PART 8
When I woke up, my head was splitting. Yellow rays of sun passed through the white lace curtains and shoved their way deeper into the blankets. For a moment, I wondered where I was. I could see a tall magnolia outside the window. But the first thing on my mind wasn’t what I was doing in my old room at my mother’s house, but rather that I was thirsty. I thought about the first time I tried to commit suicide: I had slit my wrists in this very room. Of course, I knew then that what I was doing was wrong. Ever since I was young, I had been going to church, and I never hesitated to mark the box for Catholic on the questionnaires they handed out in school. When I was christened in the church that my father carried me to in his arms right after I was born, I was given the name Sylvia in addition to Yujeong. In those days, the Catholic Church was still so strict that they did not allow a funeral Mass to be held for suicides. People who committed suicide were regarded as murderers who mistook their God-given lives as their own to take. During catechism class, the nun explained to us why suicide was murder.
Raise your hand if you decided to be born, was how she began the lesson. Raise your hand if you decided whether you would be male or female. Raise your hand if you think you can die whenever you want to. In the throes of puberty, I was ardent on the subject of suicide. I had drawn my own conclusion about it, which was that I did not have the right to kill myself. Above all, my life was not created by me. I didn’t know why the hormones I had learned about in biology class were released at certain times and went away at others, or why my stomach was refusing to digest food, or why my period had to start. I didn’t know why I got diarrhea, or why my stomach hurt, or why my heart was beating. The territory I governed was smaller than my own brain. Back then, I had a folder with a Descartes quote printed on it that said the only thing about ourselves that we can control are our own thoughts. So I, too, had come to the conclusion that since I did not own myself, it would be murder to kill myself. But then I slit my wrists in this room. Back then, I felt only one thing: knowledge could not ward off despair. And I realized something else: Descartes was wrong. Not even my own thoughts were under my control, and I had even less control over them than everything else in my life combined.
I got up and headed downstairs to get some water or juice to drink.
Around the time I started high school, my father bought land in this neighborhood that was now towering with high-rise buildings and built a house on it. Back then, there weren’t that many high-rises yet, and it was the kind of out-of-the-way spot that was crowded with cheap motels bearing old-fashioned names. Yusik, my oldest brother, had moved out of the house with his wife. It was right around the Lunar New Year, so I had gone on an errand for my mother to the head family’s house, where my father’s eldest brother lived. I went alone. That wouldn’t seem like a big deal nowadays, but at the time, I had already grown to my full height and was very tall for my age. Once, I had even been approached while out running errands. It was summer, and I was wearing a dress. I think I was in the seventh grade at the time. An army officer in full uniform came up to me. His breath reeked of alcohol, and he said, Excuse me, miss, care to join me for a drink at that café? I told him I was only in middle school, and he looked flustered for a moment and then looked up at the sky and laughed in amazement. I laughed, too. When I got back home, I told my mother, Someone flirted with me. But he was a soldier. I don’t remember what my mother said. I’m sure it wasn’t nice. My brothers teased me about it: He must have been really drunk. He was blacked out, wasn’t he? Maybe he deserted his post and wanted to take a kid hostage to keep from having to go back. Now that I look back on it, I was as tall as a grown woman. I had hips and, though they were not yet full, my breasts were showing. Since I was no longer a child but a young lady, I didn’t mind being approached by a man, but I felt strange that it had to be a drunk soldier. Was that to be my fate?
On my way downstairs, I kept thinking about the man who had made me want to kill myself. Each time I walked down those stairs, I used to think about all the ways I could die. What if I did it this way? What if I did it that way? At the bottom of the stairs, the telephone was ringing.
“Yujeong? I think she’s still asleep. Oh, no, here she comes.”
My mother saw me coming down the stairs and shoved the phone toward me. It was my brother Yusik. When I said hello, he let out a long sigh. I couldn’t help but sigh as well.
“Do you remember what happened last night?”
He sounded as if he had been waiting a long time to ask me that.
“Yeah, I meant to thank you.”
He sighed again.
“I was planning to give you a piece of my mind, but since it’s Mom’s birthday today, I’ll hold off. It’s only been a month and a half since her operation, and I’m worried she might collapse again. I didn’t say anything to anyone else in the family.”
“Thanks.”
“Also, since we’re both grown-ups, I didn’t want to say anything to you, but let’s talk again later, around dinnertime. Mom’s sick, so don’t throw another one of your tantrums. Just hold it in until dinnertime. I called Aunt Monica. I don’t think you should keep meeting those death row—or whatever—inmates. Stop going there.”
“What are you talking about?”
