If You Leave Me

by Crystal Hana Kim

  “Oh.” Sookja pushed me aside. She picked up an egg lolling on the counter and strode to Haemi. Neither of them spoke as Sookja held the egg to Haemi’s cheek with a softness I didn’t understand.

  “What are you doing?” I tried to ask, my voice cracking out half the words. Sookja shifted in front of me so I couldn’t see them. “What’s going on?”

  I stood there, watching them murmur to each other.

  Finally, Sookja picked up the fallen scratcher, placed it on the counter by the lamp. She didn’t meet my gaze and spoke only to Haemi. “I should go. Good night.”

  We listened to the back door close, and then we were alone. I wished Haemi would yell or cry or hit me. She stood still, the egg in one hand.

  “I didn’t mean what I said.” I moved toward her. “I’m drunk and I’m stupid. Nuna?”

  I wanted to hold her, to tell her I was sorry. Her wet face looked strange, almost swollen, as if she’d been crying for years, as if she were someone else. I wanted to touch her cheek, the way Sookja had done.

  Haemi stepped back, her hand a blade in the air between us. “You think you’re so smart, but you don’t know anything. You, Hyunki,” she said, slow and precise, “you—weren’t worth this life.”

  She turned and left. Tiny, hunched over, belly hidden from my view.

  Alone, I picked up the scratcher and raked it across my hand and tried to understand. The hardened husk left red marks across my palm.

  The next morning, dense clouds cloaked the sun and sky. I folded and refolded my clothes, ate two bowls of rice, and finished all the vegetable dregs of my stew. I looked around for Haemi, but she wasn’t in the kitchen or the dining room. By leaving time, I still hadn’t seen her. Mother called from the front yard, prodding me to hurry before I missed the bus.

  In the common room, Jisoo held Jieun in his good arm as Solee tugged on his right leg. I wondered if Haemi had told him about our fight, if he’d berate me before I left. He grimaced at the girls’ high chatter but smiled when he saw me. “That was a fun last outing. Are you feeling all right?”

  I nodded. “I have a headache.”

  “Me too.” He laughed. “You’ll be great in Seoul, you know that? You’ll fit right in.” He shook my hand. “You ready to go?”

  Jieun squeezed Jisoo’s ears. “Daddy, you stay today?”

  “Say goodbye to Uncle first,” he said.

  “Bye for only a little while,” I added. “I’ll come back.”

  “I’ll miss you,” Solee said, and hid her face in Jisoo’s pants when I tried to hug her. Jieun didn’t understand. She bowed her head dutifully and again asked Jisoo to stay home.

  “Don’t let Mother worry you. We’re in the Second Republic now. A parliamentary system, the way it should have been since the beginning. I’m jealous of all the fun you’ll have.” Jisoo thumped my shoulder, his mind already drifting toward matters that didn’t relate to me. “You should go before the bus leaves.”

  I looked out the front door. Mother stood alone. “Have you seen Nuna?”

  He squeezed Jieun’s narrow face left and right, like a puppet. “Nope. I woke up and she was gone. Right, Jieun?”

  “Hyung.” I shifted my bag between my hands, feeling panicked all of a sudden at its weight. “I haven’t seen her. I kind of argued with her last night.”

  Jisoo breathed out his nose. “Then we both did. She’s probably mad, hiding somewhere.” He set Jieun down next to Solee, ignoring her protests, and shook my hand. “I have work. I’ll see you soon.”

  I shepherded the girls to their room, hoping to find Haemi there. I wanted to apologize, to ask for her forgiveness. She wasn’t there.

  “Where’s your mommy?” I asked.

  “She said I have to watch Jieun until you leave. She went walking.” Solee cuddled Jieun. “I’m being a good sister.”

  “She said that?” I searched the room for any sign of where she might have gone. I’d been drunk and mean, but how many hateful words had she thrown at me in the past months? I always let her taunts slide off. I never held her words against her.

  “Will you visit soon?” Solee asked.

  “Visit visit?” Jieun echoed.

  “Of course. In the meantime, I’ll send lots of treats and letters. Now, back to sleep.” I sang a song and they fell asleep quickly, the way only children can.

