Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  Later, the lone weed-bush my father had left untouched would turn out to be a raspberry bush that bore dozens of berries. Eventually the trees we’d planted would grow twice as tall, until our entire yard was enclosed, protected, a space that belonged only to us.

  6.

  As abrupt as the move to America had been, the move my parents were planning to make back to Korea seemed somehow worse. They’d built a life in Michigan, and it seemed a shame that they would have to leave it now that they were finally comfortable. It had been over twenty years, and we had not returned once, not even to visit, not even after my father’s friends had written him and told him they were sure it was safe for him to come home.

  Still, as my parents packed up our house, they did not talk about that first move. Instead, we talked about practical details: four suitcases would go to Korea. Movers would come and pack up our things. Almost all of it would be put in storage.

  Over dinner, my parents and I argued about whether or not I could join them.

  “Come over vacation,” my father said. “After your classes next quarter.”

  “I don’t have to teach classes next quarter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m taking a break, too.”

  “No.” My father shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. I won’t allow it.”

  “Yubbo,” my mother interrupted, her voice calm. “Chew your food.”

  My father waved her off impatiently. He said to me, “You need to get back into your work.”

  “I want to come to Korea. I want to be with you.”

  “Jeehyun,” my father said. “You have to finish your studies.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “It’s just teaching. I’ll still be able to work on my research. And, Daddy,” I said in the sudden grip of an idea, “I was thinking that we could work on my dissertation together. I can tell you more about my work, now that you’ll have more time.”

  My mother looked at me sharply, but my father seemed struck by the idea. He nodded slowly, mulling it over.

  “I could use your perspective,” I said, “and this way you can see what I’ve been working on.”

  Then he shook his head, and I thought he was going to argue with me.

  “My advisor doesn’t mind,” I said. This was a bit of a lie. My advisor had warned me that I’d already taken too much time off, and had stressed how difficult it would be to get back into my work once I left it. “Really,” I said now. “He said the break might do me good, and it’d be great to be able to show it to you.”

  My father smiled then, and reached his hand out to me. “Shake,” he said, pumping my hand up and down.

  . . .

  When the movers arrived, what horrified me most was when they infiltrated Hannah’s room. They packed everything in there, even the unused paper that had been left in a pile on her desk. I couldn’t help looking in every time I walked by. The sight of strangers in her room finally made me realize that our house would no longer be ours. And more than that: as I looked in and saw it barren, stripped of its stuffed animals and twin-size bed, emptied of her books and posters, it seemed as if it was the end of our childhood.

  “Enough,” my mother said one day as we sat on the floor, surrounded by meticulously labeled boxes. “Your father and I are leaving in a week. You must call your sister.”

  By then I was ready to be bullied, and I didn’t protest.

  “I never had the chance to find my sister,” my mother continued. She reached over and took my hand. She squeezed hard. “You’re lucky.”

  I tried to pull my hand out of my mother’s grasp, but she held on. She had lost her sister; she had lived in the aftermath of war. This was always what it came down to, in the end. My grandmother had told me once that my mother had never gotten over the death of my aunt. “Never talk of it,” my grandmother had said. “Never bring it up.”

  When I asked her what had happened, she told me my aunt had died after disobeying her.

  “How?” I asked, fascinated. “What did she do?”

  But my grandmother would not tell me, and there was only one story my mother ever told about her sister. When Hannah and I were children, this story had the power to make us forgive each other instantly. I memorized it and repeated it to myself as if it contained some clue about my mother, or the curse my grandmother said haunted our family.

  My mother’s family had lost its estate when my grandfather passed away. He had died right when a law was passed that cut the family land in pieces to be distributed to the peasants. There were no men in our family old enough to formally claim their portion, and when he died the land was lost and belonged to no one. They had lost everything: even the mountain my grandfather and all our ancestors were buried on.

  In their old house, they’d had their own rooms, but in this new house, my mother and auntie had to share a room that was very small: my mother could cross the room in six long steps, and my auntie could cross it in five. My mother was secretly glad. She and my auntie even had to share a bed. This made my auntie angry, but my mother pretended not to notice.

  Their new house was near a heavy wood that was still green with many old trees. Back then, my mother said, the mountains were not the deep rapturous green that my sister and I remembered, but a barren mixture of brown and black just beginning to speckle with growth. During the occupation and the war, the mountains had lost nearly all of their trees to fire and bombing. When my parents were growing up, the whole country, especially students, would go out to the mountains regularly to plant trees. Those were the trees that covered most of the mountains in Korea now. So that forest was rare at that time, my mother said.

  Also, they had more freedom out there, where there were no servants to watch over them. My mother and auntie went into the forest to fetch water from the well every day, and when they went out they explored the different paths around their new house. There was one path that had been roped off by scarlet cords, and the word “danger” had been carved onto one of the smaller trees.

  One day my auntie jumped over the barrier, and following her lead, my mother ducked beneath it. She asked her sister what she thought they would find. “A duckbill brown bear,” her sister said. “A rooster with three tails.”

