by Min Jin Lee
“I can’t explain you to my family,” Sunja said. She felt like she was lying all the time. What was he thinking? she wondered. Surely, he could not desire her anymore. She was a twenty-nine-year-old widow with two young children to feed and educate. Sunja was not old, but she could not imagine that any man would want her now. If she had never been beautiful before, she was not even appealing now. She was a plain woman with a country face, her skin spotted and wrinkled by the sun. Her body was strong and stout, larger than when she had been a girl. In her life, she’d been desired by two men; it was difficult to imagine having that again. Sometimes, she felt like a serviceable farm animal who’d one day be useless. Before that day arrived, it was important to make sure her boys would be okay when she was gone.
“You have children, don’t you?”
“Three daughters.”
“And what would your daughters say about me? About us?” she whispered.
“My family has nothing to do with you.”
“I understand.” Sunja swallowed, her mouth dry. “I’m grateful for this opportunity—to work and to be safe. But when the war ends, I’ll get another job and support the boys and my mother. I’ll work until I cannot work anymore.”
Sunja got up from the floor and brushed the hay off her work pants.
Unable to breathe normally, she turned from him and stared at the oxen—their enormous dark eyes, full of eternal suffering. Had the others noticed them talking? They seemed to be focused on the comic book. Sunja covered her left hand with her right; despite her washing, her cuticles were still brown from the dirt.
8
Again, Hansu was not wrong. The war did end, faster than he had predicted, but even he could not have imagined the final bombs. A bunker had shielded Yoseb from the worst, but when he finally climbed out to the street, a burning wall from a nearby wooden shed struck his right side, engulfing him in orange-and-blue flames. Someone he knew from the factory floor put out the fire, and Hansu’s men found him at a pathetic hospital in Nagasaki at last.
It was a starry evening, breathlessly quiet after an extended season of cicadas, when Hansu brought Yoseb to Tamaguchi’s farm on an American military truck. Mozasu was the first to spot the truck, and the small and quick boy darted to the pig stalls to retrieve the bamboo spears. The family stood by the half-open barn door, observing the truck as it came closer.
“Here,” Mozasu said, handing out the rattling, hollow spears to his mother, grandmother, brother, and aunt, keeping back two. Kim Changho was having his bath. He whispered to his brother, “You have to get ajeossi from the bath. Give him his weapon.” The child gave Noa a spear for Kim and kept one for himself. Mozasu clutched his spear tightly, preparing for attack. Noa’s holey hand-me-down sweater hung loosely over Mozasu’s flour-sack work pants. He was tall for a six-year-old.
“The war’s over,” Noa reminded Mozasu firmly. “It’s probably Hansu ajeossi’s men. Put that thing down before you hurt yourself.”
The truck stopped, and two Koreans working for Hansu brought out a stretcher carrying Yoseb, who was bandaged and deeply sedated.
Kyunghee let go of the spear, letting it fall on the soft earth, and she put her hand on Mozasu’s shoulder to steady herself.
Hansu stepped out of the cab of the truck while the driver, a ginger-haired American GI, stayed behind. Mozasu snuck glances at the soldier. The driver had light, freckled skin and pale, yellow-reddish hair like fire; he didn’t look mean, and Hansu ajeossi didn’t look afraid. Back in Osaka, Haru-san, the leader of the neighborhood association, who was most often in charge of rations, had warned the neighborhood children that Americans kill indiscriminately so everyone must flee at the sight of any American soldiers. Death at your own hands was preferable to capture. When the driver noticed Mozasu looking at him, he waved, showing his straight, white teeth.
Kyunghee approached the stretcher slowly. At the sight of his burns, she clasped her mouth with both her hands. Despite the terrifying news reports about the bombings, she had believed that Yoseb was alive, that he would not die without letting her know. She had prayed for him continually, and now he was home. She dropped to her knees and bowed her head. Everyone was silent until she rose. Even Kim was crying.
