Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

by Yu Young-nan

  I was never treated unfairly when it came to food just because I was a girl, but Mother did cook rice separately for Brother during the emergency period. The smell of bean dregs was so disgusting that she didn’t want to scoop his rice from the same pot in which they’d been cooked. Mother and I ate the rice in which they’d been mixed, but of course a distinction existed here as well. At the top of our bowls, we seemed to have a similar proportion of dregs, but the deeper we went, the more dregs Mother’s bowl held. I knew, but pretended not to notice because I despised them so much.

  In fact, my aunts considered Mother’s general refusal to discriminate in feeding Brother and me rather extreme. Boys and girls were treated differently, and so my aunts were snide. Did she think she could marry me off when the time came, raising me as she did?

  Mother, as though nothing were amiss, would reply, “Don’t worry, her taste buds will be the best gift she has to offer to her in-laws.” She never really gave up this belief until I married. Mother thought a daughter should be pampered with good food so she could learn how to cook well. After all, you can’t make something you’ve never tasted. Her ideas were exceptional in an era when appalling sayings were regarded as common sense: “A daughter-in-law with an eye infection is useless, but mouth sores are no problem.” Not surprisingly, then, I was the object of my aunties’ jibes until I got married: “Those taste buds of hers will make a great dowry gift.”

  8. Spring in My Hometown

  BROTHER QUIT WATANABE IRONWORKS. THE LATHE operator he’d helped land a job wound up being called up for forced labor, while Brother himself escaped. Brother’s failure to extricate the technician triggered his own resignation. He was fed up, he said, and would go back to the countryside and farm. No one understood why he was agonizing about it. Why should a white-collar worker risk his own meal ticket to protest? Given the times, there was no guarantee of survival even if you were just looking out for yourself.

  At first glance, you might think that Brother put aside his own interests out of a sense of justice. In actual fact, he just wanted a way out. He couldn’t tolerate working in a military factory, clad in uniform, gaiters, and boots complete with plated heel and toe.

  Elder Uncle had become the township’s director of labor affairs. His office supervised the recruitment of young men for conscription as workers or into the Student National Defense Corps. If he hadn’t had such a plum position, Brother wouldn’t have been able to give up his job so easily. And if Brother relied on Uncle in making his decision, then he was being a baby, not a hero.

  Coincidentally, Brother’s resignation occurred soon after the order came for the evacuation of Keijo, as Seoul was called back then by the Japanese. Air raids and food shortages became an excuse to shoo Seoul’s population to the countryside. The order also gave the colonial authorities a pretext to demolish houses in the city center and replace them with avenues. Everyone was living in terror, worried that the food supply would be cut and starvation would follow, or that Seoul would be reduced to a sea of fire like Tokyo. These concerns eclipsed Mother’s shock over Brother’s quitting his job.

  Uncle sent messages urging us to evacuate and come home. It was important to Mother not to look like we were returning because we couldn’t make a go of it in Seoul. Her attitude was perfectly understandable given the difficulties she’d gone through to establish herself. She must have wanted an appropriate excuse if we couldn’t manage a glorious, silk-clad homecoming.

  Younger Uncle kept his shop open, but business had practically come to a halt. Ice was a luxury item, and the store was empty, save for a few bundles of the charcoal and firewood that he also sold. But Uncle had an excellent nose for opportunity. He was doing well as a “black market rat,” reaping huge profits in the face of danger. The combination of a controlled economy and shortages had—inevitably—led to smuggling. Uncle was another father figure to us, and his latent financial savvy may have played a further role in giving Brother the strength to quit. He and Auntie wanted to flee Seoul with us, saying they’d long been after a reason to close up shop. As far as I could tell, a smuggler had no need to live in Seoul per se, as long as he could travel around the country on the train and get to whisper in clandestine meetings.

