Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  My father smiled. “I’m glad you’re coming,” he said.

  That last morning before my parents’ flight, my father sat on the kitchen floor, the light filtering in through the sliding glass door onto his face and shoulders. It reflected off the linoleum back up at his face. The bones of his face looked sharper, his skin more translucent. His cancer markers had shot up in the last several weeks. His local doctor had urged him to start treatment as soon as he could.

  “I wish I could stay,” he said, squinting. “This is my home.” He was surrounded by light so bright that everything seemed to move slowly inside it. “I don’t want to go.” He rose, and slid open the door. He stepped outside.

  It was a beautiful day. I thought our backyard had never looked so gorgeous, the bare branches of the trees swaying slowly in the cold bright air, all of it so familiar. My mother and I watched my father pace the length of our backyard, touching the trees. Some of them had grown ten times as tall in twenty years, and standing next to them, my father looked suddenly more fragile than I had noticed in the last few weeks.

  My father bowed then to his trees, his hands clasped together in front of his chest. I couldn’t tell if he was praying, or if he was saying good-bye. When he turned back toward the house, my mother and I busied ourselves in the kitchen, as if we had not been watching.

  In the end, we left our house bravely: we did not go from room to room talking about old memories. We did not stand and stare, or turn back for one last glance. We locked the door behind us and piled into the car with our luggage, smiling at each other, as if we were going on vacation. We did not speak of how the house would be emptied and gutted and sold. We did not say to each other, We will never come back. But at the airport, when we separated, and I stood watching my parents ride up the escalator to their gates, when I saw them walking away from me, I thought of our house, and of Hannah’s empty room. I thought of our toys, packed away, our entire childhood sorted through and boxed. And she would never have to see it; she would never really have to know.

  7.

  The first summer after we’d moved to America, my father’s sister had called and said she and her family were driving up from Indianapolis to stay for a month in August. To help us get settled in, she said.

  My mother said that we had already settled in just fine, and if she’d really wanted to help she should have come earlier, before we’d bought our car and found the grocery store and unpacked all our boxes.

  “It’s still kind of her,” my father had replied.

  I’d never met my Komo: she’d moved to America long ago, and had two American-born sons. She was ten years older than my father, and the two of them were the sole surviving members of a family of eight. My father had been the baby of the family, the third and last son in a brood of five girls and three boys.

  He was six years old when the rest of his family was killed by American soldiers, gunned down in front of their house while he hid with his sister indoors. His sister had sneaked him out of the house in the dead of night, and lifted him past the bundles near the door that he only realized years later were the bodies of his family. He never knew if they were buried.

  My mother said my Komo carried my father over the mountains, singing to him the whole time. There was a cousin on the other side who might take them in. The cousin’s own father had already died. That’s how it was in those days, everyone gone, their lives so short.

  So began the first of my father’s many exoduses: it was his first loss, his first death, the first house he left behind. Everything I knew about his family I knew from my mother and the stories my father’s cousins had told me when I was growing up in Korea. Once I asked him about it—six people gone in one day, whole lives over in an instant—and my father shrugged and said he was too young to remember. When I said I still remembered being six years old, and the day Haejin was born, he said he was so old that his new memories had crowded out his old memories. “That’s what happens when you grow up,” he said. For a long time after that I tried to go over certain memories in my mind every night before I went to bed, afraid that if I didn’t guard them this way, they would disappear.

  The stories I knew of my father all began after he and my Komo had crossed over into what would become South Korea, after their ancestral home had been lost, and everyone was already dead.

  “We had only each other,” my father said of my aunt, and sometimes when he said it an odd, hard expression would flicker across my mother’s face.

  As children, my Komo and my father had walked to the library through a foot of snow, the two of them pretending to be martial arts masters who could skim over ground so fast they left no trace. After a blizzard once, he had shown me how they did it, and I had copied him, lifting my feet as little as possible, sweeping forward as fast as I could, “like the wind,” my father said. “Try to be as subtle and swift as the wind.”

