Sad Peninsula

by Mark Sampson

  “You are a whore!” he bellowed. Wiped his mouth, moist with anger. “Do you even understand the disgrace you have brought to this family? Do you even know?”

  “Father please …” Ji-young wept from the corner.

  His eyes would not leave Eun-young. “Slut! Fox! Diseased vixen!” He shook all over. “You had to be out there in the world, didn’t you? You had to ignore me. And now look at what has come to pass. Look at you!”

  He took a step closer to her and she recoiled into herself. “You killed her, do you know that? You killed your mother, Eun-young.”

  “Father, no!”

  “She waited outside that door for you, staring up that hill for you. Every day. Thinking that you would one day come back down it. But you never did, Eun-young. You never came back, and it shattered her heart.”

  He was trembling now. Looked like he had finally finished. But then he struck her again, harder than before.

  Eun-young crumbled to her father’s feet. He floated over her before grabbing a handful of her hair. Pulled her back up. Placed his face near hers, as if he were about to kiss her.

  “I cast you out,” he moaned. “I cast you out of my house like the ghost you are.”

  He dragged her to the door by the hair, with Ji-young screaming and following behind them. He raised the latch, threw open the door and tossed Eun-young to the street.

  “You wanted to be part of the world?” he barked as she got to her feet and began walking away. “Well there you go, slut. You belong to the world now.” He kept yelling even as she hiked back up the hill and out of earshot, even as he held a screaming Ji-young back with one arm. “You belong to the world now!”

  I may belong to the world, she thought in those first hours, those first days on the streets of Seoul, but who does this country belong to? As she searched for a way to survive, Eun-young could not ignore that foreigners were once again deciding the fate of her homeland. A line had been drawn, she found out, just north of Seoul — temporary, people were saying — until the Americans and the Soviets could decide what to do with this strange, crucial peninsula.

  The Americans were everywhere in Seoul, she noticed. They were running things, along with Koreans who had obviously been Japanese collaborators during the occupation. Still, Eun-young was grateful to this new administration: it offered her a job right off the street, cleaning government buildings and the homes of rich diplomats. She couldn’t believe it. The work paid poorly and forced her to live in a squalid rooming house full of prostitutes and paupers, but still. She had her own room. She had food to eat. She would survive.

  Her new neighbourhood was soon littered with all manner of competing pamphlets. Rife with garish slogans and propaganda, they choked the gutters and hung like leafy scales on trees and power-line poles. Both sides had an explanation for recent terrorist attacks — blamed on Marxists — that rocked various sections of Seoul; both sides had their definitions of what Korea for Koreans meant. Eun-young began collecting these pamphlets, taking them back to her room to read at night. She used the blank spaces on the back to write letters to Ji-young, explaining where she was now, describing her long, anonymous days in the government buildings cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors. She also saved a paragraph to comment on whatever absurd propaganda blared across the reverse side of the page. Are these idiots really advocating civil war? she asked.

  At first Eun-young mailed these to Ji-young through the regular post, but months passed and she never received a response. She imagined her father intercepting the letters, ripping them up before Ji-young could see them. Eun-young eventually got the idea to walk to the family house in the middle of the night and slip her letters under the door. Their father would either be asleep or working at the factory. The plan succeeded: within days, Ji-young’s first letter arrived at the rooming house. It was not written on the back of pamphlets and made no reference to Eun-young’s commentary on the propaganda. It was written on plain rice paper and, much to Eun-young’s surprise, talked about boys that Ji-young was discovering at school. About how she was beginning to think that a yonae would “actually be not such a bad thing.”

  One day, Eun-young was emptying garbage cans in a civil servant’s office when waves of pain suddenly overtook her. They clenched her guts, nearly doubling her over. By the time she finished her shift, she could barely walk back to her room. She had been sick like this before, mostly at night. The fevers, the heavy, crawling itch between her legs, the painful swelling of her private places. The next morning she forced herself out of bed, desperate not to be late for work, and left a stain of discharge on the sheet below her. She arrived late anyway and was threatened with dismissal. Worked her way through the pain, all day long, practically weeping as she scrubbed and cleaned.

  For months she tried to ignore these days. Her body was fighting with itself, waging a war between health and sickness. Eun-young kept believing that time alone would heal her and that the periods of health would soon outlast the periods of illness. How long since my last rape? she often thought. Surely one day there will be no trace of the Japanese and their diseases in my blood. But that day never came. And soon she was late for other shifts. The threat of termination hung over her constantly. Eun-young could not bring herself to visit the clinic set up by the U.S. army near the government building. She didn’t want American doctors probing her down there and discovering her shame. So she instead turned to a Korean folk healer, an old woman who kept a ginseng shop in a back alley near the rooming house. After Eun-young gave her a vague description of her symptoms, the a’jumah prescribed foul-smelling ointments, bitter-tasting teas, and a nightly ritual of standing on her head with her legs spread out like airplane wings. For a few weeks the treatment seemed to work. But then the symptoms returned, and worse than before. Eun-young ignored them for as long as she could, the randomness of them. On a particularly bad day, one of the prostitutes in the rooming house gave her a small sample of penicillin. The Americans are giving them out like treats! she exclaimed. You should go see them about your problem. And could not understand why Eun-young wouldn’t. I am not like you, she wanted to say. I don’t want an American doctor thinking that I am, or ever was, one of your ilk. Because I wasn’t. But she had to admit, the penicillin helped for a while. But then the flush and aches and night sweats returned.

