by Mark Sampson
The sliding door opens and I forget to jump. I should have jumped, because now there is another old woman here to join us, standing at the room’s threshold. Conversations cease. The clink and click of our dining pulls back, like a tide. Everyone, including me, looks up at her. My heart plummets at the sight of this woman, the confirmation of her existence. It’s her. Eun-young. The woman in Jin’s painting. There is no mistaking the scar that streaks like a thin, pink ribbon across the wrinkles of her mouth.
“An’yon haseyo,” she bellows into the silencing room. There is a deep timbre to her voice, like a man’s; her greeting comes out almost like an admonishment. Nobody says a word in return. The woman’s hair and clothes are so grey that she is nearly translucent in them — like a ghost. She’s hunched over at the waist and leaning on her wooden cane, just like in her painting. From her place at the threshold, she exchanges a few sentences with Ji-young, her sister. Perhaps a polite birthday greeting, one elder to another. Then she slips off her footwear — soft, old lady shoes, almost like slippers — and staggers in. She struggles. Her hips jerk awkwardly, one after the other, as she tries to negotiate the floor’s elevated lip with her cane. She’s like a scarecrow being walked across a field by mocking children. Jesus. Jesus. She’s going to fall. She’s going to fall, and yet nobody moves to help her. In Korea, being an elder is everything. It is the top of the family hierarchy. And yet for that one beat of time, not a single person moves to assist her.
Jin sucks her teeth at her family as she climbs to her feet. “Eemo halmoney!” she exclaims, followed by another phrase I know: “Jo’shimhae!” — Be careful now. I watch my girlfriend flutter across the ondol floor to assist Eun-young as she wobbles. There is something like an embrace between them, and then Jin is petting the old woman’s hands and saying sweet things to her in Korean. Eun-young nods at her grandniece, but doesn’t smile. Jin takes her arm and helps her over to the table, braces her withered hand as the old woman lowers her bones to a mat on the floor. Jin squats down next to her, talking and talking, and then begins organizing a plate and bowl in front of her. She points at dishes and Eun-young either nods or shakes her head. The bit of food she accepts would not be enough to fill a sparrow.
Jin is suddenly waving her hand forward at me. “Michael — come come come.” I get up and walk over, sensing a pair of nervous eyes follow me as I do. Tae’s. She’s holding her breath as I approach Eun-young, listening for every word we’re about to utter. I hover over the old woman as Jin makes introductions. Again, Eun-young nods, but doesn’t smile as she looks up at me. I catch very little about what Jin tells her about me — I hear Canada and hagwon and maybe the Korean word for journalist. Eun-young’s eyes narrow a little.
We eventually return to our own mats and discover that conversations and dining have resumed, though much more subdued. Why? Is it out of respect or — no, it’s discomfiture. Eun-young’s presence here weakens everything, makes what was hard and secure now wobbly and trivial. I can sense it in the table’s banter. Eun-young eats silently except for a few occasional words passed to Ji-young. She doesn’t even acknowledge the younger generation here. I wish I’d brought a notebook with me. I’d be jotting furiously, trying to capture what I’m seeing. Nothing I’ve read on the Internet has prepared me for this.
I look down at my digital camera. I turn it on and move it to the edge of the table, trying to hide it as best as I can. I clasp it between thumb and finger, turn it to my left, look down through the viewfinder. Turn it, turn it, and then there Eun-young is, streaming across the screen in a pixilated image. I press the button quickly before I lose her. When the flash has finished, I return the camera to my lap. The screen goes black for a moment, returns, and then there she is, frozen at a badly blurred angle, captured in all her torturous dignity.
I look up and see Tae glaring at me with unmistakable contempt. I sip my baekseju. Jin touches my arm, leans into me.
“Michael, put the camera away,” she whispers.
Much later, Jin and I are alone outside the restaurant saying our goodbyes. The party is breaking up and her parents are waiting inside to drive her home. A brief silence falls between us, this moment of privacy.
“I feel guilty,” I say finally.
“For what?”
“I feel if I get what I want and you follow me back to Canada, I’ll be taking you away from all those people.”
She looks away, says nothing.
“You did the right thing tonight, by the way.”
She perks up. “What did I do?”
“You helped an old woman when nobody else would.”
She just glances at her feet, hair falling in her face.
“Jin, I’d like to speak to her.”
She looks back up. “ What?”
“I’d like to interview Eun-young, if I can. You could translate. I think it would —”
“Michael, are you out of your mind?”
“Just hear me out. I know it’s —”
“I told you: we don’t talk about her in this family.”
“I know, but —”
“ She doesn’t talk about herself. Ever. The only people who know what she went through are the people who were in that room tonight.”
“Jin —”
“The only people, Michael. She has told nobody else. Nobody.”
“Yeah? Well maybe that should change.”
Jin’s a bit shocked by my forwardness. She steps up to me, gets right into my face. “What, all of a sudden you think you’re a journalist again? You don’t understand anything.” Then sees the hurt she’s caused me, and so she squeezes my hand. “You know I love you, but you don’t understand. Michael, you don’t.”
