“One hundred thousand won.”
One hundred thousand! Kyung-sook looked around wildly, as if there was money to be found for the picking in the office. She found herself looking at the curtain around the table. There were stains of dark blood, like pinpricks, sprayed on the fabric.
Kyung-sook ran headlong down the steep stairs into the street, where she retched into the gutter. When she looked up, saliva dripping from her chin, she saw Dr. Rhee in his second-floor window looking down at her.
“You stupid poji-cunt, Yankee shit-whore.” He shook his head, then slammed the window shut.
Kyung-sook went back to the restaurant. For some reason, the door was unlocked, but no one was there. No cook-owner, no Sunhee.
She had to think. Maybe the cook-owner could loan her the money. And maybe David could bring her to the foreigner’s clinic, so she wouldn’t have to face that terrible Dr. Rhee. She had to do it all soon, while she could still convince herself that the bulge in her belly was really not a baby, but an obstacle, the one obstacle lying between her and a new life in A-me-ri-ca.
She was so weary, she sat down and fell into a deep sleep in the back of the restaurant, and before she knew it, it was morning.
As soon as she awoke, she ran to David’s boarding house. Impatient, she slid open the rice-paper panel. The room was bare, except for a bucket and a rag sitting in the middle of the floor, a crumpled English-language Korea Herald in the corner.
Kyung-sook ran into the courtyard. There, the bent-over landlady was sweeping.
“Ajuhma,” she said to her.
“Don’t tell me you’re looking for your big-nose boyfriend,” she snorted, beginning to sweep more vigorously.
“I am.”
“Well, he flew the coop, Missy. Been gone since day before yesterday.”
Kyung-sook heard a noise, like a rushing wind. The sound of her past, present, and future flying away.
When she woke, she was under the covers in an unfamiliar room. The landlady came in with some cold barley tea and helped her to sit up while she drank it.
“That big-nose ran out on you, too?” she asked, then clicked her tongue in reproach. “That bastard nom owes me two months’ rent, which is nothing compared to what you—”
She stopped herself.
The landlady let Kyung-sook stay in the warm covers for another hour. Then her husband came home, and she said Kyung-sook had to leave.
Kyung-sook walked away, dazed, cupping her abdomen. The baby kicked right under her hand. Without thinking, she felt herself squeezing back with her palm.
Maybe it’ll be a boy, she mumbled to herself. A boy is still a boy, someone who could help her support her parents, then herself, in old age…
“Where have you been?” shrieked Sunhee.
“What do you mean?”
“The cook-owner is dead!”
Dead!
“Oh, it was horrible! They said she was returning from the market, and as she was crossing the street she was run over by one of the army trucks!”
“What?” said Kyung-sook.
“The soldiers, they just drove away. I stayed with her all night until I could finally get someone to help me bring her body back here to the restaurant. I was so upset I just drove all the customers away. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Kyung-sook thought she was going to retch again when she saw the cook-owner’s body laid out on the concrete floor of the storeroom where she used to sleep. Blood and dirt were matted into her hair. Sunhee had tried to nudge the body onto a mat, but the cook-owner, in death, had become like a rock and was impossible to move.
Kyung-sook sat, numbly.
“One of the customers said there’s some kind of rioting going on down south,” Sunhee babbled. “So the President declared a national emergency and sent the army into Seoul to keep order here. The streets are just crawling with soldiers and police.”
Kyung-sook just rocked back and forth, holding the bulge in her stomach in between her hands.
Sunhee hurriedly scrawled a sign saying “Closed because of death” and bolted the door.
“Are you just going to sit there?” she said to Kyung-sook. “When are you going away with the Westerner?” Kyung-sook didn’t answer her. The two of them sat in the restaurant all night, listening to the occasional roar of army trucks.
Early the next day, a young, well-dressed couple knocked on the door of the restaurant. They said they were the cook-owner’s niece and nephew-in-law. They viewed the body without emotion, looking around at the restaurant’s furnishings with more interest. Some workmen came to take the body away.
