by Mark Sampson
Eun-young lowered her head, felt a flush appear around her neck like a wreath. She scoured her brain for all the rationales for staying away. They are there, she thought. Your justifications are there, aren’t they? No. No, they are not. They are not there. You speak of God not being in this place, but it is your reasons , not God, that have abandoned you. They are not here. You cannot speak your reasons aloud because they are not really here.
“I’ll come, Ji-young,” she said.
“Eun-young …”
“I’ll come.”
“You promise?”
“I do. I’ll come. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Chapter 20
Jin is wearing hanbok.
Jin is wearing hanbok in some of the photos she’s showing me on her camera. She races through them to get to other pictures, from her recent trip to Paris.
“Wait, go back,” I tell her.
“What?”
“Go back for a sec.”
We’re on my bed, huddled over the viewfinder. We haven’t seen each other in more than a month: After the extended break with her family at Chuseok, Jin went to France for three weeks on business. It’s great having her in the apartment again, but also a little weird. Awkward. We’re waiting for Paul to leave for the day. He’s off to Suwon to hike the fortress there with friends he’s made at Bible study.
Jin scrolls back a few pictures. And then there she is, under that tent-like dress in its layers of pastel.
“You’re wearing hanbok in these ones,” I say.
“Well, it was Chuseok.”
“Jin, you never wear hanbok. You always said it looks unflattering.”
“Michael, Chuseok was different this year. I told you that. It had to be, coming so close after my mother’s death. I felt, how you say, obligated to be a bit more traditional.”
“But I’ve never seen you wear it. You look different. You look …”
“Michael, do you have a problem with me wearing hanbok?”
I bristle. “Of course not. I don’t. It’s just that …”
A knock rattles my door.
“Come on in,” I sigh.
Paul peeps his head in bashfully, like he’s worried we won’t be decent. “Hey, you two.”
“Hey, man.”
“Hi, Purposeful Paul.”
His smile curdles a little, like he’s not sure if Jin is mocking him. “I’m off to Suwon,” he says. “I won’t be back until late. Have a great day, you guys.”
“You too, man. Enjoy the hike. It’s fantastic.”
“Yes, have fun down there.”
After he’s gone, I turn back to Jin. I want to talk to her about the things I’ve been noticing, these little slippages in her personality. But I don’t get the chance. As soon she hears Paul close and lock the apartment door behind him, she sets her camera on my nightstand and then moves in on me. Her palms run over my thighs, and she kisses my throat.
“Hello there, stranger,” she croons.
Within a minute, our clothes are on the floor. It’s been so long since we’ve had sex, so long since I’ve had her undivided attention for any stretch of time. It’s nice; but again, weird. Passionate, but in the tawdry way of a one-night stand.
After we’re done, she throws on one of my T-shirts and goes to use the bathroom; and when she returns, spots something on my floor near the bookshelf. It’s the 2004 academic calendar from the University of Ottawa. Tucked in its pages is my application form. She brings them over to the bed and climbs in with me. Hikes up her naked legs and rests the book on them.
“So are we really going to do this?” she asks, flipping.
She said we. I cling to the fact that she said we.
“I would certainly like to.”
Her expression is an eddy of indecision, so many thoughts swirling around her head.
“So tell me how it would work.”
“Well, it’s a two-year program. I’d have a B.Ed at the end. I could probably find some freelance editing during the summers to help keep us afloat.”
“And what would I do?”
“I’m thinking you could apply for a job at the Korean Consulate. Or maybe do some freelance translating. You are fluent in French, after all.”
“And how often would we come back to Korea?”
“As often as we can afford. If I’m going to be a school teacher for the rest of my life, I’ll have two months off every year. We could spend entire summers back here in big smoggy Seoul.”
She doesn’t smile at that. She just sticks out her bottom lip and thinks hard.
“Jin, we’ll come back as often as we can.”
“But is that what you want?” she asks suddenly. “I mean really, Michael. Are you willing to spend every summer vacation commuting between our two countries?”
“If it means being with you.”
