Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

  We went out to meet my grandmother and my uncle, who had driven her here. I bowed, greeting them both formally.

  “Umoni!” my mother cried. “You shouldn’t have come so early. It’s too exhausting.”

  “How else was I going to see my firstborn grandchild? Were you going to bring her to me?”

  “Of course,” my mother began, but my grandmother waved at her to be quiet.

  “It’s no matter,” she said. “Let’s go inside. There’s no reason for us to be talking outside in the cold.”

  “Yes, Halmoni,” I said, thinking that it was somehow reassuring to watch her boss my parents around. As if some order was being restored.

  Inside, my mother cleared off the breakfast table, and my grandmother took both my hands in hers and squeezed. Then she stood back and appraised me. “Hm,” she said.

  She readjusted my posture, pushing my shoulders back, my lower spine in. “How is your father feeling?” she asked. “Does he eat well? Does he sleep?”

  He was standing right there, but I answered anyway. I was struck by how she seemed more herself than she had the few times she had visited us in the States. There, she’d been unsure and wavering, and I’d thought she had grown different with age. Here, she was in her element, and it was clear that she had retained some essential energy, a force that I remembered from childhood. Here was the one person, I thought, to whom my relationship would never change.

  She grilled me about my father’s illness. My parents had told her it was nothing. From the way she pressed and retreated, prodded and pulled back, I realized that she was trying to reassure herself. If it was bad, she did not really want to know.

  When I had satisfied her about my father’s health, she pointed to the kitchen where my mother was still cleaning up. She said, “It’s bad manners to let your elders clean up after you.”

  So I went in and took over for my mother while my parents and my grandmother talked in the other room. My uncle was quiet, but I heard him get up and pace around the room.

  After I had cleaned up, I brought out fruit and tea. “Let Jeehyun come and stay with me a while,” my grandmother said. “If you’d brought her to Korea earlier, she’d be married with children by now.”

  I cringed. In the timeline of Korean things, I was late to marriage, late to everything. In the States, only two of my friends were married. But I hadn’t had a boyfriend in years, and this embarrassed me.

  Thankfully, my grandmother didn’t pry. Instead, she turned to my father. “The most important thing now is your health,” she said. “These other things will work themselves out.”

  “Absolutely,” he replied. “But really, I’m feeling much better.” He described the hikes he’d taken recently. He talked about the freshness of the air, how he felt rejuvenated here. “I’m doing great,” he said.

  “Good,” my grandmother said. She turned to me and smiled. “You’ve given him energy,” she said. “He looks better than I’ve seen him yet.”

  This made me happy, and my father nodded. “It’s true!” he said.

  None of us mentioned his treatment or his actual illness. Instead, my grandmother launched then into a list of all the ways she had stayed so healthy for the last fifty years, and named herbs and tonics she had brought, with long instructions in the order and frequency with which he should take them. “And insam, of course,” she said. “With some natural raw honey. And push here, with this finger on this point in your hand. And this point in your leg. Ten or twenty times a day, push hard.” She reached over and pressed.

  My father cried out.

  “Is it tender?” my grandmother said, with satisfaction. “Keep pushing there until it doesn’t hurt anymore. Are you paying attention, Jeehyun? Will you make sure your father does this?” She sat back. “Do as I say,” she said, “and you’ll live to be one hundred.”

  A few days later, my parents and I drove out together to go to my father’s treatment in Seoul. On the drive there, everything seemed beautiful. My mother pointed out cranes nesting in the trees, the shining glass surface of the paddies, the rice stalks waving in the wind.

  When we reached the city, I was glad for a chance to see it in daylight. There were so many cars and so many people. Neon signs in both Korean and English stacked up the sides of the buildings. The weirdest part was that everyone was Korean: everyone looked like me. I wondered if this had taken my parents by surprise as well when they first arrived, after so many years of looking different from everyone around us.

  The hospital itself was impressive and immaculate, with soaring ceilings and granite floors. Men in suits whisked back and forth. They looked alike, sharp, with somewhere to go.

  “Hurry,” my father said. He took me by the elbow and pulled me along.

  For all the bustle of the lobby, we were the only ones to get on the elevator. We went to the fourth floor, which was drab and empty, and smelled of disinfectant and something else familiar that I couldn’t place. Overhead, the fluorescent lights backlit everything with a garish glow. My father, undeterred, led us through the hallways to the treatment room, which was crowded with beds, but otherwise bare. None of the other patients had arrived.

  “Huh,” my father said, shrugging as he settled himself onto one of the empty beds. “I guess we didn’t need to worry about being late.” There was only one chair beside my father’s bed, and I hovered as my mother sat down.

  Then a nurse entered, and briskly measured my father’s blood pressure. When she went to wheel an IV stand over, my father stopped her. “Wait,” he said. “This is my daughter.” He pointed at me. “She came from America to see me.”

  The nurse smiled, and after arranging the IV stand next to my father’s bed, she brought an extra chair over for me. I sat next to my mother as the other patients wandered slowly in, chatting and introducing themselves. The small room seemed to expand as they entered.