“Thank you for your services to our esteemed aunt,” the man said. “Now, we can take over from here, so your services are no longer required.”
“Wait,” said Sunhee. “How do we know you are who you say you are? I have been working here for five years and I never saw you come into this restaurant once to pay a respect-visit to your elderly aunt!”
“How dare you speak to me like that!” Light flashed from the fancy gold cufflinks on the man’s sleeve. “If we catch you here tomorrow morning, we’ll have you thrown in jail for trespassing. The police chief in this district is a personal friend.”
That afternoon, Sunhee fled, taking with her some of the steel bowls and a bag of rice. Kyung-sook sat in the back, packing and repacking her meager belongings, fingering her flute.
She cooked herself some rice, but then wasn’t able to eat. The smell of death pervaded the place.
She couldn’t stay.
Could she face her imo? she wondered. She knew no one else in Seoul.
Kyung-sook’s mother had once told her that when she and Imo were young, Buddhist monks used to come to their house, begging. In their filthy robes and their shaved heads, they looked so frightening that their mother could discipline her by threatening, “If you don’t behave, I’ll give you away to the next monks who come to the door!” Imo, however, always reached through her fear to sneak them a bowl of barley.
Christo-religion is such, she said, that one is supposed to help another person, no matter if they are your enemy, if they follow Buddha, no matter who they are, you must help if you are asked.
Kyung-sook made her way back to Imo’s, traveling as fast as she could with just her light bundle.
The store was closed and locked. She banged on the door for many minutes, until her hands were sore.
She went into the sealmaker’s shop next door.
“Is that you making such a racket?” the sealmaker said. “Arirang Ajuhma’s gone with her church someplace in the mountains to pray about all this goddam violence.”
Gone!
Kyung-sook made her way to Seoul Station. There were more army trucks downtown, soldiers patrolling the streets.
At the ticket counter, the man said something she couldn’t hear, so she leaned in closer.
“There are no more trains,” was what he said. “Until further notice.”
Kyung-sook didn’t know where else to go, so she went to a nearby park and sat. When she became hungry, she went to one of the red-tented pojangmach’a carriages and used a few spare won to buy a bowl of noodles. Most people went to the pojangmach’as to drink, not eat. When Kyung-sook spooned some crusted-over red pepper condiment into her soup, the clump turned into wiggling worms when it hit the tepid broth. The stone-faced ajuhma, stirring a pile of roasting sparrows, glared at Kyung-sook, daring her to say something. Kyung-sook bowed her head. She was very hungry, so she scooped out the bugs and silently ate the soup. The ajuhma spooned something into her empty bowl. It was a runty sparrow, burned black as a piece of coal. Kyung-sook thanked her.
It had become darker. Her hunger abated, Kyung-sook realized she hadn’t thought about what to do for the rest of the night. She sat on a bench and watched the light fade, watched the people leave the streets, one by one.
The pojangmach’a ajuhma packed up shortly before midnight.
“The curfew,” she reminded
Kyung-sook. “They’re enforcing it pretty heavily with all the to-do, you know.”
The curfew!
As if from the sky itself, a high-pitched siren screamed.
In a few minutes, large vehicles rolled down the streets waving eerie blue lights.
“Attention citizens!” boomed from a loudspeaker attached to the roof of the vehicle. “All citizens should be off the streets for the midnight curfew. Anyone found in the streets is in violation of the law and will be arrested as a subversive. Attention citizens!”
Kyung-sook bolted, running into an alley to escape the searchlights. She backed up further and further until she was hiding behind a pile of rotting garbage. The baby kicked and kicked.
Sometime later, she was awakened by voices. She forced herself not to gasp or scream.
It was the voice of a young man.
“Mother,” he said. “We are almost to the hospital. Just hold on a little longer.” There was a quiet groan in reply.
The bright lights swept into the alley again, and Kyung-sook saw a figure of the man with his mother slumped on his back. In silhouette, the man-and-mother looked like a single animal.