  Watching them clutch each other as they dreamed, I decided I would come back for the girls, but no longer for my sister. If she planned to hold a grudge and disappear on my last morning, if she was going to make me feel guilty for leaving, I could be that way, too. She wasn’t the only one.

  On the bus, I devoured Mother’s carefully packed gimbap without much chewing. Fingers slick with oil, I handled the slim box I’d found tucked inside my bag, between layers of shirts and pants. I almost ripped open the paper wrapping, thinking it was money. The seal stopped me.

  I watched as millet fields, rebuilt towns, mountains, and large patches of land still marked by the war passed by my window. I touched my seat’s frayed stitching, the clouded glass separating me from the world, my unsteady legs. I left a glistening trail of oily fingerprints.

  I held out as long as I could, and then—I tore open the box.

  Inside, a dragonfly lay pinned to a scrap of ramie cloth. Tiny, withered, preserved whole. The wings—sheer and netted, except for a darkened panel at the corners—felt like crystallized air.

  Kyunghwan

  1962

  The whiter, the better. I chased it like a restless dream. One year in sugar, three and a half in flour, another half in cotton, then the past three in paper. I knew how to work all the sections, but I liked the calenders best. They were simple. Two rollers leveled out the lumps until smooth and finished paper reeled toward you. After shit work, the creation of something so white and clean was enough.

  Donggeon and I sat next to the reel chewing on dried squid legs. His wife roasted them perfectly, until their suckers were burnt nobs. “Want to see a movie today?” he asked.

  “Which one?”

  “Does it matter?” Donggeon was twenty-seven, the same as me, but also a father with a movie obsession. He folded the squid leg into fourths against his tongue. “Farewell Duman River or the American one—West Side Story?”

  “I haven’t heard of either,” I said.

  “The posters are everywhere. You’re a bastard if you haven’t seen them.”

  “Still a bastard, then.”

  Donggeon sighed. “We’ve got a jam. Let’s lift the reel.” He climbed on top of the table and grabbed the chain that held the paper roll steady.

  “You know, I have heard of West Side Story,” I said. “Doesn’t it have all that singing and dancing?”

  “Yeah, so what?” His face reddened as he pulled the chain. The roll was heavy, but he always insisted that turning the wheel was the harder job. “Hurry up.”

  I checked the paper’s hardness and shoved the wheel’s stubborn handle with my feet. It turned tight and slow, the paper amassing into a thick, weighty spool. “I don’t want to watch a bunch of Americans singing about love,” I said. “I want something realistic.”

  He groaned as he always did when I turned disagreeable. “No movies for you, then.”

  I was a strange single man to him. To everyone I knew. I didn’t like movies except the few that had been released the year before, free of censorship, during our too brief Second Republic. I didn’t have a woman. I didn’t buy women. “Your dick still work?” Donggeon once asked when we were drunk. I hit him in the face and immediately felt ashamed. It was what Jisoo would have done.

  At the end of the workday, Donggeon tightened his cap. “If you change your mind, we’re going after dinner.” He slapped my back with affection, like an American, and left for the trams.

  I didn’t like movies, but I had my own obsession. I walked toward it, cutting through the city’s thrashing streets. Handcarts, horse-drawn carriages, military junta jeeps, trams, and automobiles crowded
the roads without order. The sounds of wooden wheels clattering underneath loads of cabbages, horses breathing in their high, animal way, gas exhaust dusting the pedestrians’ legs—these things comforted me. I wanted to fill myself with noise.

  At the eastern end of Seoul, where a clutch of paved roads widened into factories and upturned land, the activity quieted to the sounds of machinery and a public speaker spouting Military Revolutionary Committee slogans. We will rebuild our proud nation! We will eradicate corruption and return to a democratic government! I entered a garage attached to a tire factory. Unused and slightly defective tires were heaped everywhere. Uncle Park squatted in a rectangle of summer light coming from the open doors. A pile of discarded metal and engine parts lay before him.

  “I might get an exhaust today,” he said, with a quick glance.

