‘I don’t know. I was diving long hours in the sea. Your father wouldn’t let your grandmother dive with me. He didn’t trust her. So I worked alone, and at night I slept like a rock, exhausted. And I was young. Many things didn’t make sense to me. Still more escaped my attention.
‘I returned home one day, and she was gone. Your father wouldn’t tell me where she was. I searched the village for any news of her. No one would tell me anything. They were too scared of your father.’ Emi touches her forehead, recalling their faces as she passed them on the road.
‘I remember that,’ her daughter suddenly says. ‘Everyone used to look at him in such a way. I didn’t understand it as a child … but now that you say it, I do. They were all afraid of him.’
The look on her daughter’s face pains Emi. So many secrets, so many lies, all hidden away in one small heart. She wishes her heart could have been larger, like her friend JinHee’s; her laughter over the waves is like joy come alive.
‘He turned her in, didn’t he?’ YoonHui says.
Her voice is so certain, as though she has known all along, but it’s impossible. She wasn’t even born yet.
‘He never admitted it to me. Never. Not even on his deathbed,’ Emi says, staring into her hands. She looks up and meets her daughter’s eyes. ‘But I knew, deep down, that it was his doing. I always knew.
‘My marriage to your father wasn’t a love match. I’m sure you noticed that. We were forced to marry because of the war. He was a policeman. He worked for the government after that.’ Emi hopes her children won’t ask about the day she was forced to marry their father; she fears it will hurt them too much. Her hands tremble slightly, and she cannot make them still. Her son takes them in his. The warmth gives her courage.
‘I was fourteen and newly married to your father, and another war was on the verge of breaking out. Your grandmother went missing only a few months into this new life. I was distraught. Left alone in the house with this stranger who petrified me. I needed her. I was desperate to find her. Months passed, and then years with no sign of her. It was like she just vanished.’
Emi pauses, remembering the effort it took for her not to lose her mind. The Japanese took her sister away. Then the Koreans took her father. Now someone had taken her mother. Emi was suddenly alone.
‘I was pregnant with you when I finally learned that she had been executed,’ she says, looking at Hyoung. ‘Over two years had passed without a word of her whereabouts, and then one day a friend came to the house to tell me they had killed all of the political prisoners. I rushed to the police station, desperate to find out if she was one of the dead. They wouldn’t tell me, so I demanded to see the list of prisoners. The government loved their paperwork. They documented everything. Your father followed me to the station. He wouldn’t let them show me the list. I threatened him, said I would kill myself and his unborn child if he didn’t make them give me the list. It was the first time I revealed that I was pregnant.’
As she speaks the words, she can no longer look at her son. Her guilt is magnified. It is as though she is on trial for failing in her motherly duties. If she were in front of a jury, she would most certainly not succeed in securing their sympathy vote.
Her husband looked at Emi as though she had daggered him in the gut.
‘You’re pregnant?’ he asked, incredulous.
The office had grown quiet and a few of the police officers left the room. Emi couldn’t look him in the eyes. She stared at the desk, and it occurred to her that it was the very desk where she had signed the marriage contract to HyunMo.
‘I am.’
‘How long have you known?’
He looked at her tenderly, as though he was in love with her, but Emi didn’t believe he could love her when he had only married her to claim her family’s land. He reached for her arm, but she moved away from his touch. At night, he took advantage of his marital privileges, but during the day, he couldn’t touch her against her will. That was the deal they had struck so that she would cease to fight against him and they could bear living together in their forced life.
‘Just a few months. I need my mother. I can’t do this without her.’
Emi beseeched him with her eyes, unable to express with words how much she needed her mother. She was sixteen years old, afraid of giving birth, afraid of mothering, but most of all, afraid of raising a child while feeling isolated in a life that was no longer her own.
‘And now you’re threatening our child?’
He looked betrayed, but Emi didn’t care. He had betrayed her first. He had stolen her land, her innocence, and now he stood in the way of the truth. Emi lifted her chin and glared at him.
‘Yes.’
HyunMo’s shoulders sagged, but he said nothing more. He opened the door to the office and called in a policeman.
‘Let her see the list.’
‘But, sir,’ the policeman stammered. His eyes nervously darted between Emi and HyunMo.
‘Do it.’
Emi watched HyunMo leave the room a broken man. It was the only time she ever saw him like that. Afterwards, he closed himself off from her, making it impossible for her to hurt him. He became a father who made decisions without her consent, like sending their daughter to school. Once in a while he would reach out, to try to touch her physically or emotionally, but she always shrank from him. She never forgave him for his part in her mother’s disappearance and death. Emi searches her children’s faces as she finishes the story.
‘He left the police station after giving me permission to view the list, all the while knowing her name was on it because he had put her there. I didn’t even have to look at it to know. But I did anyway, my eyes scanning hundreds of names until I found hers. She had been held prisoner all that time. And then one day, they executed her.’
After reading her mother’s name on the list, she walked to the seashore, determined to fling herself from the highest cliff. She was alone in the world and pregnant by a new enemy. Yet, as she stood there, swaying in the strong October breeze, she couldn’t do it. She realised that she loved the baby growing inside her.
