“This isn’t for children,” my parents said. “She’ll have nightmares.”
But my grandmother ignored them. “She is old enough,” she said. “This is not the first time such a thing has happened.” All her life in Korea, people had been killed for their ideas. Students had died asking for change.
Long ago, when she was a child, families of dissidents had been driven to churches and town halls and burned into piles of ash. You breathed in that ash, my grandmother told me. It covered your skin. You held that ash inside you: it coated your lungs. It clung to your eyelashes and settled on your hair.
“Mother,” my mother interrupted. “Things are different now.” She covered my ears with her hands, even though I had already heard it, and could hear through her fingers anyway. When I shook my head, she stroked my hair. “Don’t listen,” she said. “All that was a long time ago.”
“It was not so long ago,” my grandmother said. To my father she said, “Your parents died in the war.” He looked startled. I saw his jaw clench, but he did not respond.
“Mother,” my mother said again, a warning in her voice, but my grandmother ignored it. Water in her village, she told me, had run red. It had tasted like iron. For years, she said, skulls would rise out of the ground during heavy rain, so that human bones were discovered along the fields and then reburied, as if they were seeds. “And now it is happening again,” she said.
My father shook his head. “Things have changed. But be careful what you say,” he said. “You still never know who is listening.”
My parents were in the habit of cutting off conversation when it became most interesting.
Even though the massacre in Kwangju was important, outside of that night we spent watching the news in the living room, we never talked of it openly again. I stayed quiet, too, but without understanding. I did not know that the massacre had become a censored topic, and even bringing up the town’s name could be considered a suspicious act. At the time I thought my parents were the source of the silence around the event. I had not yet learned that any powers beyond them existed.
. . .
Weeks later, my uncle returned, and I knew then that he’d been diminished somehow. Injured, perhaps. Grieved. But my parents seemed not to notice. When he finally came home they ushered him into our living room, and punished him. They pushed him for information. How many innocent victims had been killed? He did not know. Hundreds? Thousands? He could not say. The dead were mostly college students. They were young men, barely grown out of boyhood, his age. Had he killed anyone? my mother asked. Had he fired into the crowd of students? Had he any blood on his hands? He stood in the center of the room, facing my parents, our summer fans whirring around them and blurring all their voices. He was not supposed to tell. He was not supposed to talk about these things, but my parents would not relent.
My grandmother should have stepped in and stopped them then, out of love or pity, but I think they were punishing him for their own relief at his safety. They had worried about him ever since the first reports of the conflict. In any case, my grandmother left: she left my uncle in my parents’ hands.
He responded haltingly to their questions. He’d been told the students were communist sympathizers. He’d been told the students had declared war on their current government. He’d been given direct orders to do what he did. “I had no choice,” he said.
“Everyone has a choice,” my father said. “Even if the choice is between honor or death, you can still choose not to kill innocent victims.” This comment terrified and exhilarated me. He sounded so heroic, so willing to bear anything.
Then I looked at my uncle’s bent head, and I wanted to run into the room and take his hand. But I stayed put. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference if I had gone to him. I probably would have been sent back to my room and put to bed. Still, I have always wished I had gone and stood by his side.
He stood with his head down, and his shoulders shaking. My parents did not touch him, but stood, watching him. It wasn’t until much later that they would come to regret the work they did that night.
When I woke up the next day, my uncle was gone, and my parents were grim and tense, and would say nothing about it. Something happened in the following weeks: one day they just turned against each other. My father had written a pamphlet about the details they had been able to glean from my uncle, and published it under the pen name of Eun Po. This man had been a famous poet and scholar and advisor to the king in the fourteenth century, and had been murdered for refusing to betray his king. Only my mother and two of his close friends knew my father had written this pamphlet, but my mother was furious at the danger she believed he’d put us all in.
For the next several days, they fought. They argued over the dishes, on the way to the grocery store, everywhere they went that we were alone. In public they were silent, but they stopped taking us to the playground, they didn’t go to the store. They stayed at home and fought. They shouted at the table between bites of food.
“You’re a mathematician,” my mother said. “This isn’t for you to do.”
“I’m a citizen and a patriot. I did the right thing, the honorable thing.”
“You did nothing but put us at risk. And no one will notice if something happens to you, or us.”
“I thought you would support me,” my father said. “When we met, you felt differently.”
“That was before we had children.”
“Someone has to protest. We can’t always yield.”
“You’re risking the lives of our children.”
“You used to believe in things.”
“I believe in new things now. We have a family.”
“You used to be brave.”
“You call yourself brave?” My mother drew in her breath. “I should never have married you,” she said. “I should never have given you children.”
Then my father was silent. Perhaps my mother’s words had lodged in his heart, as they had in mine. She was wishing her marriage to my father undone, Hannah and myself unmade.
Several days later, my parents called us into the living room. At first neither spoke. Then, “We are leaving,” my father said. “We are moving away.”
He didn’t say more. After a moment I asked, “When are we going?” and Hannah let out a whimper, and puckered herself up to cry.
