by Mia Yun
I manage to collect myself quickly enough, but Inah’s already gone. I see her crossing the street, recklessly dragging Mom’s suitcase by the handle through the swirling traffic and cacophony of horns. I can tell she’s mad. Mad at herself for letting me talk her into this trap of a trip.Mad at me. I scramble and catch up with her at the foot of a high, arched bridge, encased in wooden scaffolds. She is furious. She can hardly bring herself to look at me.
“Inah, I … ,” I fumble.
“Don’t!” Inah blurts out with disgust in her thin splintery voice. “Just don’t say a word.” She grabs Mom’s suitcase and hauls it up the steep steps of wooden planks. Halfway over the bridge, in despair, I stop and watch her stomp away. Black clouds follow her, hovering like seagulls tagging a fishing trawler. I know I shouldn’t have come. But then I knew all along this was what was waiting for me. I knew we would fight because, with Inah, it’s something as inevitable as death. But I was wistful. Just like Mom. And it’s all too late. I can’t simply turn around and go back home. I will just have to endure her. I asked for it.
I walk over to the side of the bridge to compose myself. But how improbable! Suddenly, I realize I am looking at the famous Grand Canal. Belatedly feeling dizzy from the ceaseless motion of the water around me, I quickly swallow down the thick, sea-tangy air. And then, hypnotized, I stare at the vista that unfurls in front of me, so dazzling and so utterly unexpected; the listing and decaying buildings along the canal, the onion domes and orange rooftops, the boats and bridges, indescribably beautiful and splendid, awash in the sunlight, so opulent and yellow, and complemented by the sky, so immense and pastel blue; it’s a painting drawn on a gigantic air balloon leisurely floating in the breeze. Leaning over through the scaffolds, I greedily drink up the sight, having forgotten Inah, the intense anger and the despair of just a moment ago.
“Are you coming or not?” Inah’s impatient voice pulls me out of the delirious state of enthrallment. She has stopped at the end of the bridge. She looks listless and exasperated. Reluctantly, I walk over.
“Inah, it’s the Grand Canal, isn’t it? I wish you had told me.”
“Well, what did you think it was?” she says, trying hard not to sound too mean, and starts down, recklessly pulling Mom’s dinosaur of a suitcase behind her in a loud clunk. Off the bridge, not bothering to wait, she walks ahead, up the crowded embankment along the noisy canal, constantly bursting with the hiccups and groans of motors. The sun, a red, combustible flame, has now climbed to the center of the sky as if on a ladder, eating up all the shadows, and it’s a carnival of golden sunlight. Everything looks phosphorous, the moving crowds, the green-and-white striped parasols shading the tables of sidewalk cafes and orange and yellow and blue streamers hanging outside the souvenir stalls. A warm, wet breeze lazily drifts over from the canal carrying a sharp whiff of gasoline. Alongside Inah, Mom’s mammoth suitcase rumbles and rattles on like a disgruntled child, threatening to careen off on a broken wheel. Annoyed, Inah stops and gives it a quick, violent jerk, as if that will do the trick. She’s still mad. It’s going to be a very long trip.
SIX
There’s no more gibbering and gibbering Inah. It has been like that for days, although I don’t know how many because, without her, everything has become a shapeless blur. Now, in the morning, Grandma hastily stuffs my see-through vinyl bag with crayons and coloring books and picture books and snacks, and hurries me up the crooked alley to a two-leafed wooden gate. There she delivers me and my bag into the hands of a woman Grandma calls wolnam ajooma, Vietnamese Auntie. Then looking dazed but determined and galvanized, she hurries away back down the alley, stuffing back her slithery muffler, which is escaping from the collar of her coat. I don’t know where she goes. I am too scared to ask her. I am too scared to ask about Inah or about Mommy and Daddy, who never seem to be around anymore ever since that snowy afternoon Grandma disappeared with Inah in her arms.
Every time Grandma hurries away, my head gets all foggy and I get all breathless. I am scared that she will never come back to get me. I have to try very hard not to cry when I follow the Vietnamese Auntie inside. The wooden gate closes with a solemn squeak, and the auntie helps me over the high threshold of the sliding wooden door fitted with two milky glass panes, and we enter a rectangle courtyard, paved over in gray cement that smells like the wet moss on the cement tub at home in summer. It has the typical layout of a traditional Korean house, so everything looks very familiar, as if I’ve been here many times before; the tiled roofs, wooden beams, the shiny yellow color on the varnished wood, and the rice-papered doors with intricate wood patterns.
