she hadn’t been the kind who sang or danced. Etsuko stared at the back of the driver’s gray-streaked head. The driver nodded thoughtfully while Solomon talked to him, and their quiet gestures appeared intimate. She wished she had something like baseball that she could talk about with her daughter—a safe subject they could visit without subtext or aggression.
Etsuko told Mozasu that Hana had an appointment with a doctor in Yokohama. When he asked if she was sick, she shook her head no.
This was how life had turned out. Her oldest, Tatsuo, was twenty-five years old, and it was taking him eight years to graduate from a fourth-rate college. Her second son, Tari, a withdrawn nineteen-year-old, had failed his college entrance exams and was working as a ticket collector at a movie theater. She had no right to expect her children to hold the aspirations of other middle-class people—to graduate from Tokyo University, to get a desk job at the Industrial Bank of Japan, to marry into a nice family. She had made them into village outcasts, and there was no way for them to be acceptable anymore.
Etsuko unclasped the watch and put it back in the velvet case. She laid it down in the space between them on the white, starched doily covering the black leather seats. He handed it back to her.
“It’s not a ring. Save me a trip to the jeweler.”
Etsuko held the watch case in her hands and wondered how they’d stayed together with him not giving up and her not giving in.
The Yokohama ward office was a giant gray box with an obscure sign. The first clerk they saw was a tall man with a narrow face and a shock of black hair buzzed off at the sides. He stared at Etsuko shamelessly, his eyes darting across her breasts, hips, and jeweled fingers. She was overdressed compared to Mozasu and Solomon, who wore white dress shirts, dark slacks, and black dress shoes. They looked like the gentle Mormon missionaries who used to glide through her village on their bicycles when she was a girl.
“Your name—” The clerk squinted his eyes at the form Solomon was filling out. “So-ro-mo-n. What kind of name is that?”
“It’s from the Bible. He was a king. The son of King David. A man of great wisdom. My great-uncle named me.” The boy smiled at the clerk as if he was sharing a secret. He was a polite boy, but because he had gone to school with Americans and other kinds of foreigners at his international schools, he sometimes said things that a Japanese person would never have said.
“So-ro-mo-n, a king. Great wisdom.” The clerk smirked. “Koreans don’t have kings anymore.”
“What did you say?” Etsuko asked.
Quickly, Mozasu pulled her back.
She glanced at Mozasu. His temper was far worse than hers. Once, when a restaurant guest had tried to make her sit with him, Mozasu, who happened to be there that night, walked over, picked him up bodily, and threw him outside the restaurant, breaking the man’s ribs. She was expecting no less of a reaction now, but Mozasu averted his eyes from the clerk and stared at Solomon’s right hand.
Mozasu smiled.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said with no trace of irritation or anger. “We’re in a hurry to return home, because it’s the boy’s birthday. Is there anything else we should do?” Mozasu folded his hands behind him. “Thank you very much for understanding.”
Confused, Solomon turned to Etsuko, and she flashed him a warning look.
The clerk pointed to the back of the room and told Mozasu and Etsuko to sit. Solomon remained standing opposite the clerk. In the long, rectangular room, shaped like a train car, with bank teller windows running parallel along opposite walls, half a dozen people sat on benches,
reading their newspapers or manga. Etsuko wondered if they were Korean. From their seats, Etsuko and Mozasu could see Solomon talking to the clerk, but they couldn’t hear anything.
Mozasu sat down, then got up again. He asked if she wanted a can of tea from the vending machine, and she nodded yes. She felt like slapping the clerk’s face. In middle school, she had once slapped a bossy girl, and it had been satisfying.
When Mozasu returned with their tea, she thanked him.
“You must have known—” She paused. “You must have warned him. I mean, you told him that today would not be so easy?” She didn’t mean to be critical, but after the words came from her mouth, they sounded harsh, and she was sorry.
