Sad Peninsula

by Mark Sampson

  “I shouldn’t have called you so late at night — and in the state I was in.”

  “No, it’s fine. I shouldn’t have stayed away for so long. I have been struggling, Ji-young, to know how to handle all of this. I’m not sure what you need, what any of the family needs from me, or where I fit in. I spoke to Jin-su after the funeral and she said —”

  Ji-young turned her face up suddenly. “Eun-young, I need to speak.”

  Eun-young fell silent, and Ji-young went on.

  “I know there are aspects of your life that I will never know about. You have endured things that I can’t even comprehend. All my life, I have looked up to you. I know how lucky I was, not to have gone through what you did. Everything I’ve been blessed with is a result of me being born five years after you. I know that. I know that whatever strife I have had in my life pales in comparison to yours. But Eun-young, I have lost my daughter. And I will not measure my pain against yours. It is not something one can measure. But it is my pain, Eun-young. And I need to speak it — to you.”

  “Speak,” Eun-young said.

  And so Ji-young did. She sipped her tea and spoke of Tae. Spoke of the enriching childhood she had tried to give her despite their joyless poverty throughout the fifties and sixties. Spoke of the reflection back to Ji-young of what Tae became as she grew older — suddenly obsessed with marriage and bearing children, the stones of obligations she would need to carry as a Korean woman. “I told her stories of my own desires for a family,” Ji-young said. “I told her: ‘Here I was, a girl of seventeen or eighteen, and my country was being ripped apart by war — and all I could think about was finding a man to marry and having his children.’ Do you remember, Eun-young? Of course you do. I was obnoxious!” She spoke of how Tae had taken those same ambitions and warped them into something Ji-young could not approve of: a fixation on status, on what the neighbours thought, on her obsessions with social climbing and how Jin-su and Bum Suk were to be educated. It all seemed out of touch with everything Ji-young knew about how the world really worked. She had tried to steer Tae away from those hollow pits of materialism, the wealth she demanded of Minsu, the gadgetry she was always accumulating, the immense pressure she put on her children, to say to her: Look at what your aunt went through — do you honestly think any of this matters so much? But there were disappointments in Tae’s life that Ji-young just couldn’t get her to shake: the constant fights with Jin-su about how she should live her life; the stress she put on Minsu to climb the corporate ladder; the initial displeasure she showed (later reversed) when Bum Suk asked to study culinary arts in America. By the end, their house seemed saturated in conflict, to the point where Ji-young could hardly bear to visit. It was like Tae had a perpetual scowl branded onto her face. “I know her childhood had been hard. We had been so poor for so long. And I know that it bred these fears, these horribly shallow fixations of hers. But what? What? I wanted to scream at her. We all suffer hardships in our lives. I came to learn that my sister — you, dear Eun-young — was a sex slave for the Japanese. I watched our mother die of a heart attack when she was just thirty-nine. I watched our country torn apart and its fate decided by foreigners. It happened before my eyes. I always wanted to say to her: What is it in you, Tae, that makes you the way you are? We all suffer hardships. But eventually we learn a terrible truth about our lives. We learn that soon, the source of our unhappiness stops being about the traumatic things that happened, and starts being about how we’ve failed to deal with them. That’s what I should have told her, but I never did. It was really the only wisdom I could give her. But she died before I thought enough to speak it.”

  Her sister’s words left Eun-young shaking. A spasm she struggled to contain, to hide. She set her teacup down on the table but it upended with a rattle from her quavering. The spilt tea rushed to the raised edge of the cherry wood and spread like fingers. Reflexively, Ji-young reached out for the mess but Eun-young seized her by the hand. Her grip was fierce, the fist it made convulsing.

  “Say it again.”

  “What?”

  “Your wisdom — your wisdom to Tae. Say it again.”

