Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  On the drive home, we were very quiet. We didn’t want to disturb anything with talk. Outside, fields of rice paddies rolled by, the water shining like glass beneath the midday sun, scores of white cranes picking their way through the stalks of rice.

  When we were a few miles from home, we stopped by a shop to buy seedlings. The shop was a little box set on the side of the road, a convenience store alone in the middle of that countryside surrounded by paddies and mountains. We walked up and down the aisles of seedlings, shaded by large umbrellas, and we bought trays of tiny plants: organic tomatoes, peppers, mint, lettuce, and radishes.

  My father had always dug our gardens himself, but this time he just marked the perimeters and I did the actual digging. The seedlings smelled fresh and pungent. My father patted plant after plant into place, his knees pushing into the ground. When he was finished, he stood up, his hands and knees caked with dirt. He patted brown handprints down his shirt, and I thought of my mother having to wash them out later. He saw me watching in disapproval, and laughed. He said, “Let’s go. I want to show you the rest of the property.”

  He led me in a loop around the pond, which was very clear and stocked with all different sizes of fish. Its walls had been built up with rocks, and the surface held the outlines of the mountains around us. We crossed a small curving footbridge and watched the large dark shadows beneath the surface slice calmly through the water. The fish swam back and forth, slowly.

  Beyond the pond was a field, and past the field ran a river lined with trees. My father led me to the path. Along the edges of it, the grass grew long, as if to mark the border. The long stems clung to our pants and our arms as we walked by. The reeds there were thick with insects. I slapped at my arms, at the wet grass sticking to my legs. Pointing to the river, which ran alongside our path, my father said, “I put a watermelon in there yesterday, as a surprise. Let’s go down and get it.”

  When I was little, my father used to put watermelons in the ocean. At the end of the day he’d break it open, and shivering dry in the setting sun, we’d taste the surprising coolness of the fruit after a day in the water.

  “Don’t eat too many seeds,” my father always said, “or a vine of watermelons will grow out of you.”

  “More likely you’ll wet your pants,” my mother replied.

  Now, on the edge of the riverbank, my father took off his shoes and rolled up his pants. He walked up and down looking for the watermelon. He plunged in. Knee deep in the river, he peered into the running water.

  There were rocks on the bottom of the river. My father wasn’t supposed to cut himself because of his weakened immune system. “Be careful,” I said. “Come back. I’ll do it.”

  But he was already in the water, holding his pants high in his fists, picking past branches and rocks like a long-legged bird. The current swirled around his legs.

  “Could somebody have taken it?” he asked. “I left it right here.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “I’m coming.”

  He splashed ahead. “I found it!” he said triumphantly. The melon had rolled a little bit away, and caught itself against a branch. When he reached down to take it, he let go of his pant legs, which unfurled and fell into the water. He held the watermelon up high and shook it in triumph. Then he splashed back toward the shore, laughing, the hems of his pants drowning against his knees.

  14.

  My Komo interrupted our breakfast one morning, just as my grandmother had when I first arrived. We hadn’t heard her car pull up, and when she appeared at the threshold of our house and stood, peering around, we jumped up, startled. We looked at each other as if we’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t have seen.

  I recognized her immediately; she was exactly as I remembered her: angular, unlovely, and somehow striking nevertheless.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast,” she said, as we bowed our greetings.

  “Let me set a place for you at the table,” I said, motioning toward our breakfast. “You should join us.”

  My aunt shook her head. “We have our breakfast by six a.m.,” she said. “When your father and I were children we woke even earlier than that. Our parents thought anything later was laziness. I guess he’s gotten out of the habit. But go ahead, finish your breakfast.”

  “We were just finishing up,” my father said, even though when I looked at his plate he had barely eaten anything. “I’m done.”

  “Maybe you can finish up what you have left?” I said, but he pushed his plate away.

  “Come, Noonah, sit down,” he said, smiling.

  I looked at my mother, but she didn’t even flinch. She motioned for me to help her as she began clearing away the table.

  “He didn’t eat anything,” I whispered.

  “Let it go,” my mother hissed back.

  In the living room, my aunt had seated herself beside my father. “How do you feel?” she asked. She peered at him anxiously. “Did you stay up late the other night waiting for Jeehyun to come in? I hope not.”

  My father smiled. “It was fine, Noonah.”

  She looked unsure. “The body heals while it’s resting,” she insisted. She turned to my mother, who was serving the tea, and said, “He looks so tired. And he ate hardly anything.”

  My mother raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

  My aunt sighed and turned to me. “So,” she said. “Jeehyun, what’s it like to be back in Korea?”

  I shrugged. “It’s good,” I said.

  She nodded. “My sons didn’t like Korea at all when we first came back.”

  “Oh, I like it,” I said. I wondered if I should mention Gabe now, and say I was sorry he had died in that car accident.

  “Well, they didn’t,” my aunt continued. “But I prayed for them, and prayed for them, and in the end it all worked out.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, still unsure about whether I should say anything about Gabe.