“Halt!” Another voice, heavy footsteps.
“But, but I’m just taking my mother to the hospital. She’s very sick.”
“I said halt!”
“But my mother! She collapsed on the floor of the house a little after midnight—I think she might be hemorrhaging.”
“Hah! How do we know you’re not a Red infiltrator? An antigovernment terrorist pulling off a neat trick? No more words, come this way.”
“No, I mustn’t—”
Kyung-sook heard blows, a muffled cry of pain. When the light came sweeping that way again, the man and his mother were gone.
Awake again, the baby kicked on Kyung-sook’s left side. She put her hand on that place. She felt the outline of the folded-up body and suddenly had the overpowering belief that the baby was a girl. She didn’t know why, but she was as sure of the baby’s sex as she was of the nose on her own face.
How had her life gone spinning out of control like this?
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she said to the wretched baby, over and over.
SARAH
Seoul
1993
On the way back to the Residence, Doug and I stopped at the Baskin-Robbins. I chose a green honeydew-melon ice cream, he got a “General Yi’s Turtle Boat Ship,” a treat that tasted just like a Dove bar.
We licked our treats contentedly as we approached the main gate of Chosun University.
Something was different.
Lined up in rows just outside the stone arches were hundreds of riot policemen in helmets with opaque visors, carrying shields. Mixed in with them were some extremely tall men in denim jumpsuits and sunglasses—they looked like some strange Korean traveling basketball team. Parked all the way up and down the street were dozens of buses with steel mesh covering the windows. None of this had been here a half-hour earlier.
“I wonder what’s up,” Doug said. As we walked through the gate, planning to cut through campus to get back to the Residence, we could hear faint chanting from the inner campus. A few students were already massed about the entrance, holding picket signs and wearing headbands with Korean characters written on them.
“What’re they saying?”
“Something about wanting to send a delegation of students to a peace festival in North Korea, to discuss tong-il, reunification.”
The chanting suddenly grew louder and nearer, a parade of students crested the hill and began to head down the street toward the gate, toward us. A vibration seemed to pass through the rows of riot police, the high-tension-wire feeling was palpable.
“I don’t like the look of this, Sarah. I think it’s best if we don’t stick around.”
We turned back to take the long way, but the crowd of police behind us cut us off from the exit. As the shouting and chanting became even louder, the police began to ooze into the campus, a slowly spreading ominous pool of black.
I don’t really know what happened next. Doug said he thought someone might have thrown a bottle. There was a crash, a shout. Then the police unhooked their clubs, hunkered behind their shields, and started running into the campus, hitting everything in sight.
It was like being in a school of minnows. There was only one way to go—away from the gate. People were clawing and trampling. Someone stepped on the back of my sneaker, pulling it off. I stopped to grab it, but Doug pulled me along.
The denim-clad men caught up to our section of the crowd. They rushed in, martial arts moves felling people like trees. One of them executed a jumping kick to the head of one of the students, sending his glasses propellering away into the air. Another pulled a woman by her hair and started dragging her back in the direction of the gate.
“What’s happening?” I screamed to Doug. Suddenly there were so many of them, the denim men, the police. I thought suddenly: was Jun-Ho here? Would I recognize him?
Doug was fumbling in his pants pocket. I thought he might have some kind of secret weapon. He pulled out a small blue book. His passport.
“We’re Americans!” he screamed in English, waving it around like a can of mace. “Leave us alone!”
A denim thug punched Doug in the face. I saw it happen in slow motion. Doug dropped the passport. I ran toward them as the man grabbed a bunch of Doug’s T-shirt and pulled. It ripped across his back.
“We’re American citizens!” Doug yelled again, blood trickling out of his nose.
I grabbed the passport and shoved it in the man’s face. I wanted to shout, but no sound came out.
Then, as quickly as he came, he disappeared. In fact, most of the police seemed to have melted away. Students were still lying on the ground, weeping, bleeding from cuts and head wounds. The ones still standing started putting on surgical masks and began running back toward the gate, fists raised, shouting.
