by Sumi Hahn
Junja had always known that her resemblance to her mother was uncanny. She had never imagined, though, that she would be forced to take her mother’s place so soon. If a person’s fate was written on their face, as Grandmother always said, what did that mean for Junja? And what about her little brother and little sister? With their round faces, wide eyes, and pouting mouths, those two looked just like their father.
When he abandoned his family, Junja had been twelve. Father had scarcely been mentioned since that time. Mother had erased him from their lives completely by giving the children her mother’s family name. Grandmother had recently begun talking about him again, giving away secrets that the children never knew. Only yesterday she had revealed that Father had grown up on the mainland, near the big city of Seoul, where it was too cold for tangerine trees.
“City folk should never marry country folk, and mountain folk should never marry coastal folk,” Grandmother had lectured. “Too many differences! See what happened to your parents.”
Mother could have had her pick of any man. They were drawn to her, Grandmother boasted, though she was not considered a conventional beauty. Her face was too angular, her mouth too wide, and her stubbornness betrayed by her jawline. But she was striking: tall, with long, well-shaped limbs. And she was a top-rank haenyeo, a woman worth two men. Her best feature, Grandmother said, were her light brown eyes. “The color of dark honey. Spirit eyes, though she didn’t live long enough to come into her vision.”
Mother had shrugged off so many suitors that by the time she was twenty-six, no man dared approach her. Villagers called her the stone maiden for dashing so many hopes. One summer day, on a trip to Seogwipo, Mother spied Father on the docks.
“A beautiful man,” recalled Grandmother. “So pretty that every woman who saw him tried to lure him. Your mother decided that she would catch him for herself.
“He was surrounded by giggling women, all gazing at him with easy promises in their eyes. Your mother was too proud and too cunning to join that sorry group. Instead, she took off her outer layers and stood on the dock in her water clothes. Her hair was unbound, so it flew in the wind. Your father noticed her because she was the only woman not paying attention to him. She was pretending to study something under the water. When she sensed him watching, she jumped.
“She dove deep, her eyes blind from the sun, her fingers searching. She told herself, ‘If I find an urchin, I will bring it to him. If he eats it, he will be mine.’
“There shouldn’t have been any urchins near the docks. The water is too cloudy there and too shallow. But the sea king must have been in a mischievous mood, because her hand pierced itself on a spiny ball.
“When your mother surfaced, your father was leaning over the water, reaching out to offer assistance. Did she take his hand then? Of course not. Instead, she looked him in the eye, showed him the urchin, and said, ‘Eat this, and tell me what it tastes like.’
“She stayed in the water, watching as he tried to open the spiny creature. She laughed when its quills made him bleed and curse. Still, he kept trying. Finally, one of the other women took pity on him and brought him a black rock. He hammered open the urchin and laid its insides bare. Your father took out the orange flesh, put it inside his mouth, and swallowed.
“‘What does it taste like?’ Your mother demanded.
“‘It tastes like marriage!’ he crowed.
“After a short courtship, they married. They were very happy, in the beginning. However, your soft, city-bred father did not take to life on the water. He was a terrible fisherman. Because your mother supported the family, his shame ate away at his love. He grew weak because men need pride to be strong. One day, he took the skiff, saying he was going to catch sollani. He left, whistling a tune, and never came home.
“At first, we thought the worst, that he had died at sea. But when his boat was found, the man who bought it swore that he had paid a fair price. Enough, he said, for your father to buy a one-way ticket to the mainland.”
* * *
When Junja opened the kitchen door to get more kindling, a round bundle was squatting on the stoop like an overgrown mushroom. Another belated condolence meal, she thought. She had to start the fire and boil some water first, before deciding whether to serve the gift for breakfast or set it aside for later.
The girl hesitated between the matchbox and tinder box, pushing the memory of Suwol’s lighter out of her mind with an irritated mutter. She had managed to avoid the boy every time he visited the village by saying that she was still in mourning. Junja picked up the tinderbox. It was almost summer, so she had no excuse to waste a match. When the sparks caught, the dried grass curled into a flame under the black iron pot. She added a handful of small sticks before stretching. Yawning, the girl studied the contents of the pantry, wondering why she was feeling so hungry. With a yelp, she remembered the bundle on the stoop.
Junja hefted the bundle onto the stone slab next to the cooking fire. She unwound the layers, rolling the cloth strips carefully so that she could return everything to its owner. Her heart seemed to skip as a lidded clay pot emerged, with a covered wooden bowl set on top. She knew only one family who could afford such fine dishes. She held her breath as she opened the lid to the bowl. Inside was a generous cluster of gosari.
The girl restrained herself from rushing outside to see if anyone was there. How could she think about Suwol while she was still mourning Mother? She chided herself for her selfishness, which had made her shirk her duties. If Mother had gone to the mountain as she had planned, she would not have gone diving that day. Though Grandmother insisted that Mother’s fate had been shaped before she was born, Junja could not escape her role in that disaster. She had wanted to take her Mother’s place, and the gods, in their spiteful way, had allowed her.
