Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  My parents’ friends told me my father was a hero. The best and smartest of them all. My mother, who had always bristled at such praise—since she had paid the price—smiled indulgently. Those nights, my parents seemed to expand, to become larger versions of themselves, more real somehow.

  In the kitchen I cut up fruit and listened to everyone talk. “What a good daughter!” the adults cried whenever I walked in bearing trays of melon or peaches or cut-up pears. I blushed. Here everyone called me Jeehyuni, the diminutive, the little girl name, but it didn’t bother me. Instead, I felt cared for, and safe. It made me wonder if I would also have been a different person had I grown up in Korea: more confident and easygoing.

  Most days when things were quiet, my father would go outside wearing a hat, his trowel in hand. I sat by the window and watched him; other days I went out and helped. He looked like a child then, sitting back on his heels, examining the plants. And time passed as it had when I was a child—without distinction, as if nothing would ever end and the days were years, and the hours whole days.

  One day I came indoors muddy from working outside by myself, and my mom and dad were lying together on a single sleeping mat, which they had dragged out into the middle of the living room. They were heaped under the blankets, whispering and laughing. I checked myself at the door and stared. They looked like children sharing secrets under the blankets. When they looked up and saw me, they laughed. After a moment they rolled out of the sleeping mat and pulled it back into their bedroom. I could hear them still laughing there.

  The only thing that bothered me those days was that I’d told my parents I’d been sending Hannah regular updates about my father. I had meant to. I had meant to write to her, to tell her my parents wanted her to come out here after all. When my parents’ friends asked about Hannah, I told them that she was in Los Angeles studying biology, as if there were no problems between us.

  I told myself Hannah wasn’t thinking about us either, and that she could always write me if she wanted to know how we were. I spent time with my parents and all our guests. I worked on my dissertation. I felt I could only do one thing or the other: that dealing with Hannah would make everything else impossible.

  But some days I watched my father go out to the river and sit back on his heels, watching the water, and I thought of Hannah and felt like I was committing a crime.

  The day our garden yielded up its first pepper, my father’s cousins came to visit. These were the cousins my father and aunt had gone to live with when he and his sister were orphaned, the cousins whose father had made them eat in the kitchen with the servants because they were poor relations. After my parents had married, my father never returned to that house, even to visit. We’d never gone there for holidays when we lived in Korea, and I had never even seen a photograph of the place, though every once in a while my father had described the grounds there, the lake, the mountain, the trees.

  Now his cousins arrived with baskets of fruit and packs of aloe drinks. “Jeehyun is here!” they cried, and pushed each other aside to embrace and greet me. My father showed them the pepper, and with our smallest knife he cut it into six little pieces.

  “Delicious!” they exclaimed, nodding at each other and chewing theatrically. We all laughed. My father’s cousins had always been kind to me. They’d been proud of him ever since he’d placed first in a nationwide exam at the age of fifteen. They’d adopted him into their clan without question—but my aunt had been left out.

  “And who made sure he won that prize?” my aunt had complained to my mother. “Who took him to the library and tutored him and fought for them to let him go to school when they said he wasn’t smart enough? No one else cared for him in those days.”

  “Your father has been through so much,” his oldest cousin, the head of the family, said, launching the rest of them into stories about the “old” days, when my father had become sort of a mascot to them. He’d won competition after competition: I knew the story. He’d gone to college at the head of his class. He’d been in newspapers. He had been a self-supporting student who worked on the side and sent his money home to his sister, as well as a little for his uncle and cousins, not because they needed it, but as a symbolic gesture of gratitude.

  For a while my father smiled through the stories, content to relive his former accomplishments, the potential he’d had when he was young. Then he said, “But Jeehyun is the genius now. She’s getting her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago! She’ll be a baksa in math!”

  They looked at me with approval, and said I must have gotten my brains from my father. “You’re going to fulfill your father’s potential,” Big Cousin said, patting me on the shoulder. “That’s why we have children, after all.” He looked thoughtful. “It’s a shame,” he said, “that the country was what it was when your father came of age. He could have done great things.”

  “He’s done enough,” my mother said.

  “Yes, he has,” Big Cousin agreed. “But we expected more.” He turned to me again. “Not just from your father, but from our generation, I mean—we thought we’d do big things.”

  “Big changes have happened,” my father said. “More than we thought possible.”

  “Not enough,” Big Cousin said.

  My father shrugged. “But it’s not the end.” He smiled. “Our children will make us proud.” He stood up. “Anyway, enough of that. Does anyone want a tour?” he asked.

  We walked around the grounds, then, saving our garden for last. As my father talked, he let slip what the doctor had said—about the shrinking tumors, the decreasing cancer markers. We’d agreed not to mention this to anyone, as if it was a secret and something fragile to be protected, so I was surprised. Later he said that his cousins didn’t count, since they were family. But soon enough both my parents were telling everyone who asked that the cancer was shrinking, that it was too early to tell, but surely it was a good sign. The exhilaration of saying this out loud was addictive: it seemed more true each time.