“But I want to,” I reply. To this, she has no answer.
A few minutes later, I’m on my way back to the subway. I’m almost at the station when I freeze abruptly, there in my tracks. I pat madly at my pockets. Rifle through my satchel. Ah shit. I hustle back, all the way to the restaurant. Up the steps and through the door. Jin and her parents have already left. I bow to the hostess at her podium and motion to the back. She nods her understanding and lets me through. I hurry into the hallway and aim myself at our room, the place at the table where I’d been sitting.
I don’t make it.
We meet each other in the hall. Face to face and alone. She, hunched on her cane and wobbling. And me, slumped shoulders and gawking. She turns her gaze up to mine. Recognizes me instantly.
“An’yon hashimnigga. ” I bow, but she seems unimpressed.
“Ka Meh La?” she asks, forking an eyebrow.
I shrug lightly: I don’t understand.
So she reaches with her brittle hand into the pocket of her dress and takes out my camera. Must have picked it up after we left, must have been on her way to give it to the hostess. Now she lets it float there, like she’s not quite ready to relinquish it to me. But then does.
Our fingers touch as I take it from her. I bow again. “Kamsa’hamnida.”
But she says nothing more. Just shoves past me in the hall and on her way, alone. I watch her go with ten thousand questions sitting at the bottom of my throat.
Later on the subway, I flip through the evening’s images.
Son of a gun.
She deleted the one of her.
Chapter 16
It often seemed to Eun-young that she was the only person of her generation who used the Pusan Municipal Library. If she came during the day, the place was nearly dead except for a few old men poring over ancient scrolls rolled out on tables. If she came during the evening, the library was swarmed by young people doing their homework. Never did Eun-young see another housewife in her thirties in here. She sometimes wondered what her mother would make of this library, these shelves straining under the weight of information. If her mother had had access to such a place, Eun-young imaged her doing what she was doing — reading voraciously, indiscriminately, sucking up the sustenance that fed and quelled and distracted her min
d. Facts are everywhere, her mother would have said. Anyone can absorb facts. But real wisdom lies in the gaps between things, in the pictures you draw from all the little pieces.
Eun-young’s favourite books were the poetry. She would often take out whole stacks of anthologies — ancient poems, contemporary poems, poems written during the occupation. For her, they distilled knowledge into pure wisdom. She loved the way a poem could drop a stone down the canyon of her soul and send that slight but irrefutable ping of Truth reverberating back up.
She often read verse to Po at night in bed while he kissed the scars on her legs.
In the spring of ’61, at the height of Korea’s political chaos, General Park Chung Hee pulled off a dramatic coup d’etat and seized control of the country. To legitimize his new regime, he ran in a general election two years later and won a narrow majority. The newspapers and radio heralded this as a new dawn for the Republic, one that secured its economic and political future. But ordinary Koreans were still uncertain, still nervous that they remained, technically, under a police state.
Po and Eun-young never discussed how they had voted in the 1963 election, but Eun-young was sure that her husband had acquiesced to her brother-in-law’s argument and voted for General Park. Po had come to believe that stability was better than instability, no matter what the cost. He longed to hide beneath mundane things: his work on construction sites, his weekends taking Eun-young to the cinema, their nights in bed when he would try his best to be a man, to force sounds of pleasure from her with the earnest efforts of his tongue and hands. He was willing to believe in anything, so long as it didn’t disrupt the tenuous rhythm of their days.
But as the months and years passed, Eun-young spent more and more time in those places where Po could never reach her. There were nights when she would burst awake in bed, slimy with sweat and panting from some nightmare. When this happened, she would not allow Po to speak or touch her, to infiltrate her terror in any way. There were times when she spent untold hours locked in the bathroom under the twist of another vague illness, and would not tell Po what was wrong once she finally emerged. And there were evenings when he could not pry her away from the newspapers, or the books she borrowed from the library. She pored over them as if researching something, as if burrowing down into all those words on the hunt for some buried truth. She was keeping track of her country as it moved on, moved up in the world.
Of course, Po believed that these widening distances had a lot to do with his ongoing inadequacies. He would often find ways to broach the offer he had once made to her. “Did you meet anyone interesting when you were out today?” he asked one evening in their sitting room. Eun-young was engrossed in the newspaper and hadn’t spoken to him since supper.
She looked up and squinted, as if he were a stranger. “I’m sorry?”
“I said did you meet anyone … interesting when you were out?”
A bemused frown fell onto her face. But then she got up, set the newspaper aside, and crossed the room to where he was sitting. She knelt at his legs, rested her arms on his thighs. “Po, we’ve been through this: I could never touch another man.”
“Eun-young, I’m just saying — if you wanted to, I wouldn’t —”
“ Po — I could never touch another man.”
He didn’t believe her. There were too many secrets that she kept from him already. He knew this, a doubt he couldn’t restrain no matter how hard he tried. When she kissed him then, he refused to acknowledge the assurance behind it. It felt perfunctory. A wife’s duty to her doubtful husband.
