White Chrysanthemum

by Mary Lynn Bracht

  The next day Hana learns that Keiko’s friend died in labour, but not before she understands why she was brought to this place.

  Emi

  Seoul, December 2011

  Emi’s daughter awakens her with a gentle squeeze on her arm. Her eyes feel dry and scratchy.

  ‘Breakfast is ready,’ YoonHui says.

  Emi smells freshly brewed coffee, along with boiled rice and pan-fried whitefish. Her stomach grumbles. Rising from the sofa, her knees pop. Snowball wags his tail and follows her into the bathroom. He doesn’t seem to mind watching her go about her morning business. It’s like they’re old companions with years of intimacy behind them. She splashes water onto her face and then cups her hands over her eyes, soaking them in cold water. Refreshed, she picks up the little dog and shuffles into the kitchen.

  Her daughter has outdone herself. An array of dishes on small porcelain plates sits on the breakfast table next to two steaming bowls of rice.

  ‘You made my favourite banchan,’ Emi exclaims, motioning towards the seasoned bean sprouts.

  ‘I spent yesterday morning cooking,’ YoonHui admits, and sits across from her mother.

  Emi picks up her chopsticks and retrieves a portion of bean sprouts. They taste excellent, and she tells her daughter so. They eat in silence for a while, although Snowball intermittently makes his presence known. YoonHui feeds the dog a few morsels of fish.

  After breakfast, they take their coffee to the living room, and her daughter puts on a CD. Classical piano music drifts about the room, and she turns the volume down.

  ‘This is pretty music,’ Emi says.

  ‘It’s Chopin. You liked it last time, too.’

  ‘Yes, it’s very good.’

  YoonHui smiles and looks out the window. Emi thinks Lane must be arriving soon.

  ‘Mother, are you sure it’s OK if Lane comes with us today? You don’t mind?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t mind. Don’t worry about me. Is your brother coming?’

  ‘No, he has to work.’

  ‘And my grandson?’

  ‘He has school. We’ll meet them again for dinner tonight.’

  Her daughter audibly releases a heavy breath. Emi thinks she’s upset. She doesn’t know why, so she sits and waits, even though she has finished her coffee and wants to get dressed.

  ‘Mother? Can I ask you something?’

  She looks afraid to speak. Even after all these years, her daughter, a fifty-eight-year-old woman, is afraid to speak to her own mother. Emi wonders what she must have done to make her daughter so fearful.

  ‘Of course, ask me anything.’

  YoonHui swallows and stares at her coffee mug. She licks her lips and doesn’t look up when she speaks.

  ‘Were you a “comfort woman”?’ Silence falls between them like an invisible sheet.

  Emi does not immediately answer; instead she looks at her hands.

  ‘Is that why you’ve started going to the Wednesday Demonstrations whenever you visit us?’ her daughter continues. Concern wrinkles her forehead.

  Emi touches the table. It feels solid and smooth. Her heart clenches. The Wednesday Demonstrations have been held every week since the first so-called comfort woman came forward twenty years ago, though Emi has only attended once a year for the last three years. The demonstration calls for justice, for the Japanese government to admit their war crimes committed against thousands of women during the Second World War.

  So many years have passed since the war ended, since the protests began, yet still the crimes go unpunished. What does it require to deserve an apology? To give one? Emi touches her chest. Her heart unclenches. Today’s demonstration is special, the one thousandth protest.

  ‘Why can’t you talk to me?’ Her daughter’s voice aches with hurt.

  Emi places her palms onto her thighs. She has never known how to talk to her own daughter. YoonHui is an academic, ruled by logic. Her every decision is painfully researched and carried out with calculated precision. That’s why she couldn’t follow Emi into the sea to make her living as a haenyeo. Instead she left for university in search of a world that made sense to her. Emi could never understand the world her daughter inhabits. Just as her daughter could never understand the secrets Emi has kept from her for her entire life. She doesn’t know enough words to explain to her daughter a lifetime of silence. But she cannot tell more lies.