  Ji-young rolled her eyes upward, as if trying to remember exactly what she had said. “How did it go? Oh yes. The source of our unhappiness stops being about the terrible things that happened to us and starts being about our failures to deal with them. The wrong choices we make to get beyond our traumas — that is what really makes us sad.” She chuckled a little. “I should put it in a fortune cookie.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Eun-young, please. I should go get a cloth to clean this up.”

  Eun-young let her go and Ji-young climbed to her feet to go to the kitchen. While she was gone, Eun-young pulled herself completely inside her own mind. A mind that was suddenly hemorrhaging. She thought of Po, rotting away in that house in Pusan for nineteen years, pining for the wife who abandoned him. She thought of herself, living in stubborn solitude in her basement apartment with mould growing on the walls. And then she thought of Kim Hak Soon, the very first comfort woman to come forward, and the bravery she showed to tell her story in the hopes that it would change everything.

  Ji-young came back with a cloth and began dabbing away at the spilt tea until it was gone. Just as she finished, they heard the apartment door open and Chung Hee come in. He set his keys down noisily on the chest of drawers in the living room and then called out for his wife.

  “We’re in here,” Ji-young yelled back.

  “We?” he asked as he came in to the sunroom, and saw Eun-young sitting on his floor. He stared at her blandly, his cheeks sinking a little.

  “Hello, Chung Hee,” she said.

  “So you finally decided to pay us a visit, did you?”

  “Yes, finally.” She looked up at him in his tweed cap and collared shirt, his Confucius beard gray with age. Very much the Korean gentleman.

  Ji-young, sensing this brief tension, tugged at her husband’s pant leg. “How was the park?” she asked.

  And then Chung Hee did a strange thing. He laughed a little, his shoulders heaving.

  “What’s so funny?” Ji-young asked.

  “Oh, I really do need to tell you this,” he said, sitting himself down next to them. “Ji-young, do you remember that young guy I was telling you about, the one the boys and I met at the park that time? Ho Su is his name.” He turned to Eun-young. “He’s maybe forty years old. A decent enough man. He works for government, and I must tell you he speaks and reads English perfectly. Anyway, he was there again today. And he told us all the most hilarious story. He got it from an American novel he had just finished reading. He’s always reading American novels.”

  “What’s the story?” Ji-young asked, curious.

  “It was about this young couple on their wedding night,” he replied. He turned to Eun-young again. “I hope you won’t mind me telling this. It’s a bit racy. Stop me if you think I’m going to offend you. But it was about these young newlyweds, very much in love, who both came to their wedding night as virgins. After their wedding, which was in New York City, they got a room in one of the best hotels in town. A honeymoon suite way up on the thirtieth floor or something, with a great view of Manhattan. It was a stifling summer night, so they opened the room’s big windows to let some cool air in. After they did, the young bride went into the bathroom and closed the door to prepare herself for, you know …” He chuckled. “Oh, it is rather morbid. I don’t know if I should tell you.”

  “Go on.” Ji-young smiled.

  “So while his new wife is in the bathroom, the young man gets very excited, dancing around the room and throwing his arms in the air. He is, after all, about to lose his virginity to the woman he loves. In his enthusiasm, he climbs onto the hotel bed and begins jumping up and down on it. Imagine this: a young guy, maybe twenty-three, and he knows he’s about to make love for the first time. He’s so excited, and he’s jumping up and down on the bed, higher and higher, as if it were a trampoline — so exc
ited, so excited! He’s jumping higher and higher, like a little boy. And then he jumps so high that he loses control of his jumping, and he leaps clean out of the open windows and falls —” Chung Hee’s eyes were watering now. “— and falls thirty stories to his death!”

  Eun-young watched her sister. Ji-young had placed a hand over her mouth.

  “So of course,” Chung Hee said, barely able to continue, “a few minutes later the blushing bride comes out of the bathroom, wearing some kind of gaudy lingerie, looks around the empty room, and thinks, Where the hell did my husband go?” Chung Hee had nearly keeled over now.