  They went on laughing, and when they came to the end of the path they were astonished to find a second well they had never known existed. My auntie grabbed my mother’s arm and pointed to something blocking the path. It was a large metal ball, large enough to sit on. It was as tall as my mother’s waist. She didn’t know what it was, but my auntie said it was a bomb.

  My mother clutched my auntie’s hand, but my auntie shook her off and told her to wait where she was. My auntie walked closer to the bomb and knelt in front of it. “They must have built a new well to keep us away from this,” she said. She reached out her hand.

  My mother ran forward, on tiptoe, and stood by my auntie’s side. “It can’t go off now, can it?” she asked.

  “Of course it can,” my auntie said. “It happens all the time, don’t you know anything?” She stood and stepped closer. She laughed. “I’m going to sit on it,” she said. She flashed my mother a look that my mother didn’t understand, a look of defiance my mother would always remember.

  “Don’t,” she cried. She took my auntie’s sleeve.

  My auntie shook her off. “I can’t take you anywhere, you little brat,” she said good-naturedly. Then they were both quiet. The bomb faced them smugly. It was nestled deep in a bed of heather, and covered in moss. Slender white flowers grew along the cracks.

  My auntie leaned forward until her face was very close. She was almost touching it: my mother could see her breath swaying the tips of the heather. Then my auntie reached out a hand and plucked a flower from the moss. My mother stepped forward, in wonder, but a branch broke beneath her foot, startling her. She turned and ran, screaming at the noise, her pail banging against her legs. Through her scream she heard my auntie running behind her, la
ughing. When they finally stopped running my auntie was still laughing, the flower dangling weakly in her hand.

  Embarrassed, my mother said, “I’m telling Umma what you did.”

  “Do what you want.” My auntie scowled. “No one’s stopping you.” And she turned and ran toward home, leaving my mother alone to fetch the water from the other well and to carry the heavy bucket home by herself.

  When my mother got home, my auntie was alone in their room. The flower lay discarded on the floor.

  “I wasn’t really going to tell on you,” my mother said. She was angry and embarrassed, but she was also sorry.

  My auntie was unmoved. “I can’t share this room with you anymore,” she said. She pointed to the flower that lay in the doorway. “That flower marks half the room.” She had placed it there before my mother returned on purpose, to let it mark what had come between them. “This side is mine,” my auntie said, stomping. “Take care not to cross over.”

  “The bed’s on your side!” my mother cried.

  “Too bad for you.”

  The rest of that day they glared at each other across the room, their hostility unbroken by the onset of darkness. My mother grew angrier and angrier, but when my grandmother asked at dinnertime why they were fighting, she said nothing.

  That night, she lay down on the hard wooden floor without blankets, expecting my auntie to relent. When she didn’t, my mother kicked the bed.

  “My side,” my auntie said. My mother kicked the bed again, and pounded her hands on the ground. My auntie was quiet.

  My mother forced herself to be quiet as well. She closed her eyes. She would not beg. But she was on the brink of tears. She counted to twenty. To thirty. One hundred. It was a trick her father had taught her before he died. And then, just like that, she felt cool hands grab her ankles, fingers tickling the bottoms of her feet. She kicked at her sister’s hands, unwilling to make peace. But they returned until she relented and began to giggle. And then they reached out and grasped her hands, and pulled her into bed.

  This was the story my mother had always told to make peace between my sister and me, and now when my mother said, “I want to tell you a story about your auntie,” I thought she would tell it again. But instead she told me another story I had never heard before.

  When the time came for my aunt to go to college, my grandmother was in the middle of a long illness, and my mother begged her not to leave. To go would be selfish. My mother was too young to keep house herself. “How can you leave this all behind?” She swept her arm around to include their house, the trees behind it, their mother, their brother, herself. “You will be sorry,” she said. She did not understand then the dread with which her sister faced the threat of being bound forever to this house, with all its reminders of what had been lost. Of course my auntie left.

  Afterward, my mother went to fetch water by herself. She played with her wide-eyed younger brother, whom they had always treated like a baby. He became her new playmate, and my mother learned how to be an older sister, too, for once. She nursed jealousies of whomever her sister might be friends with now, at school. Those girls who got to be near her. At night she stretched out, covering their mattress alone.

  Then one night my mother woke to the dim form of my grandmother hovering at her doorway, her feet falling out of her slippers. She stood there with a startled look on her face, her hand opening and closing, rubbing her throat.

  Frightened, my mother said, “Is it morning, Umma?”

  “Your sister is missing,” my grandmother said in a strange and trembling voice. Then she shook herself, seeming to wake, and whispered, “Go back to sleep.” She shuffled away.

  At breakfast the next morning, my mother’s uncle was there. He sat across from her at the table. He had come from Seoul sometime in the night, to bring the news to the family himself. “What happened?” my mother asked. “Where is she?”

