But he had other ideas. He squeezed my hand whenever I started to doze off, jerking me awake. When I got so tired that even this stopped working, he called out. He croaked out the Buddha’s name in his pitiful, unused voice—and it was a strange sound, the sound high in his throat—like the call of a bird. I straightened up at once and began again. My father chanted with me the first few times to keep me going, and then his voice faded away and he was still and satisfied. “Kwansenbosal,” we said again and again. “Namuamitabul Kwansenbosal.”
I knew he wanted me to stay awake with him, to keep this vigil through the dark. I had heard somewhere that most people die at dawn, just before sunrise, and every day I thought if we could get past the sunrise, we would be safe. As I chanted away the dark hours, I prayed that he wouldn’t get worse. I had stopped asking for his recovery. I didn’t want to ask for too much.
Halfway through the night, when I was almost unable to continue chanting, Hannah woke up. Her voice, calm and assured, joined mine. We carried the chant together. We did this all night long, and the longer it went on, the more I was filled with an ebullient kind of hope that rose inside my chest and lifted my spirits. Finally, when the sun was just reaching its fingers of light through the window, the three of us fell asleep.
The drive the next day to the house my father had grown up in took five hours. My father rode strapped into the back of a van in his bed, my mother beside him. Hannah and I rode in a separate car with Big Cousin, and along the way he told us stories and pointed to landmarks, and I watched Hannah smile and laugh.
When we finally arrived, the estate was as beautiful as my father had always said. The sky was blue, and the air had a chill in it. I felt as if everything could change right here. It had been so long since we’d been outside, since we’d been in the mountains. I looked around at a place I’d heard only the briefest of stories about. There was the courtyard, the persimmon tree with its orange fruit flaming in the sky. There was the apple orchard, a flock of birds circling overhead. Here was the place where my father had grown up. Until now it had existed entirely in my imagination, and I was surprised by a sense of recognition, a feeling in my bones that I had come home.
But the sense of wonder that came with this feeling was replaced by regret as soon as I saw my father. His face was frozen in pain, and my mother’s face was panicked.
“Everything rattled in the back of the van,” she said, horror etched in her face. “His bed, the rails, and the IV bags and the pole on his bed. All of it shook every time we took a turn. Even the restraints.” It had been hard for her to give him water with a steady hand. “We shouldn’t have come,” she said, wringing her hands. “We should have turned back.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. This had been my idea, my fault.
My father’s cousins were lowering his bed onto the ground, and they accidentally jolted him as they put it down. My father’s mouth opened wide, as if he would scream, but he didn’t make a sound, his face just frozen like that.
“Careful!” my mother cried, jumping forward. “Be careful.”
And then there was my father. Everything in his body was tense, stiff, suffering. He did not lift his head. He did not look up. His arms were flat against his bed, his back arched, his eyes rolled back and unfocused, his mouth open like a fish.
My mother stood next to his bed, running her hand up and down his unresponsive arm. She followed as his cousins wheeled him into the house, calling, “We’re home!” in cheerful voices, as if this could undo the suffering none of us could bear to acknowledge.
After they had gotten him settled in his room, Big Cousin turned to Hannah and me. “Let me show you the grounds,” he said.
My father was still lying there stiff and unmoving, but my mother nodded at us to go, and so we followed willingly, hoping that when we returned, my father would look a little less horrible.
Outdoors, Big Cousin showed Hannah and me how to pick the persimmons. They were impossibly high, at least four times as high as we were tall, and there was a long wooden pole with a small basket on the end that you balanced up and then underneath each persimmon. You gave a quick twist, and then you lowered the pole and the basket, upright to keep the persimmon from falling out, all the way down. They were gorgeously dark and heavy in the hand. They were so ripe that they burst at the touch and then there was the sweetness of them, a deep persimmon taste. I wondered how my father had satisfied himself with the small hard stubborn ones we’d bought at the Asian market each year, leaving them in the garage for days at a time to ripen to a flavor that was just the faintest echo of what they tasted like here.