  I pulled on my gloves and joined him. We’d already built a chassis, gotten tires from our friends next door, and attached a fork.

  He circled his fingers and motioned. “It’s this long. Good condition.” Uncle Park was fifty-five, widowed, and a father to one son, a lawyer, who’d survived the war. I didn’t know why he continued as a mechanic. Mostly he fixed trucks for deliveries, but on his own time he built motorcycles, and I tried to help.

  “You work on this.” He pointed to a salvaged rear spring. “I’ll keep wrestling with the engine.”

  As we worked, Uncle hummed to block out the slogans that filtered in from the street. “This military coup and their falsehoods. I don’t need excuses for what I know and see,” he said. “Park Chung-hee will take over and become a dictator, just as Rhee did.”

  I agreed, but I didn’t say this aloud. It was hard to trust any person’s political loyalty anymore. Instead, I concentrated on oiling the rear spring and attaching it to an arm. I wasn’t good or fast, but I was patient. I wanted to construct a machine with my own hands, one that was better and faster than me. We worked until a delivery boy knocked on the door.

  “Eat with me and go home,” Uncle said.

  The buckwheat noodles were chilled, chewy, mustard hot. They were the only thing I’d ever seen Uncle eat. He slurped without paying me much attention until most of his noodles were gone. Then he looked up. “My son’s getting married.”

  “That’s great news.” I swallowed. “Who was he matched with?”

  “Some woman he met himself. Lee Sunok is her name. She’s from here.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “You must be happy.”

  He trawled the broth with his chopsticks, looking for any last noodles. “She wears Western clothes and high heels.”

  I laughed. “So?”

  He clucked like an old grandmother. “It’s not what I’m used to. She’ll have to wear a hanbok for the wedding.”

  “I don’t think that’s the style anymore,” I said.

  “A father gets some say.” After finishing his broth, he watched as I ate. I was slow, a habit I couldn’t seem to break even now. “My son said he’d pay for your matchmaker.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked.

  “You work with me when he doesn’t want to. He’s feeling lucky now that he’s getting a wife. Who cares why? Take it. Tomorrow. It’s already scheduled.”

  I slurped my last noodle. “Why so soon?”

  Uncle stacked our empty bowls together and laid them by the door for the delivery boy to collect. “You’re getting old, that’s why. Bring your lineage papers.”

  As I walked home, I thought about his words. A matchmaker. It was common, traditional. I would be able to buy a house without suspicion. I would have someone to return to in the evenings. A woman to talk to when I woke in the middle of the night, aching with loneliness. Even so, the thought of a wife didn’t appeal to me anymore. I no longer belonged to anyone.

  Grandmother Song had left me rice, a bowl of spinach soup, and a kettle of tea in the kitchen. Even though I’d just eaten, I took my tray to the inner courtyard. The hanok where I lived was traditional, with the rooms laid out in a square. In the center, the courtyard was decorated with bushes, a small magnolia tree, and a planked wooden porch. I sat by the reading room I rented from the Songs and picked out the spinach leaves, chewing them one at a time. I watched the sky’s deep pinks and blues fighting for space. This darkening light was what I most enjoyed about summer.

  Across the courtyard, Aejung emerged from her room with her eating tray and a book. She bowed.

  “Studying?” I asked.

  She crossed and set her tray next to mine. “Mathematics. I don’t like it.”

  I flipped through the pages of her notebook. She had large, graceless handwriting. “I don’t think I learned this when I was your age,” I said.

  “It’s boring. Oh!” She snapped her fingers together like a girl in a movie. “I have something for you. Let me get it.”

  Aejung was beautiful in a youthful way. Sixteen and in high school, with a knapsack stuffed with short, colorful American clothes she wore after class. I’d caught her once in a printed skirt that showed her knees and she’d blushed, begged me not to tell. I had pretended to refuse, until the fury in her face made me laugh and lose my composure.

  I ate the leftover pork on her tray and tried to solve one of her math problems. She returned with an envelope. “A post came for you.”