My father turned to her. “Come here,” he said, opening his arms. She crawled over me to get to him and leaned her head against his shoulder. She was comforted so easily.
“We’ve been thinking of moving for a long time.” His sister, my Komo, who had lived in America since before I was born, had found him a job. Both he and my mother thought it’d be best if he took it. He said this with a sideways look at my mother. He sat up a little straighter and shifted Hannah in his arms. He held out his hand to me. “Shake,” he said.
I reached out and shook his hand. In school we had learned that this was how they greeted each other in the West. This was how they made a deal.
When my father let go of my hand, I turned to my mother. She had fixed her eyes on the building across from us, her whole body angled away. “Umma?” I asked. “Will you come, too?”
She tapped her foot against the ground, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t even turn to look at me.
“Umma?” I asked.
She stopped tapping her foot and touched her forehead as if to clear away a stray hair.
“Are you coming?” I repeated.
Her laugh was brittle. “I have no choice, since your Komo says to do it. Your father listens to his sister when she tells him he’s in danger, but not to his wife.”
I looked from her to my father and back. “So you’re coming?” I repeated in a small voice.
My mother looked back at me, her face hard to read. Then she shook her head and said, “Oh, you little fool,” and her voice was unexpectedly warm. She stood up and reached down for me, picking me up off the ground and hugging me hard. The relief of her touch was
miraculous. I let it wash over me and was silent, as if I had asked the only question that mattered.
Our last months in Korea were spent packing up our things, visiting relatives, and taking leave of ancestors who lay buried on mountains an hour’s drive and then an hour’s walk away. There were so many people, dead and alive, to say good-bye to: we walked from bus stop to bus stop, apartment to apartment, up mountain after mountain, bowing on wood floors and in the dirt, calling out in heat that did not subside even after the storms came.
It rained for days, but afterward it was no cooler. We couldn’t tell whether the dampness on our skin came from ourselves, or the humid air. It felt as if we were being steamed alive like oysters, and one day my mother discovered a colony of tiny red bumps growing under my armpits and behind my knees. Once I knew they were there I couldn’t stop contorting myself to get a better look at them. They hurt when I scratched and itched when I didn’t.
Haejin got the same rash a couple days later. It spread all over her body. She clawed at herself until she bled. My mother held our hands down and poured baby powder all over us to dry out the sweat. My bumps got smaller, but Haejin wouldn’t stop scratching. Whenever we weren’t looking, she turned away and went to work, shrieking as she carved furious red lines into the white powder crusting her neck.
To stop her, my mother bandaged Haejin’s hands until they were two white stumps. For a whole week she couldn’t use her hands. I had to open doors for her, take her to the bathroom, and feed her, but she couldn’t scratch anymore. Strangers stared at her, whispering about what might have happened to her hands. Haejin loved the attention. When she caught them looking, she would sing and dance, wiggling her body. This made my parents laugh helplessly. My mother said she had no shame. But Haejin loved it. I stood apart from the scenes she commanded, my own body crusted over with a layer of powder, aware of my own awkward invisibility.
At home, my mother and relatives packed things into boxes. There were so many things to account for, and so many things we could not take. The desk and bookshelves my grandfather had built when my mother was a young girl had to be left behind. We could not take my mother’s lacquered cabinets with their inlaid mother-of-pearl villages. My father said heavy things were too expensive to ship. When he left the room, my mother touched the cabinet that had been a wedding present from my grandmother. It had passed from daughter to daughter for five generations.
My mother did not want to go to America: this much I knew. I knew it by the way she became distracted and impatient with my sister, by the way she stopped tucking us into bed at night. I knew it from watching her feet, which began to shuffle after my father announced the move, as though they threw down invisible roots that needed to be pulled out with each step.
Four days before we were supposed to board our flight to America, my mother went grocery shopping, and did not come back in time for dinner. That evening my father waited until long after the usual time, and then laid out the rice and the side dishes on paper plates.
His mouth was a grim line as he chewed his food.
Hannah made a soft whimpering sound in her throat, and he turned to her, his voice harsh. “Not tonight,” he said. “Enough.”
None of us ate much, and afterward I helped clean up, throwing everything into the garbage.
After a couple more hours of waiting, my father called the police. Two officers came over, in uniform, and they crowded into the living room. They looked at our boxes, and asked questions about our move in loud voices. My father stood very straight with his hands behind him. He said nothing about America, only that we were moving to another apartment soon. He asked them to call him if there was any news about my mother.
After the policemen left, none of us slept. Haejin whimpered from the bed next to me, and I could hear my father pacing in the other room.
My mother finally returned late the next morning, close to lunchtime, her face swollen and ugly from weeping, her words garbled, her explanations lost. She pulled Haejin and me to her, breaking away from my father and clutching at us.
“Where were you?” I asked, crying.