“Let me show you the apples, too,” my father’s cousin said, and we walked past barrels of them to the orchard. They were enormous: both my mother and my father had always been able to break apples in half with their hands. In the orchard, the apples were dark flashes showing through the leaves.
All around us, between the neatly kept fruit trees and the mountains, was a ring of trees. The property was surrounded by them. The leaves on the outer trees had turned color, and from inside the orchard walls they looked strange and bold. I looked at Hannah. When we were children, we had chased leaves as they fell, losing all sense of balance as we looked up, the sky fixed, the branches rushing past.
This was where he had come from, my father who had planted trees in a circle around our house in Michigan, and pulled up all of those raspberry bushes one by one. I looked around me, standing in a ring within a ring, and I turned to the path that led out of the orchard. For a brief moment, I imagined that the path that led out of this orchard and to the road that took us to Seoul could show me the whole trajectory of his life.
“Can we bring him an apple?” I asked Big Cousin. “And a persimmon? Just to show him?”
“Yes of course,” he said. He seemed more relaxed now. More himself. I wished my father had been the one to show us this place, these things, but I felt as if something about him had still been revealed to me. Of who he’d been and what he’d tried to make for us, everywhere else we had lived.
When we went inside, my father was lying in his bed, his body still frozen in that frightening rigidity. I showed him the persimmon and apple we had brought from outdoors, but he stared blankly at the ceiling. When he flicked his eyes in my direction, they rested on me only for a second before he flicked them back up.
The nurse we’d hired arrived, and said the ride had been too hard on him. His second cousins had also come, and were gathered around him, weeping and exclaiming at him, calling his name, telling stories of his youth. They had brought out an old book of photographs, and were pointing to the ones with my father in them. He was the youngest of the entire clan, the baby. I stood over the shoulders of these strangers, my relatives, and peered at these pictures I had never seen.
He had been a very thin and serious boy, his back ramrod straight, and he gazed straight at the camera, his hands on his hips or in his pockets. He was never smiling: even at his youngest, he was drawing himself up as tall as he could stand next to his sister, both of them sober with the same dark-eyed gaze. In all the pictures we had of him after we were born, he was always smiling. That was how I thought of him. But in these pictures, his arms crossed in front of his chest, the mountains behind him, his mouth was a straight horizontal line across his face, his eyes assessing.
“And this is him the year before he left,” Big Cousin said.
There he was in the orchard I had just stood in, surrounded by two rings of trees. He was looking past the camera, his hands in his pockets, looking as if he had already left this place, the barest hint of a smile upon his lips. I wanted this picture very badly—but could not bring myself to ask for it. I would not have been able to explain what it meant to me—this image of my father so young and determined, ready to meet the future, not knowing what it held, or everything that would happen next.
Even after all his relatives left, my father remained motionless. I had never seen him so still. My mother
leaned over his bed and murmured. He lay there, eyes half open, unfocused. She pulled up a chair.
“So we are finally here,” she said. She looked up at Hannah and me. “We never came to this house, but he brought me out here to this part of the country once.” She smiled. “To show me where he was from.”
That year, my mother had already received three proposals of marriage and rejected them all. She had told herself that when the time came, she would shoot my father’s down as well. She hadn’t forgiven him for forgetting who had saved him at the demonstration. For never knowing. The thought of retribution filled her with glee. Let that teach him. This was the reason, she told herself, that she allowed him to woo her.
One day, he took her to his hometown. He did not show her the house he’d grown up in, but took her walking in the mountains, and together they visited the nearby lake. On their way back to the car, they passed a rice paddy, and on a whim he threw off his shoes and asked if she wanted to walk through it. So she threw off her shoes and stepped in. Together they waded through the water. The sunlight skimmed off the surface of the water like stones, and the frogs cleared a path for them as they walked through the stalks of rice that grazed their skin. Close up, the clear shallow water that shimmered like glass from a distance was cloudy with perforated depths. The rice was planted in rows, and between the rows were furrows that formed a pattern, as though a large honeycomb had been buried under a layer of dirt, which had then been immersed in water. Shoots of green rice plants stood upright with straight, steady backs, waving stiffly in unison to greet the wind.