‘You saved my life,’ she says, looking up at her son. ‘If I hadn’t been pregnant, I don’t know how I could have survived. I had you to look forward to. You, who would be a part of me and my mother and father and even my sister. Their blood runs through your veins. I believed it then, and I see it now. I buried them in my heart that day. I had to. For you and for me. And then I went back home to your father, and I never spoke of this to anyone … until now.’
‘Mother,’ her son says quietly. His eyes are rimmed in red. In all his adult years, Emi has never seen her son look at her so tenderly. ‘I never knew.’
‘Of course you didn’t. He was your father, and it was right for you to love him. I could never have taken that away from you.’
‘But he killed your mother … our grandmother.’ His words fall flat in the quiet that follows.
Emi knows what he must be thinking. Both of her children are running their childhoods through their heads, making sense of all the moments she did not respond to their father’s affectionate advances or the times she did not laugh at his best jokes, or even sleep by his side. They often found her sitting on the front porch late at night, unable to sleep, but also never able to tell them why. It was her way of protecting them, insulating them against the terrors of the world. She never wanted her children to know suffering as she had. Keeping them in the dark was the most selfless thing she ever did. And she did it out of love.
‘Yes, his actions killed your grandmother, but he was a government puppet. He did what he was told. It was wartime. People committed atrocious acts against one another. And many, many died. But that is war. People are killed. All those who survive have been wronged, one way or another.’
The Korean War was a bloodbath. Emi remembers how neighbours turned against one another – years before it even officially began in 1950 – accusing one another of spying before the other
had a chance to make the same accusation. Many of her mother’s old diving companions were lost. Everyone with sons lost them, everyone with daughters lost them or gained new sons they could never trust. The whole island wept with collective grief.
Emi’s grief was buried beneath Jeju International Airport. At the time it was a military airfield, abandoned by the Japanese imperial air force when they left the island after the Second World War ended. More than seven hundred political dissidents were held there, including her mother, Emi learned. The prisoners were executed by firing squad, and their bodies were buried in a massive pit, one on top of the other.
No one ever mentioned what was beneath the brand-new runways when the airfield was expanded into the current international airport, but those who had lived through the massacres never forgot. That’s why Emi could never fly. The idea that her aeroplane could be rolling over her mother’s unmarked grave made her stomach shrivel and her mouth run dry.
At sixteen years old, Emi found herself orphaned with no family left to love, but there was hope growing within her. Her son was born the year the Korean War officially began, 1950, and then her daughter followed when it finally ended three years later. HyunMo and Emi lived together through the war and for years afterwards without ever baring their souls to one another. Only on his deathbed did he reveal his true feelings.
He was dying of cancer. His lungs and liver were riddled with tumours. He used to smoke his pipe all day long, even while waiting for the fish to swim into his nets. In the end he weighed barely ninety pounds and could hardly lift his head to gaze at his children and his only grandchild.
‘Thank you for our children,’ he managed to say through shallow breaths.
Emi had been wiping his forehead with a cool cloth. She paused mid-wipe and looked into his eyes, something she had not done since her daughter had refused to become a haenyeo. A milky cataract threatened to cover the whole of his right pupil, and the whites of his eyes were tinged yellow and streaked with angry red blood vessels. He looked much older than his years. Emi wondered how much harder his life had been compared to hers.
‘I always loved you,’ HyunMo whispered. He reached out for her hand, which she instinctively snatched away. He blinked, slowly, with a determination she was used to.
‘In my way, I did,’ he said, and lowered his hand onto his concave chest.
Emi looked down at him and wondered when he had become an old man.
‘Don’t hate me so much after I die,’ he said, catching her off guard. He laughed at her expression of surprise, but his laughter quickly turned into a bout of wet coughs.
Emi pressed her hands gently against his chest to keep him from shuddering too violently. When the coughs subsided, he placed his palms on top of her hands and lightly gripped her wrists.
‘Burn incense for my ancestors if you ever find that you can forgive me.’ His red eyes searched hers as though asking for her to breathe life back into his frail body.
Looking into his eyes was like sifting through a stranger’s memories. When she finally found her voice, it was harsh and filled with bitterness.
‘Forgive you for what? For my mother?’
He released her wrists, his hands sliding down to his sides. He blinked his slow blink, and the seconds between his eyelids’ closing and opening seemed to edge into days. A deep cough rattled his congested lungs. He spat up black blood that looked more like motor oil. Emi dutifully wiped it from his mouth.
‘Forgive me … for so much more than I can say … for everything.’
Those were the last words he ever said to her. He hung on to the thinnest thread of life for two more weeks, his sickly body torturing him in ways she would never have wished upon her worst enemy. When he finally died, it was a relief, but Emi was surprised to find that she also felt a pang of sadness as they buried him. It could have been the tears falling from her grown children’s eyes that made her feel sad, but she wasn’t certain.