  I took it and set it aside. “It’s probably the matchmaker. I’m meeting one tomorrow.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  I laughed. “Should I be attending church instead? Or seeing a shaman at temple?”

  She kneeled beside me, took her notebook, and balanced it on her head. “They make us do this for posture. We even get points.”

  “That sounds stupid.”

  “It is. Only the girls have to do it.” She made a face. “My parents plan to match me when I’m nineteen.”

  “You don’t want a love marriage like other girls your age?”

  She smiled. “Who said I’ll listen to them? They’re old world.” She poured tea from my kettle into her cup. “I’m going to get Oppa to fall in love. If he gets a love marriage, I get one, too.”

  “I don’t know about that. Sons usually get their way, don’t you think?”

  “We’ll see.” She drank her tea and fingered the letter. “Open it.”

  I did. It wasn’t from the matchmaker. It was from Haemi.

  Kyunghwan,

  I’ve gotten a job. Me, a middle-school failure, a housewife. It isn’t much of anything. I work in an orphanage in town. It’s where I’m writing you from, with a half-American child sleeping on my lap. I haven’t told Jisoo about my working yet, although he might know. I don’t have anyone to tell. Mother died earlier this year. It’s strange to even write those words. I expected it for years and yet I am stunned by her leaving. Hyunki is in Seoul now, in his last year of high school, about to enter college, and has no time for my small accomplishments. Everyone else in this town, I can’t bear.

  I’ve had three children. Three. And you haven’t met any of them. Solee is eight. Jieun, six. Mila, eighteen months. I haven’t told Jisoo because he will hate it. He will think I am choosing other children over my own. He will say it does not make sense. It’s true. Adoption is unthinkable, shameful. He will say I am working to spite him. Do you know why? There was a woman here at this orphanage he used to know. He kept an item of hers hidden among his belongings. A red hairpin. She left for America years ago. Some days, I stink with jealousy, convinced they had an affair. In my dreams, I riffle through her closet searching for an imaginary yellow dress. When I wake, I touch Jisoo as he sleeps and think, this lame-armed, calloused, darkened body is mine. She was sweet-looking in the way found animals seem sweeter for having once been lost. Bright with trust. With straight black hair that shone like it had been soaked in changpo. Other days, I don’t care at all. It makes me laugh aloud. The thought of jealousy passes by me, inconsequential, like death in a war. Like the impotent seeds from this year’s awful rice harvest. Like jealousy is a feeling that r
equires too much effort to have ever existed in my body.

  When Solee and Jieun are in school, I work at the orphanage with Mila toddling beside me. When they return, I leave Mila with them at our house. Is that terrible? Only for an hour so that I can help Grandmother Lee with dinner. I don’t want her to take the job from me because I cannot be there all the time. Sometimes, I bring the girls along. They play and try to give away their toys. Jieun picks fights, and I scold her. She is fierce, and I love her for it when I can. Mila is gentle and dreamy. My little artist. She floats, allowing her sisters to take up space with their need for attention. You’ll like Solee. She’s smarter than I was at her age.

  I’m not a good mother, but I try. How does it come so easily to some? The tending, the giving over of oneself to those who’ve come out of you. As if we women are nothing on our own.

  My mother was like that. Because I am stupid, uneducated, I didn’t see this when she was alive. How she was strict and unforgiving and calculating for us, everything for our protection. I pity her, the husk of a person she was, but I’m also grateful. Without her, we wouldn’t have survived the war. Without her, I would have married you, and we would have brawled with each other through our poverty. She knew better than to trust my judgment.

  Do you remember when we were eight and went in search of chestnuts? We climbed a tree and collected burrs in my hanbok skirt. We jumped from the lowest branch like flying squirrels, and I tripped and dropped the prickly things everywhere. My skirt ripped, so my thighs showed through, and I knew Mother would punish me for being a careless, rough girl. As I was whipped that night, I imagined you roasting chestnuts and eating them all on your own. That was jealousy.

  This letter is bulky, I know. It wanders and folds inward. It is ugly, and it is that way because I was not sure what I wanted to say to you when I began. How about this?

  It has been eleven years.

  If you write here, only I will find it.