But there was something about the way she said it that felt off—the emphasis was on the “you.” I chalked it up to a snag in translation. “Ya, he’s the lucky one,” I said.
But Monica did not match my joking tone. “You know who is Changhoon father, right?”
“I think he does something for Sinnara?” I still didn’t know exactly what his father did. I think I was mostly grateful he never pried about mine.
“But . . .” She lowered her voice. “They okay, who you are?”
My skin prickled at where this conversation was headed. I forced my voice to go light. “If this is about my Choco Pie addiction, I swear I getting help. . . .”
Monica’s face tightened. There was a flash of something—anger? annoyance? feeling tap-tap-hae?—before her expression became blank and unreadable. It reminded me of the way the hostess at Dosirak had sized up Sang and the rest of us disapprovingly.
This wasn’t how I’d pictured our conversation. We were supposed to whoop about the engagement, the flowers, the dresses, the honeymoon. Wasn’t that what friends did?
I switched to English. “There something you want to say to me?”
Immediately a different look darted across Monica’s face—fear. Then it was gone. Her expression flooded with its usual friendliness. “Ah, nothing. I was just think—” She corrected herself. “Just thinking, maybe Jane Teacher needs some help planning. Anyway, I’m so happy for you!” She smiled. It was painfully forced.
Monica was right: I was lucky. But I was also right: Changhoon was lucky, too.
* * *
Sang, too, was not exactly thrilled with the news of my engagement to Changhoon. This was a blow, because I’d taken it as a given that Sang would approve of our union. I was getting married to a Korean; he wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore. Instead he grew quiet. Thinking the phone line had gone dead, I called out “Hello, hello!” until Sang finally said, “How long you know him?” I told him a little more than a year. “Who he is?” he asked. “What kind of character he has?”
I gave Sang a rundown of Changhoon’s jogun—conditions and qualifications. It read like a résumé:
• He graduated from Yonsei—the Yale of Korea.
• He worked for Sinnara—the combined GM/IBM/GE/ Walmart of Korea.
• He came from an excellent family. (Apparently Emo, as well as Monica, had done some snooping.)
• He was ambitious.
• He was organized; he made prodigious use of spreadsheets.
• He was smart.
• He was kind.
• He was age-appropriate.
• Oh, and he was tall.
I added one more item, in my head: He wasn’t married. As I ran through the jogun, I couldn’t help but compile a second, simultaneous list. And by all objective measures, Ed Farley came up short.
“When your wedding gonna be?” Sang asked.
“I’m meeting his parents next week. Then, after that, I guess we’ll figure out a date. Changhoon wants to get married before the spring.” As I spoke, I remembered Nina’s comment about getting the job interview. I promptly dismissed it.
“So I guess you staying.”
“Looks like it.”
Sang cleared his throat. “Uncle probably should sending your stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“You forget already? Everything you leaving behind your old boss house in Brooklyn.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Sorry.”
“I thought no point Uncle sending because waste of money, when you just coming back home anyway,” he said. “But now you not.”
“No,” I said. “Now I’m not.”
Sang fell quiet again. The rhythms of our speech were off, out of sync.
When he started up again, he said, “They ask about you. I tell them you fine.”
“Who?”
“Lady boss and little Chinese girl. She getting big. The husband, he not there.”
I wondered if Ed was still in upstate New York, as Nina had mentioned. But I knew better than to ask Sang.
“That neighborhood, change a lot. More American people.”
I knew what he meant. American like Beth. Not American like Ed or Nina. And certainly not black.
“Uncle old store, Smith Street? Now sushi restaurant. Around the corner they building new construction. Condos. Who gonna buy when projects down the street?”
I was growing exasperated with my uncle’s digressions. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”
“Happy? Why happy?” He sounded genuinely confused.
Finally I burst, “Uncle, I’m getting married!”
“Why I gonna be happy, when you make decision out of impulse?” And like that, Sang’s tone snapped to impassioned, angry. “Better you take more time, think responsibility. But you doing only what your heart wants!”
Marrying Changhoon is the responsible thing! I longed to shout back. Couldn’t he see? That responsibility was the sole impetus behind every major decision I’d ever made: choosing Baruch over Columbia, double-majoring in accounting and finance, applying for a job at Lowood, fleeing Ed? If I had done only what my heart wanted, I would have chosen to be with Ed—consequences be damned. But my uncle knew nothing of my heart.
Sang went on. “You always like this, since you was the child. You say, ‘I want to run away, becoming baby-sitter! I want to run away, living Korea!’ People not suppose to do like that. What you choose not gonna be easy for you. But anyway, is your life now.”
Sang seemed to have made up his mind about the kind of person I was. I knew that none of my actions—past, present, future—would ever change his perception of me. “You don’t know anything about me,” I told him.
Sang let out a chuh of disbelief. “You, too.”
It was one of his classic comeback lines, his way of wedging in the last word. But whether he’d meant I knew nothing about him or that I, too, knew nothing of myself was unclear. At any rate there wasn’t much left to say.
“Will you make it to the wedding?” I asked him.
“Maybe, maybe not. Timing not so good right now, Uncle business.”