  The nearest library had only let fifty people in at a time, he said, and during my father’s two-month winter vacations, he and my aunt woke at daybreak to walk to the library and wait in line so that he could stay warm inside all day, studying while my aunt trudged home alone, returning all the way back to fetch him when the library closed.

  I loved these stories of my Komo, this determined and willful guardian of my father, but when I found out I was finally going to meet her, I felt uneasy and a little jealous—just for the power she wielded over him. For the debt she held over his head.

  My father had told me many times that I looked like his sister, and I knew the thought gave him pleasure. Secretly, I imagined her beautiful and gracious. I believed she would prefer me over Haejin. I imagined her still as the teenage girl she’d been in my father’s stories, the girl I hoped to one day resemble.

  Of course she disappointed me. When she finally arrived, I was the one to answer the door. She stood on our porch laden with luggage and two boys and a husband. Her face was lined and her smile was hard, and it held no warmth for me. Her hair was short and permed tightly against her head in a style that all Korean ajumahs seemed to adopt once they reached a certain age, and she did not seem special at all. For a moment I did not register that this was my aunt, my father’s sister. When I did, I put my hand to my face, hoping whatever likeness existed between us was very faint.

  She saw me touch my face as I looked at her, but just as she was about to speak, my parents arrived at the threshold, bowing and exclaiming in welcome, reaching to help with the suitcases. At the same time, my cousins pushed past my aunt and through my parents into our house. They came in as if they owned it, barely pausing to greet my parents. Kicking off their shoes, they ran up the stairs to explore the rooms. My parents would never have permitted us to behave that way, but my mother said, laughing, “They’re so vigorous.” As if it was something to be proud of. We could hear them stomping upstairs.

  “Let me show you your rooms,” my mother said to my aunt and uncle, leading them up after Hannah and I had made our bows and been properly introduced. She’d made up the guest bedroom for my aunt and uncle, and Haejin’s room would go to her sons Gabe and Keith. We would share a room for the time that they were visiting.

  But the boys had already commandeered both of our bedrooms and were throwing our stuffed animals at each other across the hall. My mother paused at the top of the stairs, watching them.

  When she told the boys they’d be sharing Haejin’s room, they flat-out refused. My mother turned to my aunt smiling, expecting support, but my aunt said only, “They are used to having their own rooms at home.”

  “Yes of course,” my father said quickly, stepping in before my mother could respond. “Jeehyun and Haejin can sleep in our room with us.”

  My mother pressed her lips together but did not disagree, and watching my cousins whoop and pelt each other with our pillows, I felt a little relieved that we would be sleeping with our parents.

  . . .

  In the following days, my cousins paid no attention to us, but I observed th
em covertly. Gabe was the eldest, at twelve. His face was chubby and cheerful, he had one of those laughing faces that would have led me to believe he was good-natured. Keith was ten, and nearly the same height. He was not overweight like his brother, and looked totally normal by himself, but somehow disappeared when he was next to Gabe, and became an extension of him.

  My cousins spent their days throwing water balloons in the backyard and playing on their identical Game Boys. But when we crossed their paths, they yelled, “Scram,” and chased us away. At meals, they kicked us under the table until our legs were covered in bruises. “Girls,” they sneered, punching us on the arms when we walked by, or digging their hands into the soft spot between our shoulder blades. “What can you do with two girls?”

  At mealtimes, my uncle snatched food off Gabe’s plate and instructed my mother not to offer him seconds. Watching him eat so little, I wondered how he stayed so fat. One morning, I walked by Gabe’s room and through the half-open door I saw my aunt fitting a girdle around his waist. As she fastened the snaps, the folds of fat on his body came together and held. My obnoxious, cocky cousin stood absolutely still, the way he held his body clearly protesting this indignity. I walked quickly by, feeling as if I had witnessed something I should not have seen.