  That afternoon I was full of hope, and wrote to my advisor in Chicago. My father’s praise was still fresh in my mind. He thought I would accomplish something. He was proud of me. “I’m making progress,” I wrote. I detailed a few new results I’d been able to get since arriving in Korea.

  “I brought all my books,” I remarked to my father after my e-mail was sent. “I brought my notes and latest results, and I made some new sketches today. I thought we could go through them now that I’ve been here awhile.”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling. “That would be great. But maybe later.”

  “Sure, like when?” I asked.

  He patted my hand. “Not now,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

  I was disappointed, but I felt placated when my advisor responded to my e-mail within the hour, saying he was very pleased, and that we should talk.

  “These are great results. Very exciting!!!” he’d written.

  I noted the exclamation marks, and wrote back immediately. I said that yes, we should talk very soon. I wanted to tell my father about this exchange, but he had fallen asleep in his armchair. I am doing this for you, I wanted to say. I felt a terrible pang remembering how my parents had told me this when I was growing up, It is for you we work this hard. It is for you we do everything.

  When he woke from his nap, he said, “Let’s play cards.” So I didn’t say anything about my work or my advisor’s e-mail. Instead, I got out the deck and dealt. My father lost four times in a row. I was shocked. He had always won at card games, at chess, at anything involving strategy, but he didn’t seem too worried.

  “I wish I could go home,” he said, laying down his cards. I thought he meant back to Michigan, back to our home there, but he started talking about an orchard, south-facing windows, the sound of the wind rushing through from the mountains, and I knew he was talking of his old ancestral home, the one he’d once told me he no longer remembered. Still, when he sat back in his comfortable chair and talked about his childhood, about
walking across hills in the snow, and the games his sister had made up to get him to walk when he was too tired, when he talked about the hunger that gnawed at his belly for months, I leaned forward and listened.

  I wondered why he wanted to go back there now, after so many years. “I like it here,” I said. “I think this is a good place.” I was inexplicably jealous of his ancestral home, that place that still called to him, that I had never seen.

  At dinner that evening, I noticed my father didn’t eat much. As soon as we’d cleared the table and had our tea, he said, white-faced, “I don’t feel well. I think I should take some painkillers.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. His face was set, and his skin had a yellowish cast to it, but I didn’t want him to take any pills. He hadn’t taken one yet, and I didn’t want him to start now. “They’re not good for you,” I said.

  My father said nothing, but took my hand and put it on his abdomen, right under his ribs, which I could feel beneath my hand. My fingers fit into the grooves of them. My father said that when he breathed, he tried to push his energy through the areas where the cancer was.

  “I used to be able to feel it going through,” he said. “At first there was a block, and then it cleared, but now the block is back again.”

  “You’re just tired,” I said. “It’s because of the chemo.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sure.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, as dismissively as I could. “I feel different because the tumor is shrinking.”

  My mother interjected, “If you need a painkiller, you should take it.”

  “Give it a little longer, Daddy,” I said, but he shook his head impatiently.

  “I don’t feel well,” he said, and rose. I thought he’d go to the cupboard to take the painkillers, but he walked right by them. Without saying good night, he went into his room and shut the door.

  My mother and I stared at the shut door. We heard him shuffling around. We heard him lie down.

  I took up my notebook. I couldn’t concentrate, but I didn’t want to go to bed either.

  After a moment my mother said, “How is your work coming along?”

  “It’s been going well,” I said. “But it’s also been harder than I expected.”

  “What’s been hard about it?” my mother asked.

  “Well, it’s like building a house before you know what it will be. Or how you will build it. And with what.”

  “Why don’t you do something you are better at?” she asked. “I always thought you should have changed your major to history back when you wanted to.”

  “I’m not actually bad at this,” I said. I wanted her to believe inme. “As painstaking as it is, I like drawing and thinking about objects that exist in a kind of space that is itself just an abstract concept. It’s like drawing an imaginary place. Anyway, I’m hopeful.”

  My mother sighed. “Then get it done,” she said. “Don’t waste your time.” She looked at the closed door to the room she shared with my father, and then she looked at me, straight on, a hard, inscrutable look that traveled down to the very tips of my toes. “Your father is doing worse, if you haven’t noticed,” she said.

  “He’s just tired today,” I said.

  “It’s time for Haejin to come.”

  “I’ll try to get her here. I’ve been trying.”

  “Are you sure you’re trying hard enough? Does she know the situation?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Okay, then tell me—what is she doing? What does she say?”

  “It’s Hannah,” I said. “You know how she is. She doesn’t say much.”

  “You need to get her to talk. We need you to get her here.”

  “How can you forgive her for everything she put you through?” I asked. “How can you pretend nothing happened, and keep asking me to beg her to come?”

  “She’s part of this family. Nothing else matters.”

  “She could really mess everything up.”

