A Thousand Beginnings and Endings

by Ellen Oh

  Tam is with them now, laughing and smiling, stumbling as she picks up seedlings, like she always did, under Father and Grandmother’s fond eyes. She’s gone home.

  She must have.

  Please, Mother. Please let her be well.

  In the bedroom—her new one, impossibly large, impossibly luxurious—someone has laid out a five-panel tunic of rich brocade, with the hen insignia of the second rank picked out in threads so thin it seems like a painting. Cam lets the attendants dress her, as if in a dream: one layer of dresses after another, in rich shades of red, and then a thin, long sleeveless over-tunic, so dark it’s almost black. She stares at herself in the mirror, and a stranger gazes back at her, her hands drowned in large gold-embroidered sleeves, her face whitened with ceruse, her long hair piled up in an elaborate topknot with golden pins in the shape of turtles. Her lips are painted the color of imperial ink, a slash of blood red like a wound.

  She’d thought she’d feel victorious, but there is nothing but emptiness in her chest, as if her heart had been removed.

  Cam stares at herself in the mirror, forces herself to smile, and watches her reflection move, vermillion lips parting on the black-enamelled teeth of officials.

  Time.

  The door opens, with that same soft exhaling sound like a last breath. Cam steels herself for more attendants and more guards, for the long journey into the Inner Vermillion Chambers and everything she’s ever dreamed of.

  Tam stands on the threshold.

  Time slows down, becomes trapped in honey. Cam breathes in, slowly. “Big’sis?”

  Tam smiles. She’s wearing the rough tunic of a peasant, and her hair hangs loose on her shoulders, but she hasn’t changed. Her face is the same—moon-shaped and dimpled around a fierce smile—and she holds herself as though going into battle. Behind her are Supervisor Bach Kim, and guards. The supervisor’s face is closed, angry. “See?” she says to Tam. “Your younger sister is moving on to better things. She has no need of you.”

  “You . . .” Cam takes in a deep, shaking breath; has to stop, because it hurts so much, with the clothes encasing her. “You were outside.”

  “She turned herself in,” Supervisor Bach Kim says, sounding angry.

  Tam shakes her head. “I went home, Lil’sis. I—” Her face twists, for a moment; loses its familiar smile and becomes hollow and taut. “I tried. With Grandmother and Father and the aunts, and I—” Her hands clench. “They— Every time they would reach for chopsticks close to the points, every time they would say a word wrong . . .” She’s shaking now. “I sat with Cousin Lan and we didn’t have anything to talk about anymore. Her world was the village and the rice harvest and who she was going to marry, and there’s so much more out there that she couldn’t see!”

  “They’re our family,” Cam says, but Tam shakes her head.

  “The way they looked at me—they tried, but it was awe and fear—like they worshipped me. I just couldn’t bear it anymore.”

  “Of course you’re no longer peasants,” Supervisor Bach Kim says. “As if you could ever stifle what you have become.”

  Tam walks into the room, past Cam, toward the tiled pool and the steaming water. Her gaze rakes the bed from end to end: Cam’s discarded clothes, the rich, alien scents saturating the room, changing Cam from peasant’s daughter to imperial official. “We can’t go home, Lil’sis. We’ve changed too much.”

  Cam opens her mouth to say no, that of course they can, that she will—and then she remembers the stranger staring at her in the mirror, the official the least of whose acts is now imbued with the authority of the throne.

  Instead, she says, “You didn’t have to come back. Why—” Why couldn’t you stay away? Why couldn’t you be careful, for once in your life? Why—

  Tam’s gaze holds her. She raises her hands—dark and thin and elegant, their veins shining blue beneath the translucency of her skin. “Don’t you know?”

  And her eyes are the bird’s, quick and bright and fierce; her arms moving in a slow dance, like wings.

  Behind her, Supervisor Bach Kim says, “Come, child. Your sister has to see the Emperor, and you have to be assigned a suitable punishment.”

  Tam says, quietly, “We can’t go home, but that doesn’t mean we have to be caged. Remember how everything looked different, up there?”

  “Like jewels,” Cam says, the words rising from the morass of memory.