“Well then . . . I guess we’ll be in touch.”
And with that, Sang and I hung up.
“I just don’t understand him!” I muttered on my way back to the kitchen, where Emo, squatting on her haunches, was pickling cabbage on the newspaper-lined floor. Ever since the proposal, she’d been intent on teaching me how to cook. She looked up at my sudden outburst, the intrusion of English.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“It’s just . . . tap-tap-hae.” I relented. “So sorry. I know it’s not respectful to say.”
Emo said, “I always felt a little sorry for American Uncle. Your grandfather was always so hard on him.” Her eyes darted to the front door before continuing. “Much harder on him than on Big Uncle, if you ask me. I used to overhear fights between your grandfather and Big Uncle. Right after Big Uncle got married to that crazy fox-woman. He said, ‘Why don’t you show noryuk like your younger brother? It should be the other way around.’”
Noryuk. Effort. Diligence. Follow-through. “American Uncle had gotten into Seoul National. He was all ready to go up to Seoul when your grandfather told him he was sending him to America instead. And not to study.” I asked why. “In case everything here went belly-up, I think. You never knew in those days.”
It could have been the language of business. Re Myungsun was hedging his bets or diversifying his investment portfolio. Which meant Sang had been his father’s Plan B.
“And American Uncle, he never came back. Not until your grandfather’s death.” Emo shook her head with pity. “He’s been away for too long.”
I asked Emo why my grandfather had sent American Uncle away instead of Big Uncle. It didn’t ma
ke sense to me. Why cast off the one you thought was better and had more follow-through? Why not keep that son beside you and send the son you thought less of far away?
“Didn’t you hear a word I said to you?”
Emo was still crouched as she spoke. It always amazed me how long she could hold that pose—the kids at church called it the “kimchi squat”—without tiring. I couldn’t stay on my haunches longer than a minute before pins and needles started shooting through my legs.
“It takes a certain kind of person to go through immigration. You get broken. Only the strongest can put themselves back together again. But even then . . .” Emo, still balancing, pried open the leaves of a cabbage head and sprinkled them with fistfuls of salt. “Even then you can never return to what you were before.”
I asked her what Sang had felt when my grandfather had ordered him away. Again Emo gave me a look like she thought I was a babo. “What could he feel? That was the way things were back then. Parents ordered and children obeyed. No back talk, no questions asked. Not like this young generation, that only seems to do whatever they want.”
She handed a cabbage head to me, and I followed suit: packing the salt into its tender leaves.
“But anyway! We shouldn’t be talking about sad things,” she said. “We have much, much happier things to focus on. Like your proposal! Well, I guess it’s not official-official until the parents give permission. Oh, Jane-ah! You know why I’m so happy, right?”
“Because you were scared I become ‘Old Miss’ and now no more worry?”
“No, no, not that. I never worried about that. I’m happy because now I won’t have to guard my heart anymore, thinking you’ll up and leave me for America. I’m happy because you’ve returned home to Korea. For good.”
After the salt leached the excess water from the cabbage, I helped Emo drain the heavy bucket. Carefully we rinsed each wilted cabbage head three times. Her words were still sinking in. My heart was torn. Here, in Korea, I made a connection I had always felt was missing my whole life and had now found with Emo. She was the mother I’d never had. But I also knew that her other words also rang true: If I stayed here, I could never return to what I was before.
* * *
The next morning I got into my usual blouse, skirt, and stockings. I sat at my vanity table; the reflection in the mirror sighed back at me. I spun open a jar of cream foundation. Dipped my sponge in, but I was down to the last “schmear” (one of Beth’s words). I’d have to borrow some of Emo’s.
I reached for her vanity drawer, bracing myself for the jumble of chaos that was bound to be inside; Emo tended to hoard things, stashing them out of sight. (I learned this when I stumbled upon the bakery box of Nina’s chocolate cookies in the linen closet, half nibbled and growing stale.) I pulled on the drawer but was met with resistance. I gave the drawer handle a firm yank, and instead of the clack-clack of glass or plastic bottles hitting wood, I heard a rustling, like the sound made by a wedged piece of paper. I got on my hands and knees and carefully removed the drawer from its tracks. Out tumbled a downpour of mostly empty tubes and bottles. They clattered to the floor, rolling off in all directions, but my attention was focused on the impediment: a crinkled envelope that had been taped to the outside of the back of the drawer. It had come loose, flapping free like a barn door.
I hesitated. This was obviously some private letter or other. Emo had gone to so much trouble to hide it—was it my right to snoop? I remembered the short-lived period in the fifth grade when I had kept a diary. “I hate Sang and Hannah! They’re so mean! This house feels like a gulag!” (We’d just finished up a unit on the Cold War in social studies.) “I’m going to run away and go find my real dad and live with him!” Hannah had found the diary, which I’d hidden in a shoe box tucked under the far side of the bed, against the wall. Which meant she’d gotten on her hands and knees and reached for the box with a broomstick. So ungrateful! she’d boomed, shaking my diary in the air. How dare you call us by our first names? Don’t you know how to show respect? I didn’t know whether she couldn’t understand the English past the first sentence or if in her anger she’d latched onto my first set of offenses. She’d handed the book to my uncle, who studied the words on the page. Then, tossing it casually onto the table, Sang turned to his wife and said, She wants to run away? Then let her go. But she’s a fool if she thinks for a second that her American father wants to take her back.
