This Burns My Heart

by Samuel Park

  They’d been marching from his mother’s shack toward Daegu city hall, starting with a group of about a hundred people, led by Yul in front, and Soo-Ja and Chu-Sook’s mother next to him. Yul had been expected in Seoul hours earlier, but he’d stayed behind to lead this extemporaneous protest. Night fell somewhere along the way, and the chants grew less angry and more mournful, turning the walk into a funeral procession.

  Word spread quickly of the discovery of the body, and the crowd seemed to grow with each block; first the students from the nearby high schools and universities, then everybody else, until almost all the denizens of the town seemed to have left their homes and joined the demonstration. Along the way, Soo-Ja had to help Chu-Sook’s mother remain steady a few times. Her spirit appeared to leave her body, becoming a mere bag of tissue and bones, unable to walk or remain upright. Soo-Ja had to hold her with her arms around her back, until her strength returned. The other protestors glanced occasionally at them. Word had spread about Chu-Sook’s mother, but no one knew who Soo-Ja was, which made her glad; she did not want the presence of a woman of her social class to serve as a distraction.

  Once in a while, Soo-Ja would glance over at Yul and wonder how his lungs never got tired. He chanted with enormous conviction, and part of Soo-Ja felt self-conscious, watching him. It reminded her of being in church, in the middle of a group prayer, and opening her eyes before the others did. It seemed terribly intimate, to see the parishioners like that, with their lips still moving. Here was Yul, too, unaware of Soo-Ja’s gaze lingering over him.

  Soo-Ja wondered if he sensed the same thing she did—that in spite of their momentary closeness, they would probably never see each other again after that night. There were boys being killed, and generals authorizing massacres, but all she wanted was to grab Yul’s hand and have him turn around and look at her. Would the night, with all that still had to happen, stop for her?

  By the time they reached city hall, there were more than a thousand people behind them. Up on the steps of the building, rows of policemen wearing helmets and body armor stood with their rifles pointed at the protestors. Behind them, soldiers stood guard with their own guns. With their outlines traced faintly by the light of the lampposts behind them, they looked like perfectly still marble statues—an impenetrable line surrounding the entire perimeter of the building.

  “Join us,” said Yul, speaking to them as if they were all brothers. “Be on our side. We have room for you. This is a cause worth dying for, but it’s not worth killing for. Drop your guns. This march is for everyone, including you.”

  The police officers pointed their guns at Yul, who started walking up the steps toward them.

  He smiled, shaking his head, as if bewildered that they were at this standstill, when they could be playing hato cards together in a bar. Soo-Ja’s heart began to beat faster. She wanted him to turn around and come back. But instead she saw him emerge farther and farther into the light, his body drawn like a magnet to the steel and metal of the rifles.

  “You are our friends. You want the same things we do. You want freedom and democracy. This boy—he could’ve been your brother. Your son.”

  Most of the officers looked impervious to his words, though one or two of them—the youngest-looking ones, the ones in closest proximity to Yul—seemed to waver, and Soo-Ja could see how hard they were trying not to look at Yul, not let him inside their bodies. His words had already shaken some of their conviction.

  But then, a sudden yell came from the crowd. Soo-Ja could not make out the words, until others joined in the chant, and it became clear they were screaming, “Killers! Killers, all of them!” Yul turned and tried to stop the shouting, but the crowd had suddenly taken on a life of its own. In a matter of seconds, the men and women grew bold and powerful, like the ravenous foxes of folk tales, unaware that they were ravenous for the entrails of their own brothers and sisters. Soo-Ja had never seen such force descend upon a crowd before, and she began to fear it.

  “You killed an innocent boy! You spilled the blood of our children!” they shouted.

  Yul started shaking his head at them, waving his arms in front of him for them to stop.