“But wouldn’t it be simpler to take Korea — to take me — out of the equation completely?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I tell her. “You’re the reason we’re even having this conversation.”
“But maybe you’d be happier with a Canadian girl. Did you consider that? Why be chained to Korea for the rest of your life just because you think you’re in love with me?”
“ Hey. I don’t think I’m in love with you.”
But she turns away then, away from the severity in my tone. “Maybe it would be better if you weren’t in love with a Korean. Then you could move home next year with no complications. Did you ever think of that?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jin. You’re the one I want to be with. I have nothing else to say.”
Thankfully, she smiles a little. “Even if you don’t like me wearing hanbok?”
“I told you — I don’t have a problem with you wearing hanbok.”
“You think it makes me look ugly.”
“It doesn’t make you look ugly,” I say. “It makes you look pregnant.”
She huffs. “Well, I’m not pregnant.”
She kisses me between the eyes and then slides out of my sheets to go take a shower.
Another month and another month, and I’ll still be on this assembly line of English. My classes at the hagwon grow more predictable with each new batch of kids. There’s the princess in the first row, there’s the thug in the back. There’s the kid too smart for his own good, sarcastic and demanding linguistic explanations. Why not “gooder”? Why not caught “blue-handed” when doing something wrong? Why is “losing your temper” bad when “having a temper” is also bad? Why, MichaelTeacher, why? His essays teem with personality, but I still need to scribble corrections in the margins. No, Louis Armstrong was not the first man on the moon. No, Jesus was not betrayed by Judas Asparagus. He means well. At least he doesn’t write ad nauseam about the World of Warcraft or Pokémon. The older kids want to talk about America. They can’t believe Kerry lost the election. How could so many people be so stupid? “Bush is crazy man! Crazzzy man!” the kids scream at me, as if I had something to do with his victory.
My life is bifurcated now, between the grind of today and my plans for next year. The application to Ottawa is in the mail and I’m imbued with optimism. I’ve already begun researching the city, thinking about neighbourhoods to live in and commutes to campus. Does Ottawa have a Korean community? Will Jin be able to get a job? What sort of visa will she need? I plan and I plan. You might say I overplan. I take ideas to Jin looking for clear-cut approval: Let’s spend the summer in Halifax: JazzFest and the buskers and day trips down to the South Shore; let’s go to Ottawa a couple of weeks before classes start and be tourists, walking the ByWard Market and exploring Parliament Hill. She nods with acquiescence, but there is no commitment behind her eyes. Only distraction. She is deeply distracted. I mention my worries to Paul, but his advice is just a thin gruel of determinism. Have faith that she’ll follow you to Canada, Michael. If it’s meant to be, it’ll be. I don’t want to have faith. I want to fucking kidnap her. I want to make things hap
pen. It’s no use talking to Paul about this. He doesn’t believe that we’re in control of our own lives. I wish Rob Cruise were around for me to seek his counsel. He’d know what I should say to Jin to extinguish these reservations, to take charge of our relationship. But I haven’t seen Rob since the summer. I don’t even know what he’s doing for a living this year. I don’t even know if he took my advice, and fled the country.
And let’s not forget about my other little project. I feel like I’ve done all the research on the Web that I can. I’ve read every article, testimonial, bit of history out there for public consumption. The time has come to take this obsession to the next level.
I ask Ms. Kim for a Wednesday off. Any Wednesday, it doesn’t matter. I realize that beseeching her for this favour is risky business: my absence from the school, even for a day, could put me on her “bad teacher” radar. She’ll have to ask one of the Korean front-counter staff — all of whom are bilingual, more or less — to teach my classes. She’ll hate doing this because Koreans aren’t supposed to teach Koreans at an English hagwon. It goes against the advertising, against what the school has promised all the mothers: Our teachers are the real deal — Western, almost always white, and native speakers. Still, it’s only for one day. I ask Ms. Kim for this during our prep period in the most diffident voice possible. I have to be careful. She is forever on the look-out for ways that her foreign teaching staff might be ripping her off, always one beat from flying off the handle. Still, she likes me. Considers me obedient and reliable. We negotiate the terms: I won’t be paid for the day, and if I’m back in time I should come in and teach my evening classes — for free, as a gesture of thanks. I have no choice but to agree. Why do you need a Wednesday off, anyway? she asks. Personal business, I tell her. Something I can only do on a Wednesday. Thankfully, she doesn’t ask for details. What would I say if she did? Tell me, Ms. Kim, do you have a grandmother?
