All Woman and Springtime

by Brandon Jones

  Could she dare go inside? Would they even allow it? It took weeks for her to gather the courage to try. Gi stood at the door for over an hour wondering if her songbun was good enough. Finally she opened the door and walked in. A bored man in a blue-and-white uniform stood at the entranceway. He took no particular notice of her, so, with her head down, she walked past him.

  The building was no less magnificent from within, and she quickly lost her apprehension. It was quiet and cathedral-like, in spite of a certain amount of bustle and conversation. It was clearly a building designed to catch and hold the light. Maybe this is what it is like to be inside a grain of salt, she thought. There was no regularity to the space that could be described in terms of blocks or symmetry, but it did have order and pattern. She let her feet take her of their own accord. She rode escalators and traversed floors. She walked between rows of desks and along balconies. She observed all the angles, and was awed by the interior distances. It was a monument to collective human knowledge—the structure itself gave the definition for the word library, and Gi did not have to wonder what it was. It was a dream come true.

  Central to its function was a slow helix of books rising from the floor to the ceiling. It was a spiral of information on a gradual incline around a center. Gi walked the spiral, touching the books, smelling the volumes, buffed by the light coming through the triangular panes. So much information in such a small space! She could almost feel it in her lungs when she breathed.

  The library became the center point from which all of Gi’s activities sprung. It was her favorite place, and she would spend long hours, whenever she was not actively searching for Il-sun, perusing books under the slanted glass roof of the reading room. She discovered the mathematics and physics sections and pulled books off the shelves at random to read them. She learned the common methods of notating concepts that she had already intuited but did not know how to write. She learned whole new ideas that she had not considered before but that made perfect sense. She even uncovered a few things that she could not readily understand or that she outright disagreed with. The language of mathematics, she discovered, was learned in much the same way as the English language. There were rules of syntax, vocabularies, whole concepts distilled down to symbols, and even punctuation. Mathematics, at a point, transcends mere numbers and enters a conceptual realm. Whenever Gyong-ho opened herself into that realm, she entered a kind of euphoria, a deep state of bliss, and she wondered if that was the state of mind Il-sun was trying to achieve when she smoked the sugary hiroppong from her glass pipe.

  Gi found a yellow notepad, and she filled its pages with the things she learned from books and the ideas they inspired in her. So far away were the Dear Leader and the many rules to please him.

  81

  SPRINGTIME ON THE STREETS of Seattle was truly spectacular. Trees seemed to be in bloom everywhere, showering the sidewalks in pink and white petals, and it reminded Gi of home. Gi had lived through the winter—the time of greatest trial for the homeless, when the weakest died in semifrozen lumps, according to Sam, in alleys and forgotten gullies.

  “If you can make it through your firs’ winter, you’re gonna be okay,” he had told her.

  Gi arrived at the shelter late and they almost did not let her in. Donna had taken a liking to her, however, and sometimes bent the rules for her. Gi went to one of the small beds and closed her eyes to sleep. It was the usual chorus of creaking springs and random babble, and she had gotten quite used to it.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” she heard a voice say in Korean as she was drifting off to sleep. She opened her eyes. Had she started dreaming already?

  Then the voice came again, several minutes later. “Where do we go from here?”

  Could it be? Gi got out of bed and padded her way in the direction of the voice. The lights were dimmed but not blacked out, and she could see clearly. She scanned the room.

  “I hit him on the head.”

  Gi zeroed in on the source of the sound and crept closer.

  “I hit him but I hope he didn’t die. I didn’t want him to die.”

  “Cho!” Gi exclaimed loudly. It was definitely her, lying wide awake on her bed and talking to herself.

  “Shhhhhh!” someone hissed.

  Cho pulled the blanket up to her eyes and remained quiet. She looked frightened.

  “Cho, it’s me! Gi—Gyong-ho!”

  “Shut up!” someone shouted.

  “Gi?”

  Gyong-ho threw her arms around her friend and sobbed with relief, and with guilt for having left her behind. But Cho was alive. Cho held her tightly.

  “I was so worried about you,” said Cho.

  THE NEXT MORNING Gi helped Cho find a pair of faded blue jeans and a green cable-knit sweater in the free box. The only passable shoes for her were a pair of cloth-bottomed Chinese slippers. They would not last long, especially if it rained, but they were better than the high-heeled sandals she had escaped in. Improvisation was critical to living on the street—it was the one thing Gi’s life in North Korea had prepared her for—and Gi was confident that, with keen eyes, they would find better footwear for Cho within a day or two.

  Gi had learned that it was important to manage her look. She was likewise dressed in blue jeans, seemingly the American uniform, but with a heavy gray cardigan over several layers of undershirts. She had found a pair of almost new sneakers in a dumpster, and they fit perfectly, but she had to intentionally scuff them up: If she arrived at the shelter with new clothes, they might not let her in. But if she allowed her appearance to get too shabby, there was the danger of being hassled by the police or attacked for sport by aggressive people who preyed on the meek. Her aim was to blend into the background, to find the look that could pass for legitimately homeless and rebellious youth alike. With that line blurred, people left her alone.