  “Shame on you,” my mother said. “You can’t throw away a sister.”

  “I’m not the one who threw anything away,” I said, standing up. “I’ve been here since the first day, I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to. You can’t blame me for this.”

  “Sit,” my mother said.

  “I won’t,” I said. “If you want her so badly, then call her yourself. I’m going to bed.” And I left my mother sitting there. I went to my room and shut the door.

  I lay in the dark for a long time: long enough to hear my mother go to bed, and to hear my father shifting and turning through the night, my mother’s worried voice asking how she could help. I wanted to get up and tell him to take the painkillers if he needed to, that I was sorry I had been selfish, and that I knew it was unfair. But I wanted to believe it meant something that he hadn’t taken the painkillers after all, and so I lay in bed and did nothing.

  The next morning my parents were late getting up for my father’s doctor’s appointment in the city. I set out breakfast, slowly, clumsily. “We’ll drop you off at your grandmother’s for the morning, and your uncle will bring you home,” my father said.

  “Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure why he didn’t want me with him. Whether he was letting me off the hook, or trying to shield me from bad news.

  He must have guessed what I was thinking, because he said gently, “Jeehyun, I think you need a break this time. You don’t have to come along.”

  “Okay,” I said, again.

  We drove to my grandmother’s house in silence, through what felt like impending doom. When my mother pulled over to the curb to let me out, my father opened the window and stuck out his hand. He smiled. “Shake,” he said.

  My grandmother had lined up apples on her kitchen table: I was horrible at peeling fruit, and she was going to make me practice. “Skill in everything,” she said, handing me a slender knife.

  We sat at her kitchen table, facing the apples. Her current house oddly lined up with my memory of the house she’d left many years ago: the painting of the three mountain peaks had been over there, the picture of my grandfather sitting sad and stern still propped up in the center of the living room, the daenjang pots lined up side by side on the balcony. Everything seemed an echo of the past, down to my grandmother, sitting at this very table, showing me the right way to peel an apple. Growing up, I had always used a carrot peeler, and when I used a knife the skin did not come off thin enough in one continuous peel.

  We peeled and ate the apples slowly, and when my grandmother grew bored of trying to improve my technique, she turned on the television. Today the lead story was about a girl who had recently been discovered living the life, they said, of someone who’d lived a hundred years ago: no electricity, no running water, no contact, really, with the outside world.

  The girl’s speech was hesitant and quiet. Like someone who is used to talking to only one person. She had always lived here, she said, since she was a child. Her father had brought her out here after her mother died, and she didn’t remember anything else. They lived so far away from everything. Still, her father had taught her how to read. He had taught her how to draw water from a well, had told her to hide from strangers.

  Her clothes were of an ugly, loose, coarse linen that billowed about her. Behind her was a glorious garden, spilling out of itself. Behind that, the woods. Then the camera was off the girl, and onto the two hikers who had found her. They were solidly of this world. They smiled into the camera; they talked, interrupting each other, eager, excited. They were proud of themselves for stumbling upon the major discovery of the year, they said. There was not even a path to the house—they had simply gone off exploring, and had discovered the hut and the girl within it.

  Then the camera panned to the small hut the girl had lived in all her life. She was a true Korean, the reporter said. She was what a Korean woman might have been generations ago, untouched. The hikers wanted to take her to Seoul to be interviewed and made famous, the reporter said, though her f
ather, lurking somewhere off camera, refusing to be seen, did not approve.

  But the reporter was adamant. The hikers were sure. The cameras zoomed in on the girl again. Her face was broad and coarse, and she was built stocky and low to the ground. I tried to see something different in her wide features, some lingering aura of another time. She was not beautiful, but she was evidence that time can stand still. Except of course time had caught up with her.

  My grandmother turned the television off and sighed. “Children aren’t obedient to their parents these days. When I was a girl, that’s all we had: the ability to honor our parents.”

  During the Japanese occupation, she said, everyone was forced to take a Japanese name. They were made to give up their given names, and those who refused were punished.

  “They wanted to make us forget,” my grandmother said, “but at home we spoke Korean. I spoke Korean with my friends.”

  She looked at me sideways. “Your father’s family refused to take a Japanese name,” she said. “Did you know that? They were offered status as Japanese aristocrats, and they turned it down. They were punished.” The coil of her apple peel broke. She set the fruit down, the knife beside it. “We are nothing but our history,” she said. She sighed and looked at me. “Your parents had no sons. It’s up to you to be a son to them.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “You must. Your line ends with you.”

  I shook my head. History was treacherous: a tangled path back to what, I didn’t know. “There’s Haejin,” I said.

  “Haejin,” my grandmother said. “Where is she now? What is the trouble between you?”

  “That’s between her and our parents.”

  My grandmother shook her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “That’s not the whole truth.”

  I looked at my hands. I thought of the night Hannah was born, and what my grandmother had told me about the girls in our family, that one of the sisters was always lost. She had made it true, I thought.