by Sonya Chung
Chong-ho’s brother Nichi is one year and one week younger. They were never close, but still they looked out for each other, out of respect for their father. Chong-ho was always the better student, Nichi the more popular and genial.
“We have both aged,” Nichi says, “but you have become much older than me than you ever were.” The comment is meant as a jest, but Chong-ho knows its truth, evident in his graying head and cracked hands. The two have not seen each other in over twenty years.
“There is the body’s age and there is the soul’s,” Chong-ho says. “I used to think they evolved independently, but now—”
The front door opens, and Soon-mi steps out, with Hannah in her arms. Nichi turns, his face tightening, then going flat. He nods, and she nods back, smoothing down her hair as she drops her eyes to the ground.
“Let’s walk,” Chong-ho says to his brother. James comes out just after they have turned to leave, and he watches the backs of the two men recede into the woods.
They walk down a path they have traversed many times before. The trees have grown tall, and yet the forest still seems smaller to Chong-ho; he wonders that he ever lost his way here.
“I am sorry I was not at home when you arrived. Big Uncle and I had to bring the news to the relatives in Taegu.” Nichi’s formality and statement of the obvious bode ominously.
Nichi has come, Chong-ho assumes, representing the family. Perhaps Big Uncle is trying to keep him from attending the burial. No matter: Chong-ho is resolved. He will not be moved. Not by his brother, not by anyone. “Of course,” Chong-ho says.
“Big Uncle can be harsh, and unforgiving,” Nichi says.
Chong-ho wonders warily at his meaning; for what is his brother softening the ground?
Nichi stops at a clearing and runs his hand over the bark of a great oak, then circles the enormous trunk. “Remember this?”
Chong-ho does remember. One of the boys had gotten hold of his father’s bow and arrow; they made a target—a face—and took turns. Young-shik and Chong-ho would say, “These are the Jap commander’s eyes: aim for dead center.” Nichi came along at first, but then fell in with his own crowd, the sons of other landowners. Chong-ho’s friends had started going by their given Korean names; Nichi and his friends never did, nor did the family.
It is hard to make out, but there it is—the target, the face they’d carved.
“Young-shik was the best marksman,” Chong-ho says. Then, turning away and walking on, “My eyesight was never as good.”
They come to another clearing, near a stream with a swimming cove where families would sometimes pitch tents in good weather. The men and boys would fish, girls and women scrub each other’s skin with stones. Embers from a recent fire flick orange in the pit. The two brothers sit on a fallen log that was years ago hacked into a bench.
“Hyung, you can’t come to the ceremony,” Nichi says matter-of-factly, almost casually. There is something in his voice, an authority that, even now, after all that’s happened, Chong-ho feels is out of line. But there is also a wincing note of regret that is even more unsettling.
“And why is that?” Chong-ho responds in a low, even tone, like an innocent worn down by a long trial. “Is it because Big Uncle is a bitter, petty man?”
Both brothers look straight ahead, into the dappled light that reflects off the water in bright bursts.
“Hyung.” Nichi crosses into a paternal tone that Chong-ho does not like at all. “Father did not forgive you. He would not want you … you cannot come.”
“Again, brother, I ask you: Who is to say? This is between our father and me.” Chong-ho stands, walks a few steps away, then turns back to see Nichi looking down, shaking his head. “What is it? What is it you have come to tell me?”
“Kimiko came back.” Nichi’s eyes are arrows, and Chong-ho the reviled target. The impossible statement, the invocation of that name, stuns Chong-ho. “She came to see Father. A year after you disappeared.”
“But Yoko never mentioned …” Chong-ho’s words erupt before thoughts can form.
“She didn’t know. She does not know. No one does. Not Big Uncle. Not even Ummah.”
Chong-ho sits down again, a few inches farther from Nichi than before. What does it mean? How could it be? He’d put his first wife, the woman his father had forced him to marry, out of his mind. He’d embraced relief—because what else could he do?—when he learned she’d died early on in the war. Neither he nor Soon-mi ever spoke of it.
“And how is it that you know?”
