The Loved Ones

by Sonya Chung

  Midway through her senior year, Alice stopped going to meetings, stopped hanging out at The Rue where she and all her activist friends spent countless hours drinking and smoking and pairing off in dark corners late into the night. That winter, it was Gideon Roth, her lab partner—studious, on full scholarship, and seemingly unaware that a war was going on—who’d gone with her to the clinic when she was three weeks late. He never asked who or when (she had no definitive answer anyway, and maybe he understood this), or was she sure she wanted to go through with it. He went with her, waited while it got done, sat with her afterward on the dusty twin mattress on her dorm-room floor. He held her awkwardly while she cried. Gideon was in the closet, but they never talked about that either.

  Alice moved out of the dorms, to an apartment five miles west of campus where no one she knew lived. She didn’t apply to med school. She told her father, unconvincingly, that she would, eventually. Nick Weaver responded by instructing his accountant to cease payments to Alice’s bank account, which didn’t surprise her. That spring, Alice made her plans. Laila was a grad student in ecology; they’d met at a march. She was olive-skinned, with wavy chocolate hair down to her butt, wore cutoff jean shorts with construction boots and gauzy Indian-print tops; she could have been a model for a Peace Corps recruitment poster or the cover of Vogue, or both. Laila was signed up for the reforestation project outside Valdivia; there was still time for Alice to apply. Come with me, she said, and it seemed inconceivable to say no. Still, Alice hesitated: Chile? She literally had to look at a map. Then Laila said, Do you like trees? We’re going to help save them. Trees, Alice thought. It sounded tranquil, focused, and important. In June of that year, 1971, they were off.

  They’d meant to keep up with what was going on back home, and in Vietnam, and the rest of the world; but really, there was too much to do. They were on the move, constantly—by mule, scooter, sometimes a van with shoddy brakes when they were lucky—transforming tree farmers into entrepreneurs and the unemployed into their labor. It was so simple, and hopeful: plant trees, improve your lives, and your country. Laila was often pulled into meetings at the university, where they were developing new curricula; Alice happily stayed with the laborers, digging and planting, digging and planting. Lengas, ñirres y coigües. Trees whose names sounded to her like hope, like nourishment itself. Alice’s arms grew strong, her skin golden; her hair glimmered platinum in the sun the way it had when she was a girl, before her father moved them from Jacksonville to New Hampshire, where not only did her hair darken, but also her mood.

  Alice all but forgot everything that had seemed so dire just months before. She knew, somewhere in her mind, that the planet was going to shit; it was her country’s fault, and she should care. But with so much actual difference-making work to do, here, now, she had the luxury—it was an odd word perhaps, but still the right one, for a life in which she cleaned latrines, bathed infrequently, and mended her one pair of sandals by hand—she had the luxury of thinking not at all about the future. She had the blessed good fortune of being absorbed in the necessities of the present. And in this essentially mindless, productive state, she passed her two years with the Peace Corps.

  She could have stayed. She should have. But she didn’t have what Laila had. Courage? Faith? The fact was no one had asked her to stay.

  The on-flight meal was served—a rubbery oval of chicken, soggy cubed vegetables, disturbingly filling despite miniature portions—then Alice tried to sleep. Her head was crowded with headlines, like crows circling but never landing. Brezhnev’s First Visit to U.S. Pete Rose Hits His 2000th. Skylab 2 Lands. John Dean Testifies Before Senate Watergate Committee. Coup d’état in Uruguay. None of it seemed real to Alice; she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  After returning from Chile, Alice lived for three months with Nick Sr. and his wife, Cheryl, in Hanover; and every day, Colonia de Curfeo, the happiness she’d found, grew more and more remote. She was desperate to leave, she had to find her way abroad again, anywhere, just far far away. Medical school applications piled up on the floor in her bedroom. She sat by the window in Nick Jr.’s room, at the opposite end of the house from her father’s, and smoked the stale Marlboros he’d left behind (inadvertently, for sure) the year before when he went off to college.