  ‘I was never a “comfort woman”. You shouldn’t doubt me.’ Emi looks at her daughter as she speaks, hoping it will be enough.

  ‘I – I don’t doubt you, I just … I want you to share your life with me. Some part of you.’ YoonHui looks down at her coffee. She looks ashamed and a little angry.

  ‘YoonHui.’ Emi says her name softly.

  YoonHui looks up. She doesn’t hide her anger. Instead she seems to dare her mother to lie to her. The fierce tiger still resides in her, and Emi feels a surge of pride.

  ‘I’m searching for someone, that’s all. I hope to find word of her there.’

  ‘Who is it? A friend?’

  The girl from her dream flashes into her mind. She sees the young face. Who is she looking for? A girl lost so many years ago? A woman grown old in another land? Yet, if she answers her daughter truthfully, Emi knows she will open a vault that has been sealed for over six decades, and there will be no way to close it once opened. Behind that sealed door lie deceit, pain, fear, worry, shame, everything from her past life that she hid from her children, and as she grew older, even from herself. It suddenly overcomes her, as though a heavy military boot worn by a faceless soldier has just kicked her breath away. Her shoulders sag, and she can’t look at her daughter. She stares beyond her at the linoleum floor, covered in marbled lines that converge like delicate flowers.

  It was a flower that sent Emi to the Wednesday Demonstrations in the first place. Three years ago JinHee convinced her to attend the inaugural ceremony for the opening of the Jeju Peace Park. The park was created to commemorate the 1948 Jeju Uprising, which led to the massacre of over twenty thousand islanders. So many of those killed were unjustly accused. She still remembers the fear that plagued her village, everyone afraid to become labelled as a red, a communist. Anyone seen as sympathetic to Soviet-supported North Korea was thrown into prisons, beaten, tortured, and then killed when the South Korean interim government, supported by the United States military, ordered the mass execution of suspected leftists as a pre-emptive measure at the outbreak of the Korean War.

  Emi was just fourteen when her family home was burned to the ground. Her village was one of many suspected of harbouring leftist rebels fighting for the communist North. She never spoke about it, but JinHee lived through it, too. She knew the painful memories in Emi’s heart because she had to bear her own. The opening ceremony at the Peace Park was the first step in healing the wounds of the island’s blood-filled past, and JinHee did not rest until Emi agreed to attend.

  ‘Those nightmares you’re having won’t go away on their own,’ JinHee said after a long morning of diving. They were sitting at the market selling their catch. Emi had filled an extra bucketful of abalone, a lucky day’s find. ‘You need to confront your past. This may help.’

  ‘Past is past,’ Emi replied, watching the shoppers stroll by. A little girl holding her mother’s index finger caught her attention. They were tourists from the mainland. The girl’s bright eyes fixed on her. She smiled, and Emi looked away. She had been having nightmares for a long while. She couldn’t remember when they had begun, but she knew they had started sometime after her husband had died.

  ‘Nothing can be done about it,’ Emi answered.

  ‘So stubborn. You cling to your han like it owns you.’ JinHee shook her head in dismay, then waved to the little girl, who covered her mouth and giggled.

  ‘I do not,’ Emi replied, stopping short and sitting a little taller, kneading her lame leg with one hand.

  ‘We’re all going. We’re renting a van to take us there.’

  Emi didn
’t reply. She looked back at the little girl, who appeared carefree and light as air as she skipped beside her mother through the crowded market. The pang of jealousy Emi repressed each time she saw a happy child throbbed. Everyone had suffered during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Many had survived the Second World War only to die in the Korean War. But if, like Emi, they had managed to live through both, they forever after carried a burden of helplessness and overwhelming regret. Family members murdered, starved, stolen, neighbours turning on one another – all this was their han, a word every Korean knew and a burden they each held within them. Everyone, even JinHee and the other divers, carried this han, but it was no one’s business how Emi dealt with hers.

  JinHee touched Emi’s good leg. ‘Don’t let your stubbornness keep you from finding peace.’

  Emi was about to argue her case, but JinHee held her hands in the air, surrendering.