  One man came with someone who seemed so clearly to be his son, but it turned out that the patient was actually the younger brother of the two. He was only forty, but he was gaunt and balding, and in recent months people had started calling him “grandfather.” He laughed at the mistake as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

  The family members who’d accompanied the patients remained pretty quiet, but the patients traded stories about what they were in for, and what kinds of things they were doing to stay healthy. This talk of illness made me uncomfortable: I had brought my math notebooks with me to the hospital, hoping my father would be able to go over them with me, but when I pulled them out of my backpack, he waved me off. He was listening to the conversation of the other patients, leaning so far forward that the line of his IV was stretched taut.

  I hadn’t done any work on my thesis since going to Los Angeles, so I opened my book and looked at my notes. I took out my colored pencils, and I tried to concentrate, but I couldn’t help listening, instead.

  “My third relapse,” one person said, and a murmur went around the room.

  “Metastasis,” said another, and an immediate chorus went up of patients calling out which organs their cancers had spread to, and what that meant, and how their treatment was working. They talked about pain management and what worked best for them.

  “I haven’t taken anything,” my father said. “No painkillers for me!”

  The others were astonished. “Not any?” they asked.

  “Not a single pill.”

  I beamed at him. I was proud. Even here, he was special. Tough.

  Once everyone was finally hooked into their IV drips, they settled back and the giddiness passed. The room became much quieter. I watched my father lie on his bed, and I was reminded of the few times he’d stayed home with me when I was sick. It had always been my mother who took care of me through the actual illness, and she was the one I wanted then, her cool hands feeling my forehead or smoothing my sheets. My father was for the recovery. He was pure excitement. He would climb into bed and read The Little Prince to me. Every time he got
to the part about the astronomer who couldn’t be taken seriously because he looked like a clown in his native clothes, he’d throw back his head and laugh.

  My mother scolded him then, because he would forget to let me rest. He’d wake me when I fell asleep, exclaiming, “Listen to this!” Then, realizing what he’d done, he’d encourage me earnestly and loudly to go back to sleep. But he could never resist his favorite part, about how the Little Prince’s planet was so small he could watch forty-four sunsets a day. “That’d be so great,” he’d say, reading that page over again. “Just imagine it!”

  Now, while the other patients quietly rested, he fidgeted.

  “Could I have my phone?” he asked my mother. “I want to call Mr. Lee.” His voice was very loud. He turned to me. “Hey, do you remember him?”

  Looking significantly at the patients lying with their eyes closed now, at their quietly reading families, I whispered, “No.”

  “Sure you do,” my father said heartily. “Mr. Lee! He bought you Little Bear, remember?”

  I kept my voice low. “Daddy,” I said, “shouldn’t we keep our voices down?”

  He looked around, blinking in surprise. “Oh, they don’t mind,” he said. “Do you remember how you cried when you lost that bear? We had to search for it for days, and even after we bought you that stuffed whale, you weren’t satisfied.”

  I did remember. I shrugged. “It wasn’t Little Bear,” I said.

  Mr. Lee agreed to come right away, and as my father snapped his phone shut, I could tell he was gratified by how quickly his friend had agreed. When he arrived, I didn’t recognize him at all. He was dressed in a suit, and his hair was dyed blue-black. It swept over his forehead to hide a receding hairline. He greeted my father with a handshake.

  “You look just like your mother did at your age,” Mr. Lee said, shaking my hand next. “Do you remember me?”

  I shook my head.

  “Impossible!” he cried. “How could you have forgotten? You ruined all my books in one day.” Then I knew who he was. I had heard this story before. When I was about two years old, my parents left me in his study to sleep while they visited him, assuming I would cry for them when I woke. I slept the whole time, or so they thought, but when they were ready to leave, they came to fetch me and discovered me sitting in front of his bookshelves. All the books from the lowest shelf were pulled down around me, their pages torn out and scattered everywhere.

  “I don’t think that was me,” I said now.

  “Oh, it was you,” my mother said grimly.

  Mr. Lee laughed. “I would never have imagined you would turn out so well,” he said cheerfully. “I hear you’re a scholar now. Is that your work?” He nodded at my notebook.

  I decided I liked him. I liked the easy way he teased me, as if I was someone close to him. I liked the way he put his hand on my father’s shoulder. No one in America had been close to my parents like that. Once, this man had been young with my father. Leaning over my father’s bed, he said, “Remember when we jumped out of a plane and landed on those thorny bushes? Remember when we had to run up that mountain in twelve minutes?”

  “That was pure hell,” my father said. “Military service was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” but he was laughing.

  “Just remember,” Mr. Lee said. “If you survived that, you can survive anything.”

  He stayed for lunch, which we ate while my father was still receiving treatment. He kept my father laughing the whole time, and then he left. I watched him go. He’d been close to my father, I thought. They had done their year of mandatory military service together. I’d seen pictures of my father during that time, crisp in his uniform, his hair buzzed short, the expression on his face serious and unsmiling. He did not look like the father I knew in those pictures, but like a sculpture. The lines in his face were too harsh. It wasn’t until after he married my mother that he began to look happy in photographs, his face softening and opening up with the years.