Before climbing up to the floor, the auntie helps me take off my silver shoes trimmed with fur, and I follow her into the dim room where a curtain printed with yellow flowers and spiky green leaves hangs over a small window. It’s the room where I play alone every day and where I woke up the afternoon Grandma disappeared with Inah and cried and cried, making myself dizzy until the whole room was turning: The walls swelled out like a big skirt, and the ceiling spun up and down and up and down, slowly first and then faster and faster, making a whooshing sound.
The Vietnamese Auntie gently pulls me down to the floor and opens my see-through vinyl bag and takes out the coloring books, the box of broken crayons and a bag of marble shaped cookies with peanuts inside that Inah likes so much. She pushes the things toward me. She looks stiff from cold. (She’s not used to the cold, Grandma says, coming from a hot country.) Her hand is purple just like her lips on her face with dark, pitted skin, and her big, brown eyes seem sad from the memory of the hot sun.
She says something with a soft voice that has a pleasing lilt. Maybe she’s telling me to play. Even though I don’t know what she’s saying, I nod my head. I don’t speak, because if I do, I will feel like crying, and once I start crying, I won’t be able to stop. She pats me on the head and leaves the room, and I am all alone. Everything in the room is still. The corners where the walls meet, dark. The wall clock tick-tocks ceaselessly. Now and then, from the courtyard outside comes the muffled sound of the auntie’s footsteps, the kitchen door sliding open and closing, basins clanking and water running. And once in a long while, someone passes by the lane outside, making that psst, psst, psst, sound of the Japanese girl ghost padding up and down the hallway at night in our house. And then it gets all quiet again. The quiet swells and grows and grows into a din, and then through it, I hear Inah screaming and screaming. I squeeze and twist the tin foil cookie bag, making the crinkle-and-crackle sound so I don’t have to hear the swelling quiet of the room and Inah crying and screaming.
At some point each afternoon, the sun hits the window, flooding the dim room, and the curtain suddenly turns into a rippling green field specked with tiny yellow flowers. I spend a long, long time staring at the sun-splashed pasture. Then I fall asleep and dream of playing hide-and-seek with Inah in the very same field, magically expanded into a huge, rolling green meadow carpeted with buttercup-yellow flowers.
Inah has hidden herself, and I walk around and around looking for her among the clusters of flowers and dense leaves. At last, the sun starts going down, but Inah is still nowhere to be found, and I am getting more and more scared. I put my hands around my mouth and shout at the top of my voice: “Can’t find you, que-kko-ri! “ Que-kko-ri is the name of a Korean warbler, and that’s what you are supposed to say when you can’t find someone during hide-and-seek. Inah is then supposed to come out from hiding, but she doesn’t. It’s just me lost in the middle of the empty and darkening meadow. I wake up crying in the dark room. The sun has moved away from the window.
There are many more dreams. In one of them, Grandma takes us twins to the dumpling house, the one that’s out on the boulevard, a couple of doors past the movie theater. She gets us a table wedged between a wall and a window that looks out onto the street, and orders our favorite steamed dumplings, stuffed with minced meat and clear noodles.
Soon, they arrive steaming in a bamboo basket
shaped like a tambourine, lined with a cotton cloth. As we eagerly reach for them, Grandma gets up and says, “Eat slowly. I will be back soon.” By the time we finish the dumplings, though, Grandma hasn’t come back. We wait and wait. Then we go stand behind the window that looks out at the busy sidewalk. Next to the aluminum newspaper kiosk, a man sells plastic sandals. A grandma (not ours) is squatting on the sidewalk with a brown-beaded rosary draped over her hand, waiting for a bus that never comes. But no Grandma. So, Inah and I count the buses and taxis and sedan cars passing on the road, and wonder and wonder where she is.
After a long, long while, the dumpling house auntie comes over and asks us when Grandma is coming to get us. We don’t know, we tell her. The auntie shouts toward the open kitchen in the back where her dimple-cheeked husband, his hair gone white from the flour dust, is beating and kneading a big lump of flour dough. The old lady must be in her second childhood, she says to him: She has forgotten all about her granddaughters.