“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
After a while, my father pulled us away from her, his hands pushing us firmly off. He led her to the bedroom. I thought he would yell at her, and followed them, ready to beg my father to be gentle. But when I got to their door, he was whispering to her in a soft voice, and lowering her into their bed. “Rest,” he said, one hand on her waist, the other already pulling back the sheets. She was still crying, but he drew the blanket over her, and passed one hand over her hair. He covered her eyes with his hand, and for a second she reached up and held it there with hers.
She slept all day. My father left the door cracked open, and all day long Haejin and I peeked in at her, to reassure ourselves that she was still there. I don’t know if she ever told my father what had happened. I never asked. Instead, I watched her carefully after that for a long while, as if at any moment she could shatter.
My uncle did not come again to our apartment during that whole time. I waited for him. Even at the airport, when we were leaving, I looked for him in the group of relatives who’d gathered to see us off. I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t come. No one had said we were leaving forever, but I felt it was true. Still, he was not there. I was so disappointed that I worked up the courage to ask my father where he was.
My father fiddled with his luggage. I asked again. He looked up.
“Ask your mother,” he said.
My mother’s hands were full of last-minute gifts from their relatives, and when she saw me approach, she turned away to put them in our suitcase. Both she and my grandmother were crying, and she wiped at her face with my grandmother’s handkerchief, and pushed me away.
“Go away, Jeehyun,” my mother said, when I asked about my uncle. Her hands were full and her face was wet. “I don’t know.”
I threw up twice in the toilet before getting on the plane. Strapped into my seat, I was grateful to the beautiful stewardess who brought me and Haejin each a little toy plane and a pin with wings. For me, that was the promise of America: I’d been told I’d have my own room, my own raised bed, that there would be things that would be mine alone.
We finally arrived in Detroit, relieved and exhausted after a layover and Haejin’s unfortunate bout of airsickness. We collected our luggage and went through customs. The glass doors to the rest of the airport slid open, revealing a crowd of strangers. I had never seen so many foreign faces all at once before, and was dazzled by the fair hair, the different-colored eyes, all those tongues navigating a language I could not follow. I realized with a shock that I would live among these people now.
. . .
Our new house did not look like the block apartment buildings in Seoul, or like the old houses in the countryside with their sloping roofs and broad gates. This new house was white and brick with a pointed roof and bump-out windows. I stood in the driveway blinking at it, trying to reconcile myself to the idea that this was our house. I was impressed by the size of our lawn, that vast expanse of mowed grass. Other children were playing in front of their houses on their own lawns, and there was something reassuring about this, and surprising. It was so different from Seoul.
One thing that was familiar was that it was as hot in Michigan as it had been in Korea. The first thing my mother did was turn on the air-conditioning. It was one good thing about America, she said: central air. That first day, while we began to get settled in, the realtor who had sold us the house long-distance came over. He took us from room to room, speaking slowly, so that I was able to catch words here and there from the English class I’d taken in school the previous year.
Out back, he pointed at some bushes, one by one, counting them. “Those are some awful weeds,” he said. “I’d get rid of them if I were you. They spread like crazy and leak a poison that kills other plants.”
My father nodded, looking at the overgrown weed
s that bordered our house, considering.
That day the dark came quite suddenly. It was bright and sunny, and then it was abruptly night. We set up our sleeping arrangements downstairs in the family room, rolled up in blankets on the carpet. None of our furniture had arrived, and all the rooms were large and empty. The carpet was thick and white, and so plush we didn’t need mats.
I kicked Haejin under the covers we were sharing, and she kicked back. I poked her, and she yelped and giggled. When my mother told us to stop in a soft voice meant not to wake my father, Hannah sneaked her hand into mine. We squeezed back and forth. One squeeze meant: are you sleeping? One squeeze back meant yes, and two meant no. Three meant: do you see a ghost? We squeezed until she fell asleep, and then I turned and looked out the large curtainless windows. I didn’t want to sleep. If I turned my head just right, I could imagine there were no walls around me, no windows, just America, this place where we had come to live.
A couple who knew my Komo through a church association came by the next morning and took my father to take his driving test, and after that to rent a car. They were an older American couple who drove a blue van and smiled at us, but after they dropped my father off that first morning, we never saw them again. The first thing my parents did with that rental car was go grocery shopping. They returned with bags of food in unfamiliar packaging, and while Haejin and I looked at it all, my father put on a pair of thick brown gloves twice as big as his hands, and went into the backyard.
One by one, he attacked the tall weed-bushes the realtor had pointed to along the perimeter of our yard. By the end of the afternoon, there were eleven weed-bushes spread against the green lawn, their naked roots still clinging to the dirt, sprawled in the light. My father left the twelfth standing where it was. He didn’t have the energy left to pull up that last one, he said when he came in for water. His hands shook as he held his cup.
The next day we all went together to a nursery to pick out trees: evergreens, maples, and cherry. We planted them around the edge of our lawn, some of them in the soft pits of brown earth that the weed-bushes had left behind. The trees scarcely reached my father’s waist, but he said, “They will protect us one day.” He scanned our yard as if he could already see how tall they would grow.
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