  He had met my mother shortly after his service. My mother had been an organizer at her school for the student democratization movement, and my father was on the fringes of the group. He went to the demonstrations, and shook his fist and yelled, along with everyone else. He actually had no memory of the first time they met. They’d been at a demonstration, and he was standing close to my mother near the front line when a stray rock thrown by another student hit him in the back of the head. She saw the rock ricochet off his head, watched his legs give way and collapse beneath him.

  She lunged forward, grabbing my father’s arm as he toppled. She scooted under it to prop him up. This was the first time she had touched a man who was not related to her by blood. He was incoherent and mumbling, and he let her drag him away from the crowd. When she’d gotten them away from the main area of conflict, an old woman watching from the front of a teahouse with a broom in her hand waved them over as they approached. She ushered them in.

  My mother maneuvered the weight of my father’s body into a chair in the back of the room; once she had him propped up against a wall, she took the chair next to him. The woman brought two washcloths and told my mother to wipe off her face. She had caked toothpaste around her eyes and mouth before the rally to combat the tear gas that she knew would be sprayed over them. My mother did as she was told.

  Then, carefully, avoiding eye contact with the old woman, she wiped off my father’s face. Her hands were shaking. Her knees. She kept seeing the snap of my father’s neck when the rock had hit his head, the buckle of his knees, so quick and awkward. When it happened, something inside herself she could not name had mirrored my father’s fall, dropping like a rope within her.

  When she was finished cleaning his face, she touched her hand to the back of his head and found the bump there. Her hand came away sticky with blood, and she wiped it off with the cloth. She stood and thanked the woman for helping them. She gave her a little money, and asked her to give my father some tea and something to eat when he woke. Then she left him there, propped up against the wall, unconscious.

  Outside, the demonstration was already over. Some students were being dragged away in handcuffs, some were on the ground covering their heads as the soldiers kicked them. The rest were running in all directions. My mother walked calmly through the chaos, her hands in her pockets, her mind humming.

  In the next few weeks, she found out more about my father. He was an orphan, with only one older sister to whom he was devoted. He was very serious and very poor. He was friends with other poor young men who were equally intense.

  Once she had discovered all this, she stopped prying and made no attempts to contact him. She told herself she just wanted to make sure that he was all right, that her efforts had not been wasted. So she was surprised when, a full year later, he turned up as a new employee at the place where she had recently taken a job. When he showed no recognition upon meeting her, she met his face with an equally blank one. Still, they were alumni of the same college, and she was very pretty. It took only a few weeks for him to ask her on a date. She refused. He asked again. She refused, with some irritation. Perhaps it was the assuredness of her refusals that intrigued him, but whatever the reason, he was smitten.

  On their fifth date, my mother finally told him she was the one who’d rescued him the day of the demonstration. He was astounded. He said that when he had woken from his stupor, he remembered nothing. The old woman at the teahouse told him his sister had brought him there. My father was not a superstitious man, or a stupid man, but the rock had perhaps knocked some sense out of him. He had been convinced that somehow it was his sister, miles away, who had saved him.

  My mother was not particularly surprised that he had no memory of her face, no memory of her body against his, but his attributing her act to someone else filled her with outrage.

  “I will never marry you,” she declared, though the question had never been raised.

  And at that moment my father realized he had to have her. That was the beginning of
his campaign to win my mother’s hand. As for my mother, it marked the moment after which she would always think of him as a man who owed her his life.

  We went to meet my father’s doctor after the chemo, and I sat next to my father on the exam table, swinging my legs.

  “I have some surprising news,” the doctor said as he came in, peering at us over my father’s folder.

  “Tell us,” my mother said.

  The doctor looked down at the file again, and shook his head. “The cancer has shrunk,” he said. He sounded baffled. He pulled an image from the folder and laid it on his desk. “The tumor in your stomach,” he said, “has shrunk two-point-five centimeters—in half since you first came here. In just two weeks.”

  We craned our necks forward, staring at the picture, dazed.

  “The tumors in your lungs are incrementally smaller,” he continued, “and the one in your liver has decreased by about forty percent.”

  “What does that mean?” my mother said.

  “To be frank, it is very irregular,” Dr. Kwan said. “It is what it is,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily get my hopes up, but it is certainly encouraging.”

  I had read about stories like this when I’d searched for miracles. This was how it always began. I opened and closed my hands. The tumor was halving, disappearing. If it shrank 2.5 more centimeters in two weeks, the doctor said, it’d be gone. Even if it didn’t, I thought, even if it just stopped growing now, my father could be okay. He would survive.

  My father reached out to shake his doctor’s hand. His face opened into a wide, dazzling smile. “Maybe you’ll get to write about me in a case study,” he said. “Maybe I can make you famous.” He laughed. The hope I felt when I heard my father laugh like that terrified me. It frightened me more than anything had since Hannah had first gone missing.