“It just happened that way. She wandered up to the house out of nowhere. Ummah and Yoko were in town, picking up the week’s rations.”
Chong-ho looks sideways at Nichi, who has lit a cigarette and now offers it to Chong-ho. Chong-ho takes it, and Nichi lights another for himself. “Yoko told me she died during those first terrible months.”
“Her whole family died. She was alone. Destitute. Neighbors took pity on her even though they had nothing, because of …” Nichi pauses, takes a long, squint-eyed drag on his cigarette. “Because she was pregnant.”
Chong-ho closes his eyes. He was already braced, because he knew. Not precisely what his brother was about to say, but that whatever it was, it would fell him; like one of these trees in a lightning storm. Somewhere, somehow, hasn’t he always known? Wasn’t Kimiko’s quick and early death just a bit too convenient?
They had married in the late winter of 1950. Chong-ho was twenty-five years old; Chong-ho’s father had learned of his affection for Soon-mi years before and conveyed his disapproval by ignoring it, while at the same time reducing Soon-mi’s father’s melon plot by half. The engagement to Kimiko was a foregone conclusion, and Chong-ho’s protests fell on deaf ears. Even Yoko, who in those days passed along to Soon-mi clothing she’d outgrown and sometimes invited her along to the river to bathe with her and her friends, offered no support. At the engagement party, Chong-ho drank too much and whispered to his future mother-in-law that her daughter had been sold into a doomed marriage.
A married man, Chong-ho still went to Soon-mi, and she soothed him. But Soon-mi had resigned herself; life’s realities did not surprise her. What was unfulfilled love next to poverty, a mean alcoholic grandfather, her beloved sister’s death from tuberculosis? She would love Chong-ho, even when he married; even when she, eventually, was married, to some ugly old tenant farmer with a tiny rice paddy. She had no expectations for happiness. Their secret nights, in the pine grove on the ridge, seemed to her the full blessing of her life.
But Chong-ho was a poet, and a romantic. Soon-mi was his truth, and his beauty. Three months after the wedding, his sham marriage became intolerable. Chong-ho took Kimiko home, to her parents’ village. He held Kimiko’s bags, stood on the doorstep in front of her. When her father came to the door, Chong-ho put down the bags and said, “I am returning your daughter to you. It is better that we part now than continue on like this. She is unhappy, because I am unhappy. If you force her to come home with me, you can be assured that I will not be faithful to her, that I will grow to hate her, that she and I will behave horribly toward each other.” He took Kimiko by the shoulders and pushed her into her father’s arms, then left.
A month later, North Korean soldiers invaded Seoul and began the march southward. City people came pouring into the southern towns and villages. Villagers fled further south to Cheju and Koje-do. Chong-ho’s family would make their way to Sorok-do, to his mother’s people. Soon-mi’s family had nowhere to go. Chong-ho refused to join his family unless Soon-mi and hers came with them.
“It is not the tenant family you should be concerned about,” his father raged, “but your wife’s!” Chong-ho’s father had every intention of forcing Chong-ho back to his marriage, but the soldiers’ approach upended everything. And so, in the chaos, in panic and desperation, Chong-ho parted from his family and found Soon-mi. He convinced her to go with him. At first she was hesitant— leaving her mother was the hardest—but she said yes, she would go, wh
erever he took her. They had nothing; and nothing but war and hardship awaited them. They knew they would never return home—never again be someone’s son, or daughter. They would have no name, no people.
Years upon years they wandered, from town to fishing village to island. They would stay months at a time, find labor for a season, then move on. Once, they stayed in a village on the far side of Jiri Mountain for almost two years, built themselves a thatched hut where they kept warm and fed until the growing population of wolves and coyotes threatened their safety. They had a child now, Jae-yoon, later James; they had lived through much worse, but now, they could not risk it. James had been born seven weeks premature, a sickly baby who would’ve died, but for the village midwife who’d tended to him with herbs. He’d survived; the war was over; they had now to ensure the child’s health. They settled in Sacheon, where Chong-ho was able to find work as a research assistant for a botanist, and Soon-mi enrolled in nurses’ training. After a year, they gave her a certificate and she applied to a proper nursing school.