  The officers pointed their guns in the direction of the voices, and Soo-Ja saw what sounded like an order coming from the lips of one of the officers. Amid the chaos, she could not tell whose mouths the yelling was coming from, and she knew the officers could not, either. In a matter of seconds, Soo-Ja watched as the officers pointed into the night and looked about to pull their triggers. Yul signaled to her a fraction of a second before the officers started firing, and Soo-Ja fell to the ground at the same time he did, pulling Chu-Sook’s mother down with her. The three of them hit the ground as the rain of bullets flew around them.

  Soo-Ja looked up in shock to see the bodies of the other protestors being shot. Seconds before, they had been alive, standing next to her, chanting in unison.

  The police were firing indiscriminately at them, and they crumpled down, lifeless, arms and hands waving in the air one last time before coming to rest. Men, women, students—some of them with their backs turned away, trying to run—paralyzed by bullets, pools of blood gushing from their mouths. Soo-Ja remained on the ground, almost being trampled, as people around her tried to flee.

  The sound of loud screaming pierced the air, and Soo-Ja tried to keep her head covered with her arms. Next to her, Chu-Sook’s mother wailed in horror, letting out all the sorrow that had been trapped in her lungs before.

  Soo-Ja then saw that the men who had been holding Chu-Sook’s body began to fall, too, like the legs of a table being knocked off one by one. For a moment, Chu-Sook’s frame seemed to hang in the air, on its own, and Soo-Ja imagined that it would fly to heaven. The moment suddenly felt very quiet and still—the body rising a few inches, as the last of its pallbearers pushed it upward toward the sky—but then its weight broke through the air again, and Soo-Ja watched as the boy’s body fell to the ground, making a thunderous noise. Chu-Sook would not make his way to his savior that night; he chose to stay with the others, becoming one more in a sea of bodies.

  chapter three

  “Now, more than ever, I long for my life to have more heft,” wrote Soo-Ja to Min. It was the first letter she’d ever sent him. “And yes, that’s the word I mean—heft. I have tasted what it means to have days packed with urgency and meaning, and I cannot go back to living an unimportant life. I find my routines so dull and tranquil. I know I have everything a young woman of my class could ask for—attentive servants, hand-stitched clothes, a temple-like home—but it all feels like a gilded cage. I can see what will happen if I stay in Daegu. I’ll never have to answer the call of my own highest potential. I must become a diplomat.”

  Lying restless on the ground, Soo-Ja thought about Min, and how much she’d misjudged him. Why had she been so quick to dismiss him? He had risked his life at the protests, just like she had. They had experienced the same—only miles apart. Had he thought of her as he evaded bullets, or as he knocked about against the body armor of the police? All he’d asked for was a date. If she’d simply said yes, he could have been out of harm’s way.

  Come back, Soo-Ja found herself whispering. If he did, they could go on that date he had so desperately wanted. They could take a walk along the river at night and name different constellations. If it got cold, he’d lend her his argyle sweater. Or maybe he’d ask Soo-Ja for hers. But what she realized was that she wouldn’t mind that, if she had to be the strong one. She’d like to swoop in and care for Min, who sometimes had the air of an orphan. How had he managed to survive all his life without her to protect him? He was the opposite of Yul, who seemed to need nothing and no one. Not even a wife, thought Soo-Ja poignantly.

  Min had been lucky. He’d marched in the large protest outside the National Assembly, the one where, according to the radio, more than a hundred people had been killed, and a thousand injured. But he had not been wounded. He’d told her so when he wrote her back. He also mentio
ned he’d be coming home to Daegu very soon. “My work here is done,” he wrote in a grandiose way. “Syngman Rhee has been deposed. Our country’s struggle for freedom, which began when we freed ourselves from the Japanese colonizers, then continued with the war against the communists, has finally come to an end with the end of the dictatorship. I was talking about this to the people in the crowd, as we watched the slow procession of the President’s motorcade through the streets of Seoul. And you know what the amazing thing was? Some people were crying. I don’t know if it’s because they were thinking of the terrible things he’d done, or because they felt sorry for him and his wife. But what matters is that he’s gone now, and this is a beautiful day for democracy.”