Wednesday is when Seoul’s comfort women gather outside the Japanese Embassy for their noontime protest. This has happened every week, without fail, for the last twelve years. I am off to observe it in the name of research, bringing along a big spiralled notepad like the kind I used when I was a middling journalist. As the subway rumbles me northward, I feel that old hollow sensation in my stomach. These blank pages speak of obligations I’ve never been comfortable with: to be assertive, to ask tough questions, to bother people, to insist they share their stories, to get it down, to get it right, to get it lucid. I’m determined to lift what I want from these women in the name of telling a good story.
But my visit to the Embassy is an absolute bust. The atmosphere of the gathering is nothing like I had imagined. I expected there to be speeches I could understand, angry chants thrown like stones at the Embassy windows, elderly ladies pounding their chests in anguish as they demand justice. It is nothing like that. There is a perfunctory air to this assembly, a well-entrenched routine. I watch these women sitting behind their long banners and waving their ping pong racket-like signs in the air. The songs they sing are almost cheerful; a few of these ladies are actually smiling. Someone does make a speech, a university-aged girl who has come out to show her support, but it’s entirely in Korean and garbled through a megaphone. I roam the small crowd, jotting observations and posing a few limp questions to a handful of people. Hardly anyone speaks English, and the ones who do can tell me nothing beyond what I’ve already learned on the Web.
I should have brought Jin. She could have been my translator, giving me the confidence to come right up to these old women and put better questions, harder questions to them — to make them reveal the little details about their experience that I can’t learn from books or articles. But I haven’t even told Jin about this project. I suspect she’d be furious if she knew I was even up here.
I return to Daechi at the end of the afternoon, thoroughly dejected. The apartment is empty: Paul has already left for the hagwon. I go into my bedroom and sit at the little wooden desk I scavenged off the street, and slap my notebook on it. I open the ancient laptop I brought over from Canada and turn it on, launching a new document. I look down at the few, scant notes I had taken. I look up at the computer’s blank page, all its possibilities.
What the hell, Michael? I think. Are you going to be a coward for the rest of your life? Are you going to do nothing, be nothing? You know that there is a different route into this. You know there is another way.
And in that instant, I feel like I hold the entire thing — every last word of what I want to write — in my mind at once. It’s there, as real as anything that has ever happened to me. Real because it is so unreal. Please forgive me. I beseech this to Jin, to Eun-young, to myself, even to Paul’s big benevolent God. Please forgive what I’m about to do.
And then I begin typing.
Chapter 21
Eun-young rode the subway across Seoul, heading east. Today was not the tomorrow that she had promised to Ji-young. It had been more than a week since her sister’s late-night call — time that Eun-young had taken to perform this inner alchemy, to turn the dull metal of her fear into a golden bravery. But now, sitting in the toss and pitch of her subway seat next to a teenager reading a violent comic book, Eun-young didn’t feel brave. Cowardice slumped her shoulders and one thought kept caroming through her mind: Have I waited too long to come? Have I just waited too long? It wasn’t simply that Ji-young might be hurt or even angry that Eun-young had taken a week to keep her promise. Eun-young was worried that the tides of her sister’s grief might have receded since her call and this visit would be all for nothing, another opportunity squandered.
Have I waited too long to come? This reoccurring mantra reminded Eun-young of something else — a single, disastrous return she had made to Pusan so long ago. The memory of it seeped into her mind then. It may have taken her a week to face Ji-young, but it had taken twenty-three years to face what she had done to Po. This act felt exactly like that one — the same sense that she had allowed her fear to fritter away a chance to set something right. That she had let her cowardice get the better of her.