  I felt sorry for Gabe then, and resolved to be kind. But he despised my attempts at friendship, and made fun of both my Korean and my English. He told me my family was going to hell, and he called my mother a heathen. He pinched me and hit my arm, and I let him, frozen by the thought that underneath his clothes, he wore a girdle. Keith stood by and laughed, his gaping mouth showing all his teeth.

  When I complained to my mother, displaying the bruises on my legs that my cousin had left, my aunt overheard. She knelt down to look at my leg, smiling what my mother called her Christian smile. “Jeehyun,” she said, “that’s just how boys are.” She gripped my calf and turned it to get a better look, her fingers clasping a particularly tender bruise. I cried out.

  “Perhaps if you had brothers, you would know how to play with them better,” she said, talking to me but looking at my mother.

  That was the first time I heard her mention a topic that would grow to become a central issue in my family after she departed. My mother had never given my father a son, and my aunt blamed her for this, as well as for not stopping my father from writing his pamphlet on Kwangju. My aunt had sacrificed so much for my father, her education and her youth, and she resented my mother, who she thought had come in and carelessly thrown everything away. “You are the last of your line,” she said to my father. “You are responsible for more than yourself.”

  Nevertheless, I felt some of my aunt’s inexorable will pulling me in during her visit. She was hard to resist. When we ate, she asked us to join her family in bowing our heads at our table. Even if we weren’t Christian, my aunt said, we should join hands and respect God. Gabe sat to my left, and when we prayed he squeezed my fingers until they ached. We closed our eyes and listened to my uncle pray with somber slowness, first in Korean and then in English, and the whole time Gabe would twist my hand and try to make me cry out.

  It was my uncle’s voice that got me through it: he had a deep and confident voice, and even through my discomfort it occurred to me that my aunt had married my uncle for his voice, so suited to command a small gathering, solemn and thrilling. Sometimes when no one was around, I repeated my uncle’s prayers out loud to myself, trying to capture the feeling I had when I heard my uncle say certain words. I liked hearing them come off my own tongue: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

  I had never liked the idea of heaven—it sounded too much like one more country where everyone spoke a different language. Still, sometimes I wondered what it would be like to go somewhere that everyone my parents mourned so intensely would be, and if they were just watching us, and waiting.

  Even though I didn’t like the idea of heaven, I did fall a little bit in love with Jesus that summer. I couldn’t bear the thought of his suffering. In my daydreams I imagined speaking on his behalf and rescuing him from the cross. I kept it a secret, I kept all my crushes secret, but when I was alone I imagined how if I had been there, I would have saved Jesus so he never had to get nailed on the cross, how I would have protected him and kept him company. I felt sorry for him—having to love everyone so much, having to forgive everyone’s deepest sins. I thought he must have been lonely, having to be the Son of God.

  That July, Haejin carried around a large doll everywhere she went. It was the size of a real baby, and heavier than most dolls. It warmed to your body like a real child. We’d spent weeks going to toy stores: my parents said the doll would help Haejin get used to sleeping alone. To my disappointment, it had not occurred to them to also buy something for me. Worse, when the doll was finally found and admired and purchased, I was dismayed to discover I wanted it for myself. I had never owned such a toy. The doll had plump arms that you could squeeze just so, curly brown hair, and glittering green glass eyes. My mother dressed her in a frilly red baby dress, the only one she’d brought from Korea as a souvenir of our infancies. The dress had been mine before it was ever Hannah’s, and though I had no recollection of having worn it, I still felt a proprietary indignation. Then Haejin named her doll Baby. This was the final straw. If the doll had been mine, I would have given her a beautiful, romantic name, like Guinevere. I would have sung to her, taught her things, comforted her when she was tired or sad.

  Haejin had always wanted everything I owned. She’d tried to steal or beg my toys away. Once she acquired Baby, however, she lost interest in all other toys. She carried that doll around and fed it, sang to it, and talked to it. She even took it to the bathroom several times a day to let it pee.

