by Sonya Chung
PRAISE FOR SONYA CHUNG’S DEBUT
Long for This World:
“An intricately structured and powerfully resonant portrait of lives lived at the crossroads of culture, and a family torn between the old world and the new, Long for This World marks a powerful debut from a young writer of great talent and promise.”
—Kate Walbert, National Book Award finalist for Our Kind and author of A Short History of Women
“Chung presents each scene with confidence and trusts us to make the necessary connections, to see what the characters are saying by allowing themselves to be seen. And in fact, one of the joys in reading this debut is connecting the pieces, then stepping back for the big view: the intricate and nuanced family story that emerges … a portrait of the way the Hans are both fractured and then relinked in unexpected ways.”
—Celeste Ng, Fiction Writers Review and author of Everything I Never Told You
“[A] beautiful book that focuses on the small but complicated negotiations of a family, and larger, global questions of identity, art, and happiness … I loved it. It’s so gracefully told, and rich—not to mention riveting.”
—Edan Lepucki, The Millions and author of California
“… lyrical and insightful debut novel … Chung carefully describes the longing and loss felt by each of the characters she has flawlessly created … Alliances and allegiances are formed between East and West, male and female, young and old, parents and the childless. Chung juxtaposes the Hans in obvious and less obvious pairings, each of which shows them in a new light and highlights their complexity as they struggle with their roles in the family and the world in terms of gender, relationships, career goals, and cultural expectations.”
—The Boston Globe
“… elegant debut novel … Switching deftly between different characters’ points of view, Chung portrays with precision and grace each character’s struggle to find his or her place in the family and in the world.”
—Publishers Weekly
Relegation Books, USA
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2016 by Sonya Chung
All rights reserved.
Book design by Zach Dodson
Cover lettering by Teo Tuominen
ISBN: 978-0-9847648-4-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-09-847648-6-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015958933
the
loved ones
A NOVEL
SONYA CHUNG
For John
For a moment she seemed poised to resist, but then she followed without a word. They arrived, breathless, at the oak grove on the ridge behind the village. The brilliant moonlight was no longer welcome. They searched for a place that was shadier still.
—Hwang Sun-won, Lost Souls
There has also been some inconsistency regarding what the sankofa, thought to stand for a West African proverb, means. The 2006 [African Burial Ground project] reports render the proverb as, “It is not a taboo to return and fetch it when you forget,” while the new interpretive display offers the easier-to-grasp phrase, “Look to the past to understand the present.”
—Sewell Chan, “Coffin’s Emblem Defies Certainty,” The New York Times, January 26, 2010
BOOK ONE:
Les Proches
Kenyon Street, NW Washington, DC
1951
Was the little girl who pulled open the front door with two hands. Yellow dress, and yellow ribbons at the ends of her braids. He saw that the dress was too tight across her chest and riding up where her buttocks were rounding out; fraying at the hem. It looked sad, and poor. But she loved the dress, obviously. Wearing it in the middle of winter.
Her mother sent her to answer the door, he knew. The grandmother or uncle would have blocked his way. He ain’t come to the hospital; why he come now. He wasn’t sure he didn’t want his way blocked.
He was late even. Said he’d come in the afternoon. Somehow couldn’t come in the light of day. But now—porch light on, cold dark night giving off starlight, too—he felt blinded, and caught out.
The girl stepped aside, big eyes and silent. Always eyeing him like that. You’re not my daddy, the eyes said. Give us back our mama.
He stood on the porch, unmoving. The girl held the door. Inside he heard the baby crying; its mother’s muffled tired voice.
His own mother had warned him; his big brother, his friends, too. Don’t start something you can’t follow it through. Widow with four children. Three wild boys, that homely girl. Can’t have her and not them. Woman’s eyes are heavy on you.
He liked it, though. Her being older, her full hips, loving on him so heavy; how he could make her dark spirits light up. She was deep sad when he met her that night at the club, and sexy in low-cut electric blue. After that night, all he had to do was smile his easy smile, touch her where and how he wanted. He liked too making the rest of them shake their heads and purse their lips; he was after the disapproval, the satisfaction of it. Eventually—too many years later—he’d outgrow that.