  Min had left as an idler, but he would return as a hero.

  Soo-Ja sat on the front steps of her house, watching the servants do the week’s laundry in the courtyard. One of them worked the lever of the water pump, her heavy arms pushing up and down, until a clean stream spurted out. Another sat on top of a stone, scrubbing wet, soapy clothes on top of a washboard. Finally, a third one rinsed the clothes in the pump and shook them before hanging them up to dry with clothespins. Soo-Ja stared at their plump bodies, hidden away underneath their old hanboks. Soo-Ja felt self-conscious about the weight she’d recently lost, shed from her already thin frame.

  Soo-Ja enjoyed the rhythms of their talk, the way they spoke like folks from the countryside, dispensing with the more formal-io at the end of the sentences. Sometimes their words overlapped, like a chorus, and Soo-Ja envied the easy, casual way they’d tease or scold one another. If she lost the ability to speak, and needed to learn again, she could simply listen to them. They often spent hours telling stories. The house chores—cooking, cleaning, washing—seemed to be incidental. In Soo-Ja’s mind, their real job was to gossip, giving their opinions about the others’ lives. Soo-Ja wondered if they talked about her behind her back, and she realized that they must, of course.

  Soo-Ja closed her eyes. She often became sleepy when melancholia hit her. She could feel her head grow heavy when she suddenly heard the servants’ talking stop. She opened her eyes and glanced at them—their eyes were directed at an intruder. A man had arrived at the house unannounced, slipping past the gate, and making his way into the courtyard. He looked tired and beaten down, wearing an army camouflage jacket cut off at the forearms, and pants rolled up to his knees. He held a satchel behind his back, and for a moment Soo-Ja thought it was one of her brothers, returning home from some war she hadn’t been told about.

  It took a few seconds to realize it was Min, and when she did, Soo-Ja leapt out of her seat and ran to him. He’d been to her house before, but she hadn’t been ready then. This time, with no concern for modesty or propriety, Soo-Ja jumped into his arms, and the two of them held each other, burying their noses in each other’s shoulders. Their bodies made shapes together—her chin on his sternum, her temple against his cheek—until theirs were interlocking parts. He had not been lost; he’d been returned to her.

  “Is your father here?” asked Min, once they finally let go of each other.

  “Yes. Why?” asked Soo-Ja, glancing into his eyes.

  Min looked shyly at her. “There’s something I want to ask him.”

  “What is it?” asked Soo-Ja, staring at his cherry-sized nose, and his downcast gaze.

  “I want to ask him for your hand in marriage.”

  “You want to marry Soo-Ja?” asked her father, looking startled.

  “Yes, I do,” said Min, with his satchel by his side, sitting across from him on the floor.

  “Isn’t this a little sudden?” asked Soo-Ja’s father, trying to maintain his self-control.

  “The protests—the violence in Seoul—made me realize how fragile our lives are. It could all be over in a second,” said Min.

  Soo-Ja moved closer to Min and instinctively held his arm. He’d come up with the idea himself, independently of her, and she wondered if he suspected her wish of going to Seoul to join the Foreign Service. She’d always spoken vaguely about her dreams, and never discussed her specific plans with Min, for fear he’d feel used. But perhaps he knew. Perhaps he’d read her mind, when the thought first crossed her head, that day at the gymnasium bleachers. Perhaps her thoughts were obvious to others, and it was only out of politeness that they did not remark upon them, when they could read them as clearly as print on paper.

  “But marriage… it’s not something you bring up lightly,” said Soo-Ja’s father, suddenly at a loss for words. “No, there has to be a go-between, a matchmaker, someone to make formal introductions, to tell me about your family, and to tell your family about ours. Followed by me and Soo-Ja’s mother meeting your parents, and getting out our ancestral rolls to check which lineages you each come from. A marriage isn’t a union between two young people, as you seem to think. A marriage is a union between two families.”

  Soo-Ja and Min kept their heads bent down, facing the floor.

  “Abeoji, Min comes from a very good family,” said Soo-Ja.