Junja opened the lid to the pot. The scent of stewed chicken rose up, striking her like a physical blow. The girl could not stop herself from tearing off a wing and gorging on the tender flesh. She gulped down mouthfuls of food like someone gasping for air. With each swallow, she began to feel less vaporous and more solid, as if she had been on the verge of disappearing.
Junja cracked open the tiny bones and sucked them clean before looking back into the pot. Red dates, garlic, ginger, and a knotty plug of ginseng had enriched the soup. She filled a bowl with broth and removed some of the sticky rice stuffing. She pulled off another wing.
Junja took the food outside to the kitchen stoop. She ate slowly this time, savoring the broth and tender meat. When she finished, she set the bowl down and picked her teeth with a wooden splinter while watching shore birds float in the sky. Her attention drifted to her mother’s vegetable patch, where small green shoots were poking up between the bristly young cucumbers and spiky garlic stems. Mother never allowed weeds in her garden. The girl fell to her knees to pull out the trespassing plants. Her fingernails turned black as she clawed the earth with her hands, pulling out everything that did not belong.
When her frenzy abated, the rows were tidy and clear, just like Mother always kept them. Junja felt ravenous again, so she returned to the kitchen. She pulled more sticky rice out of the chicken’s cavity and topped the bowl with gosari before returning to the stoop.
“Is that chicken I smell? Or am I dreaming?” Grandmother was standing in the doorway, scratching her shoulder.
Junja untangled her legs. “It’s an entire chicken, Halmung, with jujubes and ginseng. There are chestnuts in the rice stuffing too.”
“What? Who could afford to be that generous?” The old woman guessed that the cook was not a Jeju native. Chicken stewed in such a costly fashion was a mainlander affectation.
“It came from the Yang family of Cloud House Farm.” Junja had no doubt after tasting the ferns.
“Of course. That makes sense. Your mother was friendly with the wife of the eldest son.” The old woman motioned to Junja to remain seated as she peered into the pot. Almost half the chicken had been eaten. So she hadn’t imagined the
brightness in Junja’s eyes after all. When the appetite returned, so did the person.
“The eldest grandson was with me when I brought the piglet home. These gosari taste just like the ones I ate there.”
Grandmother tried a bite. “This is quite good.” Her praise was grudging.
Junja placed her empty bowl on the counter. “I think we should wash the bedding today. The sun will be hot enough to dry the quilts quickly.”
The old woman looked sharply at her granddaughter, who had not noticed such details since the tragedy. “You started dreaming again, didn’t you?”
Junja nodded.
The old woman squatted down, patting the space next to her. “Sit down and tell me everything you remember.”
Grandmother took Junja’s hand. The old woman’s skin felt cool and dry, like birch bark. The girl squeezed it gently before speaking.
“In my dream, I was married to the sea king. His two ladies-in-waiting were our daughters. Everything was strange and foreign under the sea. I couldn’t understand the language of the fishes very well, but I lived in a house as big as a palace and was very rich.”
Grandmother grunted to acknowledge that she was listening.
“I lived a comfortable, happy life under the sea for many years. But I still felt homesick for the village. When I could no longer bear it, I begged the sea king to allow me to visit, to see you and mother. The sea king asked why I wanted to return to such a pitiful place when my life with him was so grand. I said I wanted to eat a tangerine, because there was nothing in the sea that tasted like it. He chided me for my lack of gratitude, but he granted my wish. He placed a pink pearl in my mouth and told me to swallow. When it was time to return, he said, the pearl would bring me back.”
Grandmother felt Junja’s pulse under her fingers, throbbing strong and steady. The girl described how she swam away from the palace toward the sun.
“When I reached the surface, I woke up. And then I got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and found the chicken soup.” Junja turned to her grandmother. “So, was it a worthless dog dream?”
The old woman rose out of her squat, using Junja’s shoulder as support. “It feels like a true dream to me.”
“What does it mean?”
“That you will marry a rich man, move far away, and have two daughters.”
“That’s what happens in the dream.”
“Sometimes what happens in a dream is the same as the meaning of the dream.”
“How do you know? What if the dream means something else?”
The old woman shrugged. “The only way to know for certain is to live your life and find out.”
* * *
While Junja lugged buckets of water from the well, Gongja tended the fire under the iron cauldron. Jin helped Grandmother bring the bedding and clothing out of the house.
“What’s the point of cleaning this when it’ll just get dirty again?” Jin whined.
“What’s the point of eating when you’ll just get hungry again? Or waking up when you’ll go to sleep again? Please do not speak such foolishness, or else you’ll teach your mouth to say only foolish things.” The old woman whacked her grandson on his bare legs with the switch she used to beat the quilts on the wooden rack.
“Take off your clothes now! Disgusting Japanese bugs. Jeju didn’t have anything like this before those dogs showed up.”
Junja poured ashes and lye into the bubbling pot. She remembered running about nakedly while Mother and Grandmother boiled their clothes clean. When it was warm and sunny, she would bathe in the ocean, scrubbing down with fistfuls of wet sand before running back home to be rinsed with fresh water.
After the clothing was laid out on the sand to dry, Junja joined her grandmother, who was braiding Gongja’s hair. Jin was waiting, head shaved clean, a pile of hair on the ground next to him.