  Eun-young was still staring at her sister, waiting for her to move her hand away, waiting to see the reaction underneath. Her eyes gave away no clues. When Ji-young did lower her hand, Eun-young saw a mouth shaped into a little O of joy. The way her brow had loosened, the way her shoulders moved, she could tell that Ji-young had, for just that instant, forgotten her grief. Had allowed herself to partake in this brief moment of silliness.

  “Oh Chung Hee, that’s a terrible story,” Ji-young laughed. “It’s a terribly hilarious story.”

  They both turned to look at Eun-young. A little worried that this talk of sex and death and a ruined opportunity had upset her.

  She surprised them both. She surprised herself. “That is an amusing story,” she said, feeling her lips curl upward into a smile.

  Chapter 22

  This is how I’m dealing with the past. By putting one word in front of the other, this thing I once tried so hard to do, this act of aggression against the page, vandalizing it with my thoughts, my voice, my words, my perspective. It’s indecent, it’s arrogant, it’s an act of thievery and narcissism. That’s why I was so terrible at it. I couldn’t muster enough egotism to do it properly. I balked under the responsibility of stealing stories and claiming them as my own. I did not inherit my mother’s pristine self-absorption the way my sister did. I was always the quiet, rumpled guy in the corner who spoke little and was afraid to ask the tough questions. It all seemed like robbery to me. I failed at it; I failed spectacularly. But now, here, on the other side of the world, I’m putting one word in front of the other. I’m crafting a story that doesn’t belong to me. I’m taking these horrific leaps of faith, extrapolating on things I barely understand, filling in the blanks with my imagination, everything I was taught not to do.

  And I’m loving every minute of it.

  Paul sees me in the grip of my little project and thoroughly approves. He’s convinced that this book, or whatever it is, has been given to me by divine intervention. He lives vicariously through my enthusiasm. I get up and work in my room with the door closed in those slow morning hours before we need to report to the hagwon in the early afternoon. Paul’s role, which he embraces happily, is to pass by my room at that precise moment when, if I don’t stop I’ll make us both late, and knock on my door, once, a single thump of his knuckle that yanks me out of my head and tells me it’s time to go. I sign off and go shower, get dressed and gather up my lesson plans and half-marked essays, and then we’re off, out into the grey winter streets of Daechi with its Hangul signage and red crosses. On those walks to the school, Paul puts me at ease to share with him what I’m working on, and I do, telling him things that I don’t even tell Jin. The reason I’m so open with Paul is because he’s so open with me. I learn it’s been five years since he was “saved” and he hasn’t looked back. Every thought, every plan, everything he does now is varnished in the gleam of Christ, and he sees his new life, everything that he’s been given, as “awesome” — awesome in the truest sense of the word. He is struck with awe. “God’s love and purpose is so awesome,” he says. He’s not trying to evangelize my soul, at least not intentionally. He’s just so excited by his life’s new course. And I find that, on our walks to school, I can tell him about myself and my project: what I’m learning about the Korean identity, the rape camps in China, what Eun-young would have gone through, all the things that the Japanese did. Paul can relate to how a newfound obsession can bring desperately needed focus.

  Christmas comes and goes, New Years comes and goes, and on a smoggy-grey day in late January, a package arrives from Canada. The University of Ottawa. I am in! I had no doubts at all. With this news, my days of slinging English at the hagwon already begin to feel like the past, like they belong to somebody else. I talk to Ms. Kim about my contract. She asks if I’ll stay on until May. I agree. I email Justin in Halifax and tell him the good news. He emails me back, excited for me, and offers what I had hoped he’d offer: to put Jin and me up for the summer until we move to Ottawa. Justin has some news of his own: he has resumed his full-time teaching job at his old high school, and he has also begun dating somebody. Has fallen in love for the first time in forever. His emails radiate a kind of excitement and hope that I didn’t think possible of him. He’s turned a corner. He writes and says as much. “Life isn’t perfect, but it’s good,” he writes.