Feet lead heavy. The girl waiting. Then, swollen slippered feet coming down the stairs, hem of her housedress; baby in her arm. Baby boy.
She saw who it was and lit up like she always did, then stopped short on the landing. Saw him frozen there, outside. Saw how, at the sight of her and the dark bundle, his face drew blank and hard, eyebrows straight across like thick painted lines on a road.
The girl looked back and forth between them.
Essie raised the boy up onto her shoulder, turned its face toward the door. Scrunched brown face, fist up by its cheek. It kicked its legs and opened its black licorice eyes. And Frank saw—he saw everything then. The boy was his, for sure. If he’d doubted, now he knew. Charles, they were calling him, but he didn’t know it—not then, not for a long time. There was an instant, if it was that long: the shoulds, the rights, the wrongs flitted in and out of his mind like dumb brown moths flapping at a light bulb. He shut the light. No. Don’t want. Want other, want out, out there. Got plans. Not here, this, them.
Feet no longer lead. Feet flying down the steps, onto the black street. Flying, flying away, into the night—to life, unlived, calling.
SUMMER 1984
1.
The boy was six, the girl nine. Their father, Charles Frederick Douglass Lee, was himself one of five children; each had looked after the next while Charles’s mother worked night shifts and his grandmother worked days at the same corner store owned by a cousin. He’d come up fine and didn’t believe in babysitters. It was his wife, Alice, who insisted the girl was not old enough to be left alone with the boy. “What if there’s an emergency,” Alice Lee said to Charles. She often made statements in the form of questions. She said “emergency” in a near whisper.
“She’s a smart girl, she knows how to dial a phone.” Charles favored the girl, loved her more, even; but he was careful not to show it as much as he might. Veda was dark-skinned, almost as dark as him, darker than the boy, but had most of her mother’s features— heart-shaped face, gray eyes, celestial nose. She did have his full lips and bright, large-toothed smile, everyone said so. She had his dark, purplish gums, too; though no one said so. Veda’s hair was dark brown, soft and wavy, but her mother didn’t understand as well as her father what this meant, how lucky she was.
The boy, Benny, was light-skinned, but he had his father’s thick eyebrows and prominent forehead. He was a big boy for his age and barreled around like a fullback, shoulders squared, hands balled into fists. He couldn’t yet read, or wouldn’t. Sometimes, he still wet the
bed. He’d bitten other children, more than once, and crashed full-force into anything in-progress that he hadn’t himself started—a jigsaw puzzle, another boy’s Lego house, his sister’s My Little Ponies arranged for a pageant. Charles marveled at Alice’s calm, even tones with both children. Sometimes he loved her for it, sometimes he hated her. Sometimes he wanted to slap the boy and shove his wife; sometimes the other way around.
Alice Lee was going back to work. She was a social worker and had found a job at a Korean nursing home in Silver Spring. She’d been home with the children all these years and was fortunate to get the job after being out of the workforce. Alice did have a nurse practitioner’s degree—she’d gone to night school when Benny started pre-K—and the nursing home needed someone like her, who could communicate well enough with the Mexican service staff (Peace Corps in Chile), with the residents and doctors (DoD educational assistant, Yongsan Base in Seoul), and with the pharmaceutical and insurance people on the phone.
For weeks Charles and Alice argued over whether to hire a babysitter—“discussed,” Alice would say—and in the end Charles gave in, mostly for the girl’s sake. Why should she have to watch over the boy.
“There’s a nurse at the home whose daughter could do it,” Alice said. “The director put me in touch with her, and she sounds perfect. Polite, responsible. Her mother has been with the home for many years.”
So she’s already arranged it, Charles thought. Of course she has.
“Her name is Lee,” Alice said, like an offering, and with a chuckle. “Hannah—the girl—Hannah Lee.”