After some more waiting, Inah and I tell the auntie we are going home. We know the way, we assure her. Then you must walk straight home, she says, not stopping anywhere. Holding hands, Inah and I walk out and head up the sidewalk, turning into the side street by the theater, where it smells like wet papers and garbage. Back out in the street, we pass a dry cleaner, a hardware store, and the store where Grandma sometimes buys us strawberry milk in paper cartons and yellow melons in the summer. At the third alley to the left, Inah and I turn and race to the wooden kitchen door that opens right smack into the lane, and bang at it, making the milky panes rattle. We wait and then pound at it again. Finally, from inside comes the sound of Grandma’s shuffling feet in her rubber shoes.
Grandma drags open the kitchen door, looks at me and shouts, “Why are you alone?! What did you do with your sister?” I turn around. Inah is not there.
SEVEN
One morning, instead of packing my see-through vinyl bag, Grandma asks me if I would like to go see Inah. She’s all dressed up in her brown wool coat, and a shiny, slithery scarf, printed in brown and silver swirls, is wound around her neck. I don’t say anything because I am not sure if I would like to go see Inah. But Grandma doesn’t really care. She doesn’t care whether I would like to do anything, because she’s all scrambled in the head. That’s what she says, she’s all scrambled in the head when I ask her about anything: Don’t bother to ask me about anything, I am all scrambled in the head.
Grandma brings over my coat and stuffs my arms into the sleeves. Then she says she can’t find my mittens, so I will have to wear Inah’s instead. But I don’t want to wear her mittens. She is fussy about not mixing our things. She will get mad when she sees me wearing them. And I don’t want to get her mad. She will throw a temper tantrum and cry. I don’t want to ever hear her cry again.
“Tough!” Grandma snaps. “I can’t spend the whole morning looking for them. They look the same anyway. Inah won’t know.” But she is wrong; Inah’s mittens are attached to a blue string, not to a red one like mine. “So you take them off before you go in to see her. That way, she won’t see you wearing them. How’s that?”
‘No, no,” I protest.
“I’m telling you you are not going without them,” Grandma says. “It’s freezing outside. If you catch cold, whom do you think your mother’s going to blame? Me! And as it is, I’ve got enough blame to last me a lifetime.”
After a sharp spanking or two on the bottom, I sniffle all the way to the bus stop. It’s bright and cold. Big icicles are hanging from the eaves of the shops we pass. They look like glass swords and sparkle plenty in the sunlight. Inah likes to lick them, pretending they are ice-cream sticks.
At the bus stop, Grandma takes out her coin purse and counts out our bus fare into her dry, cracked palm. She’s not wearing gloves. She wipes her nose with the white, wrinkled ball of a handkerchief and puts it back into her coat pocket. Down the street, on the sunless, black sidewalk in front of the movie theater, cart vendors stand all scrunched, stamping their frozen feet.
“Keep your mittens on,” Grandma says when we settle down inside the unheated bus. Soon, Grandma is sleeping to the jolting rhythm of the bus, her arms folded over and her wrinkled mouth hanging open. I pull my hands out of the mittens, letting them hang down the front of my coat on the string. I climb up the seat and watch the buildings, cars, people and gray, bare trees fly by the bus window, slipping and sliding backward, practicing the moonwalk, as if they are all wearing soft-soled shoes. Grandma’s snore roars up like thunder, and then she’s quiet again.
The bus turns and joins the sea of traffic circling around the East Gate. Through the bus window, the roofed gate pirouettes round and round, as if on a rotating plate. I slide back down to the seat and look at Grandma. She’s still sleeping.
“Halmoni, wake up!” I shake her arm as the bus jolts to a stop, sending us lurching forward. Grandma flings her eyes open like push-out windows and looks out.
“Aiigo! We’re getting off!” Grandma grabs my hand and dashes up the aisle toward the front door. “Watch your step!” she says, picking her way down the steps. I hop down and jump, landing behind her. The automatic bus door shuts with a whoosh and I feel a quick tug at the mitten’s string, slung around my neck. I turn and look: One of the mittens is caught in the door of the bus, slowly pulling away from the curb. I tug at the string but quickly let go, shrinking at the sharp burning on my palm. And the other mitten is gone too, flung off my shoulder. I then stumble around my tangled feet and land hard on my palms, scraping the cold cement curb.