  I couldn’t agree more. I imagine my life nine months from now and grow lightheaded. I will be a student for the first time in ten years, studying to be a proper teacher. I will also be spending my free time working on a book about the comfort women of Korea. And I will be living with Jin, and we’ll begin planning our lives together. Of course she will be lonely at times and long for Seoul. We will squabble. There will be days when I’m frustrated with being a student again — studying, being theoretical about everything, not earning money, surrounded by people younger and less experienced than me. And there will be days when I doubt that I can even write a book, when putting one word after the other seems so hard, so impossible, the most impossible thing in the world to do. Life will not be perfect. But it will be good. It will be better than good. It will be — what’s the word?

  It will be awesome.

  “May seems a bit early,” Jin says when I tell her about my contract talks with Ms. Kim. We’re having lunch together at a diner near the school. I was late arriving to meet her, couldn’t yank myself out of the book in time, and she stood out in the February cold waiting for me. Now, even with our food here, she still seems cold. She shivers each time the diner door opens as another group of patrons come in.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, chopsticking some bean sprout into my mouth.

  “Michael, my father’s birthday is in June,” she replies. “I’d really like to be around for that.” She’s barely touched her own lunch, a dish of kimchi bokembop. It sits on its oval plate in a greasy mass of orange that she moves listlessly around with her spoon.

  “I don’t have to go in May,” I say. “I mean, my job will wrap up then, but I could stick around Seoul for a month or two after that.”

  “And do what? Michael, where would you live?”

  “I don’t know,” I say honestly. “Maybe a love motel. I could —”

  “For two months?” She shakes her head. “You’re crazy. Every day you stay in Seoul without work will cost you thousands of won that you should be saving for school. No, you should definitely go home in May. Especially if Justin has offered to put you up for the summer.”

  He’s offered to put us up for the summer. “All right,” I sigh. “So what, then? Tell me how it’s going to work, Jin.”

  Her bottom lip comes out and I watch her downcast eyes. She’s thinking hard. “Maybe I’ll fly to Canada later, by myself. I could come in July.”

  “So we’d be apart for two months.”

  “I don’t know what else to do. Michael, you have to understand how big this is for me. I talked to my managers about working remotely from Canada. They said absolutely not. And now that I’ve brought up the idea of quitting on them, they’ve put me in their — how you say — bad radar.”

  “What difference does it make?” I ask. “Jin, if five months from now you’re going to be living with me in Canada, who cares what they think of you now?”

  “You don’t understand. You’ve been through this before, but I haven’t. I don’t know what it’s like to le
t go of one life and completely embrace another. My future has never been open-ended, Michael. Not once. You have to know how hard it’ll be for me to buy a one-way plane ticket to some place called Halifax.”

  “Look, if this is about work, don’t worry. I have savings, you have savings. We’re going to be fine.”

  “It’s not about work,” she mumbles.

  “And it’s not about your father’s birthday, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it, Jin?”

  She says nothing. Scoops a little bokembop into her mouth. Shivers again as the diner door opens for another group of hungry Koreans.

  “Jin, do you want to come to Canada?” I ask for the thousandth time.

  “I’m scared to come to Canada.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  She glances over to another table, where two middle-aged Korean women are sitting by the window overlooking the street. Their faces are old and harsh-looking. They’re leaning in to each other.

  “You see those two a’jumah over there?” Jin says sotto voce. “They’ve been staring at us since we sat down.”

  “Really?” I say, turning.

  “Don’t look.” She licks her lips. “They’re talking about us under their breath. They don’t like us. They don’t like me sitting here having lunch with a foreign man.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Jin, this is Daechi. There are English hagwons on every corner. They probably see mixed couples sitting together all the time.”

  “Doesn’t mean they like it,” she says.

  “Can we stay on topic, please?”

  “No. They’re making me uncomfortable. Can we leave?”

  “Fine.”

  I pay our bill and then we get up to go, leaving our half-finished lunches behind. On the way, Jin halts at the women’s table. They stop talking and look at her, a little bashful, unaware that she had caught snippets of their conversation. I double back and take her by the wrist.