Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  “I have plans this weekend,” I said. This was the first free weekend I had planned for myself, and I needed to catch up on work. I’d missed several recent appointments with my advisor, and needed to get back on track. “I have work to do.”

  “I’d really like you to come,” he said.

  “I’ve been home every weekend for the last two months,” I said. “This is an important time for me.” I’d lost momentum on my dissertation, and I’d begun to feel a sense of growing panic in the last few weeks, worried that if I didn’t get a grip on this now, my whole life would spiral away from me. “This is taking over everything. I need some time for myself,” I said. “I have to get back into my work.”

  My father didn’t argue. He was just very quiet.

  His quiet angered me. “You’re the one who wanted me to do all this,” I said, meaning math, and a Ph.D. When I’d briefly considered switching majors to history in college, he had pressured me to continue with math. He made it clear he wanted me to get my doctorate in it: that anything else would be a disappointment. My mother had actually been much more supportive, telling me I should do what I wanted, explore, that this was why she’d come to America in the first place. But I stuck with it in the end, gratified that my father cared so much, that I could do something he found worthwhile.

  “I can’t just stop now,” I said. “I’m already committed to this.” And I was. I’d sacrificed too much and worked too hard to let it go now.

  When he was still silent, I was hit by a wave of fear. “Is this about Hannah?” I was flooded with guilt: I imagined her in a hospital, unconscious. “Tell me.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s something else. But I don’t want to tell you over the phone.”

  “Daddy,” I said.

  There was a pause. “I’m sick.”

  “Sick how?”

  When he answered, his voice was light. “What’s the worst thing you can imagine?” he asked.

  “AIDS,” I said, but I knew what it was, and my stomach was sinking.

  He laughed. “Not quite,” he said.

  I swallowed. “What is it?”

  “Cancer.”

  I sat down. “Is it bad?”

  “We’ll talk when you’re here. It’s fine.”

  For a moment I couldn’t say anything. “How long have you known?”

  “Not too long. I wanted to wait to tell you until we knew the prognosis.”

  “Daddy,” I said, and then couldn’t continue.

  “I’m worried about your mother.”

  I nodded. My whole body felt weightless. “I’ll come home.”

  I drove home that same day, numb and dazed, until a police car pulled me over, lights swirling. I handed the policeman my information with trembling hands, and then startled him by bursting into sobs as soon as he handed me my ticket.

  “I usually drive better than this,” I gasped.

  “Everyone gets a ticket eventually,” he said, standing awkwardly at my window.

  I nodded and turned my head away. “I don’t normally cry,” I managed to say, but then I couldn’t stop. My hands were shaking on the wheel, and I pulled them onto my lap. I said, “I’ll be all right.”

  He stood there for a minute longer, and I was relieved when I finally heard his footsteps on the gravel as he walked away. After he was gone, I sat there and cried. When I was finally exhausted and looked up, I wiped my eyes and glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. In the reflection I saw the police car still behind me. Its blue and red lights were still silently swirling. When I finally pulled back onto the highway, I looked back, and the policeman gave me a little wave out his window.

  It was strange, but I was encouraged by that wave. I thought all of a sudden, waving back, that things would be all right, that at least I’d make it home okay.

  At our house, my parents were anxiously waiting.

  “What took you so long?” my mother asked. Looking at my face, she said, “Never mind.” She picked up an envelope from the kitchen table and said, “This came today.” The envelope contained their first communication from Hannah: she’d sent back a copy of the flyer they’d made when she first disappeared with her photograph, the words “Have You Seen Me?” in block letters underneath. Her handwritten scrawl, unsigned, I am not a child.

  I stared at it. I thought, My father has cancer, and this is what my sister has sent us. I was seized by fear in that moment, for Hannah and whatever she might have called down upon herself from the universe for having done such a thing.

  But if anything, my parents seemed reassured. They told me what my father had: stage IV metastatic stomach cancer, but in their weekly phone call to her, they did not mention it. They left the standard message pleading with her to call back. They told her they missed her. Meanwhile, I researched my father’s disease and read all the data, which was grim. I called hospitals. I called doctors. During this time, my parents walked around with drawn, frightened faces, and they waited hopefully, stupidly, for a phone call from my sister, a postcard, a visit, anything at all.

  They tried to get me to call her, too, but this infuriated me. “Enough,” I said, and meant it. Things were serious now, my father was sick, and Hannah didn’t deserve any more from us. Part of me wanted to punish her, wanted her to return after my father’s illness had played out to its end. It was a cruel impulse, I knew, cruel to my parents as well as to her. But I wanted her to suffer. I wanted her to miss all of it, and know when she returned that her absence was unforgivable.

  3.

  I’d grown up always worrying about Hannah in one way or another. My mother’s favorite story to tell about me was how at five years old I’d insist on holding my baby sister, and would drag her around so carelessly that my mother was terrified I’d accidentally kill her. She had to keep constant guard over us because whenever she looked away I’d be back at it, picking Haejin up like a doll.