  “My father manufactures textiles,” said Min. “Silk, cotton, rayon. He is an industrialist, like yourself.”

  Soo-Ja noticed that this did not seem to impress her father. In fact, it seemed to make him more concerned.

  “If your father owns a factory, then why aren’t you working for him?” he asked, furrowing his brow.

  “My father didn’t want me to. My brother works for him.”

  “Your older brother?”

  “No, I’m the oldest.”

  “You’re the oldest?” Soo-Ja’s father seemed startled by this. “If you’re the oldest, then everything belongs to you—including the responsibility. Why would your father not trust you with the business?”

  “Well, he didn’t want me hanging around the factory,” said Min, his voice taking on a self-satisfied drawl. “The girls who work there kept flirting with me. These working-class girls see the owner’s son, start getting ideas. You have to be careful with women. I don’t have to worry about Soo-Ja, though, she and I are of the same class.”

  “How lucky for you,” said her father gruffly. “Now let me ask you, when these factory girls were—say, coming on to you—was there any girl in particular? Anyone particularly aggressive?”

  Min hesitated, his nostrils flaring a bit. “They’re obedient girls. But they’re trouble.”

  “Your brother doesn’t seem to have a problem ignoring them,” said Soo-Ja’s father, staring into Min’s eyes. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Abeoji, please stop grilling him,” Soo-Ja interjected. “Min is a guest in our home. Do you want him to leave and tell everyone about how you treat people?”

  Soo-Ja’s father suddenly banged on the floor with his hand. “Yes, spread the word. Tell everyone.”

  “Abeoji, please,” she said. “Give Min another chance to—”

  “You should go now,” her father cut in, looking at Min.

  Min remained on his spot, his head lowered to the elder.

  “I said you can go now,” Soo-Ja’s father repeated.

  Soo-Ja did not look up as Min stood up and, after bowing to her father, started making his way out of the room. He rushed out, as if the departure had been his idea, as if he’d been the one who’d decided they weren’t good enough for him.

  After Min was gone, Soo-Ja ran outside to the courtyard. It had started to rain, and Soo-Ja could feel the drops prickling against her, and the puddles on the ground making her steps slippery. Unsteady, she rested her hand against a pine tree, its battered branches almost breaking. She was on her way to her room, on the other side of the courtyard, when her father—who had followed her—tried to get her back into the main house. They remained between rooms, at an impasse.

  “What makes him think that he can marry you? Was he first in his class? Is he a doctor or an engineer? He didn’t even finish college!” yelled her father. His eyelids struggled to stay open, and his clothes quickly became wet.

&nb
sp; “I don’t care about that,” Soo-Ja said, trying hard not to shiver. Her long, wet hair covered her entire face, with clumps sticking to her mouth, and strands creating lines over her eyes.

  “Don’t care about that? A boy like him—with no education or professional skills—he would be laughed out of a matchmaker’s meeting!”

  “But he comes from a good family! They own a factory,” said Soo-Ja, her breath catching in her throat.

  “For a firstborn to be sent away from the family business, he must have done something very bad,” said her father.

  Soo-Ja looked over to her mother’s room and saw the lights come on. “We woke up Mother.”

  “He is unacceptable in every way. And he is the oldest son. Do you know what it means to be the wife of the oldest son?” asked her father, coming closer to her. “You would have to be responsible for the entire family. Do you know how much work that is, having to serve your in-laws? Does he have brothers or sisters?”

  “He has one brother and a sister.”

  “Well, at least he doesn’t have a lot of siblings, but the ones that he has you’d be expected to help raise, and this in addition to your own children. Soo-Ja, being married to an oldest son is a lot of work.”

  “Appa, I know you only want the best for me, but there is nothing to worry about. I have always made good decisions, haven’t I?”

  Soo-Ja’s father stood still for a moment, his clothes growing heavier, soaked by the rain. “It is a losing proposition to always be right when it comes to little things, but then be wrong on the big things.”