  ‘I’ll shut up, I promise—’

  ‘Good,’ Emi said, prematurely.

  ‘But only if you come with us,’ JinHee shouted, and clapped her hands in the air. ‘You’ll never have peace otherwise, with yourself or with me!’ Then she let out her famous laugh, which echoed among the stalls. Eyes had fallen upon them, and Emi had no choice but to smile.

  The drive to the memorial was filled with storytelling and tears as they recalled the uprising and the subsequent slaughter. Many of the divers had been young girls at the time and had lost parents, aunts, uncles, siblings and grandparents. Emi sat in the front seat of the van, staring out of the window but listening. She didn’t join in because her memories of that time wouldn’t come. When she tried to conjure an image of the period after Korea’s liberation from the Japanese, a haze covered her mind. It was as though the fifty years of strict governmental suppression that had followed had done their work. Not even the freedoms of the current government had changed her inability to speak about it. Emi’s mind had blocked out the memories of her painful past so that she could raise her children and survive. But that didn’t stop the dreams.

  ‘You OK?’ JinHee asked when they arrived at the park.

  Emi shrugged, and when JinHee kept hovering near her as though looking after a child, Emi batted her away.

  More than five thousand people attended the ceremony. Emi peered through the crowd, wondering how many had once lived on Jeju Island and left because of the atrocities committed by their own countrymen. A woman passed by her carrying a bouquet of white flowers. Suddenly, it seemed as if everyone was carrying the same white flowers. Emi didn’t know why the innocent blooms disconcerted her, but as people passed her carrying them in their arms, she began to feel out of breath. Clutching her chest, she noticed they were all headed in the same direction and began to follow them.

  Her heart quickened again as she neared a mass of people crowded around a table. It was covered in white chrysanthemums, a symbol of mourning. Burial flowers were amassed before her as hundreds of visitors offered them to the long-lost dead. The flurry of white and darkest green loosened a memory in Emi’s mind. Another ceremony, long ago. She saw her mother handing her one of these white, ghostly blooms.

  The dreams increased in intensity every night thereafter, and JinHee was sorry she had forced Emi to go to the remembrance ceremony. The memories Emi had repressed for too long began to haunt her beyond her dreams. They came to her during the day, while she cooked her breakfast or even as she dived in the sea. They were small flashes at first, an image of a girl swimming towards a rocky beach, a soldier standing on the shore, voices trailing away, until one day she couldn’t hold them back any longer. They affected her productivity, threatened to knock her off her feet. Her entire history crashed back into her consciousness so painfully that she had her first heart attack. The doctor warned her she needed to take it easy and to minimise stress at all costs. But the memories began to plague her, and she couldn’t ignore them any longer. So the next time she boarded a bus to Seoul to visit her daughter, she snuck away and went to her first Wednesday Demonstration in search of a girl lost long ago.

  The dog barks, pulling Emi’s attention back to the present. Her daughter is waiting for an explanation. Emi reaches down and picks up the dog and hugs him close to her stomach. The silky fur and small, warm body ease her mind, just a little.

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘It was a long time ago, during the war; the Japanese took a girl from our village, and she never came back.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Someone I loved.’

  Her daughter remains quiet, but the anger has dissipated, leaving her eyes full of questions. Emi says no more. She places the little poodle onto the floor and eases herself to her feet. As she shuffles to the bedroom to change her clothes, her daughter calls out to her.

  ‘You know that I love Lane, right?’

  Emi stops a moment and looks back at her daughter. She can still see the little girl she once taught to swim in the cold waters of the South Sea, her perfectly round face smiling up at Emi as they splashed each other and swam circles around the haenyeo coming in from a long day of diving. Emi dreamed her daughter would one day dive beside her like the other girls did with their mothers, like she had with her own mother. But then YoonHui grew up so quickly and was so full of ideas, Emi couldn’t keep up with the new and ever-changing thoughts from her maturing mind. The day she told Emi that she didn’t want to learn to dive was the worst day Emi ever experienced as a mother. She should have expected it. YoonHui was nothing like the other girls. She looked up into the sky instead of down into the waters.