  Gi led Cho to a bench at a public garden where they could talk and eat the rolls provided to them by the shelter. Cho looked the same as when Gi had left her: too thin and high strung, but at least not any worse.

  “Things got really bad after you left, Gi,” Cho began. “Several of the bouncers were dead. Word got out that the brothel had been shot up and customers stopped coming. Mrs. Cha was meaner than ever.”

  “What happened?”

  “The police came, but they have some arrangement with Blue Talon. They didn’t close us down, but business was bad and Uncle Lyong moved the whole operation across town. Then they started running me on the street. I had to stand on the corner and service men in the alley.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “One night some drunk kid approached me. I took him into the alley, but he passed out before we got into it. My bouncer wasn’t watching, so I left the kid and ran the other way. If they had caught me I’m sure they would have killed me. I just had to get away. I kept running and running. I didn’t have any plan. I slept in some bushes. That was four nights ago. I walked toward the tall buildings. Then I met a Hanguk lady, and she helped me get to the mission. And now here I am, talking to you. I wish I had a cigarette.”

  “I’m sorry I left you.”

  “You did the right thing, Gi. You did what you had to, and I probably would have done the same thing. Have you heard anything about Il-sun?”

  “Nothing. You?”

  “No.”

  “Jasmine?”

  “Not her, either.”

  They sat quietly for a time. Cho fidgeted constantly.

  “What do we do now?” asked Cho. Gi was unsure if she was truly asking or if it was part of her babble, but she decided to answer anyway.

  “We live. We eat, we find shelter, and we persevere. I have done pretty well, so far.”

  “You look . . . better than ever, actually.”

  “For the first time in my life I am making my own decisions. I do what I want to. We’re free, Cho!”

  “Free? What does that mean? I’m scared out of my skin. We don’t belong here.”

  “We don’t b
elong anywhere. Not here, not in Hanguk, and not in Chosun. Not anymore. I don’t even want to go back. We’ll take care of each other. We’ll make ourselves belong.”

  82

  GYONG-HO ORIENTED CHO TO surviving on the street. With the warmer weather, they spent most of their nights sleeping outside in the parks, or under the freeway with Sam. Most days they spent at the library, Gi scribbling notes and Cho looking through magazines. It was becoming clear to Gi, however, that if they were going to rise up out of the street, they needed to find a way to start making money. Though she had learned how to stay alive by scrounging food out of the rubbish, it was a life fraught with dangers and discomforts, and it was obvious that most people in Seattle did not have to resort to that. Also, the organizations that ran the women’s shelters frowned on long-term reliance on the shelters, and pressured the regulars to seek employment and independence. Gi’s goal was to find some kind of living arrangement before the onset of winter.

  One of Gi’s regular stops was in the alley behind a Chinese restaurant in the International District where, on occasion, one of the cooks would offer her a small bowl of congee. She never begged for it, but would linger in the alley until he came out for a cigarette break. He normally offered. One day, the owner of the restaurant came into the alley looking for the cook while Gi and Cho were sitting on boxes and eating from the restaurant’s ceramic bowls. She was an ancient and stony Chinese woman with a deeply creviced face. She saw Gi and Cho, then lit into the cook with rapid-fire scolding in Chinese. The man shrank from her, and Gi thought he might be reduced to tears. Finally, she turned her attention to Gi and Cho, and began screeching at them as well. The cook timidly interrupted her to tell her something, presumably that they could not speak Chinese, then she turned back and glared at Gi.

  “Nobody eats for free!” she shouted in Korean.

  Gi stood and lowered her head, and offered her bowl back to the woman, in the polite way, using both hands.

  “We are very sorry to have caused you trouble. We have no money, but we will very gladly work for the food we have taken.”

  The woman paused, then gave Gi a sideways look. “What kind of work can you do?”

  “We’ll do anything.”

  “Can you clean?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “My cleaner is worthless. If you come back after closing, and if you can clean my restaurant better than she does, then I’ll give you a full meal at the end of the night. But if you’re stupid and lazy, then I better never see you around here again. Deal?”

  Gi and Cho cleaned the restaurant with the highest attention to detail. They dug hidden grime out of corners and scrubbed every surface. The effort was not lost on the woman, and at the end of the night she gave them a generous meal, including precious morsels of roast duck, and a bag of leftover dumplings to take with them. Gi and Cho bowed deeply in gratitude.

  “Come back tomorrow,” the woman said curtly as she scooted them out the alley door.

  Gi and Cho showed up faithfully every night and cleaned the restaurant. After a week the woman, Mrs. Ling, began to soften toward them, if only by being fractionally more polite. It turned out that the cook was actually her husband, and her way of displaying affection for him was to criticize his every action. She complained constantly that his generosity, or his wastefulness, or his lack of common sense was going to drive them to bankruptcy. He made a show of cowering from her, but they had found an equilibrium that would have been impossible to upset.