  By the late summer of ’48, it was official: There were two Koreas now. The demarcation at the 38th parallel had become a heavily armed border. Strangely, the American presence in Seoul was receding in the face of this mounting tension, the rumours of war, impromptu terrorist attacks, and news of guerillas hiding in the mountains beyond the city, ready to strike. Eun-young wrote letters to her sister about what she was seeing. What can come of this? The Americans have put thugs and Japanese collaborators in control and expect us to support them. Meanwhile, the Soviets have Kim to impose their version of communism on the North. This cannot end well. Ji-young, fifteen now, had no interest in politics. She wrote back with long, flowery descriptions of her days at school and the boys she was discovering. Working hard, she was, to secure a love match for herself before all the good boys disappeared into a life in the army. Eun-young wept over the stupid innocence of these letters. She was so jealous. She walked to work one day trying to shake off these resentful thoughts, images of her little sister maturing into a life — marriage and children, family and a home — that Eun-young herself never would. It was unbearable to think about for too long.

  But when Eun-young arrived at the office, she discovered that the windows of the first floor had been blown out by a terrorist’s bomb, and there were dead bodies on the ground.

  The prostitute kept leaving fresh samples of penicillin in her mailbox. Stop being so stubborn and go ask for help, her notes invariably read. There was no doubt: this penicillin was a miracle drug. Eun-young couldn’t help but remember its predecessor, the dreaded 606 injections in the camps, and how sick it always made her, poisoning the diseases out of her blood. This pen
icillin was infinitely better. But Eun-young couldn’t help it; still couldn’t bear to drag herself to the clinic. Couldn’t bear to let the diseases inflicted by one group of foreigners be cured with the solutions of another. Even if those solutions were ultimately for the best.

  S kirmishes, the newspapers called them. The word sounded like a game, a kind of child-like horseplay. It was not. These fights were legitimized now — a genuine clash between rival nations. The streets were choking on ideology. Kim and Rhee. Communism and whatever you called the system that the Americans were leaving behind. Talk of war and reunification. The history of Japanese aggression hung in the air, leaving the entire peninsula sick and splintered.

  The eyes of the world are watching us now, Eun-young wrote to her sister. Our little peninsula is in the crosshairs of history.

  She was not surprised when Ji-young wrote back and compared the conflict to some rivalry that she had drummed up with one of the girls at her school.

  The worst day came, and Eun-young could no longer bear it. A fever that left her limp and sweating on her bed. Her genitals and anus had swollen almost completely shut, making trips to the bathroom an exercise in agony. Welts appeared around her groin and her joints ached as if she were a decrepit old hag instead of a young woman of twenty-one. Eun-young gave up on her fears, and dragged herself to the army clinic near the government building. There, she was surprised to see that it was a Korean doctor, not an American one, who treated her. He gave her a thorough, silent examination. There was a coldness to his touch, and she wondered if he was secretly judging her. When he finished, he prescribed a regimen of penicillin and other pills that she had never heard of before. “Compliments of the Americans,” he said when he saw the wad of bills that she had saved up to pay for the drugs. “Put your money away.”

  Eun-young went home, and followed the regimen that the doctor had prescribed. It took seven months, but eventually the worst of her symptoms subsided.

  But then the war broke out.

  There was no time to prepare. Her identification papers clearly marked her as an employee of the fleeing regime. As the tanks rolled in and the Communists took control, she would need to escape as well. Imprisonment or even death awaited her if she didn’t.

  No last letter to Ji-young; no final sojourn through the late-night streets to slip a note under the family door. Father will not let you run. If I know him at all, he’ll hold his ground even as the bombs fall and the killing begins. Stay safe, Ji-young. Stay out of school, stay in the cellar, stay underground with your diaries and your daydreams of boys for as long as you can.

  Eun-young needed to pack whatever belongings she could and escape to the roads that led southward. She was not alone. Streams of refugees clogged the streets leading out of Seoul. People travelled any way they could — on foot, by bicycle, in cars or trucks — to stay ahead of the advancing North Korean army. In Suwon, Eun-young found an abandoned motorbike in a back alley next to a bakery. When its fuel tank ran dry just north of Kwangju, she hitched a ride with a family in a pick-up truck; they had just enough space for her to squat down in the back.

  The long, sad streams of refugees were pushed south, and then farther south. Will they shove us into the sea? Eun-young thought. What happens if we run out of land to flee to? Within a few days she found herself back in Pusan, the last holdout of the Republic of Korea. Word spread that the Americans had made an audacious landing at Incheon, cutting off the North’s supply chains southward.