  Her father would have been able to arrange something; he was waiting for her to ask. It was a game of chicken between them, and Alice refused to surrender. She spent her days researching teaching programs at the public library, ate two-dollar meals at the diner on South Main. One day she came home to find ten women sitting in a circle in folding chairs in the living room. Cheryl was serving iced tea and lemon crisps. She introduced Alice as “home for just a little while.” There was a stack of goldenrod mimeographed sheets on the coffee table: National Right to Life New Hampshire Chapter, Founding Principles. The women encouraged Alice to stay, but Cheryl said, “Oh no, Alice has other ideas.” She looked at Alice and narrowed her eyes, almost imperceptibly. It was then that Alice knew—that Cheryl knew. She was an eerily shrewd woman. She would not have told Alice’s father, would instead relish the private knowledge. Would use it to keep Alice away.

  When Alice saw the DoDEA flyers in the window of the local recruiting office, she was ready to try anything; she made her plans—escape plans—hastily.

  And now, here she was.

  Alice leaned her head against the half-shuttered window. The couple sitting next to her whispered incessantly. The whispering seemed louder than if they’d spoken in normal voices. The man wore a starched button-down and pleated pants, the woman a collared denim dress and flat brown shoes. They reminded Alice of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who used to knock on the door weekly in Jacksonville (“You have to be polite, but firm,” Alice’s mother would say, before opening the door and demonstrating impeccably). Each wore a wedding ring, but the way the woman put her hand on the man’s bicep, along with her bright coral lipstick and nail polish (Alice’s mother would have sniffed), made Alice think they were not married to each other. This suspicion, and their constant chatter, kept Alice awake for what felt like many hours.

  Finally, she did sleep. Dreamt several dreams. First, her mother, in bed at home, the day ten-year-old Alice knew for certain that her mother was going to die: something in her face, a smile too forced, a grayness in her skin—all of which matched the facts of Alice’s memory, but in sleep evoked the lonely terror of nightmare. Then, a scene from her college dorm, the halls long and labyrinthine, not being able to find her way back to her room; an elderly stranger, Walter Cronkite but not Walter Cronkite, guiding her by the elbow until they arrive at a door that isn’t hers, although the stranger, now speaking a garbled, ghoulish Spanish, like a devil’s tongue, insists it is. In Jacksonville now, at her grandmother Weaver’s house, the ancient villa where Nick and Cheryl deposited her every summer during middle school: upstairs, in one of the bedrooms, there is a tumult, and Alice taps open the door to see a hospital room—doctor, nurse, a girl on a table, struggling. Alice doesn’t know the girl, but still she wants to tell her to stop struggling, you stupid girl, don’t you see you’re making it worse? The doctor has his hand on the nurse’s neck. Alice charges into the room, the nurse looks up, and Alice sees it is the whispering woman with the coral lips—

  “Honey, wake up.” A bony hand on Alice’s shoulder. Alice opened her eyes, saw the woman’s face straight on for the first time—no, the second time: the face was precisely what she saw in the dream. “You were having a nightmare.”

  The man was looking away, signaling the stewardess for coffee.

  Alice sat up, smoothed down her hair, felt her warm cheeks with her palms. “Do you know what time it is?” Alice asked. The woman looked to the man, her hand again on his bicep.

  “That would be … EEL-gope-shi.” He delivered his joke heartily, his accent proudly atrocious. “Seven o’clock,” he then said, businesslike. “A.M. Korea time.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said, turning to the window and l
ifting the shutter. The sun flooded the row with bright white noise.

  Two more hours; the last two hours. She’d slept a long time.

  After breakfast, which she hardly touches, Alice begins to breathe deeply, in, out, through her nose, a small constriction in the throat, as Laila taught them. She closes her eyes, lifts her top chest; deep inhalations, long, slow exhalations. Inhale, soft belly, releasing tension in the abdomen. This was always hardest.

  When she opens her eyes, Alice focuses on a green light at the front of the cabin. She wants to clear away distracting thoughts, the specter of waking nightmares, with a mantra. What will be her new mantra, now, on this new journey, this fresh start. On her way back from Chile, she’d chosen a Spanish word—adelante, adelante, adelante. Breathing, releasing, Alice pages through the Korean phrase book in her mind. She finds gwen-chahn-ta, gwen-chahn-ta; it’s all right, it’s all right.

  2.