“No. I didn’t say anything to him.” He opened and closed his fists rhythmically. “I came here with my mother and brother, Noa, for my first registration papers. The clerk was normal. Nice even. So I asked you to come. I thought maybe having a woman by him might help.” He exhaled through his nostrils. “It was stupid to wish for kindness.”
“No. No. You couldn’t have warned him. I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
“It is hopeless. I cannot change his fate. He is Korean. He has to get those papers, and he has to follow all the steps of the law perfectly. Once, at a ward office, a clerk told me that I was a guest in his country.”
“You and Solomon were born here.”
“Yes, my brother, Noa, was born here, too. And now he is dead.” Mozasu covered his face with his hands.
Etsuko sighed.
“Anyway, the clerk was not wrong. And this is something Solomon must understand. We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.”
Solomon returned to them. Next he had his photograph taken, and afterward, he had to go to another room to get fingerprinted. Then they could go home. The last clerk was a plump woman; her light green uniform flattened her large breasts and round shoulders. She took Solomon’s left index finger and gently dipped it into the pot filled with thick black ink. Solomon depressed his finger onto a white card as if he were a child painting. Mozasu looked away and sighed audibly. The clerk smiled at the boy and told him to pick up the registration card in the next room.
“Let’s get your dog tags,” Mozasu said.
Solomon faced his father. “Hmm?”
“It’s what we dogs must have.”
The clerk looked furious suddenly.
“The fingerprints and registration cards are vitally important for government records. There’s no need to feel insulted by this. It is an immigration regulation required for foreign—”
Etsuko stepped forward. “But you don’t make your children get fingerprinted on their birthday, do you?”
The clerk’s neck reddened.
“My son is dead.”
Etsuko bit her lip. She didn’t want to feel anything for the woman, but she knew what it was like to lose your children—it was like you were cursed and nothing would ever restore the desolation of your life.
“Koreans do lots of good for this country,” Etsuko said. “They do the difficult jobs Japanese don’t want to do; they pay taxes, obey laws, raise good families, and create jobs—”
The clerk nodded sympathetically.
“You Koreans always tell me that.”
Solomon blurted out, “She’s not Korean.”
Etsuko touched his arm, and the three of them walked out of the airless room. She wanted to crawl out of the gray box and see the light of outdoors again. She longed for the white mountains of Hokkaido. And though she had never done so in her childhood, she wanted to walk in the cold, snowy forests beneath the flanks of dark, leafless trees. In life, there was so much insult and injury, and she had no choice but to collect what was hers. But now she wished to take Solomon’s shame, too, and add it to her pile, though she was already overwhelmed.
10
One of her mother’s waitresses had brought her a Coke, and Hana was sitting at a table near the bar, playing with the straw. No longer permed, her hair was straight and its natural color, a reddish black. It was cut in one even length and splayed across her small shoulders. She wore a neatly ironed, white cotton blouse and a dark pleated skirt coming to her knees, with gray wool stockings and flat schoolgirl shoes. She hadn’t dressed like this since she was in primary school. Her stomach was flat, but her bud-like breasts looked fuller; otherwise, there was no way of knowing that she was pregnant.
Closed for a private event, the restaurant dining room was set up for the party. White linen cloths covered a dozen round tables, and in the middle of each sat an elegant floral arrangement and candlesticks. A busboy stood at the edge of the room, blowing up one red balloon after another with a helium tank. He let them all float up to the ceiling.
Etsuko and Solomon entered the restaurant quietly. He had insisted on coming by the restaurant to say hello to her daughter before heading home to change. At first, his mouth opened in surprise at the decorations and the dramatic transformation of the room. Then, seeing the girl at the empty table, he asked, “Is that her?”
“Yes.”
Hana smiled shyly at them.
Solomon and Hana greeted each other formally. Their mutual curiosity was obvious. Hana pointed to the balloons hiding the ceiling, and before Etsuko had a chance, Solomon replied quickly in Japanese, “It’s my birthday. Why don’t you come to the party? There’s going be an American dinner here tonight, and then we’re going to a real disco.”
Hana answered, “If you wish. I might.”