  “You have to pray,” my aunt said. She looked at my father. “Your father,” she began, “has made some mistakes. And he has this illness now, which only God can take away. Your father turned away from God, and now he must find his way back.”

  I shook my head, and looked from my mother to my father. I wondered what they expected me to say. “That’s not exactly how people get cancer,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t think that is a kind of God I’d be willing to pray to.”

  “Even to save your father?”

  “I don’t actually think my father has made such big mistakes.”

  “Oh? Let me assure you: mistakes have been made. Years have been wasted.”

  “Noonah,” my father said, but she cut him off with a curt wave of her hand.

  “First,” she began, “he married too early. I told him, establish yourself first: you have too much potential to throw away on a girl, on these petty responsibilities. But he’d never had responsibilities,” she continued. “I’d always shielded him from that, and maybe that was my mistake. And so everything I had hoped for and waited for and sacrificed for, he decided to let go.”

  I stared at her, mesmerized. She had not changed since her visit years ago, when she barged into our house in Michigan and tyrannized our family. And just like then, my parents sat quiet and powerless, allowing her to do so.

  “And then”—here my Komo shot a look at my mother that was filled with unmistakable venom—“that act of idiocy I have never understood. That foolish, stupid pamphlet, just like a schoolboy. If I had been in Korea at that time it never would have happened.” She slapped her hand down on the table. “He wasted his whole life,” she cried. “He fled like a dog, and laid aside his talent, and lived like a nobody, this mediocre life that anyone could have lived.”

  She caught my eye and held it. “It is a sin to abandon your talents,” she said. “Do you understand? It is a disgrace against God.”

  My father’s eyes were fixed on his teacup.

  “God can go to hell,” I said. I thought of my aunt nursing this bit
terness all these years. “That’s the sort of thing, what you just said, that can make somebody sick.”

  To my surprise, my aunt looked stricken. “I know,” she said, her voice suddenly low and grave. “I know it is.” It was as if something had shifted in that second, as if she had let go of all that rage. She took a deep breath. “And God isn’t only vengeful. He can heal, too. Have I made him seem as if he only punishes? Is that how you see him? Is that why you don’t pray?”

  I glanced at my parents. They were silent, their faces guarded and neutral.

  “I don’t think about whether he’s vengeful or jealous or any of that. It’s that I don’t believe such a thing as God exists.” I tried to make my voice as gentle as I could. “If I believed in God, I would pray to him. I would do anything to save my father.”

  My father reached over and squeezed my hand. My aunt watched him do this, and sucked in her breath. “Loving your father, wanting him to get better, that’s Jesus,” she said. “That’s Jesus Christ.”

  Her voice was strained, and in that moment I felt sorry for her. She had given too much to my father growing up, it was true. She’d been mother and father and sister to him. And because she had given too much, she demanded too much in return. It could never be paid back: nothing my father could do would ever be enough for any of it, for their poverty, their isolation, or her fierce guardianship over him. He could only disappoint her for the rest of their lives.

  My poor father, I thought. My impossible-to-love aunt.

  “All love is Jesus,” she said. “Don’t resist him. He is all things good.”

  “Not for me, he isn’t,” I said. “For me, love has nothing to do with Jesus. And it never will.”

  My aunt stayed another hour after that, and we all tried to move the conversation to safer topics. But when finally she left, our house felt strangely empty, as if she’d taken something with her as she went. We tried to recalibrate: my mother said my father and I should go for a walk to clear our minds. She said, “I’ve had to go hiking with your father every day. He’s been wearing me out. Now that you’re here, I can rest.” She laughed, and touched my father’s arm, and I knew she was telling him then that the visit from my aunt had done her no harm.

  And so my father and I went out together. The air was cool, and we walked toward a trailhead that was hidden by a stand of trees.

  “It’s like a secret entrance,” he said, as we sneaked through the trees and onto the path. “I wish I’d been able to stay in Korea and buy a place like this,” he continued. “When I get better, I’m going to buy land out here in the country.”

  “I think that’d be nice,” I said. I watched my father surge ahead. He looked so energetic that I couldn’t help doing calculations in my head. Four of the five to eight months the doctors had given him were nearly up. But he was still nearly as healthy as he had been when they said that. That meant he could make it another five to eight months, I thought. All he had to do was stay right where he was, and we could make it forever: month to month, year to year, just like this.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to a tiny tree frog in our path. We stopped and squatted, watched it hop and disappear into a pile of leaves. The air smelled of pine and earth. I hoped that here in these mountains, my father would begin to get better. Would this have been what it was like to grow up in Korea, I wondered, daily walks, a sense of space?

  My father reached out and tugged at the branch of a pine tree. “The trees in Korea look different, don’t they?” he said. “Even when they’re the same kind of tree.”

  “I guess.”

  “I should have brought you and Haejin back to visit.”

  “It’s nice to be here now.”

  “I shouldn’t have written that pamphlet.”

  This topic had never come up before between us. We had never acknowledged why we left Korea, or that I knew anything about it. We were in unmarked territory.

  “I was proud of you for taking that risk,” I said.