A Korean girl. Charles didn’t like it. Just as he didn’t like his wife working at that nursing home. Did the mother of the girl know about him? Charles didn’t ask, because he knew the answer: no way she did. Not at first. Alice would wait to reveal it, her gamman-saram husband—to the mother, to all her coworkers—after she’d proven herself trustworthy and likeable. His wife was a smart girl, too. Lee was likely a useful name to have around there.
Charles wasn’t surprised: so many of them were named Lee. He’d gotten used to it in Korea, the bitter irony. The KATUSAs had found it especially amusing: Lee-san, they’d called him, though he generally didn’t take it as friendliness.
Hannah Lee came by herself on a Saturday afternoon in late May to meet the children and be shown around. Alice was in the backyard with the boy when the bell rang. Charles got up from his recliner—he’d been scanning the scores and listening to WJFK sports—to answer it.
Hannah wore a navy T-shirt dress with a braided belt hanging below the waist, jelly sandals, and shiny lip gloss (in fact it was just Vaseline; her mother did not allow makeup). Her legs were long, her hair wavy and brown at the ends, her eyeglasses perfectly round. She was taller and looked older than Charles had expected. Though come to think of it, Alice had never said how old she was. He guessed about thirteen. Maybe it was her handbag, a square Gucci that was slung across her body and reminded Charles instantly of the fakes sold in Itaewon by the dozens to officers’ wives. Or maybe it was some other quality—the solemnity of her pale, rectangular face. When she smiled and introduced herself, it seemed to require much effort, an awkward exertion. But she was not surprised to see his black face. Charles knew this, because he knew that look well enough, had borne it over and over again from Alice’s friends and family. No, it wasn’t that. It was the nicety, a learned affect of cheerfulness, that seemed to cause the girl strain. Alice had apparently not detected it on the phone when she spoke to her the day before—She sounds perfect, she had said—and this knowledge gave Charles Lee a small burst of pleasure.
2.
The phone rang just as Soon-mi squatted by the flowerbed with her trowel and kitchen knife. She could hear it through the sliding screen door, and so could Chong-ho from across the small yard. The day was mild and still and overcast, and the deep ink-blue of the Baptisia—false indigo it was sometimes called—seemed to ring brightly, shockingly, along with the telephone.
It was late in the season to be dividing, but the forecast called for cooler weather and light rain tomorrow, Sunday, into Monday. There was space in the flowerbed that bordered the back of the house where a peony had been lost to an early spring storm (the gutter had come crashing down). Soon-mi thought she could divide and replant all three of the indigos, and finish the weeding she’d started earlier, before dinner.
Chong-ho looked to Soon-mi from the vegetable garden. Not with his eyes, but with his attention. The phone rang a second and third time.
Soon-mi stood and removed her gloves, laying them down, along with her tools, on the patio table; she slid the screen door open and stepped through.
Just before the door shut, Chong-ho looked up: he saw Soon-mi’s blue rubber slipper dangling from her foot. The slipper dropped to the doormat, as Soon-mi disappeared into the house. Who could be calling, Chong-ho wondered. It was strange that the phone would ring at this time on a Saturday. Probably one of Hannah’s school friends. That girl who was always calling, the fat one with the brown skin and short skirt who talked too fast. She’d come after school with Hannah once but then never again. Maybe Soon-mi had said something, though likely not; Hannah would not need to be told. Chong-ho grimaced and went back to transplanting the go-chu.
During the week sometimes there were sales calls, but never on weekends. Soon-mi thought it could only be one person, and she let out an audible sigh when she heard James’s voice—as if her wishing had made it so.
“Hi, Ummah.” There was an echo, along with yelling and laughing in the background.
“James?” Soon-mi said. She’d raised her voice, and it cracked. “Why so much noisy?”
“Those are just my suitemates. I’m in the bathroom with the phone. Remember when I switched the long cord from your phone last time? It’s the only way to have any privacy around here.”
“Sweet? Mate?”
“Roommates, Ummah. I have two, I told you. They’re okay. Just blowing off steam before exams.”
“Unh. Exam. You have exam now.”