He hung up without answering me. Despite thanking him, I didn’t actually remember what had happened the night before. As I poured myself some juice, I tried to call up all of my memory circuits. I had met my old friends from elementary school for drinks, and we went from one bar to another, and another. I remembered getting into my car and insisting that I could drive, even though someone tried to stop me. Then I remembered the police station, and yelling my head off. A detective, a short man who looked to be over fifty, had said to me, What kind of woman goes out drinking in the middle of the night? Girls like you should all be rounded up and shot. That was when I lost it. I think I must have screamed at him, So what? Yeah, so I broke the law, but at least I have character. You want to shoot me? Is that what a police officer of the Republic of Korea’s “Civilian Government” is supposed to say? Take my blood! Take my blood! I remembered screaming my head off in the police station. It all came back to me: I must have called my brother. Then he showed up and I asked him how he knew I was there. The other people in the station clucked their tongues at me from behind my brother’s back and said I was crazy, so I got mad at them. When I thought about it, I couldn’t believe that was me. As much as I enjoyed complaining, I wasn’t the type to get drunk and make a scene in public, let alone a police station, of all places. I would never be able to show my face in Itaewon again. As the alcohol in my blood receded like the tide, standing in its place were memories, as stark as rocks on the seashore.
It must have been close to dawn when he picked me up. I think I cried… I say I think I cried because all I could remember was having heard a woman crying in the car. My brother and I were the only ones there, and since my brother isn’t a woman, the crying must have been coming from me. Did that fit into my uncle’s definition of the crying he wished I would do? I don’t know if the tears helped to sober me up, but I chose that moment to pick a fight with my brother. I think I started babbling, without any sort of preamble, about prisoners who had to survive on less than a thousand won for six months at a time, and how I was going crazy. I told him, They’re driving me crazy, Yusik. Help me! I’m dying because of them! My brother could not have felt good about having to pick up his little sister from the police station—his little sister who was nearly booked with drunk driving, who had broken off an engagement with his younger colleague, and who had attempted suicide not long ago. After my father, Yusik cared about me the most. We were so far apart in age that he doted on me as if I were his niece; when I was little, he used to carry me on his back. I could still remember his warm, strong, young back.
Whenever I see those guys in my line of work, my brother had said, guys who rape children and kill old people, and don’t show even the slightest remorse
in court, I hate the idea of having to breathe the same air as them! The death penalty is too good for them! I look at them and wonder whether they’re even human or whether they’re just animals. That may be a bad thought, but it seems like there really is a devil, and those people are marked from birth. They don’t deserve to live. They’re animals.
It was just an inference, but as I drank a glass of cold juice and stared out at the warm sunlit garden of my mother’s house, I figured my brother had said what he did because his little sister who never cried had suddenly fallen apart and bawled that she was losing her mind because of death row prisoners. He was probably worried that I would go into further shock while following Aunt Monica around and die for real. I told him the men on death row were killing me and, to try to calm me down in my drunkenness and my indignation, he said in return that Aunt Monica was killing him.
I understand what she’s feeling, he said, but she keeps coming to see me to ask why he can’t get a retrial, and she pressures me to petition the minister of justice to commute his sentence. She’ll be the death of me. I knew he was only saying that to calm me down.
He was a good man, too. A conscientious prosecutor, he was famous for never accepting favors of any kind. He had made a name for himself faster than any of his peers. Though it was just the effect the alcohol was having on me, the way he called them all animals weighed on my heart.
“Back when I was in college,” I said, “I visited you at work one day at the public prosecutor’s office. But I didn’t go into your office. As soon as I got to the door, I could hear someone inside screaming. Do you remember that? I found out later what the sound was. Someone had been hung upside down from the ceiling, spun around, and tortured into confessing. You were surprised to find me shaking outside your door. You took me to a teashop on the first floor and tried to tell me you weren’t one of those prosecutors. I asked you to put a stop to it, and you said it was ‘that damn section chief’ again. But Yusik, you didn’t run back upstairs to tell him to stop torturing that person. At the time, I wondered whether you, the section chief, and the prosecutors—the ones you said you weren’t like—were people or animals.”
He stared at me in shock.
“I’ve had that question a lot, whether men like that are human beings or animals. I think about it every time I see those men who go to room salons and do things in front of others that should only be done in private—not that it has anything to do with intimacy between human beings—like shamelessly shoving their hands up girls’ skirts and feeling them up just because they paid for it, and throwing their money around. I think about it every time I see them at school, too. Those professors who get up in the morning and drone on and on about the sanctity of education and the unequal division of wealth with the smell of a whore’s genitals still on their lips. They swarm to brothels and use those poor young girls who have to sell their bodies for cash. They strip their clothes off and stick them on top of tables and watch them slice bananas with their vaginas or open bottle caps—anything and everything that can be done with the human genitals. When I lived in Paris, I felt so ashamed every time a French person asked me if it was true that democracy activists in Korea were being taken away and tortured by the KCIA—or the Agency for National Security Planning, or whatever it was—having their arms dislocated or being stripped naked and beaten and, since that wasn’t enough, female students just a little older than me being tortured sexually. Back then, as well, I wondered whether they were people or animals. Murderers? Animals, of course. Why even ask? Of course they’re animals. But now it’s your turn to answer. Of the types of people I just described, which one is the most likely to evolve into human beings?”
Like a typical drunk, I must not have been paying any attention to my brother’s reaction. He didn’t say a word to me. I kept going.