  ‘Why can’t I continue to go to school?’ YoonHui asked one afternoon.

  She was ten years old, only a year into her training as a haenyeo. It was also her final year at school. Emi had just finished diving for the day and was sorting her catch on the shore. The other women were nearby emptying their nets, too, and Emi knew they were all listening.

  ‘Because I can teach you everything you need to know about diving here in the sea. A school cannot do this.’

  YoonHui was thoughtful for a moment before replying. She seemed to weigh her words carefully. Emi continued sorting her catch. She remarked on how many more abalone she had found the day before. JinHee and a few others agreed with her.

  ‘Mother,’ YoonHui interrupted, demanding Emi’s attention again.

  ‘What, daughter?’

  ‘I’ve decided … well, after very careful consideration, I’ve decided I want to go to school like Big Brother.’

  Emi stopped gutting the squid in her hand. She looked at her daughter for a long time, saying nothing.

  ‘Don’t be angry. I have thought this through. I want to go to university one day. I want to be a teacher.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Emi went back to gutting and sorting, her hands methodically working through her catch.

  ‘Yes, Mother. It is so. It is very so.’

  YoonHui placed her hands on her narrow hips and straightened her thin shoulders. She held her head high and looked directly into Emi’s eyes. It took all of Emi’s self-control not to beam with pride at her silly, stubborn daughter, even as she simultaneously fought to conceal the hurt YoonHui’s decision caused her.

  ‘All the women of our family become haenyeo. We are women of the sea. It is in our blood. We don’t become teachers. This is our gift and our destiny.’ Emi eyed her daughter, impressing the importance of her words through her expression. YoonHui barely blinked.

  ‘That was before the war. Now there’s more opportunity. I am a smart girl, and my teacher says I’m even smarter than Big Brother was at my age. He says I’m too smart to waste my talents working like a field hand in the ocean, risking my life in the perils of the sea. No, Mother, I belong in school.’

  ‘Field hand?’ a few of the other haenyeo repeated in surprise.

  ‘Who’s calling us field hands?’

  ‘What’s that man’s name?’

  ‘Your teacher is a man,’ Emi said in a controlled yet strong voice. The others hush
ed to listen. ‘He is not from our island. He is from the mainland, and a mainlander cannot possibly understand what it means to be a haenyeo.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right!’ replied a chorus of women.

  ‘We dive in the sea like our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers have for hundreds of years. This gift is our pride, for we answer to no one, not our fathers, our husbands, our older brothers, even the Japanese soldiers during the war. We catch our own food, make our own money, and survive with the harvest given to us from the sea. We live in harmony with this world; how many men teachers can say the same? It is our money that pays his salary. Without us “field hands” he would starve.’

  Heads nodded in unison as Emi spoke. There were shouts of agreement and laughter. YoonHui’s face turned bright red, her hands clenched into tiny fists, and tears wet her eyes but did not fall.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what he said. It matters what I want,’ YoonHui said. ‘I’ve already spoken to Father, and he agreed. I just wanted to tell you, before I go. Today is my last day diving with you. Father has paid my tuition for school. One day, I am going to university.’

  Her father. It was Emi’s turn to blush. He had gone behind her back and supported her daughter’s break from her family heritage. It was a strategic move on his part, and YoonHui could have had no idea of his intention to assert his authority over Emi. The blade in her hand began to tremble. The other women hushed and turned away.

  ‘I will miss you swimming beside me.’ They were true words. JinHee reached across and steadied Emi’s blade.

  Her daughter’s tears fell, but in happiness. She rushed to her mother’s side and hugged her. ‘Oh, thank you, Mother. You won’t be sorry. I will make you proud.’

  That night, Emi couldn’t bear to sleep beside her husband. He knew the conversation had taken place, for later that day he had taken his daughter into town to buy her school supplies and a school uniform. Emi watched as her daughter smiled up at him before bedtime, thankful for the chance to leave the sea behind, ignorant of what she had helped him do.