  All this took place roughly six months before Liberation. I was about to enter my second year of middle school. The transfer process had been streamlined for the students who were evacuating to the countryside: all you had to do was visit the Student Affairs Bureau, report your destination, and state your preferred school. I applied for Holston Girls’ High School in Kaesŏng, and our house with the triangle yard was put on the market. Commuting from Pakchŏk Hamlet to Kaesŏng would have been impossible, so we agreed to find a house in Kaesŏng together with Uncle. None of us was in a position to be holed up in Pakchŏk Hamlet—even a black market rat needed a nest in the city to conduct business from.

  Brother had another shock in store for Mother. He revealed his information in dribs and drabs, letting on just enough each time to avoid making her faint. He had found a girl to marry.

  “So, got yourself tangled up in a romance, did you?”

  It bothered me for her to talk that way. Brother clearly wasn’t any happier about it and frowned. “Why do you have to put it like that?”

  These days, someone without a love life is considered inept, but Mother had other views. A son might have a lapse and get involved in a relationship, but what kind of girl would be suckered in by sweet talk? Considering what Mother had taught us and that she treated a romantic bond as a full-blown sexual affair, her remark conveyed obvious contempt for the young woman.

  Everyone thought of Brother as filial, and being a dutiful son was an important part of his own self-image. His challenge must have come across to Mother as though he were siding with the woman against her. Mother shed tears, feeling betrayed. Brother apologized again and again for his disrespect, but pressed Mother to meet her just once.

  She drew a firm line, though: “Okay, you win. I’ll have a look. But that’s it. I can do that much without losing face, and it won’t be any skin off her nose either.”

  The inspection occurred at, of all places, the Red Cross Hospital. We’d sold our house and were in the middle of packing. The new semester had started, but I wasn’t attending school since I’d already finished the transfer procedures. I decided to go along with Mother. Even though the hospital was only a stone’s throw from our home, I felt as excited as if we were opening a door to an unknown world. The wave of events that had broken upon Mother all at once left her exhausted.

  The woman was in a tidy, spacious, private room. She looked fine, which made me wonder why she’d been hospitalized. Brother had obviously given her advance warning about our visit, for she addressed us as Mother and Little Sister. Mother asked why she was in the hospital. A bout of flu, she replied, but she’d recovered. It all sounded a bit dubious.

  Brother had urged us to visit her in the hospital so we could see her before we moved, but had been evasive about what was wrong. We assumed that she’d had an operation and that was why she couldn’t be discharged quickly. A girl who had let herself get romantically involved didn’t suit Mother’s taste to begin with, and on our way to the hospital, she vowed that we couldn’t welcome a woman with a knife scar into our home. But nothing suggested she’d been operated on, and she was quite a beauty. It was hard to pin down exactly what made her beautiful, but as people say nowadays, she had class. She exuded charm, in a way different from any women we’d known until then.

  I could tell that Mother was drawn to her in spite of herself. Similar pangs of jealousy were gnawing at me, but they didn’t prevent a growing admiration for the girl. “Too bad for Mother,” I thought. “She’ll lose again.” Mother already seemed half resigned to the marriage.

  On our way home, Mother asked me what the date was. She counted out the days since Brother had resigned, working out events, and heaved a deep sigh. I could tell what she was dwelling on—the pride
and expectations she’d invested in Brother as her only son, her desperate but ultimately futile attempts to carve out lives for us in Seoul. That night, Mother curtly asked Brother why the girl was in the hospital, but Brother wanted to hear her opinion about her before he’d answer.

  “Oh, I can see how she’d bewitch you, all right!” Mother spat out.

  Brother said she’d had pleurisy but had fully recovered and would go home soon.

  “Ah, what are you going to tell me next?” Mother moaned but kept her composure. She then grilled Brother with one probing question after another about the woman’s background. Everything disappointed her except that she’d graduated from a well-known girls’ high school. She was the youngest of four daughters, and although both parents were alive, the family wasn’t well off. In the end, Mother’s interrogation uncovered that her luxurious private hospital room had largely been Brother’s doing. Mother’s disappointment and anger welled up, but she seemed to have lost confidence that she could split the pair apart. When she and I were alone, she sought a thread of comfort from me; “Pleurisy doesn’t always turn into TB, does it?” Back then, pleurisy generally developed into tuberculosis, a terrifying disease that could spell financial ruin for the whole family.