The year had been 1988. Seoul’s great coming-out party, the eyes of the world beaming onto the culture of Korea. Eun-young had been dreading the Olympics. She’d grown accustomed to her country’s global irrelevance, to its placidly controlled society and closed doors, intended (as every Korean knew) to give the wounds of the past time to heal. And heal they had. The country had changed so much in the years leading up to the Games — the collapse of the police state, the rise of real democracy, a freer press, more liberties, more growth. And now, in hosting the XXIV Olympiad, Koreans were saying to the world: “Come to us. Line up at our door. We have spread ourselves open for you.”
It all made Eun-young nervous.
She was working as a cleaner in a downtown hotel at the time, long days of pushing her cart of disinfectants and toilet paper rolls anonymously through the hotel halls. Foreigners had begun descending in swarms; she had never seen so many unfamiliar skin tones, had never heard so many strange tongues. The dark Africans with their colourful flags embroidered on their luggage; the brash Americans in their nylon track suits; the icy Scandinavians with their earnest attempts at the language. And, of course, the ever-polite Japanese — so many Japanese journalists with their notepads and cameras and microphones. Fascinated, they were, by all the quaint minutiae of her country’s customs, everything their parents and grandparents had tried to wipe out.
It was two days before the opening ceremonies. She was dusting coffee tables with a feathered wand in the little lounge off the hotel lobby. On the couch just beyond where she worked, a radio journalist from Japan, no more than thirty years old, was interviewing an Olympic organizer. Another young Japanese man, a translator, sat next to them, converting the journalist’s questions into Korean as he asked them. Eun-young discreetly feathered her way over, catching snippets of their banter. When the interview finished, the organizer got up to leave; and when he was out of earshot, the two Ja
panese boys leaned in and exchanged a callous, sarcastic quip about the man’s answers. Eun-young missed most of it, but she caught one word that ripped her stomach clean out of her body. The word flew from the journalist’s lips in a spray of cruel laughter.
Chosunjin.
Chosunjin!
It had been nearly forty-five years since that racial slur, the embodiment of old Japanese bigotry against Koreans, had scorched her ears. But the journalist, born after the occupation, born even after the Korean War, had uttered it with such nonchalance. Eun-young stopped and stared at them, but they didn’t even see her. She slapped her duster down on an end table and marched over to a vase of orange roses standing on a pillar by the doors. Yanked the flowers out and smacked them to the floor, then carried the vase over to where the men were sitting, winding her way around the couch. Eun-young didn’t hesitate as she decanted the perfumed water over the journalist’s head. She slammed the empty vase at his feet, and it broke on the thin carpet. “Your grandfather probably raped me!” she said in perfect Japanese, shocking the young man as rivers ran down his sport coat. Then she spat in his face.
The hotel manager rushed over from behind the front desk. He began apologizing frantically to the boys, bowing and bowing and bowing again. Then he turned to Eun-young, to where she stood quavering before them, and fired her on the spot.
Days later in her basement apartment, freshly terminated and navigating the rapids of her rage, she could barely bring herself to watch the opening ceremonies on her little TV. What a grotesque pantomime of harmony and peace, she thought: thousands of Korean dancers undulating on the stadium floor with great synchronized rotations; the parade of drums; the jets streaking a rainbow across the sky; the mass displays of taekwondo. It sickened her. It looked whorish. And for the first time since returning to Seoul in 1965, since uttering the truth about her past to Ji-young and Chung Hee in a cloud of disgrace, she felt an overwhelming compulsion to speak her history to the greater world. She imagined herself storming into the stadium, seizing the microphones, turning to the cameras of the world and screaming, Stop this! They raped us! Don’t you know? They raped us and raped us and raped us again! But who would listen to her, this embittered sixty-year-old woman, divorced and poor and living on the margins of this colourful culture now mincing around in front of everyone? Five billion people in the world and who would want to face such an ugly truth at a time like this? Who among them would look past what she was and see the person she could have been, the person that the Japanese had so heartlessly stolen?
