Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  She began to sing to it in a low humming voice. “Oh my darling, oh my darling,” she crooned. It quieted, calm and trusting under her soft, bare hands. My mother had healing hands, I thought, watching her. She would take her hand away and the bird would fly. She picked it up carefully, gently. Her fingers closed around it. Then she twisted it between her hands: a quick, sure motion. The bird’s neck popped, a quiet sound, and it was dead.

  Hannah screamed. She jumped up and backed away from us. I almost screamed, too. But then I looked at the bluebird, which looked so soft against my mother’s skin, its beautiful feathers ruffling, its bright eye open.

  Then my mother sent me to fetch a cloth and a garden trowel, and I followed her to the backyard: the movement of her walk jostled the small body just enough to make it look like it was breathing. It was so blue. I wanted to touch it. We dug a hole beneath our largest tree. I scoured the lawn for the prettiest leaves, and picked a few flowers to keep it company. My mother lined the hole with leaves, and placed our bird inside it. She covered the bird with leaves and flowers, and covered the mound with soil. As my mother sang, Hannah kept far from us and stared.

  Afterward, I drew pictures of the bluebird. I wanted to dig it up and look at it again, but my mother told me that would be wrong. I wrote poems, and left them on its grave. I didn’t know then that dead things decay, and I thought the bird would remain in the ground intact and blue, beautiful and still.

  By the time I went with my parents for my father’s endoscopy, I had started keeping track of the things Hannah had missed. This was a big one. After the procedure my father lay on his bed in shorts and a paper gown. I didn’t like seeing him that way. He looked so vulnerable, and the paper gown so flimsy. He was still woozy, but his gastroenterologist sat beside the bed and drew a picture of my father’s stomach and the tumor inside it. The lines of the tumor overlapped the lines of the stomach.

  “I don’t understand,” my father said. “What does it mean?”

  Dr. Abraham shrugged. “It’s been there a while,” he said. He spoke with a thick accent I couldn’t identify. “It has spread already. Everywhere.”

  “How long has it been there?” I asked.

  “Years,” he said.

  “How many?” I wanted to be able to pinpoint the time it started growing.

  “At least five,” he said. “Maybe more.”

  When my mother burst into muffled sobs, I caught my father’s eye. He gave an incongruous smile. I wondered if I was in a dream. The scene seemed so familiar, and I had dreamed my father’s death all my life. When I was very young, I woke from those dreams weeping. Sometimes my mother would see the salt crust around my eyes and ask, “What was it? What did you dream?” I liked to tell her about my bad dreams then if I remembered them—as if the telling erased them. But the dreams about my father’s death, I never spoke out loud.

  My father cleared his throat. “What do you mean, everywhere?” He sounded frightened.

  Dr. Abraham snapped the folder in his hands shut, and stood up.

  “Doctor?” my father said.

  Dr. Abraham didn’t even look at my father. He seemed angry, and with a shrug of his shoulders, he walked out of the room.

  My father called after him. “Doctor?” he said, and then again louder, hopefully, as if it might bring him back. But Dr. Abraham didn’t turn around. He kept on walking.

  After that, my father was quiet. My mother stopped crying. We sat there, the three of us, not speaking, staring at the chair the doctor had sat in. I wanted to ask if that had really just happened, but I bit my lip.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said finally. Both my parents nodded.

  “Go,” my father said. “We’ll be here.”

  I walked through the hallway, past the nurses, following the signs and grateful I didn’t have to ask anyone for directions. In the bathroom, which was empty, I went to the farthest stall and sat on the toilet. I opened my purse and found my cell phone. I called Hannah. I sat and listened to the phone ring.

  She doesn’t deserve this, I thought. But my hands were shaking, and I wanted to tell her how this doctor had treated our father, how he had walked away from him as if he was no one.

  But she didn’t pick up. I got her voice mail, and I have never been as lonely as when I heard the recording of her voice come over the line, breaking up a little as I sat in the bathroom stall. I clicked my phone shut and leaned my forehead against the door. In the last two years my father had grown thin, and I had attributed it to stress. A year ago his hairline had begun to recede. He had started to smell different. Embarrassed, I had attributed it to age. After we found out my father was sick, I felt as if I had failed him by dismissing these signs, that this was my punishment for worrying about the wrong person, the wrong thing, the whole time.

  On our way home, I tried not to think of the picture the doctor had drawn on his notepad. I waited for Hannah to call back. I don’t know why I thought she might this time, why I thought she would have sensed that this was a call she had to return. When she didn’t, I told myself it was over, that the moment had passed. And it had: when I’d called her from the hospital I had wanted to tell her that this doctor had treated our father as if he was nothing, and that we needed her now to come back, to let him know that he mattered. But I could not imagine saying any of this now. I could no longer imagine saying any of it out loud.

  In the following days, I filled the time I had formerly spent calling Hannah’s friends by researching cancer treatments, putting my father’s name on waiting lists at cancer centers with reputations for coming up with miracles. I ignored my work during this time. My parents asked a few times if this was all right, and each time I assured them it was, even as my anxiety about it grew. I felt I had to make up for Hannah: if she gave nothing, I would have to give everything to even it out.