  I don’t remember that, but I do remember how after we moved to America my sister would cling to me in front of the school each day when we got off the bus, and how I had to walk her to class or she’d sit down and cry in the middle of the sidewalk. I was late every day because of her. Back then I used to wonder what my life would have been like without a sister. It was impossible to imagine. It was like trying to answer the questions Hannah used to ask. Like what I thought it was like to grow up blind, or a boy, or a penguin. She’d get mad when I refused to answer. Once she asked me what I thought it was like to be her. I looked at her and blinked.

  “Don’t you know the answer to that?” I asked.

  “Just tell me,” Hannah scowled. She always took her games so seriously.

  “It’s too horrible to contemplate,” I responded. “There must be no worse fate on earth.”

  “I’m serious,” Hannah said, that pout in her voice always needling me to give in.

  One of the only memories I have of my life before Hannah was born is of my mother, from when we lived in Korea. It’s strange to me that I have memories of my mother in which she is younger than I am now; it makes me feel an unexpected tenderness toward her.

  In my memory I’m maybe two or two and a half years old, and my mother is holding my hand as we’re walking up a hill. I’m laughing because my mother is taking exaggerated steps and stomping loudly. The ground is bright with snow; it hurts to look at the light flying off it.

  “Huy, huy, huy,” she says to the beat of her steps. I look up, and her hair is waving in streamers around her face. I want to grab hold of it, but it is too far away. This is my only memory of my mother with long hair. She is laughing. I try to match her steps, which are too wide for me, and she holds me up when I stumble.

  Two days before Hannah was born, my mother doubled over moaning. I rode down with my parents in the elevator, pressed up against my mother’s legs, listening to her breathe. In the taxi I listened to her moan, and when we got to the hospital, I sat in the waiting room with my father, who stood and paced. I could tell that something was wrong
. My uncle came to take me to my grandmother’s house, and when I left my father barely looked at me. “Be good,” he said, distracted, running his hand over my head as he looked down the hall to the delivery room where my mother was.

  I followed my uncle, dragging my feet and crying, sure I would never see either of my parents again. But when we reached the sliding doors to exit the hospital, there was a perfect square of sunshine that fell in a neat block onto the hospital floor. My uncle stopped there, and when I looked up at him, he swung me up into his arms.

  He lifted me onto his shoulders and took me into the park. He let me pick the flowers there, even though it was forbidden. When a passing nurse scolded us, he tossed me effortlessly back upon his shoulders and took me away. That afternoon in my grandmother’s apartment, he led me through martial arts forms in the living room. Ever since I could walk, he’d been teaching me the basic forms. I practiced with him, barefoot, following for as long as I could until he was done. Then he watched me, his hands correcting my posture or the tilt of my hands and head. I loved the attention, the sense that he knew the proper way to do things and that if I let him, he would show me how. We practiced until my grandmother returned, and between those hours, lost in the rush of my uncle’s unfaltering attention, I was happy.

  When he left me alone with my grandmother that night to go back to his college dorm, I felt abandoned all over again. It was my first night away from home without my mother, and the room my grandmother put me in felt large and frightening. When she came in, she found me crying. I had cried so hard I had given myself a fever. She wiped my face with a wet towel and chanted the Buddha’s name.

  When I still wouldn’t stop, she shook me. “Jungshin chalyuh,” she said, by which she meant pull yourself together; discipline your mind. Both the command and the impatience in her voice surprised me into silence.

  “You are too old to be crying like this,” my grandmother said. “You will be an elder sister now, and you have new responsibilities.”

  I nodded, struck by the gravity of this.

  “There are things you need to know about your family,” she said. “Let me tell you how I became an older sister, many years ago.” And, with that, she told me the story of her own sister’s birth.

  When my grandmother was five years old, her father was taken away by Japanese soldiers. She did not know what her father had done, but she knew it had to do with the day everyone yelled, “Mansei.” She had wanted to go outside, too, but her mother had said, “What if the baby comes,” and my grandmother had stayed indoors. Her mother would not even let her swing in the courtyard or climb a tree to look out over the gates into the streets.

  “Can I say mansei?” my grandmother asked. “Can I say it from here?”

  “Quiet!” her mother said. “Do you want someone to hear you?”

  Everyone was shouting out in the street. My grandmother could hear the voices of the other children, rising tinny above the men’s.

  “No one would hear me,” my grandmother said. “It’s noisy outside.”

  “If you make another sound, I will send you out tonight for the tigers.”

  My grandmother sulked. Then she asked, “What does mansei mean?”

  Her mother stopped sewing, the needle arrested in midair, the string stretched taut. Her mother repeated the word very quietly. “Mansei,” she said. “It means ten thousand years.” The needle resumed. “It means, long live Korea, ten thousand years.”

  That night when my grandmother’s father came home, he was haggard and exultant. He reached under her mother’s sleeping mat and pulled out a handful of papers. He unrolled a beautiful silk sheet. My grandmother had never seen a Korean flag before, and he let her touch the red and blue circle swirling in the center, the stark slanted strokes at the edges. He knelt beside her and touched the center of it, the deep red above and the brilliant blue below.

  “Remember this,” her father said. “Hold it in your mind.”