She couldn’t remember what had compelled her to wander into the foreign-language section that afternoon in 1964. For years, she had ignored that single aisle of books in the far western corner of the library’s ground floor, as if it were a dark cavern full of unsafe mysteries. What was it on that day that had caused her curiosity to get the better of her? Was it boredom? Was it something she had read in the paper that put a nettlesome bug in her mind? Whatever it was, Eun-young found herself drifting into that aisle. When she did, it was like she was transported to a different country, surrounded now by multiple foreign languages. There was a row of English grammar books, a row of French novels, but the bulk of the selection was in Japanese. Entire yards of flaking cardboard covers lined up on either side of her. Seeing that alphabet etched on the spines, characters she hadn’t read in nearly twenty years, made her pulse quicken. She was suddenly tremulous. She tried to calm down. It is just a harmless alphabet, she told herself. She pulled a book from the shelf at random, a Japanese novel for teenagers, an anodyne tale of young love and young jealousies. See? she thought. Stupid. It’s just a language, one that no longer holds any dominion over you. These are just characters on a page. She put the book back.
Farther down the row of Japanese texts, she saw a huge tome jutting out from the shelf — its glossy hardcover gleaming under the library’s lights. She went over and looked at how its sheer mass stood out from the other books on the shelf. She reached up and pulled it down. The book’s surprising weight nearly overtook her as she moved it around to look at the cover. It was a Japanese history book for high-school students. She could tell it wasn’t very old: the corners were uncurled and its spine was still strong and unwrinkled. Eun-young rested the book on the underside of her forearm so she could open it to the publication page.
Copyright 1956.
She carried it out of the aisle and over to one of the library’s tables. Sat down and opened the book to a random chapter. Each page was divided by two dense columns of Japanese text, broken up with images — a few ancient illustrations, but mostly more contemporary photos of Tokyo and Osaka and other places. She snapped the book shut. Go put it back. You don’t need to do this. There’s nothing in here you want to see. But then her mother’s lilted voice rang out like a bell in her mind. Don’t ever be afraid of knowledge, my little crane. Always be as wise as you can be. Eun-young looked at the book again, then reopened it, this time to the table of contents. Found the section on the twentieth century. Took a breath, and flipped to it.
Her Japanese was rusty and she had to muscle her way through the vocabulary and grammatical structures. There was so much here to read. She found herself skimming, her eyes flowing over column after column, hunting for any reference to Korea. Surely there had to be something.
She wouldn’t have time to read it here. She closed the book again. And was overcome by a decision that felt like it could split her soul in two. Go put it back — or check the book out.
Go put it back.
Or check the book out.
She lifted the tome off the table, cradled its weight in the crook of her arm, and carried it to the front desk.
The newspapers were left forsaken in their little alcove by the front door. Days would pass when she would not bathe or even change out of her night clothes. Po would come home from construction sites dusty and starving to find the wood stove in the kitchen unlit, their dinner for the evening not started. When this happened, Eun-young would emerge from the sitting room surprised to see him home, then look at the clock, realize what time it was, and bolt into action. “I’m sorry Po I’m sorry I lost track of time here let me get some rice and vegetables on I’m very sorry …” But if he showed any annoyance at all, or even questioned what she’d been doing all day, she’d get defensive and snap at him. “What, do you think it is easy being a wife? To be cooped up in here all day cooking and cleaning for you?”
But his face just softened with concern. “Cooking and cleaning for us,” he ventured. And this just made her all the angrier.
One evening, he came in with the day’s mail and handed Eun-young a card out of the thin pile in his hand. “What’s this?” she snarled from her place at the stove, trying to get it lit. “It’s a notice from the library. It says you have a book overdue.” She ripped the little card in two without looking at it and stuffed the pieces down the stove among the kindling and newspapers. “Dinner won’t be ready for another
hour,” she said without looking at him. He just stood there coated in the day’s dust, watching her. “Go take your bath, Po,” she sniffed. “Your body stinks of progress.”
She checked out the history book so many times it felt like it belonged to her now. She vandalized the section on the twentieth century with a pen, underlining whole passages and writing angry notes in the margins: “Liars!” and “They were protecting their colonies from what?” The book whitewashed everything, talked about Japan’s noble intentions in Asia and how they’d been corrupted by extremists in the Emperor’s government, how the West had misconstrued everything. It made no reference to life on the Korean peninsula in the thirty-five years of occupation. It certainly made no reference to the thousands of girls coerced from their homes and taken to China. Not one mention, not one inkling. And worst of all, the book’s final chapter droned on and on about the dropping of the atomic bombs, how Japan had been a victim — a victim — of American aggression. She read the section over and over until it carved out a deep cavity inside her heart, one she vowed never to fill. They see themselves as victims. They honestly do. This is what they’re teaching their children.
One night, during those weeks when the book held Eun-young hostage, Po came to her in bed more assertive than usual. He moved up on her from behind, ran a hand down the length of her body and squeezed his face into the crook of her neck. She curled in on herself, away from him. He sang out her name, but she would not relent. When he finally gave up, he fell back on his side of the bed and looked up at the ceiling.