Hansu nodded at the slight, pretty woman who was weeping and gave her a large parcel wrapped in paper and a military-sized tub of burn liniment from America.
“You’ll find some medicine in there. Mix a very small spoon of the powder with water or milk and give it to him at night so he can sleep. When it runs out, there’s no more, so you have to wean him off it little by little. He’ll beg you for more, but you have to tell him that you’re trying to make it last.”
“What is it?” she asked. Sunja stood by her sister-in-law and said nothing.
“He needs it. For the pain, but it’s not good to keep taking it, because it’s addictive. Anyway, keep changing the bandages. They must be sterile. Boil the fabric before you use it. There’s more in there. He’ll need the liniment because his skin is getting tighter. Can you do this?”
Kyunghee nodded, still staring at Yoseb. His mouth and cheek were half gone, as if he had been consumed by an animal. He was a man who had done everything he could for his family—this had happened to him because he had gone to work.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you for all that you’ve done for us,” Kyunghee said to Hansu, who shook his head and said nothing. He left them to speak to the farmer. Kim, who had returned by then, having finished his bath, followed Hansu as he walked to the farmer’s house.
The women and the boys led the men carrying the stretcher inside the barn and made a place for him in an empty horse stall. Kyunghee moved her pallet there.
A short while later, Hansu and the men drove off without saying good-bye.
The farmer didn’t complain about having one more Korean on his property, because the other Koreans did Yoseb’s share of the work as well as their own; harvest season was approaching, and he would need them. Though none of them had mentioned it, Tamaguchi sensed that soon enough, they’d ask him for money to leave, and the farmer was determined to get as much work as he could out of them before they left for home. He had told them they were welcome to stay for as long as they liked, and the farmer meant this. Tamaguchi had been hiring returning veterans for small jobs, but they grumbled about the dirtier tasks and openly refused to work alongside foreigners. Even if he could replace all the Koreans with Japanese veterans, Tamaguchi needed Hansu to transport his sweet potatoes to the markets. All the Koreans could stay.
The transport truck returned regularly, but Hansu didn’t come back for weeks. Yoseb suffered. He had lost the hearing in his right ear. He was either shouting in anger or crying in agony. The medicine powder was now gone, and Yoseb wasn’t much better. In the evenings, he cried like a child, and there was little anyone could do. During the day, he tried to help out on the farm, repairing tools or attempting to sort the potatoes, but the pain was too great for him to work. Now and then, Tamaguchi, who abhorred alcohol, gave him some holiday sake out of pity. However, when Kyunghee started to beg him each day for more, he told her that he couldn’t spare any, not because he was a stingy man, because Tamaguchi wasn’t, but because he had no intention of having a drunk on his property.
A month later, Hansu returned. The afternoon sun had dimmed only a little, and the workers had just returned to the fields after their midday meal to begin their second shift. In the cold barn, Yoseb was alone, lying down on his straw-filled pallet.
Hearing the footfalls, Yoseb lifted his head, then laid it back down again on the straw pillow.
Hansu placed two enormous crates in front of him, then sat down on the thick slab of wood by the pallet, which was being used as a bench. Despite his well-tailored suit and highly polished leather brogues, Hansu appeared at ease in the barn, indifferent to the harsh smells of the animals and the cold drafts.
Yoseb said, “You’re the father of the boy, aren’t you?”
Hansu
studied the man’s scarred face, the ragged edges of a once-sloping jawline. Yoseb’s right ear was now a tight bud of a flower, folding into itself.
“That’s why you do all this,” Yoseb said.
“Noa is my son,” Hansu said.
“We owe you a debt—something we may never be able to repay.”
Hansu raised his eyebrows but said nothing. It was always better to say less.
“But you have no business being around him. My brother gave the child a name. He should never know anything else.”
“I can give him a name, too.”
“He has a name. It’s wrong to do this to the boy.”
