Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  Weeks later, a sailor came to their village. He was searching for a maiden willing to sacrifice herself by throwing herself into the ocean to placate the Dragon King. This would secure passage for his ship. When Simchung heard of this sailor’s mission, she called him to her house, and agreed to go for the price of three hundred bags of rice to be donated to the temple on her father’s behalf.

  The sailor agreed. He was regretful: usually the women who agreed to make such a sacrifice were old or unattractive, with nothing he saw to offer the world. The loss of such a beauty was a waste and a shame, but there was nothing to be done, and so the next morning, he came to fetch her.

  “Where are you going?” Simchung’s father asked, eating his breakfast. “Who is our visitor?”

  When she told him of the deal she’d made, her father threw himself at the sailor’s feet, weeping and pleading for him to reconsider. But it was too late: the deal had been made, the bags of rice already purchased and given away.

  So Simchung left her father weeping in their house, and followed the sailor to his ship. They sailed for several weeks, and each day the sea became more and more dangerous. Finally, a day arrived when the waves grew as tall as houses, and the sailor came to Simchung and told her the time had come. They had arrived at the place above the Dragon King’s palace where the sacrifice must take place. And so Simchung fixed her dress and tied back her hair, and said that she was ready.

  The sailors onboard wept as she walked past them: they had never seen a girl so beautiful. Yet they buried their fists in their mouths and watched her leap, praising the filial love that led her to death. Then they watched the waves crash over her. They watched the waves grow calmer and calmer. She was gone.

  But that was not the end of Simchung: in stories, it never is. A week later, the King’s courtiers were sailing the seas when they saw a giant lotus blossom floating on the surface of the water. It was the finest anyone had ever seen. As they approached, they were struck by its unparalleled beauty and sweet scent. They took this flower as a present to the King.

  The King, delighted, ordered that this blossom be put on display in the middle of his palace hall so that everyone could admire his treasure. As the court stood around the flower admiring its beauty, the flower opened, and everyone gasped, for hidden inside was the beautiful maiden Simchung, asleep.

  The King fell in love with the sleeping girl instantly. Believing her to be a gift from the heavens, he proposed marriage to her as soon as she awoke. The resulting wedding was the largest anyone had ever seen, and guests came from far and wide, from all over the kingdom to pay tribute. At the banquet there were fifty types of kimchi and fifty kinds of rice, and the dishes of meat and fish and fowl and vegetables were uncountable.

  No one had ever seen a more beautiful or radiant bride. So when she broke down in tears during the banquet, the King was shocked. He insisted on knowing the reason for her unhappiness. Simchung, miserable, confessed that she felt guilty for this newfound happiness, when her father, all alone and blind, had no one to take care of him.

  To make her happy, the King arranged a feast, and invited all the blind men in the realm to attend. To ensure they would all attend, an announcement went out: the feast would last one hundred days, and each guest would be honored with riches and granted audience with the King.

  Thousands of blind men arrived for the feast, but Simchung’s father was not among them. With each day, she became more convinced something had happened to him. She was horrified to think that perhaps he had died, and there was no one to tend his grave. She grew sadder and sadder each day, and sat silently at the head of the table. On the final day of the feast, one last man arrived, barefoot and dirty. His hair was unkempt, his clothes torn and ragged, his beard long.

  This was Simchung’s father, but she did not recognize him in his dirty clothes and long hair. She had always taken such good care of him. So he was seated with everyone else at the table, and the King asked him what he most wished for, and said he would try to grant the wish. At this question, the man began to weep. He said that he had come for the feast, since he’d been hungry for so long, but his dearest wish could not be granted: all he wanted was to hear his dear dead daughter’s voice again.

  As he spoke these words, he heard a familiar voice. “Father,” it cried.

  He leaped up, calling Simchung’s name, and like a spell, the darkness fell away from his eyes. For the first time, he beheld his daughter. She was running to him, and had thrown herself into his arms even before he had finished speaking her name.

  In elementary school, I tried to tell this story to my American friends. I was surprised when they smirked. This made me feel worse than their disgust at the food we ate in my house, or their laughter at my parents’ accents. Still, I made my mother tell me the story whenever I could, and I played at being Simchung with Hannah.

  Hannah told me later, after she was already in college, that she’d never liked the story. “Why would you want to be like her? She’s just some spineless girl,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “She’s a hero!”

  “You’re such a martyr,” Hannah said, rolling her eyes. “Seriously, how do you buy everything that’s fed to you?”

  That was how our arguments went after a certain age: our disagreements about one thing were always really about something else. She said she had only pretended to like that story because I loved it so much. “It teaches girls to kill themselves,” she said. “It teaches them that their lives are just a debt they have to pay back to someone else.”

  “I don’t think that’s what it teaches at all,” I said, caught off guard. “You’re overanalyzing.” The thing was, I loved that Simchung gave up her life, and in doing so, saved her father.

  I yearned for the moment at which everything the father had lost was returned to him, when everything was restored and multiplied. I recognized that Simchung’s life could not really begin until that moment, until she had made that happen. That made sense to me.