Etsuko frowned. She had to speak to the chef about the menu, but she was reluctant to leave them alone. A few minutes later, when she returned from the kitchen, they were whispering like a pair of young lovers. Etsuko checked her watch and urged Solomon to get home. At the door, he shouted, “Hey, I’ll see you at the party,” and Hana smiled like a courtesan as she waved good-bye.
“Why did you make him go? I was having fun.”
“Because he has to get dressed.”
“I looked in them.” Hana glanced at the bags near the entrance. There were a hundred party bags in four long rows that had to be transported to the disco—each bag filled with tapes, a Sony Walkman cassette player, imported teen magazines, and boxed chocolates.
“I wish my dad was a yakuza.”
“Hana, he’s not—” Etsuko looked around to see if anyone could hear them.
“Your boyfriend’s son doesn’t seem like a brat.”
“He doesn’t have it easy.”
“Not easy? American private schools, millions in the bank, and a chauffeur. Get some perspective, Mother.”
“Today, he had to go to the ward office to request permission to stay in Japan for another three years. If he was denied, he could have been deported. He has to carry around an alien registration card and—”
“Oh, really? But he wasn’t deported, right? Now he gets a fancy party that’s nicer than most weddings.”
“He was born in this country, and he had to be fingerprinted today on his birthday like he was a criminal. He’s just a child. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“We’re all criminals. Liars, thieves, whores—that’s who we are.” The girl’s carbon-colored eyes looked hard and ancient. “No one is innocent here.”
“Why must you be so hard-hearted?”
“I’m the only one who still talks to you.”
“I’ve said I’m sorry enough times.” Etsuko tried to control her voice, but the waitresses heard everything, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore.
“I made the appointment.”
Hana looked up.
“The day after tomorrow, we’ll take care of your problem.” Etsuko looked straight at her daughter’s pale, angry face. “You shouldn’t be a mother. You have no idea how hard it is to have children.”
The steady line of Hana’s lips crumpled, and she covered her manga-pretty face with her hands and began to cry.
Etsuko didn’t kn
ow if she should say something. Instead, she put her hand on her daughter’s head. Hana winced, but Etsuko didn’t immediately pull her hand back. It had been so long since she had touched her daughter’s satiny hair.
When Etsuko lived in the cramped, three-bedroom house in Hokkaido with its leaky roof and tiny kitchen, certain labors had sustained her. At this moment, with a kind of pinprick pain, Etsuko recalled watching her sons devour the shrimp that she had fried for dinner, piled high on paper-lined plates. Even in the middle of July, it had been worth it to stand in front of a hot tempura pan, dropping battered shrimp into bubbling peanut oil, because to her sons, Mama’s shrimp was better than candy, they’d said. And it came to her like a tall and dark wave how much she’d loved combing Hana’s freshly washed hair when her cheeks were still pink from the steamy bathwater.
“I know you didn’t want us. My brothers told me, and I told them they were wrong even though I knew they weren’t. I clung to you because I wasn’t going to let you just leave what you started. How can you tell me how hard it is to have children? You haven’t even tried to be a mother. What right do you have? What makes you a mother?”
Etsuko grew silent, utterly transfixed by the realization that how she saw herself was actually how her children saw her, too. They thought she was a monster.
“How can you think that I didn’t want the three of you?” She recalled all the letters, gifts, and money she’d sent, which the boys had returned. And worse, the phone calls to the house to check on them when her husband wouldn’t say anything beyond moshi-moshi, then would hand the phone to Hana because she was the only one who would take the receiver. Etsuko wanted to justify herself—her numerous and repeated attempts—to offer proof. Being a mother was what defined her more than any other thing—more than being a daughter, wife, divorced woman, girlfriend, or restaurant owner. She hadn’t done it well, but it was who she was, and it was what had changed her inside forever. From the moment Tatsuo was born, she had been filled with grief and self-doubt because she was never good enough. Even though she had failed, being a mother was eternal; a part of her life wouldn’t end with her death.