  One day I hid Baby in the laundry hamper while Haejin was having her bath. She emerged dripping and howling, and would not be still until hours later when my mother finally pulled the doll out from beneath the dirty laundry, scolding Haejin for not being more careful. I should have been ashamed of myself, but what I felt during those few hours of Haejin’s desperate search for her doll was a sharp pleasure in being the only one who knew where Baby was.

  Baby was captivating, and eventually even Gabe and Keith took notice. The first time they asked to see her, Haejin offered her up proudly, holding her out with both hands.

  When Gabe turned Baby upside down and lobbed her over to Keith, Haejin screamed. Keith laughed, and pulled Baby’s dress over her face before throwing her back to Gabe.

  “Stop it,” I said, but I knew that I would have joined their game if they had let me. When my mother came in to see why Haejin was crying, they threw Baby on the floor and ran into another room. Haejin guarded Baby obsessively after that, and wouldn’t let her out of her sight. She took her into the bathroom with her, and slept with her clutched against her chest. My parents were embarrassed at her obsessive behavior, but my aunt nodded approvingly and said Haejin would make a proper mother one day.

  In the third week of their monthlong visit, my parents took my aunt and uncle to the local golf course as a special treat, leaving us with my cousins in the house. My Komo said they were old enough to watch us, but I was relieved when they left the house after our parents did, with the intent of going to the neighborhood pond to try to catch some fish.

  I knew I should play with Haejin, but it had been so long since I’d had any time to myself. It was like being set free, and I was wild to do something on my own. But I couldn’t leave Haejin alone in the house, so I left her in the living room playing with Baby, and went up to my parents’ room and locked the door behind me.

  I was filled with energy and didn’t know how to spend it. I thought about climbing out their bathroom window onto the roof, or taking a bath in the fancy tub with the jets. Instead, I went to my mother’s dresser and opened a drawer. It was filled with her underwear, and I pulled each piece out, the old cotton briefs with the sagging elastic, the soft silky ones with the lace trim. I touched all her bras, unclippi
ng and reclipping the backs.

  For as long as I could remember, I had been a snoop. When my parents weren’t home, when Hannah was sleeping or otherwise occupied, I ransacked their drawers. I found medicines and condoms, trinkets and jewelry, my mother’s engagement ring, old photographs of people I didn’t recognize. It seemed to me that everything important in our lives was hidden. That was why my mother hid our money in wallets she stashed in drawers. That was why she hid jewelry between her neatly folded scarves. After I found the first little box, lined in velvet and containing a brilliant ruby ring, I hunted for more. I spread all the little boxes in front of me on the carpet, opening them up one by one, trying on every pearl and emerald, fastening the necklaces around my neck and looping them over around my wrists.

  I listened for Haejin—if she had come up, I would have thrown everything back into the drawer and closed it, and pretended I’d been reading a book. I wanted this to be mine alone, my secret. After I was done with my mother’s underwear drawer, I searched the sweaters, the T-shirts, the pants. There was money hidden in envelopes, letters, black-and-white photographs of my mother at different ages: her parents, her sister, my uncle as a baby flashing a toothless grin.

  Then I went to my parents’ closet, pulling out all our suitcases, checking all the pockets for coins, letters, stray papers, anything at all. There was a small roll of Korean candies in my mother’s carry-on bag. Perhaps she’d been saving them for later, or forgotten them unpacking. I opened the roll and peeled off one round candy and put the rest away.

  Finally, I lay down on my parents’ bed and rolled around in their blankets, sniffing their sheets, which smelled like them. When I finally shook myself out, I was hungry. I headed downstairs to make myself a snack. On my way to the kitchen, I noticed my cousins’ shoes scattered in the hallway in front of the door. I had not heard them return. Their shoes were damp and smelled sharp and slightly rotten when I picked them up to stack them against the wall, but I dropped them when I heard my sister cry out.