  “She’s dead,” her uncle said simply. My mother looked at her brother. They were having rice and soup for breakfast, like always. My mother had set eight side dishes in neat little bowls; my auntie had disappeared, and my great-uncle said quite calmly that she was dead. He reached across the table and put his heavy hand on my mother’s shoulder. “We are reporting her dead.”

  She did not know how to make sense of it. My auntie had been living in a girl’s dorm. It was her second year of college. The North Koreans had been kidnapping people for years, especially girls, and this had intensified in the last several months. And then the North Koreans had raided my auntie’s dorm and carried her off.

  Three days later, my mother’s family made a burial mound for my auntie in the mountains near where our ancestors lay. They piled great heaps of dirt on top of an empty coffin. My mother shivered, and thought of the silent bomb she and her sister had discovered next to the abandoned well.

  “What if she comes back,” my mother asked, “and finds out what we’ve done?”

  Her uncle turned and gripped her arm. He wanted her to understand the situation, he said. His words were terse. She would never be able to marry, to leave Korea, to get a job, if anyone found out what had happened to her sister. Even worse, if they knew she had a sister in the North, her entire family could fall under suspicion themselves, and be taken away to disappear.

  My mother understood then that her uncle was afraid for himself and his own children. She imagined the rest of her family vanishing, one by one, leaving four empty mounds beside each other on a hill. Did she understand? my uncle asked. Did she understand what had to be done?

  My mother nodded yes, but she thought to herself, We are killing her.

  They never spoke of my auntie after that, but each night my mother dreamed of men invading her room. They entered with bugles and shouting. With guns, and long machetes meant to cut stalks of rice. Sweet music like a parade, girls filing out in their nightgowns, her own heart fluttering birdlike as her mother’s hand. No one ever spoke of what happened to those girls, except in whispers when she wasn’t supposed to be listening: raped, she heard a neighbor say once, another time, brainwashed.

  My mother helped my grandmother make the food and clean the house. She served her younger brother his food and sat silently. No one talked at meals any longer, though her brother tried. In those days, he started going out to sit on the roof. All my mother ever knew for certain was that her sister disappeared that night. My auntie left no clues, no trace. It was better not to wonder.

  When my auntie disappeared, there was no search, no photographs sent out. My mother’s family never asked, what if, and where? This was a sin and a betrayal my mother could never comprehend: how easy it was for my auntie to be forgotten.

  “We are lucky to have what we have,” her family said, and she learned to banish my auntie’s name from her speech. My mother left it there to linger: a weight on her tongue.

  She fetched the water alone. One day she walked the path to the abandoned well. This was her first time back, but she had heard at some point that other children played carelessly around it now, as though the bomb that blocked the path couldn’t still, unexpectedly, explode. She tiptoed around it.

  She touched it then, and thought, This is real. The bomb, the world, didn’t seem possible. The world changed too quickly: the sky opened without warning. Her sister had disappeared, and once long ago, this bomb had come quietly like a beggar in the night to block the path to the well. She ran her hand over it, made the green weeds that grew out of its cracks bend under her hand, and thought, This is real. I am real.

  . . .

  Later, when my mother went to college herself, she walked past her sister’s dorm each day. She walked in once, her palm flat against the old wood as she pushed the door open. She walked up and down the hallways, looking for the room that had once been her sister’s.

  “Are you looking for someone?” a girl asked.

  My mother spoke her sister’s name.

  The girl shook her head and said, “Wrong building. No one by that nam
e lives here.”

  My mother thanked the girl, but lingered, looking for clues smudged into the walls, for something dropped in the hall. There was nothing but the lilting voices of the girls who lived there now.

  My mother told this story, and then she said, “I couldn’t go after my sister, but you can still search for Haejin. You are lucky to have the chance to find and bring her home.”

  “It’s not the same,” I said. “Hannah left us. It was her choice.” But I understood what my mother was telling me. My suffering had been so small compared to hers. I was ashamed. “I’ll go,” I said.

  My mother nodded then, and finally released the arm she’d been holding on to the whole time. “Tell your father,” she said.

  I went to him then, and told him I’d decided to go to Hannah and talk to her. He smiled with such relief and happiness that I felt jealous and guilty at the same time. He stuck out his hand. “Shake,” he said. He shook my hand vigorously.

  “I can’t make any promises,” I said, pulling away, already wanting to back out.

  But he said, “Bring her home,” holding on to my hand. He looked right at me, and nodded. Then he turned to the window and pointed at the setting sun. “What do you think?” he said.

  “Three minutes,” I said. We’d played this game for as long as I could remember, trying to predict how much time was left in a sunset before the sun would disappear beneath the horizon.

  “Forty-five seconds,” my father said, looking at his watch.

  I always thought it would take longer than it did for the sun to set. My father, somehow, could predict it nearly to the second.

  We watched it sink behind the trees. I said, “I’m joining you in Korea. After I’ve found Hannah, I’m coming.” I talked fast. “It’s all clear with my advisor. We’ll check in by e-mail and by phone. That’s part of the deal. I’m going to find Hannah so that then I can come to you.”