“Not really.”
“Janie,” he said my name again. “You can tell me. How did this happen?”
“During recess at school,” I said.
“Did your parents have anything to do with this?” he asked. The light glinted off his glasses. “Do they hit you?”
I was tempted to nod. I thought of the time my mother had grabbed my hair in her hand and shaken me back and forth; the time my father had thrown a book that caught me on the side of my head. I remembered the sharp booming sound that filled my head when it made contact, and how the sound echoed in my ears for days.
I knew enough about America to imagine reporting them to the police then. You’re not allowed to do this in America, I’d say. It’s illegal. In those daydreams they always ended up crying and apologizing, and I took them back after they promised never to hit me again.
But this was different. The doctor thought my parents had done this to me: my smashed face, my broken teeth. I felt suddenly afraid of my thoughts, of the knowledge that my parents were not safe from me, and I could do them harm.
“You’re shaking,” the doctor said. He reached out his hand and stroked my shoulder very gently with the backs of his fingers. “Tell me. Who did this to you?”
What would happen if I said my parents had done this to me? Would someone come to take me away? Would I be sent to a different school? I imagined living in this doctor’s house, being his daughter, sleeping in a pink canopy bed.
I pulled away from his hand. “We were racing at school,” I said. “It was an accident.”
“What happened?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Allison and I bumped into each other. I guess we were going too fast.”
The doctor shook his head slowly. Then he threw back his shoulders and laughed. “All right,” he said. He opened the door and called my parents back in. When they entered, he smiled at them and wagged his finger at me. “You be more careful, young lady, you were lucky this time.”
. . .
On the ride home, I told my parents the story I’d told the doctor. Allison had bumped into me while we were racing. I had tripped and hit the wall. All of it had been an accident. Clumsiness. Bad luck. Even from behind, I could see some tension in my parents’ bodies ease away. I basked in the warmth of their relief. I almost believed what I said was true. We were going home, and I was safe from the glow of the houses lining the streets outside.
We stopped by Mrs. Chong’s on our way home to pick Hannah up, and when we arrived she was still awake, wide-eyed and silent. In the car, she pressed against me, mute, her head burrowing against my shoulder. I put my arm around her and told her things would be okay. It’s over now, I said. Go to sleep.
I began to understand that night that my parents could not protect me, and that I could never let them know I knew this. Still, it was a strangely beautiful night, one in which I felt particularly close to my family, grateful to have them, relieved to be intact. When we got home, by some unspoken consensus and for the first time in years, we all huddled up together in my parents’ bed, Hannah and I cushioned between my mother and father. That night we were especially gentle with each other, careful and loving, as if each of us had some secret hurt that could not be touched. In the dark, my mother’s arm formed a careful circlet around me, Hannah’s legs entangled my own. “Good night!” we called to each other. “Good night! Good night! Good night!” I could feel my mother’s pulse beating gentle and measured through her wrist against my cheek. I listened to my family breathe, steady and warm. I fell asleep quickly, shielded by the fortress of their bodies, their fragile bones.
11.
Hannah and I sat in the lobby of my hotel: I had refused to visit her apartment, and had not invited her to my room. Instead, we sat in adjacent armchairs, making awkward conversation.
“I’m back in school,” Hannah volunteered. “I’ll be finishing up the rest of my credits at UCLA in a year.”
I looked at her feet. Each toenail was perfectly painted a dark shiny blue. I said, “Why didn’t you call? Couldn’t you have done that just to tell us you were alive?”
“I wanted to,” she said, and she pulled her feet up onto her chair and tucked them under her legs. “But then you would have told Mom and Dad where I was, and it wouldn’t have worked.”
“What wouldn’t have worked?” I asked. “Dad was worried sick. Literally. Stress causes cancer, Hannah. It makes the tumors grow.”
Hannah held up her hand. “I can’t play that game,” she said. “You can’t blame me for that. I’ve been working. I’m putting myself through school.”
“What, do you want a prize? Everyone does that, Hannah. It’s called being a grown-up. Plenty of people manage to do it without having to disappear.”
“Unni,” she said. “I wanted a chance to be my own person. I wanted to be independent. Can’t you cut me some slack?”
“Running away from home and then secretly going back to school doesn’t make you independent.”
“And neither does doing everything to please your parents.”
“I don’t do everything to please them,” I said. “I just try to be decent.”
“I’m trying to make it possible for us to be friends now, but this always makes it so difficult. It’s never just us.”
“You could have said that back then,” I said. “Before you broke all our hearts.”
“I never meant to hurt you.”
“But you didn’t care that you did.”
“I had to leave. You all wanted me to be someone I wasn’t.”
“So what, Hannah? I don’t even know what you mean by that, but even if it’s true, so what?”
Hannah’s smile was twisted. “Other families aren’t like this, you know. Not everyone is like you.” She shook her head. “Anyways, you left first,” she said. “When you went off to college you said you weren’t going to come back, you said we were on our own.”
“I never said that.”