  Tam smiles, and it’s radiant and infectious. “So many precious places to discover. Come on, Lil’sis. Let’s go see them together.”

  Mist rises, from the water in the bath, thickening with every pass of Tam’s arms—and Cam can hear, growing louder and louder, the sound of an abacus, resonating under the roof until the entire palace seems to shake with it—until it seems to take root in her chest, as sturdy as the branches of a tree. Under her fingers, the rounded shape of abacus beads, a vast array of shapes to be weighed and discarded; in her mouth, the taste of decandrous persimmon, thick and sweet and earthy, a reminder of what things taste like, outside, strong and desperate and alive.

  “We can’t possibly leave . . . ,” Cam starts slowly, desperately. She wants to talk about dreams, about magic—about how the power of shape-shifting can’t possibly sustain either of them, in the long term, but all the words seemed to have melted in her throat.

  Tam watches her from within the mist. Nothing left of the room now, of the clothes on the bed, of the guards or of Supervisor Bach Kim. “Can’t we?” She holds out a hand, her eyes dark and shadowed.

  Be reasonable, Cam wants to say—and then she realizes that Tam is right—that being reasonable will not undo the bars of her cage, or give her anything but hollow victories. She shakes her head. Her hair streams, long and black and uncouth, the color of churned mud. She slides a final invisible bead down, as if finishing the day’s tallies, and reaches out to Tam through the mist.

  Cam clutches her sister’s hand and lets the mist gather them both, dust and sand dancing on the wind—out and out and away, toward the wealth of the world outside.

  Tâ´M Cám

  A Vietnamese Folktale

  “Tâ´m Cám” is one of the most iconic tales in Vietnamese folklore. A story of the escalating rivalry of two sisters, it’s been referenced, retold, and readapted countless times in Vietnam in various mediums, from book to movie.

  Tâ´m, a beautiful and kind young woman, is treated as a servant by her stepmother and stepsister after her father’s death. With the assistance of a magic fish, she comes to the attention of the king and marries him. After her marriage, her envious stepsister, Cám, repeatedly kills her, and Tâ´m repeatedly reincarnates in various forms until she escapes the palace. The king, mourning for her, finally finds her and takes her back home. Tâ´m gets her revenge on her stepsister by suggesting that she take a scalding bath in order to whiten her skin. Cám dies, boiled alive.

  I’ve always been struck by the relationship between the sisters, and how it’s always driven by Cám’s jealousy of her sister’s beauty: there are all sorts of rather nasty undercurrents there, and I wanted to tell a new version that would have sisters who stuck together in spite of all odds. And I kept the bath, too, except in a radically different context!

  —Aliette de Bodard

  The Land of the Morning Calm

  E. C. Myers

  It’s been five years since my mother died, but I still use the back door when I come home from school. She had always been there to greet me, writing on her laptop at the kitchen table with her knees pulled up to her chest.

  I unlock the door and pause to press two fingers to the pearl choker at my throat, reminding myself she isn’t waiting for me anymore. But today someone is: Harabeoji and Dad sit at the table, drinking soju together. They turn to look at me when I walk in.

  “Hey, guys. What’s up?” I ask.

  Seeing them both there surprises me for a couple of reasons. My grandfather, a South Korean immigrant, is traditional enough that he thinks preparing m
eals and washing dishes are a woman’s work—that is, mine. Dad knows better, but he’s also way busy and his cooking sucks. So the kitchen’s pretty much my exclusive domain. I bet Mom used it as her office because it was the one place the menfolk wouldn’t disturb her.

  Harabeoji and Dad also have barely spoken to each other since Dad started dating Lisa a month ago. I mean, of course it’s awkward to bring your new girlfriend home when your dead wife’s father still lives with you, but Harabeoji just has to deal with it. We’re the only family he has left, and we need to stick together. Plus, it’s been five years, and Dad deserves to be happy. At least one of us should be happy.

  I count the little green liquor bottles lined up between them. Seven empties. Then I check how Dad’s doing. He had used alcohol to deal with Mom’s death, but he’s finally gotten to a good place. Lisa is helping with that, too.

  “Where were you?” Harabeoji demands.