“I’ll give you a hint. One at least acknowledges that they did something wrong, while the other not only refuses to acknowledge it but thinks they are decent human beings. The first are punished for the rest of their lives for a small number of sins, while the second repeat those sins over and over, all the while believing that they are pretty good people. So, who do you suppose are the ones who think they’re innocent?”
“You haven’t changed a bit! How old are you?” my older brother said angrily.
“Fifteen.”
I laughed out loud. He looked at me with pity, just as the cops had at the station, and lit a cigarette. I grabbed it from his mouth and took a puff. He sighed and said nothing.
“Fifteen years ago, on Lunar New Year, when I went to the head family’s house to run an errand for Mom, and that thing happened to me, no one in the family cared. Do you know why I’m like this? Why I swallowed pills and cut my wrists three times? The thing I could not understand, what I really could not forgive, was the fact that everyone acted like nothing happened—Mom, you and our brothers, even Dad! It was swept under the rug, the same way my drunk driving charges never happened because my big prosecutor brother showed up and made them go away. I thought I was going to die—I wish I had died—and meanwhile everyone just closed their mouths and pretended that nothing happened. It didn’t take me long to figure out why you all did that. If it hadn’t been for our uncle—Dad’s brother, the big-shot National Assembly member for the ruling party—the family business would never have survived. If he hadn’t been watching out for us, Dad wouldn’t have been able to embezzle all that money and commit malpractice and put in illegal bids and evade taxes. That’s why!”
“Enough!”
I could tell he was holding back. He yanked the cigarette from my lips and crushed it out hard in the car ashtray. But it wasn’t in my nature to back down.
“I was only fifteen. Do you understand now why I tried to kill myself, and why I’m still trying? Our family, Mom, Dad, our brothers—you all thought that was more important than me. Do you know now what you did to me? What made me even more miserable than dying? And yet you have the nerve to call those men animals? I think you’re the animals!”
He yanked hard on the steering wheel, pulled the car around, and started heading toward our mother’s house. I couldn’t speak from the force of the U-turn. It seemed like his way of saying, No, I will not leave you on your own tonight. If I do, something bad will happen again.
I could hear my mother playing the piano. It was Chopin’s Tristesse. My mother was sitting with her back to me at the grand piano in the middle of the living room. There was a time when my mother would have paid any amount of money to lose weight, but now she was as gaunt as if someone had stripped a heavy coat from her body. I thought about the fact that, with or without cancer, it would not be long before I would have to say goodbye to my mother, who was in her seventies, and I felt sentimental. What cannot be reconciled in the face of death? What in this life is worth clinging to? Especially if that thing is hatred. I had once overheard her telling her friends that it made her feel ashamed as a woman to have one of her breasts removed. She said that she had no idea what caused her cancer, and that it would cost twenty million won to reconstruct her breast. I had taunted her, saying, What are you going to do? Try out for Miss Old Korea? As I listened to her playing the piano, I thought, Twenty million won would mean ten thousand won for each inmate who has nothing in his account half the year. I was surprised at myself for thinking that. Why was I making that kind of comparison?
Over a pink silk blouse, my mother wore a silk scarf draped long in the front, and her shoulders were moving quietly. I didn’t know if it was my sentimental mood, but for once, her piano playing didn’t make me want to plug my ears the way it used to. When the song ended, I clapped. I could hear the housekeeper in the kitchen clapping, too. My mother smiled as if deep in thought, to make herself look as elegant as a real pianist on stage, and began playing another song.
The reason I hated my mother and the rest of our family was not that they fancied themselves to be cultured and artistic, wearing looks on their faces that said they weren�
�t all about money, camouflaging their own snobbishness in that all-too-typical way. I hated them because even though they all felt vulnerable and lonely as hell whenever they found themselves sitting alone at night, they had too many tools and opportunities at their disposal to help them disguise their own feelings and thus deprived themselves of the chance to face their own loneliness, their pitifulness, and their isolation. In short, they were missing out on the chance to face life head on.
I went over to the piano. It used to be so hard for me to listen to my mother’s playing. After that fateful day, whenever my mother played a romantic song like this one, I would plug my ears, put on some rock music, and turn the volume up as high as it would go. I probably did it because of her. Had she been a pop singer, I would have listened to classical. Turn it off! Turn that noise off! she would scream, and race up to my room on the second floor, whereupon I would quickly turn the volume down and open the door with a peaceful look on my face.
What’s wrong?
Turn it down!
I did.
You’re driving me crazy. Why did I have to give birth to you only to suffer like this? Why did I ever give birth to you? I should have gotten rid of you when the doctor suggested it, when he said I was too old for another pregnancy! But your dad insisted. He claimed you were a gift from God.
I always won those arguments, since I was the one who remained calm, but my mother had no idea how much my heart bled each time. Back then, I cursed our religion that forbade abortion. What was it Job said? Curse the night I was conceived? Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? I liked Job’s earnest voice. I would wait until I heard my mother’s footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs, and then I would crank the volume back up again. It was my way of getting revenge for the blood I lost each time she wounded me.
Our Happy Time Page 8