Chong-ho’s eyes have been closed for just a minute now, but it seems like he and Nichi have been sitting on the log for an eternity.
“You were gone,” Nichi says. “You were dead. Even if you were alive, you were dead to the family. To father’s honor. Kimiko arrived half out of her mind.” She was starving, and had been raped by the soldiers—who knew how many times? The neighbors could not care for her anymore. There was no room, no food, no doctors or medicines; there was cholera in the household, and she had the baby. Who knew how long she’d wandered alone, or how she survived. Who knew how or when the baby was born. But it was. Born alive. “Shortly before she came to father, she’d drowned the baby in the river. She came to father and begged him to help her die. She’d tried, but couldn’t do it. Would he please help her, she pleaded. Did he have a weapon, or poison.” She had such wildness in her eyes, Nichi tells him, that their father was not sure she even knew who he was; she may have just wandered to the first place where someone was home. They’d been among the first to return.
“What did he do? What happened to her?” Chong-ho speaks through his teeth.
“He found a place for her. In a hospital in Gwangju. We took her there. Then someone sent word a few months later that she’d died, from cholera.”
Soon-mi had once described to Chong-ho watching a man die from cholera, at her first clinic placement. A victim of cholera dies of dehydration, the organs shriveling and shutting down one by one.
Chong-ho is still sitting on the log but nothing beneath him or around him is solid. He has a terrifying urge to tear at his brother’s smooth, undisturbed face. Who is he to deliver this news? Who is he to speak for the dead? “How do you know, about the child … if it’s true?”
Nichi exhales a long cloud of smoke through his nostrils. He smiles an ugly smile. “If you had been there—if you had seen her, heard her—you would not wonder that. And you would have seen, you would have known, as true, that your abandonment destroyed her; she suffered a fate worse than death. If there was a child—and I believe there was—it was destroyed by you as well.”
Chong-ho returns to the house alone, breathing hard, a single vein bulging across his forehead. Young-shik is sitting on the porch steps, barefoot and smoking. Chong-ho stomps past his friend and throws open the screen door.
“Ho ho, my friend, sit and relax a while. We’ll eat in ten minutes’ time.”
“Yo-bo!” Chong-ho shouts into the house for Soon-mi. “James, get your things and your sister. We are leaving now.” Everything halts; the chatter and bustle of meal-making turn to stone silence.
Soon-mi puts down whatever she was chopping and comes gingerly to the door. “What is it?”
“We must go. It is time to go.”
There are no more words, except for the mortified apologies Soon-mi offers twenty minutes later, as she and Chong-ho and James and Hannah hurry into the taxi that Young-shik has called at Chong-ho’s irrefutable request. Chong-ho shakes his friend’s hand, nods to Yoo-na with lowered eyes. He cannot explain. He only knows—and his friend vaguely understands this as well—that they will never see each other again.
In the taxi, there is too much time, too much silence. James chews on the skin around his thumbnail. Soon-mi’s knees tremble beneath Hannah, who pinches at the flesh of her mother’s thighs and sucks on a piece of thick, garlicky seaweed. Chong-ho stares dead ahead at the road, jaw clenched, as Soon-mi tries, unsuccessfully, to catch his eye in the mirror. Stop it, he thinks sharply. Stop trying to know. You cannot know this. You’ll wish you didn’t.
But the wall he is erecting is weak; it will crumble. Soon-mi is complicit, he has made her so. They are one in every way, and there is no line in the sand, no caste division, no worlds apart—not even now, when Chong-ho wishes for privacy to mourn, to despise himself. Soon enough, he will tell her everything. The two will live together in this knowledge, in these deaths; and the wordless weight of them will always feel like too much to carry. Like sinking into a bottomless pit of cold clay.
They will forge on and survive; they always have. But henceforth with a persistent, disquieting sense that with one more burden, all will give way. One more blow—to themselves, a loved one—and they will be swallowed whole.