  So I spent my time calling facility after facility, and noted where they offered things like yoga classes, massages, and acupuncture. I liked the places that sounded like spas. None of these places would see my father if he’d already started treatment, so my father held off on doing anything until he could get a second opinion.

  Eventually we got an appointment with a world-famous stomach cancer specialist at a cancer center in Texas called MD Anderson, and we traveled there to see him. We carried my father’s scans and files with us from Michigan, and after the doctor had looked them over, he leaned toward us and asked my father where he was from.

  “Michigan,” my father said.

  “No, I mean originally. What country did you come from?”

  “Korea,” my father said.

  The doctor nodded. “Korea is conducting the cutting-edge research on your kind of cancer,” he said. “If I were you, I’d consider going there for treatment.”

  “To Korea?” my father asked in surprise.

  “It’s the best shot,” the doctor said. “They’re testing a new drug regimen using S-1 and cisplatin. It’s a new chemotherapy combination that’s seen some success. It’s been shown to increase survival by up to three months. It starts in Seoul in about a month.”

  “It might increase survival by three months?” my father said. “Three months over what?”

  The doctor was matter-of-fact. “Five to six months, usually. This could give you eight to nine.”

  My father asked the doctor to repeat himself. I sat, digging my fingers into my leg. My father asked about other possible treatments, and the doctor said there were none that would cure him. My father asked again, was disappointed again. That was the problem: my father wanted answers the doctor could not give. He asked for numbers and percentages. He asked the same questions one after another, as if the answers might change with repetition.

  “Hopeless?” he asked.

  “Terminal,” the doctor said.

  My father shook his head. He held up his hand, all his fingers splayed. “What are the statistics, though?” he asked. “Isn’t it possible to survive longer?”

>   “Anything could happen,” the doctor said, and then: “But I have never known a man in this stage of your disease to survive five years. In fact, I have never known someone to survive for even two.”

  It was irrational, but the shock of that word “never” made the doctor’s statement easier to dismiss. It was too large to comprehend: it was absurd. And it seemed that if this impossible thing was true, the opposite could also happen. It seemed as if this was my father’s chance to be someone extraordinary, to be a miracle. He could survive and be the first. He could be the miracle to give hope to others.

  “What would you do in my situation?” my father asked.

  “I’d go to Korea,” the doctor said.

  And that was it. The next day, we flew home to Michigan.

  Afterward, I told my father—always a numbers man—that the numbers meant nothing. “You will survive,” I said. “Just decide to beat it.”

  “Listen to Jeehyun,” my mother said. “What do the doctors really know?”

  My father raised his shoulders, not entirely convinced. “But if we go to Korea,” he said after a moment, “what will Haejin do?”

  “That’s not a reason not to go,” I said.

  My father sighed. “It’s not only that,” he said. “I just never planned to return. I don’t know if it’s the best idea.”

  I nodded. My mother had wanted to go back in the early years, I knew, but my father had never considered it. We had left Korea suddenly and without explanation; my parents had never discussed it with me. My father looked down at his hands, and I wondered if now my parents would finally tell me the whole story.

  But after a moment my mother sighed. She said, “I’ll make some calls,” and my father followed her out of the room. They left me at the table alone.

  I decided to go back to Seoul after I spoke with your Komo,” my father said, the day he announced he’d be selling our house. “She said everyone knows Korea is the best at treating my kind of cancer.”

  “Oh,” I said. Komo was my father’s older sister. She’d lived in Indiana when we first moved to America, but she and her family had returned to Korea shortly after their first and only visit to our new house in Michigan.

  “She must be glad you’re coming,” I said. My Komo did not like my mother or the rest of our family.

  My father nodded. “I’ll take a medical leave from work,” he said. “It will be a chance to relax and take a break.” His voice was overly bright.

  I smiled. “That sounds good.”

  “I’ll finally be able to go golfing,” he continued. “I’ll be in better shape than ever at the end of this.”

  That day, my parents went to see an herbalist who gave my father a special tea. He came home that evening exuberant and hopeful. He poured the concoction carefully into its measuring cup. He said with glee, “The herbalist said that this cures ninety percent of all cancer patients!”

  He knew better. “If that’s true,” I said, “why are people still dying of cancer?”

  My father smiled and shrugged. Then he said, “I guess you’re right.” He made a face as he swallowed the liquid. His shoulders slouched a little.

  Before I could take back what I’d said, my mother took me by the arm and said, “Come with me.” She pulled me out of the kitchen and down the hall, all the way into the study, her fingers painful on my arm. She closed the door behind her with one hand.

  “How dare you say that,” she said. “He was laughing today. He felt hope.”

  “I didn’t say it couldn’t work.” I tried to pull out of her grasp. I felt terrible. “I just said it couldn’t work ninety percent of the time.”

  “Be quiet,” my mother said, digging her fingers deeper. “If you want to help, if you want to do something, find Haejin. He’s waiting for her. That’s why he’s taking this medicine instead of starting treatment here or moving to Korea.” She shook me a little. “And don’t you dare say such a thing to him again.” She glared at me, and left the room.