  “School?” I toss my backpack onto the floor and lean my elbows on a chair to face them. Cigarette smoke hangs thick in the air. The ashtray next to Harabeoji’s glass overflows with ashes and butts. I wrinkle my nose.

  “You got my text?” he asks.

  “Yes. You only need to send it once, you know.”

  My phone shows four texts from my grandfather, all identical: hannah’s angry!!! come home

  Sometimes I wish I’d never shown him how to text.

  “What do you think Mom did this time?” I ask.

  “She hid my cigarettes,” Harabeoji says.

  “Right. It can’t be that you forgot where you left them. Again.” I wave my hand in the air. “Too bad you found them. You blame every weird thing in this house on gwisin.” Like when he found his comb somewhere he didn’t expect, or tiny pebbles ended up in his slippers, or his tea went cold while he was drinking it. Gwisin, gwisin, gwisin.

  Harabeoji says my mother is a gwisin. That’s the Korean word for “ghost.” Of course that’s ridiculous—I’m right there with you—but it’s not always so easy to discount, because he knew she had died as soon as it happened, even though she was three thousand miles away. He claims she visited him in a dream.

  It was my eleventh birthday, which I’d been looking forward to for ages. I woke up to find a letter from “Horgwats” on my pillow—Mom obviously hadn’t committed a typo like that—along with a white owl feather, a small buttercream flower cake, and a pouch of jelly beans, which I immediately discovered were only nasty flavors like vomit and earwax. That was Dad’s doing, of course.

  Before you think, “Aw, best family ever,” you should know that my parents were both in San Diego for the weekend without me. Dad was running focus groups for a new game his company was making, and Mom was at a science-fiction convention. She called it a business trip—she was writing a fantasy novel and needed to “network” to get an agent—but I knew she was really going for fun. She had made a new costume: a kumiho from The Land of the Morning Calm, an online video game commonly called LMC.

  Mom had debuted her costume for us in the family room just a few days before the con. I was amazed at how her body language subtly transformed as she slipped on the brown velvet mask with large slanted eyes, pointed ears, and whiskers. She shook her butt, and the nine orange feathers attached to the back of her red shorts swished behind her, making her look more like a scantily clad peacock than a nine-tailed fox to me.

  “Sunny, your mom’s a fox!” Dad said.

  I groaned, but that was far from the worst pun he’d ever made. No, that one would be my name, Sun Moon. I still can’t believe Mom went along with that.

  “You look just like Eun-Ha!” I told her. She had modeled her costume after her LMC character, a warrior-mage fox spirit. The purple pearl on the leather choker was a perfect match for her in-game “kumiho bead”—a relic that contained the magical fox’s knowledge and soul.

  “Thanks, flower cake,” she said. “You could still come with us. It would be easy to whip together a costume for Isang.” Isang was my character, a thief-scholar who could transform into a bear cub.

  “Maybe next time,” I said. Unlike Mom, I couldn’t get away with skipping out on responsibilities to go play pretend with my friends. I had to write a book report on A Bridge to Terabithia by Monday, and I still had to read the book.

  “If I don’t get stuck at work, Bitgaram also will make an appearance at the con. Rowrrr!” Dad swiped at Mom’s tails with a clawed hand.

  “Easy, tiger!” Mom looked around. “Now where’s my brush gotten to?”

  Dad and I pointed to the computer desk, where she’d left her hairbrush beside the keyboard again.

  I miss moments like that.

  Anyway, so finding the letter, and even the gross jelly beans, was a nice surprise—almost magical, if I hadn’t known that Harabeoji had snuck them into my room during the night. I’d gone to thank him, and found him sobbing and rocking back and forth in bed.

  “Harabeoji? What’s wrong?”

  He waved me over and then grabbed me in a tight hug. He smelled like cigarettes and Tiger Balm. “She’s gone. Hannah . . . Your mother is gone.”

  I pulled away from him. “What?”

  “I dreamed about her. She was standing right there.” He stabbed an index finger toward the foot of his bed. “She didn’t visit you, too?”

  “Oh! You had me worried for a second.” It was just a dream. Mom was fine. Harabeoji was obsessed with the prophetic meanings behind his dreams. He sometimes bought a bunch of lottery tickets when he had a good “money” dream, but he hasn’t won yet.