Providence Hospital, Washington, DC
1978
They arrived just past 3 AM—calmly, quietly. Too calm, too quiet. Given the wife’s condition. Her water broken, contractions coming hard, but slow. The doctor took one look and pronounced it would be a while. The woman said, No epidural; no matter what, and the night nurse almost laughed out loud. The doctor kept his poker face. This could be long, he said, and not easy. The husband bent over, a stiff, dark hand on his wife’s back. Don’t decide yet. Leave the option open. The woman clutched her hot water bottle and clenched her teeth. Red-faced, brassy hair flying wild on one side, flattened and moist on the other; sweat beading at her temples.
No. If you let them, I’ll never forgive you.
The pretty little girl, long-haired and chocolate-skinned, sat in a chair swinging her legs while the other nurse asked how old she was. Three fingers, and a grin. Dark-purple gums, and dimples.
The nurse watched the little girl, then looked over at the woman and the man. She remembered: three years before, this couple—white woman, black man. The delivery had gone fine, the man went to get food. But when she brought the baby to the woman, the woman became hysterical: No, where’s my baby, my baby boy, where is he, that’s not my baby. Slurring words, making no sense. The nurse had taken the pink bundle away, come back and put a cold towel on the woman’s head. She’d quieted down but kept saying, my baby boy. Wild eyed, she whispered: He came to me, in dreams. He told me he was a boy, and he was coming, he’s been waiting all these years, to come back to me. He said it’s all right, he’s all right, he’s coming back. My baby boy. The nurse remembered these haunting, baffling words. She’d dabbed the woman’s forehead, soothed and shushed her; some women reacted strongly to the drugs, just needed to sleep it off.
She remembered the craziness in the woman’s eyes. She remembered thinking, Thank goodness more doctors are encouraging parents to learn the sex of the baby beforehand.
This time the labor is long, and not easy. The woman does not take the epidural, and she tears badly. Five stitches.
In the waiting area, the nurse tells the husband she remembers them, when the little girl was born. He nods, but she can tell he doesn’t remember; or doesn’t want to. His face had been unreadable, back then, when she’d told him, about his wife carrying on like that. She remembers trying to read his face, but it was like she’d spoken in a language he couldn’t comprehend.
Now, tonight, when the nurse brings the child—the boy, Bennett—the woman takes him in her arms, looks into his face, weeps, laughs. You’re here, she says. You’re finally here. The woman and the baby fall asleep, soundly; on her face, a faint smile. A long-awaited rest.
LATE SUMMER-WINTE
R 1984
1.
There would be no open casket. Charles’s sister, Rhea, raised the question on behalf of the family, but Charles knew she would not insist. They all moved through the arrangements in controlled motions, like factory workers on the line. No rebellions, no complaints. There would be no open casket because there would be no demonstrations, no feeling at all. Alice had made clear, in not so many words, that she wanted none of it.
It was just Rhea and her husband, Marcus, from Charles’s side; on Alice’s, her father and brother, Nicholas Sr. and Jr. (You’d best not bring Cheryl, Nick, Charles had advised his father-in-law, in a voice that warned him of a scene between Alice and her stepmother best avoided.) Dennis Rhodes came alone (his wife had recently left him), and when Veda asked if Amy could come, Alice gave a weak smile and said, Sure, sweetie. Then Karen Mitchell called, a bit concerned, and they agreed that Karen would accompany her.
It was Sunday. Five days had passed since the drowning, though no one could have said so. Time no longer meant what it used to, and any reality seemed possible.
Alice had traveled back from Rehoboth General Hospital in the medical van with her son’s body. Charles had packed everything up and loaded the car, while Veda and Hannah sat in back. Hannah sat behind the driver’s seat and hugged her duffel bag in her lap; Veda sat in the middle. The two girls did not speak, or touch, but there was between them a palpable need to be proximal, together, in some way.
Charles could smell the salt on their skin and in their damp hair. They were still wearing their suits, wrapped in sun-striped towels at the waist. He kept to the speed limit the whole way, and as they drove, Charles wondered if they were cold, did they need to put on sweatshirts. But then he realized that he was drenched at the armpits, his neck sticky. It was in the nineties, sunny and humid; it was a day identical to the day they’d arrived.