  With one hand, Soon-mi lays down the quilted changing mat on the countertop, between sink and wall. It will be tight, but Soon-mi thinks Hannah will fit. One third of the changing mat hangs over into the basin, but it will have to do; it’s all there is. She is thankful for the mat—lent to her by a fellow night nurse at the hospital—which is coated in a plasticky layer, easy to wipe down. It’s a lifesaver, the other nurse had said. There are so many new products and gadgets these days. Soon-mi hasn’t kept up all these years; she never imagined she’d have to.

  Hannah is heavy in her left arm. Soon-mi’s hips are narrow; to rest the child there she has to jut out the right side of her pelvis, like a prostitute waving down a john. Perhaps she should have done as Chong-ho urged—just laid the child down across two seats in the baggage claim area while he and James retrieved the luggage. But Soon-mi did not see any other women changing diapers in public here; nor breast-feeding as she sometimes saw on the Metrobus. Here, in Gwangju, she cannot imagine such a thing, nor any of the immodesties she witnesses daily in America.

  It’s been ten years; so much has changed. Airport security is much more strict, for example; General Park’s military personnel lurk and loom everywhere. As a woman with children, Soon-mi feels somehow less protected, not more. The new airport is really not so new, nine years old, but still, everything is too bright, too hard, too shiny.

  Soon-mi has flown only once before—a decade ago, when they left Korea. She and Chong-ho and young James.

  Hannah squirms, waking from heavy-headed sleep. Warm drool on Soon-mi’s blouse. She straightens her hip, braces her legs, hoists the child up, then lowers her onto the mat. Hannah looks huge, squashed into this small space; she is in fact average for a two-year-old, but Soon-mi sees her always in comparison to James, who was a tiny, frail thing.

  Hannah’s eyes open wide, her face flushed and moist; her head tilts back against the wall, chin up, mouth open. The fluorescent lights buzz.

  Exhaustion washes over Soon-mi like a mantle of lead. Fifteen hours. Direct flight is better, Chong-ho had said, and indeed he was always right about such things—thinking ahead, clear-minded, on their behalf. Hannah sat in Soon-mi’s lap, not sleeping, but cheerful enough. Until the plane began to descend, and the child sobbed for thirty minutes straight, finally crying herself to sleep the moment the plane came to a stop.

  Soon-mi wills away her fatigue—she is not a young woman anymore, but her will is strong as ever—and moves through the task at hand, swiftly, a little rough. Hannah marvels, eyes still wide, at the lights, the reflection in the mirror, the swirly stucco ceiling. The buzzing lulls her. Halfway through, a woman dressed in hanbok and heavily made up—a young woman—enters the bathroom and visibly recoils from the soiled-diaper smell; at which point Soon-mi notices the odor as well. Hannah twists her little shoulders and frowns. The woman stands at the far end of the counter and arranges her already perfect hair.

  Soon-mi finishes the job and does not look up. She is aware that her own hair, wound tightly into a bun at the beginning of the journey, must now be a mess. She puts Hannah down onto sandaled feet, tugs at the skirt of the girl’s wrinkled Winnie-the-Pooh dress; then straightens herself, ignoring the kink in her back, and wipes down the mat, folds it into her tote bag. On the way out, Soon-mi notices a small room off the square entry vestibule, where a tall American woman in a loose flower-print dress leans over a pulldown changing table. Hannah stares and sucks on two fingers. Soon-mi wonders how she missed it on the way in.

  Across the baggage area, two carousels away, father and son stand together in silence, suitcases at their sides. They’d sat together on the flight, and just once during the fifteen hours, Chong-ho looked over at James’s notebook, in which he was sketching an elaborate rocket ship. “It’s for school,” James lied.

  James sees Soon-mi and Hannah first, and walks toward them. Only through thick, black-framed glasses does Chong-ho’s vision come near James’s twenty/twenty. At fourteen, James is taller than his father by a good inch (an inch and a half without the slouch), but lanky. He struggles with the smaller of the two suitcases, using both hands, while Chong-ho, compact and solid, carries the duffel bag and packed-full suitcase with relative ease. Hannah’s feet bump her mother’s every few steps, as Soon-mi beelines toward the boy and the man. Soon-mi has always had sharp eyesight as well.