“Next week,” he said. There was a muffled bang, then the crash of aluminum cans hitting the floor. James covered the mouthpiece and hissed, “Hey, dickheads, knock it off.”
Soon-mi waited.
“Sorry, they’re just horsing around. Anyway. Um …”
They spoke for just a few minutes, as always. His parents wanted to hear that James was doing all right and studying hard; and that’s what he told them, every month. Usually he called on Sundays. This week he had study group all day Sunday, and an end-of-semester party at the home of one of his professors Sunday night. He explained all this, which didn’t take long. When they finished speaking, he asked for Hannah. Soon-mi said she’d gone out. She didn’t tell James about the babysitting job. It was a long story, and she didn’t care to get into it; Hannah could tell him herself next time. And who knew how long it would last anyway. The American woman, Alice Lee—her children were old enough to be home alone, really.
“Tell her to call me sometime,” James said. “Just, you know. Whenever.”
“Unh, okay,” Soon-mi said. Then quickly she told him to make sure he ate well, not just ramen noodles, and he laughed, even though she wasn’t making a joke. Then they hung up.
Soon-mi stepped back out onto the patio and retrieved her trowel and knife. As she pulled on her gloves, she became thoughtful and laid the tools again on the patio table, then walked toward the far end of the yard, the sunny corner, where Chong-ho was putting the last of the go-chu seedlings in the ground.
“Moh han-eun goon-yo? What is it?” Chong-ho handed her a seedling, then proceeded to mix in the fertilizer he’d just sprinkled over the hole. Soon-mi cupped the ball of spindly roots in her orange gloves. She told her husband that James was fine and conveyed his reasons for calling on a Saturday. Chong-ho clawed at the dirt in the bottom of the hole with both hands—he never wore gloves—making sure the plant food was deeply and evenly mixed.
When he
was done, Chong-ho held out his right hand, which was dark with earth, and Soon-mi placed the seedling in his palm. “Hannah missed talking to him.” The words formed themselves, and multiple meanings, from an uneasy place that Soon-mi knew well; though only as a kind of bodily thrumming. She couldn’t have named it, not even to herself.
“Where did she go?”
Soon-mi was silent for a moment. She had not anticipated this question; that is, she had not considered how she would answer it. She had been distracted by sending Hannah off. Of course Hannah’s father would question the purpose of her having a job: they provided for her, she should be studying. “Out with a friend,” Soon-mi said, and their eyes met briefly as Chong-ho stood to stretch his back. In that glance, Chong-ho was saying, What you tell me is always truth enough, and Soon-mi was saying, I understand the nature of your trust.
Chong-ho squatted again, and Soon-mi knelt next to him. He mixed in the plant food and set the seedlings in the holes; she scooped dirt and filled the gaps, then patted the soil lightly. When they got to the last hole, Soon-mi said, “Hannah should call him. He has good advice for her, I think. He is becoming more responsible, concerned for the younger one.”
Chong-ho said nothing. Soon-mi shifted her weight slowly to achy ankles and hips, and brushed off her knees. As she turned to go work on the Baptisias, Chong-ho raised his head and said, “She will be home for dinner?”
“Unh,” Soon-mi said.
Chong-ho lowered his eyes, and with that, it was agreed: he would encourage Hannah to call her brother.
Soon-mi’s slippers made a muted slapping noise against her socks as she walked toward the house. She would have time to divide and transplant only one of the false indigos. She worked from a squat, and when she plunged her trowel into the ground, loosening the root ball on all sides and then pulling up from the base of the stalks, she felt how deep and intricate the roots were; how they clung to the earth that fed them. She dug deeper, pulled firmly and evenly from the top, wiggling the plant from side to side. The roots loosened, and Soon-mi thought, Why should Hannah work for the American family? Soon-mi had made the offering to Alice Lee without thinking, though it seemed right at the time. She’d felt relief when the woman wrote down their phone number. Hannah would be occupied, looking after children. Soon-mi was not convinced this was a bad idea; nor a good one, exactly. The uneasy thrumming persisted.