I held the envelope in my hands, debating what to do. But it felt thicker and stiffer than a letter, like photographs. What was Emo hiding?
Curiosity won out. I pried open the flap of the envelope.
Inside was a heavy, yellowed paper that had been folded over and over, as if someone had been trying to obscure its contents. Three brittle photos tumbled into my lap. One of a young couple. Another of two girls. But it was the third photo that hit me.
The man in that photo had a shock of rich brown hair—a color I would describe as all-American, a chestnut brown like the rich crests of the dads from TV sitcoms I watched while growing up. So, too, were his high cheekbones, cracking into a smile; the full bridge of his nose; and his strong jawline. His eyes I could not see at all—they were cast down at the bundle he cradled in his arms. I turned the picture over: Currer Bell and his daughter, Jane.
That bundle was me.
The photo slipped from my hands. I knelt in place, motionless. What to do? Tuck the photos away, pretend I never saw them? Confront Emo? Call Sang? Demand an explanation? But I could only fixate on the strewn makeup bottles, their irritating disorder. The photo, fluttering in the air like a fraught, suspended chord, dropped suddenly into my lap.
I felt a shadow in the doorway. Emo.
“Tsk, tsk, look at the mess you made!” She knelt to a squat and began corralling the bottles with a hasty sweep of her arms. She gathered them to her breast and dumped them wholesale into the drawer.
“Why are you just sitting there? Hurry-hurry!” She looked over at me, and she must have seen my blank, faraway expression. Then her eyes fell on the photo in my lap.
Disgust shot over Emo’s face, her inky eyebrows pinching into peaks.
“I know who that is,” I said in a steely tone.
“Oh, that.” Emo was reaching for the photo. Her face righted; she forced air into her voice. “That’s just nobody.”
I was getting tired of her act. “Don’t call my father ‘just nobody’!”
My sharpness startled her; her hand froze in the air. I wasn’t good at expressing—or modulating—my anger. My han. It was always the first emotion that leaped from my gut and licked the back of my throat, although life—Sang—had taught me to swallow it back down.
But suppressing your emotions, forcing your face to go blank like a dry-erase board, that was tap-tap-hae. Why couldn’t I be like Nina? I envied her ability to open up, her emotions pouring out in unbridled, if unseemly, waves.
It was tiring, being kept in the dark.
Emo knew that I knew that the jig was up. “Yes, you’re right. That’s your father.” She sighed. The singsong quality had drained from her voice.
“How could you keep him secret from me?”
“Honestly, I didn’t really like him. Your father had no nunchi.”
“Why, because he didn’t fill your water glass first?” It was an insolent thing to say, but I couldn’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth.
“That was the least of it,” Emo tut-tutted. She took my father’s photo and stuck it back with the others, rearranging them into a tidy stack. “I only met him once. But we could all tell his character right away—he had no family education whatsoever. And then he took Big Sister away.”
Emo began the tale of how my mother had met my father. But as she spoke, a sharp bitterness suffused her story. It felt unfiltered and raw, so unlike her usual homespun tales. For once her words felt unrehearsed.
M
y mother had met my father—Currer Bell—while she was on a school-volunteer work trip down in the countryside of Jeolla province. That was where my father had been stationed. When she returned to Seoul, they continued a lively correspondence—so lively that she invited him home to Busan for the Chuseok holidays.
Every year Emo could hardly contain her excitement for the harvest holiday, because my mother would play with her and her friends and help her study for exams. That year, however, her excitement was tempered by the arrival of this “foreigner friend.”
“Who was this man? Big Sister said he had no family. He’d come here on some government ‘voluntary peace mission’ trip. Father was so busy trying to earn a living he failed to make the proper inquiries. Big Brother was already married to that crazy wife of his. Big Brother Number Two was long gone in America.”
And so my grandfather, thinking the man was just a poor foreigner with nowhere to go for the holidays, gave him a warm welcome, complete with a banquet table so laden with food that its legs threatened to collapse. This I found hard to picture. But apparently my grandfather had a soft spot for the Americans—when he fled the North Korean army for Busan, they’d helped him along the way. They were generous with their food and supplies. Perhaps my grandfather thought he could return the favor in some small fashion.
“That man was insufferable,” Emo said. “He and Father began to talk politics. I couldn’t follow everything they were saying—I was just a child, and also his Korean was terrible—but I remembered thinking how he should have just sat there quiet like a proper guest. Instead he had the gall to tell Father how he would reform our country. Him! A foreigner! Who did he think he was? Swooping in and expecting everyone to treat him like he was so special.
“I kept looking over at Big Sister, to see if she would stop it. Maybe nudge her ‘foreigner friend’ to shut up. But the whole time she kept staring up at him all moony-eyed. Like she was grateful. Big Sister should have taken Father’s side. It was the worst kind of betrayal.
“Finally Father shouted at that man, ‘It’s just your kind of thinking that split our land in two!’
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