Yoseb frowned; the smallest movement hurt. Noa had his younger brother’s mannerisms—from the way he spoke in Isak’s measured cadences to the way he ate his meals in modest bites, chewing neatly. He behaved exactly like Isak. Whenever Noa had any time to spare, he would take his old exercise books from school and practice writing, though no one told him to do so. Yoseb would never have believed that this yakuza was Noa’s biological father except that the upper half of Noa’s face was virtually a mirror image of Hansu’s. In time, Noa would see this. He had not mentioned it to Kyunghee, but even if she had guessed at the truth herself, she would have kept her suspicions from Yoseb to protect Sunja, who was closer to her than a sister.
“You don’t have a son,” Yoseb said, taking another guess.
“Your brother was kind to help Sunja, but I would’ve taken care of her and my son.”
“She must not have wanted that.”
“I’d offered to take care of her, but she didn’t want to be my wife in Korea. Because I have a Japanese wife in Osaka.”
Lying on his back, Yoseb stared at the barn roof. Jagged slats of light broke through the beams. Column slivers of dust floated upward in diagonal lines. Before the fire, he had never noticed such small things; also, he had never hated anyone. Though he shouldn’t, Yoseb hated this man—his expensive clothes, flashy shoes, his unchecked confidence, reeking of a devilish invulnerability. He hated him for not being in pain. He had no right to claim his brother’s child.
Hansu could see Yoseb’s anger.
“She wanted me to go, so I left at first, planning to come back. When I returned, she was gone. Already married. To your brother.”
Yoseb didn’t know what to believe. He had learned almost nothing about Sunja from Isak, who had seemed to believe that Noa’s origins were best forgotten.
“You should leave Noa alone. He has a family. After the war, we’ll do everything possible to repay you.”
Hansu folded his arms close to his chest and smiled before speaking.
“You son of a bitch, I paid. I paid for your life. I paid for everyone’s life. Everyone would be dead without me.”
Yoseb shifted to his side a little and winced from the pain. Sometimes he felt like he was still on fire.
“Did Sunja tell you?” Hansu asked.
“Just look at the child’s face. It doesn’t make sense for anyone to go through all this trouble, and I know you’re not some sort of saint. I know what you are—”
Hansu laughed out loud. It was almost out of respect for Yoseb’s directness.
“We’re going back home,” Yoseb said, and closed his eyes.
“Pyongyang’s controlled by the Russians, and the Americans are in charge of Busan. You want to go back to that?”
“It’s not going to be like that forever,” Yoseb said.
“You’ll starve there.”
“I’m done with Japan.”
“And how will you go back to Pyongyang or Busan? You can’t even walk down the length of this farm.”
“The company owes me my wages. When I’m well enough, I’ll go back to Nagasaki to collect my pay.”
“When’s the last time you read a newspaper?” Hansu pulled out a sheaf of Korean and Japanese newspapers he’d brought for Kim from the crates. He put the stack beside Yoseb’s pallet.
Yoseb glanced at the papers but refused to pick them up.
“There’s no money for you.” Hansu spoke to him slowly as if Yoseb were a child. “The company will never pay you. Never. There are no records for your work, and you can’t prove it. The government wants nothing more than for every poor Korean to go back, but it won’t give you the fare or a sen for your troubles. Ha.”
“What do you mean? How do you know?” Yoseb asked.
“I know. I know Japan,” Hansu said, looking privately disappointed. He had lived among the Japanese for all of his adult life. His father-in-law was unquestionably the most powerful Japanese moneylender in Kansai. Hansu could say with confidence that the Japanese were pathologically intractable when they wanted to be. In this, they were exactly like the Koreans except their stubbornness was quieter, harder to detect.
“Do you know how hard it is to get money out of the Japanese? If they don’t want to pay you, they will never ever pay you. You’re wasting your time.”
Yoseb’s body felt itchy and warm.
“Every day, for every one boat that heads out to Korea filled with idiots wanting to go home, two boats filled with refugees come back because there’s nothing to eat there. The guys who come straight from Korea are even more desperate than you. They’ll work for week-old bread. Women will whore after two days of hunger, or one if they have children to feed. You’re living for a dream of a home that no longer exists.”