  Chong-ho leads them out to the taxi line. The humid air hits them like a sodden blanket.

  “Won’t it be very expensive?” Soon-mi asks. From the airport to Chong-ho’s father’s village, in the Hadong countryside, is some fifty miles. The skin of Soon-mi’s cheeks and armpits is suddenly red and bumpy with heat rash, but she resists the urge to scratch and awaits Chong-ho’s answer.

  But Chong-ho does not answer. It is his way of saying, Do not question me. It is his way of rejecting the question and assuring his wife that he knows better: there are stronger imperatives than money.

  Chong-ho and James load the suitcases into the taxi’s trunk while the driver stands by. He is white-haired and stooped, holds a cigarette that’s burned down to the filter. He takes one last toke, then tosses it into the roadway. Chong-ho sits in front, even though, with Hannah on Soon-mi’s lap, there is room in back.

  “Umulkol Village,” Chong-ho says.

  “Eh?” The old man inclines his ear cartoonishly.

  “Just go toward Hadong. I will tell you the way.” The driver puts the car in gear with enthusiasm, nearly peels out into the lane. This fare will cover two, maybe three days’ worth of his normal fares.

  “Of course there is an extra zone charge, for out of town.” Chong-ho does not answer. It is James, staring out the window and seeing everything, sharply and at once, who understands best that this time his father’s silence means, Your cheating lies mean nothing to me, old man.

  Once they are on the highway, the driver attempts to make conversation. “You from Seoul?” Chong-ho shakes his head no. In fact, neither he nor Soon-mi has ever been to Seoul. “You’re visiting at an odd time. It’s quiet in these parts in August and September. It’s the springtime, May and June, when it’s busy, when everyone comes for the tea festival.” Soon-mi’s ears perk up, and a distraught look passes over her face. She always loved the tea-harvest season. “It was a big one this year, one of the biggest harvests they’ve had; because of Saemaul.”

  “My father is ill,” Chong-ho says tersely. “I am the eldest son.”

  The driver nods and grimaces, grinding his teeth on a ginseng candy. There is nothing more to say in response to Chong-ho’s statement. It is a heavy burden, and unavoidable. What every firstborn male must bear. The old man steps heavier on the accelerator, and James’s stomach, always sensitive, lurches.

  Saemaul? Soon-mi wonders. A strange word, it must be something new.

  From Hadong, the journey is south and east, along winding roads. The air cools, even as they move southward, as they ascend into the mountains. Twice, unsure of the turns, Chong-ho asks the driver to pull over so he can step out onto the shoulder—in one case, to the middle of the road�
�and take in the panorama of the valley to get his bearings. The roads they are traveling are new; they have route numbers and yellow painted lines. Chong-ho is not sure if these are the same dirt roads he remembers, now paved over and numbered, or completely new ones that follow alternate paths. They are surrounded by mile after mile of golden rice paddies, as if every paddy from years before had spawned a family. Packs of workers crouch and climb with their harvest buckets on new peach and melon farms; on vast pear orchards, fruit blossoms en masse like so many well-ordered platoons. Gone are the familiar thatched roofs, and, in their place, brightly colored tiles and armies of concrete buildings flash by in clusters.

  “What are they?” Chong-ho asks.

  “It’s incredible,” Soon-mi whispers.

  Hannah’s mouth hangs open at the brilliance of colors—the gold and green of the rice paddies and orchards, the bright blue of the roof tiles.

  “The government,” the driver says, vaguely. “General Park gives them concrete to build meeting houses for local officials and village leaders. Who knows what happens inside, but the more they build, the more they get from the government.”

  “The government owns everything now?”

  “Well, it’s hard to say,” the driver says. “Officially the land belongs to the people. But the people … who do they belong to?” A bitter laugh loosens the old man’s tongue. “My cousins in these parts say the village leaders compete, for everything—first it was concrete, then steel. Then better rice seed and equipment. Sometimes the farmers are forced to donate land for ‘village improvement.’ That just means the government cronies are stuffing their pockets. If you are a friend of the Saemaul leader, then you are doing well; but if you are not … My cousins wanted to grow traditional rice instead of the new high-yielding variety, but the Saemaul leader cracked down and now has it in for my cousin’s family.”