“You did. And you meant it. You said you were sick of being controlled all the time, and you were done being told what to think. You felt the same way as me. You said you hated it at home.”
“Everyone says things like that when they’re teenagers. It doesn’t mean anything, Hannah.”
She leaned forward. “Maybe, but you meant it.” The look on her face made me uncomfortable. “When you came home in the middle of your sophomore year, you were different; you were dating that guy, and you wouldn’t talk to any of us.”
“That was a hard year.”
“You left first. It was you.”
“I went to college,” I said. “Jesus Christ, Hannah. Did you expect me to stay home and wait for you?”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “And here’s the thing: when it didn’t work out with that guy, you came crawling back to us, but I knew better. I knew you’d have left us then, if you could have.”
I stiffened. “It was more complicated than that,” I said. “You were too young to know anything about it.”
Hannah looked me straight in the eye, and smirked. “I know enough,” she said.
My sophomore year of college I’d dated a guy who hit me. He was the first guy I ever slept with, and the marks he left took days or weeks to fade. Sometimes, days later, he’d softly push back my clothes, at my neckline or my sleeve, and stare at the disappearing bruises. Sometimes he would lick them. He touched me so gently in those moments, and it was the gentleness that actually scared me. I could never reconcile it with what else I knew.
So yes, I’d come home and been secretive. What could I have said? It all ended when one day the guy put his hands around my neck and choked me. I’d wanted him to stop, and I tried to tell him so, but when I opened my mouth to speak, his hands were around my throat, and I wasn’t able to breathe.
My eyes had watered, and I reached up my hands and tried to pull his off, but he was looking at the ceiling, and wouldn’t look down. His hands tightened beneath mine. I stared up at his chin, t
rying to pull back his fingers. He blurred a little in my vision, and in that moment I knew more clearly than anything that I could die, that this guy could kill me. And then I passed out.
When I woke he was gone and I was tangled up in sheets that smelled like him. My neck was sore, and his fingers had left puffy pink marks up and down the sides. Over the next few days they turned purple then black and faded away beneath the turtlenecks I wore.
After that, things changed. We stopped speaking, and he never hit me again, but he lived in my dorm, ate in my cafeteria hall, and I thought I could smell him everywhere. I stayed in my room as much as I could: I skipped my classes and meals. I couldn’t breathe correctly, and worried he’d damaged my windpipe. I hated him for making me afraid; I hated him for not coming back. I only felt safe when I went home to be with my family.
I looked at Hannah. She understood nothing. “We thought you were dead,” I said. I got up. “I’m done,” I said, walking toward the elevator.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to get away from you.”
Hannah stood and followed me.
“Go away,” I said. “You’re not six years old anymore.” I clenched my hands.
A white-haired man approached from the lobby and sprang into the elevator when it opened. With great gallantry, he held the door and smiled. “Going up?” he asked.
I nodded. “Good-bye,” I said to Hannah, but she followed me in.
The man pressed the button for his floor, but I did not step forward and press mine. We ascended sixteen floors. When the door opened, the man held out his hand to signal us out. Wordless, we stood our ground, looking away from him, looking away from each other. There was a moment of baffled silence, and then awkwardly the man lurched forward and exited. The elevator door closed. We began to descend.
“I thought we were talking,” Hannah said. “I thought we were finally getting somewhere.”
“It’s too late.”
“You don’t believe that,” she said. “Why did you come here if you believed that?”
The elevator door opened. We were back on the lobby floor, and a family with two young girls crowded into the elevator. Again we rode up, and again we waited on a floor that was not mine. The girls looked back over their shoulders at us as they walked away.
“Why did you come here?” Hannah asked when the elevator door closed. She folded her arms. “I can ride this thing forever.”
I folded my own arms. “That makes two of us.”
As we rode up and down in the elevator, neither of us willing to concede, I wanted to tell her that she could not always win. I stared at the Stop button on the elevator. I thought about hitting it and beating the crap out of her. I imagined us emerging from the elevator bloody and bruised. The thought was satisfying.
Finally, I hit the button for my floor. “I told Mom and Dad I’d find you,” I said.
Hannah shrugged, that familiar motion.
“They went crazy over you,” I said. “You ruined their lives.”
“Okay, enough,” Hannah said. “No one can really ruin someone else’s life.”
I wanted to tell her that she had ruined my life for the last year. Instead, I said, “Dad didn’t get treated for cancer because he was waiting for you to come back.”
“Don’t put that on me,” Hannah said. “I never asked him to do that. It’s not my fault.”
The elevator door opened.
“Yes.” I stepped out of the elevator. “It is.”
Undeterred, she followed me out.
“Don’t follow me,” I said, but she pushed herself into my room behind me.
“Get out,” I said. “Nobody invited you in here.”
“Whatever. So where are Mom and Dad now?”
“Korea.” I was suddenly tired. “They’ll be landing at the airport soon.” They would be deplaning, collecting their four suitcases between them: that was what they had distilled from twenty years. That was what they’d been able to take with them.