  Several days later, my transfer went through without any further effort. Notification arrived that I should report to Holston Girls’ High School. With all the turmoil, I never got to pay a farewell visit to my school before we moved. Brother remained in Seoul. We heard that his sweetheart had been discharged and was recuperating in her hometown.

  The house we found in Kaesŏng sat in Namsan-dong below Wardrobe Rocks Hill. Mother and Uncle chose that neighborhood because we’d be making frequent trips to Pakchŏk Hamlet. The house wasn’t far from my school either. On my first visit there with Mother, we saw impressive and beautiful buildings of granite set on a hill and a large playing field surrounded by luxuriant greenery. Cherry trees in full blossom made it all seem like another planet. For some reason, I couldn’t come to grips with the idea that this was where I’d be attending high school. It was too alien. I was extremely shy and clamped my mouth shut. I didn’t even glance at the girl sitting next to me. Often I was on the verge of tears, feeling helpless and infuriated over all the changes that had occurred in the span of just one month.

  I went to school for about ten days, but then skipped the next several, feigning a cold. At least I meant to feign a cold. But I actually did develop a slight fever that didn’t subside. I went to a clinic nearby and was told to go to the provincial hospital for a chest X-ray, my first. Mother panicked when the X-ray showed a lung infiltration. The very words threw her into near hysteria, and she asked the doctor if my condition could develop into tuberculosis. Possibly, if I wasn’t well cared for, came the reply.

  I was packed off to Pakchŏk Hamlet together with a bundle of Chinese medicine. I couldn’t help suspecting that Mother was unreasonably projecting her fears about Brother’s beloved onto me. Until then, Mother would scarcely allow me to miss a day of school even when I was suffering from relatively serious ailments like diarrhea, malaria, or stomach parasites, much less a common cold. I’d taken it for granted that if you weren’t on your deathbed, missing school spelled catastrophe. Still, whatever the case, I was delighted to be off to Pakchŏk Hamlet.

  For the first time, I realized how beautiful spring in Pakchŏk Hamlet was; I hadn’t been there in that season since leaving for Seoul. I’d been an unbridled child, but now I had reached the sensitive age of fourteen. I wandered the hills and fields as if in a trance, friendless. Once I went out with little cousins in tow and gathered a heap of mountain herbs. Nothing made me feel more at peace than going out with a small basket at my side, like the village women. I thought that the basket suited me better than a book bag and that no matter how hard Mother pushed me, I simply wasn’t cut out for study. Wasting the care and hope Mother had lavished on me would be a shame, but I had no intention of returning to school.

  In my solitary mountain wanderings, I stumbled upon a damp vale where a small colony of lilies of the valley grew in profusion. They filled my heart with yearning. Without realizing it, I’d been attracted by their surreal perfume—so cool, sweet, strong, and elegant that I thought I was hallucinating. Until that point, I’d seen lilies of the valley only in pictures, but here they were, their lush, well-formed leaves carpeting a shady patch. They had white flowers that hung in clusters, like tiny bells the size of rice grains. Their gorgeous scent belied the way their heads bowed shyly.

  The lily of the valley was Sookmyung’s school flower, and I’d proudly worn a design of one on my chest. Our school song extolled its bashfulness and fragrance. But since I’d entered school at such a difficult time, I’d never actually seen one that was alive. Finally coming upon a real specimen of this flower I’d known only as a vague ideal depressed me. My heart ached all day. What was going to happen to the world? What was going to happen to me? The perfect joy I felt was bound up with awareness that my situation couldn’t last forever. I sensed that I could trust neither myself nor the blissful oneness with nature I felt. I had also left an important part of myself behind in Seoul.