“My parents are there.”
“No. No, they’re not.”
Yoseb turned to look at Hansu’s eyes.
“Why do you think I brought back only Sunja’s mother. Do you really think I couldn’t find your parents and your in-laws?”
“You don’t know what happened to them,” Yoseb said. Neither he nor Kyunghee had heard from them in over a year.
“They were shot. All landowners who were foolish enough to stick around were shot. Communists see people only in simple categories.”
Yoseb wept and covered his eyes.
The lie had to be told, and Hansu did not mind telling it. If the parents weren’t dead already, Yoseb’s and Kyunghee’s parents would starve to death or die of old age inevitably. They could have very well been shot. The conditions in the communist-occupied North were awful. There were numerous landowners who’d been rounded up, killed, and shoved into mass graves. No, he didn’t know for certain if Yoseb’s parents were alive or not, and yes, he could have learned the truth if he didn’t mind risking some of his men to find them, but he didn’t see the point of it. He didn’t see how their lives could be useful for his purposes. It had been easy to find Sunja’s mother—barely two days of his man’s time. In the scheme of things, it was preferable for Yoseb and Kyunghee to lose their parents, because Sunja would have followed them blindly out of some preposterous sense of duty. Yoseb and Kyunghee would be better off in Japan for now, anyway. Hansu would never allow his son to go to Pyongyang.
Hansu opened one of the parcels and withdrew a large bottle of soju. He opened it and passed it to Yoseb, then left the barn to see Tamaguchi about a payment.
After finishing her work, Sunja finally returned to the barn, and she found Hansu waiting for her. He was sitting by himself by the feed bins at the far end of the barn, a good distance away from the boys, who were reading. Yoseb was sleeping soundly. Kyunghee and Yangjin were in the house cooking dinner while Kim loaded the sacks of potatoes in the cold shed. Hansu said hello to her first and waved her toward him openly, no longer feeling the need to be discreet.
Sunja stood by the bench opposite Hansu.
“Sit, sit,” he insisted, but she refused.
“Tamaguchi tells me that he wants to adopt your sons,” Hansu said quietly, smiling.
“What?”
“I told him you’d never let them go. He offered to take just one of them even. The poor man. Don’t worry. He can’t take them.”
“Soon, we’ll go to Pyongyang,” she said.
“No. That’s not going to happen.”
“
What do you mean?”
“Everyone there is dead. Kyunghee’s parents. Your in-laws. All shot for owning property. These things happen when governments change. You have to get rid of your enemies. Landlords are enemies of the workers,” Hansu said.
“Uh-muh.” Sunja sat down at last.
“Yes, it’s sad, but nothing can be done.”
Sunja was a pragmatic woman, but even she thought Hansu was unusually cruel. The more she got to know this man, the more she realized that the man she’d loved as a girl was an idea she’d had of him—feelings without any verification.
“You should be thinking about Noa’s education. I brought him some books to study for his college entrance examinations.”
“But—”
“You cannot return home. You’re going to have to wait until things are more stable.”
“It’s not your decision to make. My boys have no future here. If we can’t go back home now, we’ll go back when it’s safer.”
Her voice had trembled, but she’d said what she’d needed to say.
Hansu remained silent for a moment.
“Whatever you decide to do later is one thing, but in the meantime, Noa should be studying for university. He’s twelve.”
Sunja had been thinking of Noa’s schooling but hadn’t known how to help him. Also, how would she pay for school? They didn’t even have enough money for the passage home. Out of Yoseb’s hearing, the three women talked about this all the time. They had to get back to Osaka to figure out a way to make money again.
“Noa should study while he’s in this country. Korea will be in chaos for a long time. Besides, he’s already a good Japanese student. When he goes back, he’ll have a degree from a good Japanese university. That’s what all the rich Koreans are doing, anyway—sending their kids abroad. If Noa gets into a university, I’ll pay for it. I’ll pay for Mozasu as well. I could get them some tutors when they return—”