  As the weeks went by, the Lings showed greater and greater kindness. As hard as Gi and Cho tried to keep themselves clean, the grime on the street found its way onto their clothes. Because they were working at night, they could no longer go to the shelter to shower or have their clothes laundered; so Mr. Ling took them home with him one night to let them bathe and put their clothes through the washing machine. And, since it was late, he gave them a mat and blankets and let them sleep in the garage. Gi learned later that it had been Mrs. Ling’s idea to let them stay.

  When the first cold night of the autumn hit, Mrs. Ling offered to let them stay every night in the garage, in exchange for housekeeping and as long as they were gone during the day. Also, they were allowed occasional use of the shower and laundry. To the homeless girls, this was the greatest generosity imaginable. Though the garage was not heated, it was shelter from the wind and rain, and they were able to gather enough blankets to insulate themselves from the cold. For the consistency and privacy, it was an improvement over the shelters.

  All the while, Gi worked actively on her English and continued her studies at the library. She absorbed books on algebra, trigonometry, and geometry. She explored calculus and chaos and the mathematical principles behind the concepts of physics. She loved how numbers could be used to describe and predict the concrete world, and in that she found a bridge that helped her explain and validate her own existence to herself. She was real, numerically consequential, a vehicle with mass and velocity and substance.

  Strength slowly returned to Cho. She fidgeted less and nearly stopped mumbling to herself. Without money she could not buy cigarettes, and eventually she stopped craving them. Gi hoped to see more of the old Cho come back, with her snappy comments and fearless attitude; but she seemed now permanently subdued, as if she were happy to be invisible. Regardless, Gi was grateful for her companionship.

  83

  GI HAD BEEN AWAY from the brothel for nearly a year and a half, and her quest to find Il-sun had been almost entirely replaced by the quest to improve her own life. The odds of finding Il-sun now seemed improbable, though she still kept her eyes sharp. She had done many double-takes, thinking she had seen Il-sun out of the corner of her eye, but it was never her.

  One evening Gi and Cho were walking through the International District, on their way to clean the restaurant, when they passed two women speaking Korean. They were dressed like prostitutes, in short skirts and stiletto heels, but it was not always easy to tell: Sometimes women just dressed like that in America. As they went by, Gi thought she could detect the unmistakable Chosun accent when one of them spoke.

  “Excuse me, are you Chosun?” Gi asked, incredulous. She had not met anyone from North Korea since arriving in Seattle, and she did not expect that she ever would.

  The women stopped and gave a wary stare. Then one of them shrugged and nodded.

  “So are we,” said Gi. There was another guarded pause as the women sized each other up.

  “How did you get here?” asked the woman, finally.

  “That’s a long story,” replied Gyong-ho.

  The woman chuckled, and then nodded. How could it be anything but a long story?

  “We’ve been looking for a friend of ours. She’s Chosun. Her name is Il-sun, but she also goes by Daisy. Do you know her?”

  “We know a Daisy,” said the other woman. She spoke with a Hanguk accent. She was apparently glad to be part of a mystery solved; but then her face fell. Something had made her uncomfortable. The Chosun woman elbowed her: It would be in her nature to want to hide information—anyone could be an informer for the secret police. Gi and Cho understood her reticence all too well.

  “You do?” Gi had only asked out of habit, and expected the usual negative response. She could not believe what she had heard.

  The other women looked at each other, but remained silent.

  “She is my friend from childhood. We lost track of her, and I have been worried sick. If you know anything about her, or where I can find her, please, please tell me.” Gi could not keep the note of pleading out of her voice.

  “We know where they took her,” the Chosun woman said, finally.

  “Who is ‘they’? Where?”

  “Pill hill,” the Hanguk woman said in English.

  “Pill hill?” repeated Cho.

  “She means First Hill, where the hospitals are,” said Gi. “What’s wrong with her? Is she alright?”

  “It doesn’t look good.”

  “Whe
re can we find her? Which hospital?”

  The women shrugged and walked away without another word.

  84

  GYONG-HO AND CHO SPENT most of a day trying to locate Il-sun. They walked all over First Hill, going to the hospitals and speaking with unhelpful receptionists and harried nurses. Finally Gi realized that there was confusion with Il-sun’s name: Korean names are typically given with the family name first, followed by the personal name. The person who admitted Il-sun made the mistake of thinking Park was her first name and Il-sun was her family name, and noted it that way on her chart.

  Once they established which hospital Il-sun was in, they had to convince an ill-tempered nurse to allow them in to see her. She insisted that only next of kin were permitted on the terminal ward. Eventually she went off duty, and her replacement proved to be less of a stickler for the rules.

  Gyong-ho and Cho were not prepared for the sight of her. There was no question that she was dying. She was emaciated and her hair had thinned to the point where her scalp was visible. She had sores and bruises festering here and there on her papery, pallid skin. Her breathing was rough and shallow, and she went into coughing fits that seemed powerful enough to break her frail-looking bones. She had tubes going up her nose and poking into her arms. She was completely wasting away. Even so, when they walked into her room she lightened considerably, even managing to smile.