  Younger Uncle evacuated to Kaesŏng at almost the same time as the rest of us. At first, he and my aunt stayed in the house we’d bought in Namsan-dong, but they soon moved to a rented room of their own. Uncle was a seasoned smuggler by this point and hardly wanted to spend his money on a house, but marriage negotiations with the woman’s family had progressed rapidly, and Brother’s wedding date had been set. Uncle’s move had been partly motivated by concern that their presence might make Brother’s bride uncomfortable.

  Uncle’s trips to Pakchŏk Hamlet came after he’d finished off some major deal, and he’d show up in a terrific mood. I was the most excited on days Uncle arrived. He and I had a much closer relationship than children did with their fathers back then. We’d act more like a loving father-and-daughter pair do nowadays. I played the baby, and he showered me with affection. I was even jealous of unborn cousins, thinking I’d have to behave differently when Uncle had a child of his own.

  Uncle fished as a hobby, using a net rather than a rod. When he opened the storehouse door and slung a net over his shoulder, I’d follow him out in high spirits, clutching a basket. It was more than a mile to the reservoir, but there were lots of wading pools and brooks on the way for him to toss his net into. How manly he looked as he made his powerful cast toward the water!

  In the local dialect, the net he used was called a “shrinky.” It spread into a wide circle in the air and sank heavily as soon as it hit the water. Plumb weights hung at intervals along its edges, and the net would contract as Uncle pulled the string, sweeping fish up within it. Collecting the writhing, shiny-scaled fish filled me with delight. Sometimes, if Uncle was unlucky, the net would catch on submerged branches, and he’d have to swim in and pull the torn net out.

  Every once in a great while, we’d manage to trap jumping eels. I found it impossible to keep them in my basket as they thrashed around. Once, we caught an enormous eel. It hurled itself about with such force that we wound up in a frightening do-or-die battle with it; Uncle actually had to throw it on a boulder and bash its head with a rock.

  Uncle stopped fishing whenever we caught an eel. He’d say it was for me, and we’d hurry home while it was still alive to debone and roast it. The weather was getting warmer by the day, but the brazier was always going in the kitchen. We’d set a grill over it and then put the eel on it. Grilled with a sprinkling of rock salt, the eel was indescribably delicious. The fat sizzling off it sent up fierce tongues of flame. My cousins would rush over, but Uncle wanted to feed only me, because I was supposed to be recuperating. Ever since I was young, people said I had a strong constitution, but I lacked energy. I’ve never considered myself especially hardy.

  But during that spring and summer at Pakchŏk Hamlet, I was savoring the joy of life and good health. It was as if vital fluids were coursing through
my body. Being treated as sickly felt strange, but I was hardly inclined to insist that I was fine. I didn’t want to go back to Holston.

  One reason I may have been considered infirm was because Mother couldn’t pay any attention to me at the time. After sending me off to Pakchŏk Hamlet, she was frantic with preparations for Brother’s wedding, preoccupied with welcoming her only daughter-in-law and doing her very best for that most auspicious of events. Nonetheless, doubts about the young woman’s health left her more flustered.

  “What’s wrong with me these days? When I go out to buy something, I forget what I’ve gone for. I’m so full of worries that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not even sure we should go ahead with the wedding.”

  Foreboding swept over me when Mother sighed out complaints like that. My aunts seemed to share her feelings.

  “If that’s how you really feel, why not just break it off? People say sons are better for a reason. It’s no big deal for a man to have a fling. You gave your approval easily enough, didn’t you?”

  “If I just wanted to ruin someone else’s daughter, I could have opposed the marriage in the first place. I’ve got eyes, you know. I could see that the boy would have fallen apart if I didn’t say yes. It’s our fate to get a sick daughter-in-law. But who knows? A newcomer just might draw any evil eye destined for my children.”

  I was stunned that Mother’s love for us could be so cruelly selfish. I’d had positive feelings toward my prospective sister-in-law and admired her ever since we first met at the hospital. Mother actually might have felt the same way I did, despite what she said, for she regularly embraced whatever Brother and I liked. The frailty of Brother’s fiancée probably troubled her so much because she was quite fond of her.