  Then he and her mother folded the sheet together, and he went outside. Through the window, she watched him bury the flag and papers in their garden. She did not ask why.

  The next day soldiers came into their house; they overturned everything. They took her father away. When she asked what her father had done, her mother would not answer. The streets, which had been raucous with shouts for several days, were filled with screams. My grandmother thought of the dirt her father had washed from underneath his nails, and of the beautiful flag under the ground. She wept in a corner, but her mother sat steadfastly in the center of the room, sewing. When the air turned dark and gritty, and the strange smoke seared their eyes and throats, she closed the windows and covered them with blankets. She ordered the servants to bring all their meals, quietly, into their room.

  It grew ominously quiet. My grandmother strained her ears: she could hear nothing but the steady marching of soldiers up and down their street.

  When her mother went into labor that evening she ordered my grandmother to stuff her mouth with rags so that no one would hear her scream. She told my grandmother not to remove them until the baby was born. For one day and one night she writhed on the sheets, grabbing at the air and the rags in her mouth. She became slick with sweat, and the sleeping mat where she lay grew heavy and wet. Her hair stuck in clumps to her face. Her skin began to cool and grow clammy. She looked like a ghost.

  My grandmother was sure her mother was dying. In the morning my grandmother disobeyed her mother’s command and removed the rags to pour in some water.

  Her mother gagged and grabbed my grandmother’s wrist with cold, slippery hands. My grandmother poured more water into her mouth. Her mother swallowed and moaned. Her body shook with a long contraction, and she cried out sharply. My grandmother hurriedly stuffed her mother’s mouth back with rags, but it was too late.

  The soldiers, always marching outside, rushed in. My grandmother crouched protectively over her mother. The men spoke to her, but she could not respond. To speak Korean to these men was forbidden, and she did not know Japanese.

  The men pushed my grandmother aside and pulled the rags out of her mother’s mouth. Her mother gagged, then screamed, and the soldiers hoisted her up and took her away. My grandmother would never forget the sight of her mother’s exposed thigh, a man’s fingers digging into the flesh.

  When her father returned the next day, my grandmother ran and clung to his leg. He sat down on the floor and handed her a bundle.

  The soldiers had brought his wife’s breasts to him on the tip of a bayonet, and then released him from jail. He had brought the child, my grandmother’s sister, who had been cut out by the same blade, and had somehow survived. He had been released, but was not allowed to leave their house.

  Together they sat indoors, and he did not speak again for a long time. My grandmother and one of their servants tended her little sister for days, feeding her rice water bit by bit until she died.

  I shouldn’t remember the things my grandmother told me; I was too young to understand. But after my grandmother told me this story, I crawled into her lap and held on to her loose nightclothes. I was dry and stiff with fear. My grandmother taught me the words to chant to the Buddha then, and together we chanted and prayed: all night we prayed for a brother.

  My sister was not born that night or the following morning, but the next morning after. My mother had been in labor for nearly two days. By that time we were gathered in the hospital; my father, grandmother, uncles and aunts and I in the waiting room, wondering what was wrong.

  When they hooked my mother up to new machines to see what the problem was, they saw Hannah pushing down into the birth canal and at the same point every time, bouncing back off. The baby would not come out. When her heartbeat began to slow, they cut her out.

  My grandmother sat in a chair and prayed, murmuring words I couldn’t distinguish, her breath one low, articulated groan. When the doctor announced that Hannah had finally been born, my grandmother started to cry in relief.

  M
y father rushed into my mother’s room then, and all my relatives started talking at once. The burst of noise after all that silence was jarring. Everyone else was relieved, but my first emotion was dread.

  “In our family,” my grandmother had told me, “a sister always dies.”

  A few hours later, they finally let me see my mother. My sister had already been taken away to be cared for in the nursery, but my father had promised me, smiling, that he would not let her out of his sight while I visited my mother.

  I climbed into her bed even though my relatives warned me not to. My grandmother tried to pull me off, but my mother said, “Let her come.” She wrapped her arms around me. She was limp and sweaty, but I snuggled into the comfortable softness of her warmth. They had cut her open, but she was whole. She looked very tired and sick; on her gown, blood bloomed like a slow flower.

  “You have a younger sister now,” my mother said. “Her name is Haejin. I hope you will always take care of her.”

  I nodded so gravely my aunts and uncles laughed.

  “So serious!” they said, patting my head.

  I shook my head: I didn’t want them to touch me. I only wanted my mother.

  But then she said it again. “Haejin,” my mother said, cupping my face in her hand. She smelled like sweat and sickness, and when she said my sister’s name, it was as if she was calling my own.

  4.

  Hannah had always been the one who cried to see a wounded animal, the one who was inconsolable when someone else was hurt. I learned to control myself in front of her. Once, when we were little, a bluebird flew into one of the windows of our house. We heard it thud against the glass, and ran out to find it flapping on the ground, its bright head stuck to the ground, its one eye staring. We shrieked at my mother to come out. She came running, wiping her hands, and when she saw what we were pointing at, she knelt beside the bird. She put her hand over the bird’s head until it stopped flapping.