A little later, my father woke up. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Where are we?” He turned and looked at Hannah and me. “I must have fallen asleep,” he said. “Are we going to Muju?”
My mother reached over and put her hand on his leg. She said, “We’re going to the hospital. Just sit back and rest.”
I pressed my forehead against the cold window. The hills, the paddies, all of it shining and glorious under the sun. And at any moment anything could happen and change: a car could appear from nowhere and run you down. This was how life worked, and we had no control—your foot could slip, your heart could stop, one cell might mutate again and again—and suddenly you had this disease that could grow in your body until everything was powerless to stop it.
In the hospital my father lay in his bed; my mother had gotten him a private room, and it was very clean and empty. The floor shone. The doctor was a short, squat, oily-looking man. “How long have you had blurred vision?” he asked my father.
“You’ve had blurred vision?” I asked.
“Jeehyun, be quiet,” my mother said softly.
“About a month,” my father said.
“How long have you been disoriented?” the doctor said.
“I’m not sure.”
“How long have you had difficulties with cognitive processes: difficulty concentrating, finding it hard to read, forgetting words, being unable to add or subtract numbers?”
“A while.”
I stared. My father had never said anything about forgetting words, being unable to add or subtract numbers. How long had he been losing at card games? I tried to count back.
The doctor stood up and turned away from my father. He addressed himself to my mother. He said my father had had a seizure: a tumor had spread to his brain and swelled. “He had better stay here from now on. We will be able to deal with such emergencies as they arise.” He didn’t say anything about the possibility of my father improving. Then he left, and we could hear his shoes tapping the floor as he walked down the long hall.
“Don’t worry,” my father said, looking up at us, an IV hooked up to his bed. How quickly he had become one of the patients, in his blue gown, lying in his bed with rails. It hit me how frail he was: how taut his skin, how yellow his eyes. I had not noticed until now.
Later, my mother and I sat out in the hallway in two chairs we’d brought out from my father’s room. We were watching him in shifts; right now it was Hannah’s turn.
In the hallway, a girl walked slowly with her father. Perhaps she was my age, or maybe even younger. Her face was sunken, but some sheen of youth still clung to her skin. Her hair was thin and fell limply around her shoulders. Back and forth she walked in her hospital gown, long and blue, stamped with the hospital’s logo and address, rolling her IV before her.
Through her gown, I could see all her bones, her shoulder blades, her collarbone, and the sharp, dangerous points of her elbows. She shuffled her feet. She might have been pretty once, but now she had thin, colorless lips and enormous watery eyes. The bones of her face were too sharp. But they might have been lovely. She might have been beautiful, before the illness had wrecked her face and made it look so tired.
Her father murmured beside her, stroking her hand. His whole body was turned toward her, his shoulders, his head tilted in, even his feet shuffling sideways so that his toes pointed toward hers. His hand on her back looked strong. I wondered if the girl was dying, if she had hope. I wondered if we were all using up the same hope.
“I can’t do this. I want to run away,” my mother suddenly said. She twisted her hands in her lap. “I want to get in the car and drive.” And suddenly, so did I. I wanted to run away from all of them, from the guilt I felt every time I looked at Hannah, from my mother’s haggard, worried face and the memory of my father’s mouth twitching, saliva coming out the corners.
When I was little, my mother used to leave the house after a fight with my father and say she was never coming back. She’d drive away in tears, both Hannah and me begging her to stay. Sitting with her now, I could imagine her leaving, and Hannah with her. “You can’t trust me,” I wanted to tell her. “I can’t be counted on.” I had let my father fall. I had let everyone down.
. . .
Every morning, the nurses came and weighed my father, took his vitals, his blood pressure. All day long they measured him, then had nothing to say. All day long I thought of my sullen response when he’d said he wanted to go to Muju: I don’t want to go anymore.
We sat by his bedside and tried to talk. My mother called her relatives, his relatives, their friends, and we listened to her explain again and again that we were at the hospital now, that something had happened.
The day of the firefly festival came and went. My grandmother and uncle tried to visit, but my mother sent them away.
“In Korea it’s not appropriate for someone your grandmother’s age to have to face an illness in the husband of her child,” she said when I asked why. “It’s a burden for both parties, it goes against the order of things.” So my grandmother sent messages and food through my uncle, but she did not come again.
My father tried to be cheerful, and we tried to be cheerful with him. But every time I left his room I saw things I did not wish to see. I saw whole families weeping, men, women, children. I saw a man lose his balance and swing in a long arc across the room, spinning until the IV pole tipped and took him with it. He lay splayed against the floor, a trickle of blood collecting near his face while nurses rushed to help him up. And there was so little blood, as if he had nothing left in him to lose.
My Komo and her cousins piled into the room later one afternoon while my father was sleeping. When they arrived, my aunt’s eyes were brimming with tears, and Big Cousin’s wife was openly weeping.