Even now, thinking about his wretched death, she isn’t sure how she felt when he was finally gone. Looking back so intently, she feels detachment once more, her familiar dispassion for her own husband. She did what she had to at the time because her anger threatened to overwhelm her. Instead, she swallowed her emotions, until she was able to continue to exist.
Her sister once called her a dancing butterfly, full of life and laughter and free like the birds of the sky. Emi thinks back to the moment that little girl disappeared, leaving behind this husk of a woman. She sees the painful moments of her childhood and knows that the final straw was standing in the police station and seeing her mother’s name on the list. They both died that day.
‘Will you burn incense for your grandmother?’ Emi suddenly says to her daughter.
‘What?’ YoonHui replies, her expression filled with worry and pain.
‘I – I never did burn incense for our ancestors …’ Emi’s voice fades. She sees her mother’s dead face and wonders if she ever found peace in the afterlife.
‘Don’t worry about such things, Mother,’ Hyoung says, an undercurrent of anger in his voice. ‘You just focus on getting well.’ He tries to smile, but she can see the war battling in his mind.
It’s too much, the task of revealing the truth of her past. The pull of the eternal sleep tugs at Emi’s eyelids, bidding them to shut once and for all. She touches her forehead, pressing her fingertips into the skin until the pain brings her senses back to the living. Her time is short, but her willpower remains strong. She will not wait until her children are at peace with their father’s crime or her own secrecy. She has something she needs to do.
‘I want to go to the statue. I have to see it again,’ she says suddenly.
‘You can’t leave the hospital, you’re ill, it’s too much of a strain on your heart,’ YoonHui says, sounding more like a mother than a dutiful child. ‘We can go in a few days, after you’ve recovered.’
‘No, I must go today. Now. I need to see it now.’
‘Mother, you can’t. You’re not well!’ YoonHui is shouting, Lane is trying to calm her down, Hyoung is silent, staring at his feet.
‘I will take you.’ Her son’s voice is a whisper, yet it cuts through his sister’s high-pitched cries.
‘You can’t,’ YoonHui shouts. ‘She needs to stay in hospital so they can treat her condition. She can’t go, not yet.’
She is on the verge of breaking down. Lane places her arm around YoonHui’s shoulders. She comforts Emi’s daughter like a mother comforting a wounded child, except the graze is not on her knee but on her heart.
No more words are spoken. Her son leaves the room to organise the use of a wheelchair, and YoonHui is silent when she realises she has no more to say. She goes to Emi’s side and kisses her cheek. She reaches for Emi’s hand, and they are mother and daughter again, sitting in their village home near the sea. A rush of waves crashes against the rocky coast as they wait together in peace.
‘I should have followed you into the sea. It was my duty. I failed you.’
YoonHui’s voice is riddled with guilt. Tears drip from her chin. Lane wipes them with her hand. The tenderness between them touches Emi deep within her heart. In her long life, she has never experienced such intimacy. Her daughter’s relationship gives her a sort of reconciliation with the struggles within her own life. She thinks perhaps it was worth it, if her daughter has found someone in the world to share her life with, someone she chose for herself, and someone who loves her back.
‘You followed your heart. That is all I ever wished for both of my children. I’m proud of you … of your choices for your own lives. I’m happy that they were yours to make. Nothing could give me more satisfaction as your mother. You have what I never dreamed of.’
Hyoung arrives with the wheelchair, and it is time to go. He commandeers the chair and wheels her out of the room towards the elevator. YoonHui and Lane follow without further complaint, but she does not see them. She can only see ahead of her, the face beckoning her to return.
Emi concentrates on that golden face, so much like her sister’s. She lets herself get lost in the possibility that her sister is still alive, that the likeness it bears to her cannot be without a reason. Emi feels it in her bones that her sister is somehow linked to the statue, but she must look upon its face again to be certain.
Hana
Mongolia, Autumn 1943
The dog’s low growl rouses the rest of the ger. The Mongolian man – aav ni, ‘father’, another word Hana has learned – lights an oil lamp. His wife stirs. Hana feigns sleep, watching him through her eyelashes. The dog barks a warning. Dressing in a hurry, he nudges Altan awake with his foot. Together they slip on their boots and duck outside with the lamp. A man shouts a greeting to them before the door flap falls shut, again cloaking her in darkness. A gust of predawn air slips into the ger, chilling Hana’s skin. She pulls her blanket close around her neck.
A bird’s shrill song pierces the quiet of the ger. A trotting horse approaches. Careful not to awaken Altan’s mother, Hana crawls to the door and listens. Altan’s father calls out to the approaching rider, who responds in greeting. Hana recognises the voice.
Her heart seems to stop mid-pump, draining the blood from her head. She can’t breathe. Panicking, she gasps like a fish out of the sea. Morimoto has returned.
It takes too much time before her heart unclenches. She is on her knees, forehead to the carpeted floor, desperate for air. She has lost all sense of hearing or touch. It is as though she is lost in a vacuum. Then, as suddenly as the panic began, it dissipates. Very slowly, her lungs fill with oxygen, and she can breathe once again. When she has stopped trembling, she leans her ear closer to the door flap.
White Chrysanthemum Page 22