“All finished, Gongja. Off you go to the beach to bathe. Jin—throw that hair into the fire! Stay to the left of the large rocks and don’t wander out too far. Scrub yourselves carefully!” Grandmother’s voice broke off as the two scampered away.
The old woman patted the ground in front of her. “Your turn, Junja.”
She combed through Junja’s hair, squinting and muttering as she worked. “Isn’t it interesting how, as I get older, I can see things as tiny as a grain of sand. But those big trees and boulders are blurry, and I can hardly make out the mountain and hills anymore.”
Junja said nothing, only half listening to Grandmother, who was now reminiscing about the keen eyesight of her youth. Once the old woman followed her memories into the past, she would wander at leisure before returning to the present.
“… and that’s how I found the first oyster bed, which led me to the second. The sea bought this house for me, as a reward for my sharp vision. Now, even my greatest gift is weakening, like everything else in my body. Aigoo! If it weren’t for the strength of the Goh family spirit, I don’t think I’d be able to lift a finger.”
Grandmother’s next words shocked Junja like a bucket of cold water. “Your father is coming for your brother and sister.” The old woman’s voice was low, to avoid being overheard. “They will live with him and his new wife.”
“What?” Junja tried to turn her head, but her hair was wrapped in Grandmother’s fist. “Father has a new wife? How do you know?”
The old woman sighed. “I sent him a letter. Of course, there was another woman. That man was too weak to leave on his own.”
“Why just Jin and Gongja? Why am I not going too?”
He had only asked for the boy at first. The old woman had written back insisting that he take his youngest daughter as well. Junja would never find a suitable husband while burdened by the care of a sister and grandmother. If he didn’t understand that, he might as well throw both his daughters off a cliff with his own hands.
“You’re old enough to take care of yourself. And I need you here to bury me properly.” The old woman separated Junja’s hair into three sections and combed scented oil through each plait before braiding them together.
“I wouldn’t leave Jeju even if Father begged me,” said Junja, trembling. “Jin and Gongja don’t have to go, do they? We have this house, and I make enough to feed all of us.” Like her mother and grandmother, Junja was well on her way to becoming a top-rank haenyeo.
Grandmother wound a piece of twine around the bottom of Junja’s thick braid. She leaned in to pull the knot tight with her teeth before answering. “He’ll be arriving in about two weeks, when the tides are high.”
“From where?”
“Busan, where he now lives.”
He must have met the new wife during a supply run to the mainland. Junja remembered the last trip he had made, when he was gone far longer than he was supposed to be. When Father finally returned home, Mother had refused to talk to him, and the small house had been bitter with silence.
“Do Gongja and Jin know?”
“Jin knows he is going on a trip, that’s all. You can tell Gongja, or I can. Whatever you think is best.”
“I’ll tell her,” said Junja before changing her mind again. “They should stay here with us, Halmung. They don’t really need to go, do they?”
Grandmother placed her hands on Junja’s shoulders. “Your father has promised to send them both to school. Can you do that much for them? And think about yourself. What man would take in a brother and sister? You wouldn’t be able to marry until they left. Do you really want to become an old maid?”
Junja looked down at the ground and bit her lip.
Nine
The morning’s cleaning wrung out the old woman, so she went inside to rest. Junja draped the bedding between two wooden racks before spreading coals underneath and covering them with sand. The rising heat would steam out any remaining uncleanliness without burning the cloth. With the sun beating down on the other side, the thick quilts would dry quickly and smell sweet.
The girl thought back to the night she spent at Cloud House Farm. T
here had been enough clean bedding to spare for a guest. Her blanket had been silk, so light she worried she might be cold, but she had stayed wonderfully warm. Grandmother had explained that though silk batting was lighter, it was both warmer when it was cold and cooler when it was hot. “Even when they sleep, the rich are removed from the heavy cares of the rest of the world.”
Junja tried to imagine living on the mountain instead of by the shore. Would her skin grow soft and white from sleeping under silk blankets every night? Would she tire of gosari and crave salty tastes from the sea? Rather than bringing her offerings to the water, she would light candles and incense for the mountain.
A shout from the street interrupted Junja’s reverie.
“Hey, you there! Is this haenyeo Goh Sookja’s house?” A man in the road was waving a walking stick to attract her attention.
“Yes, this is haenyeo Goh Sookja’s house.” Junja squinted against the midday sun.
The man ambled toward her. As he approached, his hat slipped and he halted to rearrange it. The man took another step, but a gust of wind pushed the hat off his bushy head. Junja almost smiled when she recognized the constable who had been guarding the mountain road. She half expected cherry blossoms to fall out of his beard.
“I’ve visited every pigsty between Mosulpo and Seogwipo looking for haenyeo Goh Sookja. Have I really come to the right place at last?”
The constable walked rudely close to peer at Junja. A smoky odor wafted from him. He was taller than she remembered, and his beard more matted.
“Ah, yes. You’re that girl. The one who tried to sneak past me without paying the toll. Take me to your mother, the excellent cook.” He added a belated ‘please’ to soften his bark.
“I can’t, sir.”
“And why not?” The constable puffed out his chest.