  My father shook his head. “It was a waste,” he said. “Nobody read it, nobody cared. I was a fool, and it didn’t help anyone.”

  “I’m glad you did it,” I said. My father had never talked to me like this before, and it frightened me. “And we were better off in America.”

  “Do you really think that?”

  I shrugged. “We had more freedom. Our horizons were broadened.”

  He laughed. “Was it worth it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

  “I am glad you think so.” He sighed. “I wanted to accomplish something with my life,” he said. “I hoped to do more.”

  “You still can.”

  He shook his head. “At my age, you’ve already caught up to your dreams,” he said. “You’ve already passed them by.” We were walking faster, and both breathing hard. “That’s why I want you to push yourself,” he said. “That’s why you have to work hard now.”

  We hiked on, until we turned a bend that led us straight into a meadow. The sunlight was dazzling in the long grass, playing off the way it bent to the slightest breeze. “I always wanted to write a book,” my father said. “Maybe I can do that, when this is over. When I have time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You should.”

  We had come to a small grove of trees marked off from the waving grass by a trampled circle. My father stopped here and said, “This is where the deer come to rest.” He smiled. “Perfect for us.” He lowered himself onto his back and lay down. I sat beside him, and he groped for my hand. He brought it back to rest with his on his chest. He covered his face with his hat.

  “A book,” he said, from beneath his hat. I could tell he was smiling. “I could do that.”

  I sat, looking at my father with the hat over his face, watching the rise and fall of his breath, thinking of a book filled with all the things I still didn’t know about his life. I thought: Let him get better. I lay down beside him.

  On my back, squinting against the light, I thought I could see the air moving. On the tree above us, a lone leaf quivered recklessly out of sync with the rest. When we were children, my mother had told us how trees grow: about the roots gripping the ground, the stable trunk, the branches, the separate leaves. She told us about veins we couldn’t see carrying sap to all the branches, the chemical processes that turn light into sugar, chlorophyll infusing each leaf with green as it unfurls.

  She had told us that beneath the ground, where no one could see, some trees gripped each other’s roots in the ground like so many held hands. Mahogany did it. Aspen. Gnarled wood grasped gnarled wood until one tree’s roots were another tree’s roots. In times of drought they passed water, when there were fires they passed messages of danger. Burning, an aspen would send the alert root to root so that even if it died itself, the other trees could bring up sap to save themselves from danger.

  “Even plants live longer if they’re closer to their families,” she’d said.

  Next to me, my father stirred. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said sleepily.

  I turned to look at him. The trees were bending over us, blurring in the hot sun. “I think that heat warps the space-time continuum,” I said.

  “Heat?” he said. He laughed. “Do you think it speeds it up or slows it down?” He lifted the hat from his face, peered around, and chewed on another piece of dried fruit. Down went the hat again.

  “It definitely slows it down,” I said. “And when it’s hot enough, you can see the air bend. Look over there at the trees.”

  My father cast aside his hat and propped himself up on an elbow. He looked at the trees and smiled. We watched the leaves shake. He moved his hand through the air. “What else?” he said. “Do you think there’s anything that can stop time?”

  “Maybe the past,” I said. “Do you think maybe time is expanding all the time, like space, and can only expand so long before it collapses back into itself, and we can only use up so much time before we end up getting pulled back by the force of it? Lik
e the past gains gravity?”

  My father started laughing. “No,” he said. But then he was quiet. He looked around, at the mountains in the distance, at the trees. “But sometimes I still feel so young, like nothing’s changed and I still have so much to do. And then I remember I’ve had a whole life.” He stretched his hands above him and then clasped them beneath his head. “A good life.”

  The trees swayed above us.

  I closed my eyes. I thought, let the tumor shrink. My grandmother had taught me to pray like this: chanting the repetition of my dearest wish. I thought maybe the universe had been saving up its magic my entire life for this wish. Let him get better, I thought. Let him heal, let him heal, let him heal.

  “I think joy can stop time,” my father said. “I think joy can do the trick.” Satisfied with this answer, he nodded his head, lowered himself back down, and closed his eyes again.

  I turned to look at him, my father half sunken in the grass, the blades pushing up around him. The sun in his eyes, the light all over him, and the grass, and the arms of trees meeting overhead. He was smiling with his eyes closed, pleased with his answer, pleased with himself. I felt the weight of it upon my chest. Yes, I thought. Joy can stop time with the force of its insistent, incomprehensible weight.

  15.

  In the following days, which my father jokingly called “the tourist season” at our house, guests came early and stayed late into the evening, sitting in bunches in our living room or out on our porch. They hugged my parents and talked about their youth, the mischief they’d caused and the dreams they’d had—it was like a reunion. One woman said it had been years since she’d laughed so hard. The presence of these people made me realize how different our lives had been in America.

  They brought gifts upon gifts including bags of books that filled our one bookshelf double stacked, and spilled onto our table and a corner in the floor. Most of them were about spirituality or alternative treatments and miracles. My father would go through all the books and sigh, wondering in mock despair when anyone would ever bring him a comic book, and then our house was overrun with them, my father greedily reading them at night after our visitors had left.