“Halmoni!” I scream, pointing at Inah’s mitten on a string, flying along the speeding bus like a kite, like a small waving hand. Grandma turns around and bleats. Suddenly, her arms are all over, pulling and dragging me up to the sidewalk.
“Are you hurt? Are you hurt? Tell me!” Grandma shouts in her frantic, shrill voice. She jerks me around, checking my face and hands. I shake my head even though my palms are raw and throbbing. “Are you sure? Look at me!” I look up at her. Her face is whiter than white chalk, and she’s trembling.
Grandma is still shaking and muttering when we start across the road. Her muffler has spilled out of her coat collar and hangs down the front. And she is squeezing my hand so tight that she’s going to break my fingers. After crossing the street, Grandma stumbles toward the bottom of the steep hospital driveway and collapses against the low stone wall hugging the hospital garden. She is all scrambled in the head again because she has that look in her eyes when she pulls me into her arms. “Aigoo, aigoo! “ she squeals, sobbing over my head smothered inside her arms. “Why don’t I die? Why don’t I die now? If I live any longer, I’m going to end up having both of you maimed or killed….”
We stand there a long, long time against the icy stone wall. Dwarfed by the tall, crooked pines, the hilly hospital garden, and the bright, blue sky. It’s so cold, it hurts to breathe, and inside my fur-trimmed shoes, my toes are turning numb.
“Don’t say anything to your mother,” Grandma says when we are finally walking up the driveway to the hospital. “She doesn’t need one more thing to worry about.”
From the doorway, Inah in the hospital bed looks so very tiny. Like a leaf floating in a sea of white. White sheets. White walls. White metal frames. White is the color of snow.
“Go in,” Grandma whispers sternly, nudging me on the shoulder, but my feet are stuck again, glued to the floor. I see Mommy sitting on a chair by Inah’s bed. I haven’t seen her for days. She comes home late every night, long after I go to bed, and leaves again early in the morning before I get up. She must hear Grandma because she turns her head. She looks strange, puffy in the eyes and all stiff in the face. She waves me over. Only she doesn’t smile.
I walk, making small, careful and tentative steps. It seems to take forever to reach Inah’s bed. Bit by bit, Inah’s face comes into focus and I see it’s all bandaged up, except an eye and the tip of her nose and a sliver of her lower lip. They have her hands tied to the be
d rails in gauze strips so she won’t touch her face. There are reddish bruises on her wrists where the cloth rubs against them.
I inch closer and stop by the bed rail. I am barely tall enough to reach over it. Inah looks over, steadily fixing her one exposed eye on me. Her long black lashes are wet and hold tiny dewdrops at the tips. I feel anxious and shy. The room is a vacuum with all the air and sound sucked out. I can’t think of anything to say to Inah. It scares me. Her one eye. Staring and staring. Unblinking. It’s a dark black button on her bandaged face.
“Your sister is here.” Leaning over, Grandma tenderly whispers to Inah in her raspy voice, “Remember you asked for her?” Inah lets out a sad whimper. “You want her to come later?” Grandma asks, and Inah turns her head away, bleating, and jerks her arms, pulling at the straps and shaking the bed rail. I am frightened. The sound of her crying sends me rolling and tumbling back into a sea of thick, black fog. Mommy leaps to her feet. She bends over Inah, pats her, trying to calm her down. Inah cries on anemically in a weak, scratchy voice. She won’t look at me again.Mommy says we better go. Inah’s upset. She’s not ready to see Yunah.
Grandma grabs hold of my hand and pulls me away. She rushes me out of the room and into the hallway with gray linoleum floors and lime-colored walls and on to the waiting area, where the sunlight is blinding. Without ever letting me stop. Outside the window, the sky is a speckless bright blue. Blue is Inah’s favorite color, I remember. I remember all of her and our favorite things.
PART TWO
ONE
On a hazy, steady-rain afternoon in June, Inah and I are planted in the backseat of a lemon-green Hyundai taxi, plowing through the traffic and rain puddles to Kimpo International Airport. Just seven years old, toothpick skinny, and swimming in our stiff, brand-new clothes from the South Gate Market in Seoul: bumblebee shirts, jellybean red pants and blue jean jackets.