Still, they’d have family to meet them. My grandmother and uncle, my father’s cousins, and my Komo’s family, too, except for Gabe, who’d been killed in a car accident while he was in college. I’d been in high school when it happened, and even though it had been years since we’d seen them, his death had been a shock to me. It was so sudden and violent, he was alive and then not, and his death made me aware of the fact that we had shared blood.
My father had told us the news in a grim voice. “I don’t understand,” he’d said, and the admission surprised me. I wondered what he wanted us to say. My mother went to him and took his hand.
She said, “Darling, it was an accident. Just a terrible accident.”
I’d wanted to say something comforting, too. I had never seen him look so sad or defeated. But before I could say anything, Hannah laughed. We turned to her, astonished, but she kept laughing. She showed us all her teeth like a cat.
I looked at her now. I reminded myself she was not to be trusted.
“I’m not going to let you hang this around my neck for the rest of my life,” she said.
I stood with my arms folded. When my father had first told me all his test results, before we knew the full prognosis, I sat down on the sofa and had nothing to say. I held up my hand when he began to list all the places they’d found the cancer. “It’s in my liver,” he said. “And I think maybe my lungs. Is that right?” He sounded baffled, almost amused.
He’d looked at my mother then, and she smiled at him encouragingly, but that lasted only a moment. She left the room hurriedly, pretending she had something else to do, but we heard her weeping through the walls.
My father had turned to me and smiled, after glancing after her in a dazed way. “I’ve lived a good life,” he said. “Haven’t I?”
I shook my head. “Don’t say that.”
“I’m happy,” he said. “It’s been a good life.”
That night I looked up the disease while my parents were sleeping. Less than one percent of patients with my father’s kind of cancer survived one year. I logged onto numerous groups, searched for miracles, and tried to find survivors. I told myself they were out there. It didn’t matter how many out of one thousand or ten thousand survived. As long as one person could, as long as my father did, it would be enough for me. But I couldn’t find a single one.
Hannah interrupted my thoughts. “So what happened to you your sophomore year in college?” she asked. “Are we ever going to talk about that?”
“It’s none of your business.”
Hannah smiled, a little twist of her face. “I wasn’t the first one to give up on us,” she said. “I just want you to admit it.”
“But it’s not true,” I said. “You’re wrong.”
“Fine.” She sighed. “So tell me: how long does Dad have?”
“That’s a messed-up question.”
“Is he terminal?”
I hated her for using those words. “Look,” I said. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to come.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Seriously. They just wanted me to tell you they sold the house, and they’re gone. They wanted you to know. They’re done with you.”
She didn’t even blink. “I see,” she said, and then she squared her shoulders and nodded.
I wanted to laugh. When we were little girls, I’d told Hannah that she was adopted, that she wasn’t ours. “That’s not true,” she’d insisted, tugging at my sleeve.
But now, she nodded thoughtfully. She couldn’t possibly believe it. It was such a stupid lie. We stood, staring at each other, tense, as if the moment could go either way.
“I guess I’ll go then,” Hannah said, and turned toward the door.
I felt a momentary triumph. She paused, her hand on the handle. She turned back to me and smiled. “You’re just like them,” she said. Then she turned away slowly, and walked out of my room. I watched as she turned the handle and stepped into the hallway. She was slow enough for me to go
to her, slow enough for me to call her name at least five times before the door closed behind her and she was gone.
12.
My favorite story of all the stories my mother told me growing up was about a beautiful girl named Simchung. When she was born, her mother died, and her father went blind from grief. Because of this, he had to beg for his living, and as he went from door to door he also begged the village women to nurse his newborn daughter.
Simchung grew up into a dazzlingly beautiful girl who took such tender care of her father that she won the admiration of her entire village. “She is beautiful enough to marry a prince,” they said. “What a shame her father cannot see how beautiful she is.”
One day, while her father was walking the roadways begging for coins, he fell into a ditch. Simchung, at home, preparing dinner, knew nothing of this. That evening, when he didn’t return, she grew frantic with worry. Anything could have happened, but she could only sit at home and wait.
Meanwhile, a passing monk on his way to the temple happened upon her father, and pulled him out of the ditch and took him to the temple. The monk gave Simchung’s father dinner and a bed to sleep in for the night. Before going to bed, Simchung’s father confessed to the monk how much he wished he could regain his sight. Then he could work and earn money and provide for his daughter, and she would not need to spend her entire life looking after him.
The monk listened to the blind man’s story, and told him that for a donation of three hundred bags of rice to the temple, he and his fellow monks would make the necessary prayers to the Buddha to restore his sight. Simchung’s father wept when he heard this: he knew he would never be able to beg that many bags of rice.
The next morning, after having breakfast with the monk, Simchung’s father returned home to his daughter’s anxious welcome. He recounted the tale of what had befallen him, and what the monk had said about the three hundred bags of rice. From then on, Simchung could think of nothing else.
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