  I stayed put. I felt queasy. I had done damage with my doubt. It wasn’t a question of science, it was a question of loyalty. It was a question of faith.

  We drove the next day to a Buddhist temple in Detroit. It had been built after I went to college, and my parents had gotten in the habit of going every weekend. When we arrived, the monk met us at the door, and took us straight to the altar with three sitting gold statues of the Buddha and his bodhisattvas, and we lit three sticks of incense in the cold, unheated room, and bowed three and a half times to each.

  The scent of incense was familiar and heady, and reminded me of daily trips in my childhood to the temple in Seoul to pray with my grandmother. This memory made it seem more real that my parents were returning there, and I wondered if my parents had ever spoken to the monk here about Hannah: if he knew she had run away.

  When the monk withdrew to his private office with my father, my mother and I remained in the room with the statues of the Buddha. They gleamed gold on their altars. I closed my eyes, pretending to meditate. My mother was breathing funny, and I sneaked a look at her, afraid that she was crying and that I would have to comfort her. But she wasn’t crying. She was just sitting very still and calm.

  “I’m afraid,” I said after a while, and even though I spoke quietly, my voice sounded loud, echoing in the room.

  My mother didn’t answer for a moment, and then her voice was rough. “You’re grown up now; you have your own life. What do you have to fear?”

  I didn’t respond. I knew this was a reprimand: she did not want me to burden her with my anxiety. I was old enough to bear it myself.

  “What?” she asked.

  I bowed my head, resentful of her question and ashamed to name all the things that frightened me.

  “Speak up,” my mother said. “What are you afraid of?”

  I shook my head. “Never mind.”

  We sat there for a long time in silence, until the monk returned. He called us into his private sitting room where my father was already waiting. There, the monk poured tea into tiny cups, and while we held the cups on our laps and took small sips, he began to tell us a story about a woman who had lost her child.

  This woman had gone to the Buddha, distraught, and asked him to perform a miracle. She told him she’d lost her only child, and she asked him to bring her dead child back to life. The Buddha listened carefully, and then he said he would restore her child to life when she was able to bring him a blanket from a house that had not known a sorrow. And so this woman went from door to door begging for such a blanket, but each house had its own story, recent or long ago, of tragedy. So the woman returned to the Buddha resigned, having accepted what he meant her to learn: that no one can be spared loss, that this is the cost of life.

  I sat and listened to the monk tell this story. My grandmother had told it to me once, and I hadn’t liked it then, either. I’d wondered then what good that knowledge of other people’s tragedies was. I listened to the monk utter the familiar words: emptiness, grief, sorrow. “I have known people to survive such a prognosis before,” the monk said. “But regardless of whether we die today or fifty years from now, life is always transient, and true enlightenment is letting go.”

  I thought of everything my parents had already let go of, how much they had lost. All the homes they had ever lived in, Hannah, my aunt, my grandfather, my father’s entire dead family. That everyone dead in their lives had died before I was born was always a secret source of selfish relief to me: I was glad I had not had to suffer, or witness my parents’ grief. Sometimes I was grateful that there were fewer people to keep track of, that there was less to lose.

  I watched my father’s face as the monk spoke, and I could tell he didn’t want to hear this lecture either. I wanted to get up and tell the monk to stop talking, to stop telling us how everything passes away, to stop telling us to let go when all we’d come for, all we wanted from him, was a way to hold on.

  5.

  There was something famil
iar about packing up our house and getting ready to move: nearly twenty years ago we had dismantled everything and come to America, and now my parents were leaving everything again to rush back. I had been eight years old that first time, and though no one would explain the circumstances, I knew we were running away. While my parents never used the words “blacklist,” or “exile,” or “enemy of the state,” these were words I learned in the months before our move, though I never spoke them aloud.

  I knew they were linked, however, to our leaving, and to the night my uncle came to our apartment and stood in our living room in tears. That year, President Choi had been assassinated and General Han had taken power through a military coup. Ever since, there had been pro-democracy demonstrations, and crowds in the streets, with soldiers and policemen and roadblocks and air horns. General Han tried to shut down criticism by closing all the universities and arresting all his opponents, but the demonstrations continued all over the country: so many citizens demanding democracy.

  During all this, my uncle was deployed to Kwangju to put down an uprising there. He was doing his year of mandatory military service, and when he left Seoul, none of us knew much about what was happening out there. Several student demonstrations had been staged throughout the country on the same day urging democracy. In Kwangju, when some students were fired upon and killed, the city rose up and armed itself. Many of the protesting students had themselves just served their mandatory military service, so they were able to fight. When the military was sent in to contain them, they were told that it wasn’t a student demonstration at all, but a communist uprising.

  There were rumors of another civil war. There was talk of a massacre. My parents and I sat in my grandmother’s living room, watching the news. No one believed the official number of two hundred casualties. Everyone knew more people had died. In front of the television, my grandmother prayed. We sat all evening, and then Hannah was packed off to sleep, but my grandmother insisted I stay up and watch.