  Chapter 11

  In retrospect, it was probably in poor taste to show up drunk at my mother’s funeral after she had died of cirrhosis of the liver. There are regrets in a man’s life that he feels less keenly than others — a mere sprain rather than something broken, something poorly set that never heals right. I remember thinking this as Cora and I staggered up the steps of St. George’s church in Halifax on that slushy afternoon in January 1994. I’m going to regret this later, my mind had warbled, but not much. Thank God for Cora. She had not dissuaded me when I suggested we go down to the Nautical Pub when it opened at 11:00, giving us three and half hours of solid drinking before I was due at the church. She and I had been dating for about four months at this point and were still tentative with each other — not sexually mind you, but tentative in the sense that we wouldn’t yet criticize the things that annoyed or alarmed us about the other. If she was worried by the sight of me pounding back a succession of pitchers in my jacket and tie there at the Nautical, she didn’t let on. Just watched me with her silvery blue eyes and steeled herself against anything that might erupt from my sadness. I appreciated that, the way she allowed me to talk in bursts and then fall into long silences, did not grow impatient when I took lengthy stares out the window at the lazy grey harbour, at the container ships heading out to sea. Now, on the steps of St. George’s, she felt compelled to parent me a little. Actually straightened my tie and patted down the cowlick I would lose to baldness years later.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I replied. “You only get to bury your mother once.”

  We moved through the narthex to stand before the rows of pews beneath the tall white dome. There, sitting in the front bench, was my older sister Heidi. She was surrounded by the minister, and the funeral director, and several altar boys. In the grips, she was, of one of her many fanatical outbursts of grief since we had pulled the sheet over Mom four days earlier. Her body was hunched, her shoulders bouncing, the minister kneeling in the aisle by her side with her hands in his, and Heidi’s seven-year-old daughter, Soleil, sitting next to them and looking a bit stunned at the sight of her mother’s grief. I stood there and watched Heidi in her performance. It had been ten years since she had run away from home, and I had seen her back in Halifax only a few times since and always at her worst, always at the apex of some personal catastrophe that she took out on Mom. I thought about all those arguments that had practically taken on a callisthenic property. And now here Heidi was, jiggling in regret like Jell-O. Not so much, I suspected, over the tragic end to our mother, but at the solipsistic remorse that her death kicked up like mud. And I blame the beer for what I thought then, for what I nearly hollered aloud down the empty pews: You fucking fraud.

  We walked up to face them. Heidi, at this point in her life, was at the peak of her tattoo phase: beneath her frilly black dress, I could see the shadow of eagle wings around her collarbones, the silhouette of a spider’s web on her shoulder. Soleil gave a shy little wave when she saw us, her tired blond hair the colour of mashed bananas and falling all over her own black dress. When Heidi looked up, her face was a rosy red carnival of tears.

  “Where have you been?” she barked at me. Looked at her watch. “Michael, it’s nearly three. Could you not have gotten here sooner?”

  “Sorry, I spent the morning …” and here had to choose my word carefully, “… thinking.”

  The minister stood and looked to ease our tension with his hardened Anglican calm. He shook my hand and offered his condolences. “We have some business to take care of before your guests arrive,” he said. “Shall we go into the other room and say goodbye?” So off we went to see Mom one last time in her open casket, all tucked in and tarted up.

  An hour later, the pews were barely peppered by the family and friends who bothered to show up; their scant numbers seemed even smaller in that massive house of worship. Throughout the service, I kept twisting with great drama around in my seat to cast a glare from one near-stranger to another, these benighted uncles and dim-eyed cousins who had stayed eternally on the sidelines while my mother destroyed herself. Haven’t seen you in five years … haven’t seen you in two … I don’t even know who that person is … A dishevelled half-uncle of mine had shown up wearing a checkered lumberjack coat — a Cape Breton dinner jacket, we called it — and a crust of dried toothpaste around his mouth. The sight of him filled my eyes with tears. “Fucking asshole,” I slurred. “Could he not have shown her some respect?”

&n
bsp; “Shh-shh,” Cora just said, patting my arm.

  With rituals done, we made a slow procession over to Camp Hill Cemetery. One more quick prayer over the green brands and then we lowered Mom down into that rectangle carved in the slushy earth. An aunt offered to have everyone back to her place for coffee. Heidi trembled her acquiescence — she and Soleil still had a couple of hours before they were due at the airport for their flight back to the west coast. Gazes turned to me. Cora straightened me up from where I was leaning blasphemously against a gravestone, and I looked from face to face. Saw genuine welcome there: this paltry ensemble of my family were finally, after ten years, reaching out to help me. And maybe I do regret it, not accepting their rare offer of fellowship. But can you blame me? I was twenty going on twenty-one — hotheaded and stupid. Maybe if I had taken that olive branch, then other things, the whole thing, would have worked out differently — to have family around years later when my life really fell apart.

  I shook my head. No.

  “ Michael …”

  No, Heidi. Who you turn to when your mother dies speaks volumes about where your heart is. And my heart wasn’t with these people. I squeezed Cora’s arm. This is where I am. Only here. And so we walked away, dispersing as if I were just another family acquaintance.

  “What do you want to do?” Cora asked as we milled on the icy sidewalk outside Camp Hill.

  “Let’s go get a drink,” I said cheerily.

  “I think you’ve had enough.”

  I sighed. “Can we go back to your place?”