  I had always retained a keen sense of what had been denied our family, of what we had lost. After we moved to America I kept track of the twists I imagined my life would have taken if we had remained in Seoul. I wouldn’t have struggled so much with everything; I might have been popular; I could have done better in school.

  I imagined the other side as well: if we’d stayed in Korea my father might have been thrown in jail. He might have been tortured or executed. The government might have seized everything and sent the rest of us to the countryside to live off apples and the kindness of our relatives.

  As I grew up the story lines kept diverging, and I tried to map out all the different paths our lives might have taken if certain circumstances had been altered. This habit contributed to a sense of mine that my current life was not quite solid, not quite real. That might have been why as a mathematician, I chose topology as my field, studying how certain objects that intersect in three-dimensional space don’t in four-dimensional space.

  I was aware that my father had come to the United States to work as an engineer, but before that, he had been considered the most promising young mathematician in Korea. So this was another story line that I filed away and tended carefully: the life we would have had if my father had been able to fulfill his potential. In these scenarios, there was never any question that he would have been great; there was only the fact of this future having been denied him.

  When I went to grad school in what had once been his chosen field, I knew I was living a phantom version of his dreams. This thrilled me, as if I’d found a way into one of our parallel lives, and reclaimed something that had been taken away. And then, slowly, I began to understand the other side of that dream. I could not take him with me. That was the price: I had to live his dream alone.

  Still, I thought about what Hannah said. Why had my heroes been Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale—why had I prayed for my own crippled person, my own terminally ill or unlovable person to take in
and love, with such fervor when I was young? I wondered if Hannah was right. I wanted to remind her that as children we had fought to play Simchung, that she had always been happy when I let her take the title role. I could still see her, acting out the moment of sacrifice as she jumped off the back of our sofa, arms out, eyes closed—glowing with the thrill of that plunge into the imagined abyss.

  13.

  I left Los Angeles without seeing Hannah again. I walked up and down the beach my last morning there, listening for seals. I felt angry and ragged, as if my sister had tricked me into saying things. I thought of that guy from college, whose name I still couldn’t say without feeling nauseated. He had taught me that I could count on no one but my family.

  The year I’d dated him, I had to come home to Michigan when an infection began at the tips of the roots of my teeth and spread to my jawbone. I never knew how much my parents had known or guessed back then. We never talked about what was wrong: I tried to keep everything from them, afraid of what it said about me.

  The infection, I was told, was a result of the accident long ago, when Allison had pushed me into the wall. That had actually surprised me. The body remembers old wounds. It stores them away, in your blood and your bones, long after you believe they have healed.

  . . .

  I cried when the plane to Korea from Los Angeles took off, and was surprised by the tears and unable to check them. I turned my face to the window. The woman sitting next to me offered me Kleenex after Kleenex, and I took them without acknowledging her, ashamed and terrified that she might ask me what was wrong. I could feel her looking at me. Once she let her hand flutter questioningly onto my shoulder, but I shrugged it off and moved as far away from her as I could in my little seat, leaning my forehead against the window. I pressed my hand against my mouth and closed my eyes, and after a while was able to stop.

  When the plane finally landed in Korea thirteen hours later, it was the dead of night. My uncle was waiting at the airport. He stood behind the gate, in the front row of the crowd gathered there to greet the plane. It was the same airport where I’d waited for him years ago, when he hadn’t come. In the years between, he had never called us, and we had never called him.

  As he approached now, he nodded at me, and I bowed my greeting. He took my suitcase, awkwardly raising his hand as if he might pat me on the shoulder. He let it drop without touching me. I followed him then, in silence, to his car.

  It was a long journey to the house my parents were renting in the countryside. First we had to pass through Seoul, which had become completely unfamiliar to me. There were so many new buildings and flashing lights—even the traffic signs, now in both English and Korean, were new. It did not feel like a place I had come from, like anywhere I’d ever lived. I sat with my nose almost touching the window, watching it roll by.

  “Sleep,” my uncle insisted each time I turned to look at him. I did not know if he thought I was tired and should rest, or if he didn’t want to talk to me, or if there was some bad news he was trying to hide. I wanted to ask how my parents were doing, and I also wanted to hear his voice after all this time, but I felt clumsy and confused, as if the affection I felt for him was unseemly or misplaced. I had missed him, and had never forgotten him. But whenever I turned to him he looked uneasy, and looked out his window, away from me, and did not speak.

  I was quiet, too, watching the lights of the city until we had passed the tight streets of crowded buildings, and left it all behind, everything coming farther and farther apart until even the streetlamps were gone. We went a while longer, and stopped at a gas station: a pocket of light surrounded by darkness. A man filled the gas tank and gave my uncle a packet of tissues, and we went on. The road turned to dirt, and then it was completely black except the light the car cast ahead of us. For the rest of the way, we drove like that into the dark.

  I saw the glimmer of trembling light that was my parents’ house from a distance, even before my uncle pulled onto the road that would take us there. A low fog clung to the ground, but above it the air was clear, and behind the tiny light of the house I could see the shadows of mountains in the distance.