From the direction of the gate there was a sound, like WHOOM!, and something that looked like a bomb came hurtling toward us. It landed about a hundred feet short of us, spewing plumes of smoke.
“Oh shit, tear gas,” Doug said, dragging me up the hill by my elbow. I didn’t feel anything for a few seconds, but suddenly, I couldn’t breathe, my nose and mouth seemed to have swollen shut.
“Come on,” Doug croaked, coughing. “They might shoot some more.”
We heard a few more WHOOMs, but they landed behind us. Doug pulled me to the top of the hill, which was, luckily, upwind, and we collapsed on the curb. My eyes were still burning, tears and snot were pouring out of my nose. I used my shirt to wipe my face. My ice cream was gone.
In a few minutes, the pain subsided, and I started crying regular tears. What had just happened? Why had the police started beating up on the students like that?
“You okay?”
I had a small scrape on my knee, my foot was cut where I’d stepped on something, but otherwise I was unhurt.
“Why?” I gurgled. “Did you see them kick that guy lying in the street? They kicked him in the head.”
Doug’s right eye was red, where vessels had burst. Blood crusted around his nose. His diagonally torn shirt made him look like a playing card.
“I have no idea what’s going on. Let’s just get back to the Residence.”
As we got up, a few students carrying signs walked by us, wiping at their noses with brightly colored handkerchiefs. They did it nonchalantly, as if today were merely a high pollen-count day, not a day when their own government was trying to hurt them. Some of them were laughing, a carefree college student’s laugh. I didn’t understand it at all.
Back at the Residence, on the bulletin board in the lounge, there was a notice from the police warning in garbled English of a possible “action” at the dae-mun, the main gate, today, and they advised us to use the chung-mun, the back gate. I never paid attention to stuff on the bulletin board because it was usually advertising culture shows, cookouts, things that
I avoided like the plague, as did Doug. From now on, I’d pay attention.
The next week, they posted warnings about the civil defense air raid drill, which they have at regular intervals. My sense of Korea’s geography was so off, I hadn’t even realized Seoul was only a few miles from the 38th parallel, the pie-slicing line the Russians and Americans had devised to separate North and South Korea after the Second World War. Because of pride or boneheadedness, the South Koreans had refused to move their ancient capital further south, so here we sat, within shelling distance of the North. No wonder Seoul had been bombed to the ground several times over during the Korean War.
This time, Doug and I made sure to stay inside the Residence at two o’clock when the sirens began wailing and people ran like roaches into underground tunnels. Into the eerily deserted streets, the soldiers and the medics ran, pretending Seoul was being bombed and poison-gassed by North Korea.
KYUNG-SOOK
Seoul
1972
Army trucks were still roaring up and down the streets the next day when Kyung-sook painfully unfolded herself from her squatting position. No one took any note of her when she emerged from the alley.
At the train station, there were notices posted that travel was being restricted. Her train was running, at least. She used the last of her money for the ticket.
“Going home to your mother’s house to have the baby, yeh?” said the woman sitting next to her. She opened her bag and offered Kyung-sook some of her rice balls dipped in sesame seeds and salt, and Kyung-sook gratefully accepted. She was hungry, and she found herself thinking that the baby must be hungry as well.
“Oh, I remember,” the woman said, her eyes twinkling. “I remember when I returned to my mother’s house for my first labor. It was so horrible, I thought I was going to split in two! So much blood, so much pain. The midwife said she’d never heard someone yell as much as I did—she was afraid I was going to wake my ancestors. I passed out after that final push, but when I came to, there he was, all swaddled up, a nice swatch of hair, those eyes, the dear little fingers. Oh, it was heavenly that month. My mother made me seaweed soup three times a day and I just nursed and slept and gazed at my precious jewel. I felt like I was a princess, or a noblewoman being waited on night and day. Heh-heh, if I could have, I’d’ve had a hundred children, just for the resting time, just for the time to be spent with my gone-to-heaven mother!”
Somebody's Daughter Page 21