“How is he?” she asked in a voice loud enough that it woke him. My father opened his eyes, and tried to sit up. Hannah and I stepped forward to help him. He did not like other people seeing him in bed, or watching him while he slept.
He smiled at my Komo and reached out his hand. He wanted to shake hands with everyone: he thanked them for coming to visit. “I’m doing just fine,” he announced.
Big Cousin asked in a low, stricken voice if it was true he’d had a seizure. If it was true he had a tumor in his brain.
“Sure,” my father said. “But it’s no problem.”
Big Cousin’s wife howled, then covered her mouth. My father stared at her, startled at the noise. Then he caught my eye and began to grin. He winked. He turned to my mother and said he had to go to the bathroom, and she jumped up immediately to help him.
As they passed us, I saw my mother’s hands tighten around my father’s shoulders.
“Your father and I were very close,” Big Cousin told me as we waited, as he’d told me every time he visited us.
“It’s so terrible,” his wife said. “It’s so terrible to lose him like this.”
“We’re not losing him yet,” I said. How dare they do this?
“We lived together as children, you know,” Big Cousin said. “We were like brothers.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. I bit my tongue—I didn’t say I also knew the stories they never told: that when my father’s mother was dying, they had not given her money to go to the hospital. They’d had the money to give, but she had died without so much as a doctor’s visit because they hadn’t thought her condition seemed serious enough. “He’s spoken of it,” I said.
Big Cousin looked pleased.
We sat chatting long enough for Big Cousin’s wife to notice my father was still in the bathroom and wonder if anything had happened, and then he emerged from the bathroom, trailing his IV. He looked incredibly weary. I was worried: he usually made such an effort.
We must have all thought the same thing, because Big Cousin rose and went to my father. He raised his fist. “Fighting!” he said. He growled. My father laughed.
“Come on,” his cousin said, hitting him on the shoulder so that m
y father nearly lost his balance. His IV shook on the pole, the bag rattled. My mother grabbed him by the shoulder, and Hannah and I leaped forward. We glared at Big Cousin, but his eyes were fixed on my father’s.
My father smiled. He growled back. They both laughed.
Satisfied, Big Cousin took my father in an awkward embrace. “Good boy,” he said. “Good boy.” My father, thus released, stumbled to his armchair, lowered himself down with the help of my mother, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
Later that day, my advisor sent an e-mail. “I’ve read your results,” his message read. “I think we can fast-track you to finish next year. But in the meantime you’ll need to fill out some paperwork and demonstrate that you can complete all your non-dissertation requirements in time. Why don’t you come here for a few weeks in person so that we can sort this all out?”
I read the e-mail again. I had never imagined I could finish early, and since I’d come to Korea had assumed I was falling behind. I looked around the computer room and wished there was someone to tell.
“But I can’t,” I said out loud. I started to write a response explaining that I couldn’t leave now, but I couldn’t bring myself to send it. I looked at a calendar. Maybe I could go for two weeks, I thought. Just two weeks. This was the one thing I’d wanted to give my father.
I thought about my notebook, filled with ideas and symbols and sketches that I’d thought would build a bridge to my father’s past. I did the calculations. All I had left aside from my dissertation were my language requirement and the minor thesis portion of my qualifying exam. That would take three weeks at most to prepare. I’d messed so many things up, but if I went to see my advisor, I could come back with a date and a promise: I could tell my father I’d complete my Ph.D. within the year.
I erased the e-mail saying I couldn’t come, and bought my ticket. “I’ll come Monday,” I wrote, and hit Send.
For dinner that night, my father’s cousins and my aunt said they would keep my father company while my mother, Hannah, and I went to have dinner in the hospital cafeteria. We took the elevator down to the basement level, which was lined with restaurants and stores. It didn’t look at all like a hospital there, but like a mall.
We went through the cafeteria line and found a table together. There were so many people down there: I wondered what they were all doing.
“Can you believe your father’s relatives?” my mother said. “We’re going to have to find a way to deal with them, and with all the visitors. Though it’s nice to get this break down here.” She sighed.
I couldn’t bear to make small talk. I was anxious about my decision. I dreaded telling them, but my stomach was queasy and insistent.
“I’m leaving,” I blurted out.
“To go where?” my mother said blankly.
“I’m going to Chicago.”
Hannah didn’t react. My mother blinked. “You can’t go,” she said. “You can’t do that.”
“My thesis advisor e-mailed me,” I said. “I need to.”
“No,” my mother said, shaking her head. She started to cry into her soup. “Why?”
“I’m only going for a little while,” I said. “Twelve days. I have to work on my dissertation.”
“Twelve days,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I have to.”
She turned to Hannah. “Tell her to stay.”
“How does she have the right,” I began, but Hannah interrupted.
“Unni has to do what she has to do,” she said. And then, “It’s her life.”
A loud sob burst from my mother. She wiped her face with her napkin and blew her nose. “He may not live a month.”
“He could still get better.”
She shook her head.