  My parents were renting a place that had been built in the traditional Korean style, complete with a curving roof. When we pulled up, a door was flung open. A figure stepped out and started walking in our direction: a shadow moving through the haze. Then the figure waved, and began running toward us. It was my father, in his old blue coat and a brand-new baseball cap. I stood next to the car, watching him come toward us.

  “Shake,” he said when he reached us, holding out his hand. As he pumped my arm up and down, some of my anxiety dropped away.

  “You look good,” I said.

  “Do I?” He smiled broadly.

  I nodded. “You look great, Daddy,” I said. “You look better than you did when you left.”

  Then my mother called my name from the open door. She stepped into a cloud of lamplight. “Hurry up and come in,” she said. “It’s chilly outside!”

  As we went in, she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. She put her hand on my uncle’s arm. “Thank you,” she said. He flinched a little, but followed her into the house, dragging my luggage behind him.

  “Go,” my father said. “I want you to see the house.” He was smiling, expectant.

  Inside, it was small and clean. Everything was bright: the wood floors, the small kitchen off to the side, and the sliding paneled doors made to look like old-fashioned Korean paper screens. My father stepped in behind me, his hand warm on my back. “Do you feel the heat?” he asked. “Coming from the ground?”

  I could feel the warmth penetrate my socks through the wood floor.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s a traditional Korean heating system,” he said. “Let me show you how it works.” He took several sheets of paper from the table that stood in the middle of the room and flourished a pen. “Now,” he said. He motioned to the sofa at the back of the room. He sat beside me, immediately beginning to sketch. He drew a picture of a house and a space beneath it. He explained that it was one of the most efficient heating systems in the world. “It’s uniquely Korean,” he said. He drew a fire under the house, and mapped the tunnels winding together beneath the house, directing the heat from under the floor. “Sometimes traditional is best,” he said.

  I smiled, and studied the drawing.

  He turned to my uncle. “How was the drive?”

  “Dark,” my uncle said.

  My father nodded, and waited for my uncle to say more. My mother came in with a pot of tea on a tray, and my uncle rose—I thought to help her, but then I saw he’d gotten up to leave.

  “No, stay,” my mother insisted. “Have just one cup.”

  “Please sit down, Uncle,” I said, trying to help. “I haven’t seen you in so long.” My uncle glanced between my mother and me and reluctantly resumed his seat.

  My mother smiled at him encouragingly.

  This seemed to alarm him, and he fidgeted. “Can I smoke?” he asked.

  “It’s not good for my father,” I began.

  “It’s okay,” my father said. He leaned forward and, putting his hand on my uncle’s shoulder, said, “Go on.”

  My uncle’s hand shook as he lit his cigarette. He took three quick, nervous puffs, and we didn’t ask any more questions, just watched him for the next several minutes as he relaxed, blowing long streams of smoke into the air. He did not touch his tea, and we did not talk. When he was finished, he stubbed out his cigarette onto the tray with the tea things on it, and stood up again to leave.

  We rose, too, and followed him to the door. When he stepped into the darkness he did not look back: we waved, though we couldn’t see him through the darkness, and didn’t know if he saw us. My mother called out a last-minute message for my grandmother, but he gave no sign that he’d heard as he pulled away.

  “What happened to him?” I asked, watching his taillights fade from view.

  Neither of my paren
ts answered.

  “Is he always like that?”

  My mother shrugged. “Your Halmoni says he’s better now than he was,” she said. “It’s a blessing he’s doing this well.”

  We went back in and sat quietly for a while, and then my mother asked, “So how is your sister?”

  I’d told them on the phone that Hannah was in school, that she looked well, that she wouldn’t be able to come to Korea. They had taken it all with a resignation that alarmed me, as if they no longer had the energy to worry about anything other than my father’s health.

  “She looks well,” I said. They looked so expectant that I wanted to give them something, so I lied. “She said maybe she’ll be able to visit after the semester is over.”

  “Does she have our number here?” my mother said.

  “She has our e-mails,” I said firmly. “She didn’t want our number.”

  My mother sighed. Her lip trembled, and my father reached over and rubbed her leg. She put her hand over his, and tried to smile. “She will regret this,” my mother said. “She is hurting herself more.”

  The house we were staying in stood at the foot of a mountain, and over breakfast the next morning, my father pointed out the window, and described the lay of the land. To the south there was a small river, to the east the rice paddies, with their shallow, gleaming surfaces punctured by slim, graceful shoots. And to the west, between two fields, was a man-made pond the landowner had stocked with fish. My father described this all with great enthusiasm, getting up from the table to go to the window and point.

  “Eat,” my mother insisted, laughing. “Tell her whatever you want, but eat.”

  While he was still explaining, a large black car came up the gravel driveway, spraying pebbles and dust.

  “That’s your grandmother,” my mother said. She sounded surprised. “I didn’t expect her until this afternoon.”

  We rose together, and my mother told me that my grandmother had gotten in the habit of dropping in on them without calling ahead. They had hidden the extent of my father’s illness from her, but she suspected they were lying, and now she came unannounced, as if she meant to catch them at something.