  “You just had a bad dream,” I said.

  “No. It was Hannah’s gwisin.”

  He’d been telling stories about gwisin since I was little, great stuff for bedtime tales if you want to make a kid wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Gwisin were usually transparent and legless, the spirits of dead people out for revenge or with some unfinished business. Sometimes that unfinished business meant an unmarried woman who is, well—Harabeoji called it “looking for love.” Some of them hid underwater and tried to drown you, or haunted forests and killed hapless hikers. But most of them were supposed to be harmless, unless you ignored their attempts to get your attention.

  “First of all, ghosts don’t exist. Second of all, Mom can’t be a ghost because she isn’t dead,” I said.

  “It was her!” He slapped his knee.

  “Fine!” I threw up my hands. “What did this ghost look like?”

  “She had a fox face and nine tails fanning behind a white hanbok.”

  I covered my mouth. Harabeoji couldn’t have known about her fox mask and tails. He hadn’t seen Mom’s costume before she left, and she never would have mentioned it since he didn’t approve of her “playing dress-up like a child.” The white dress didn’t match the halter top and shorts from her costume, but Korean ghosts typically wore traditional clothing.

  This was starting to freak me out.

  “If she was wearing a mask, how did you know it was her?” I asked.

  “Not a mask. It was her, but she looked like a kumiho. I felt it. I know my own daughter.” He laughed gruffly. “She looked ridiculous, like a cartoon. She always was a foolish girl.”

  “Look, I’ll call her right now,” I said. I went back to my room and got my phone, and for some reason I picked up the owl feather from my bedspread and brought it, too. I dialed as I returned to his room. The line rang and rang and rang before it went to voicemail. That was the last time I heard her voice, and it was telling a lie: Hi, this is Hannah Kim Moon. Sorry you’ve missed me, but I’ll call you right back.

  “Hey, Mom. Just calling to see how you’re doing.” I twirled the feather around in my fingers. “Call me when you get this?”

  Harabeoji was looking at me with pity, like he knew he was right, and he couldn’t even hope that he’d dreamed up her ghost.

  An hour later, Dad called. One of Harabeoji’s dreams had finally come true.

  Dad doesn’t believe in ghosts any
more than I do, but he’s been strangely silent since I walked into the kitchen.

  I want to believe the world is bigger and more mysterious than it seems. It would be great to have Mom around, in any form. But when she died, I learned that wanting something with all your heart doesn’t make it any more real.

  “Dad, you’re not buying this, right?” I say.

  “Well . . .” Dad drains the last bit of soju in his glass and then stands up. “Come take a look at this and tell me what you think.”

  He leads me to the desktop PC in the den, Harabeoji trailing behind us a little unsteadily. This used to be the family computer, but only Harabeoji uses it now. Dad and I use our laptops on the couch or in our rooms, together but not together.

  It’s a goofy horror-movie cliché, but I freeze when I see what’s on the monitor: the splash screen for The Land of the Morning Calm.

  “Wow, we haven’t played this since . . .” I swallow. “In a long time.” Five years, to be exact.

  While Mom was marathoning LMC at her convention, she suffered a sudden brain aneurysm and collapsed right at her keyboard. She never woke up. So you see why Dad and I hadn’t particularly felt like returning to the lands of the ancient, magical Korea of the game since then.

  “This is where we found Harabeoji’s cigarettes.” Dad points behind the monitor.

  “Not surprising to find his cigarettes at his computer.”

  “I didn’t leave them here!” Harabeoji says. “And I didn’t turn that damn game on either.”

  Dad clears his throat. “What makes it even weirder is that today Chasa announced that they’re shutting down LMC next week.”

  “Oh, Dad.” I give him a fierce hug that takes him—and me—by surprise.

  Chasa Entertainment has been running LMC since 1998 in one form or another. The massive multiplayer online role-playing game had been a big part of our lives. My parents met in the game. A year later they had an in-game wedding reception for their characters Eun-Ha and Bitgaram in Andong District. (They also had a real-life wedding, but they only ever talked about the virtual one.) I celebrated my eighth birthday party in LMC, when they finally let me start playing, under Mom’s supervision.