“Anyway, that’s why I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said. “So I can leave soon and come back soon.”
“You tell your father, then,” she said, straightening up and suddenly livid. “Tell him what you’re planning to do.”
“I was going to,” I said.
. . .
Afterward, Hannah and I went for a walk around the hospital. On the street, we passed a couple from the hospital: the woman was wearing the same pajamas that all the patients wore. She was holding on to her husband’s arm. They were moving very slowly and not talking at all. On the sidewalk, some women were squatting, selling cabbages, apples, chestnuts, and a few pairs of pants. We walked right past the grandmothers, who called out to us in Korean. We spoke English, and I wondered if anyone would guess that we were from the hospital.
“It’s hard to be around someone dying,” Hannah said, out of nowhere.
“Don’t say that about him,” I said.
“He knows he is, you know.”
I shook my head.
“I get why you’re leaving,” she said after a while. “I don’t blame you. But, Janie, he’s not going to last long.”
I didn’t respond; I just kept walking, and my sister stayed with me.
In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to tell my father I was leaving until the day I left. If no one had said anything, perhaps I would have just stayed on, pretending I’d never planned to leave.
But an hour before the bus was due to leave for the airport, my mother approached me and said, “You can’t go.”
“Stop,” I said. “It will be fine.”
She started to cry.
“Jeehyun,” my father called from his bed. I went over to him. “Why is your mother crying?” he asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “You know how she is.”
“Wife,” he called to her, lifting his head from the pillow. “Come here.”
But she shook her head and left the room, and I thought about how my parents never called each other by their names but by their relationship to each other.
“Go find her,” my father said, but I stayed.
“Daddy,” I said. “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to go away for a little while, but I’ll be back soon. Maybe you’ll be better by then.”
“Where are you going?” he asked. “Shopping?” His eyes were so large in his face.
“I have to go back to Chicago to handle some stuff for my dissertation. But Hannah will be here.”
My father frowned. He didn’t speak. He’d gotten so thin so quickly, and looked different lying in his bed than he had even five days ago. He could get better just as quickly, I told myself. This was how miracles worked: first they took you to the edge. Then they pulled you back.
I took a deep breath. “If you want me to stay, Daddy,” I said, “I can stay. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”
“No,” he said, waving his hand vaguely in front of him. “Go.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding. I didn’t know whether I was disappointed or relieved. “I’m only going away for a little while,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, but he frowned and didn’t say anything else.
“It’s for you,” I said, and my eyes filled with tears. I really meant it. “I want to get this done for you.”
He didn’t respond. “I want to get up,” he said. “Help me.”
I pulled him up as gently as I could, and then we sat on the bed together. He took my hand in his dry, hot one. They were so thin, the veins as large as ever. He swayed, and I leaned against him to keep him steady.
My mother came back into the room. My father blinked up at the clock. “What time are you leaving?” he asked.
“In half an hour.”
He nodded. He squinted at the clock again, as if it was difficult for him to figure out the time.
When I stood up to leave, my father shook my hand, which he had been holding. His legs dangled on the bed.
“Tell her to stay,” my mother said. She began to cry again.
My father looked at her wonderingly, and did not answer. He turned back to me and smiled. His lips were so dry they pulled on his teeth.
“Be good,” he said. He made his voice strong for me. “Work har
d.”
“I will,” I said. I felt his arms go around me, and I held on to his arms. I was suddenly terribly frightened, that this could be it.
He kissed my head, my hand, and then he pulled me down and kissed me all over my face. His lips were dry and scratchy. I couldn’t remember the last time my father had kissed me. I must have been a child. I wanted to cry. I wanted to stay. I wanted to run away as fast as I could.
“Daddy,” I said, “will you always love me?”
My father let go of me and nodded. “Yes,” he said. He smiled.
When I stood and walked to the door, he smiled again and waved. He smiled and smiled. How he shone. Only my father had the power to smile this way, as if everything in the world were perfect, as if he was welcoming me home. Oh God, let me never forget his face.
20.
On the bus to the airport I sat next to a man in a suit who avoided eye contact and spread his newspaper out on his lap and read. I flinched away when the paper touched my knee. I watched everything go by, the tall buildings, the stoplights, and the people on the street. I wanted the bus to go faster, faster. When I got to the airport and finally checked in and went through the long security line and had my passport stamped I walked fast. But when I finally strapped myself into my seat and felt the lift under my gut as we took off, I felt a tremendous sense of dread, as if I would never come back, and as if everyone around me knew what I had done.
I arrived at my apartment in Chicago bleary-eyed and stumbling. I’d arranged to stay at the place of some anthropology graduate student I’d found online, and after I retrieved her key from under her mat I spent several minutes jiggling the doorknob before it would open. She had left in a hurry: the shades were drawn closed, and papers and clothes were strewn about the floor. I opened the curtains and looked around. There were dishes in the sink, a bra draped over a chair, socks crumpled beneath the desk.
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