Beneath the water the shoots reached down and gripped the loose soil there very tightly. My father told my mother that when he was a child, he had curled his toes into the mud and stood up very straight, pretending to be one of the slender green stalks. But more fun than that had been to look for fighting fish. The fish lived in the little bowls separated by rice plants, and they circled around and around in their tiny enclosed homes, coming up to take gasps of breath. Sometimes they would follow his finger when he trailed it along the surface of the water. When it rained and they were washed into the same tiny bowl, they puffed out their cheeks mightily and charged, fins streaming. They fought to the death.
My father led my mother through the paddies, the hem of her skirt trailing in the water. She felt the weight of it pulling down on her, grounding her in the earth. She could take root here, she thought, stepping carefully between the rows of rice plants. And then my father stopped and went suddenly still. He let go of her hand and reached into a tiny foaming fray of water. He lifted up a fish that was clamped in the jaws of another fish. They were both blue, with purple fins, and they looked identical, as if a single fish had reached up and caught its reflection by the fin. The dangling fish would not let go, and when my father shook the slippery bodies, a fin tore off in a long strip before the hanging fish plopped back into the water with a dull splash. The shredded fin floated along the surface of the water and caught on my mother’s ankle like a strand of ribbon. She cried out and lifted her foot, the dead skin of the fish dangling—and then so quickly she hardly noticed the movement, my father knelt down and plucked the fin from her skin and cast it from them.
My mother said she would never forget that. While it was happening, his hand was on her back. And the water from his wet hand seeped through her shirt. It wasn’t the wetness she felt through the cloth that made her stand up straighter, but the warmth of his skin. She shivered. She asked him how fast a fish heart beats. She could feel her own heart speeding up.
He told her then of the time he had found a fish with its mouth puffed gently out in bubbles, tender with the baby fry it carried within its cheeks. He had caught it in a jar and watched it for hours, hoping to be there at the moment when the fish were released. He wondered if it was because in the beginning of their lives the fish had to share a home in the mouth of their mother that they fought so fiercely once they had made their escape. He watched all day, but the fry never emerged, and in the evening he dipped the fish back out. He described watching the fish with her cheeks puffed out, waiting for her to release her cargo, and my mother forgot everything except his cheeks, blowing out to show her what it had looked like. She forgot everything but that and his hand on her back.
And then a moment later, she found her hand in his, the insistent warmth of it pressing into hers. So this was how it could start then: the touch of a hand against a hand. How lightly he held it, how loose. The gentleness of that touch was almost more than she could bear. It made her weak just to remember.
They walked back through the paddy and back to the place where they had left their shoes. As he pulled her onto dry land, he asked her to marry him. She was silent, feeling her hand in his hand. Everything important, it seemed, was held there between them. She did not say yes or no, but she let him keep her hand in his.
Every day in the house we had brought him back to, my father lay with his face frozen in pain, and every day my mother sat by my father’s bed and told stories I had never heard before. She spoke of their life together, of her childhood, of their love, as if the stories could bring him back to us. Hannah and I sat on the other side of the bed from her and listened.
Remember when you took me to the pond? my mother said. Remember when we kissed in the pagoda under the rain? The first time my father came to her house, my mother said, he brought her cheese. He stood in front of their door with the cheese cradled in one palm, and then he offered it to my grandmother, holding it out with both hands. When my grandmother took it, he stiffened up and stood a little taller, as if he had brought something of great worth. It was wrapped carefully in soft waxy paper, and my grandmother looked at it in her open hand.
“It’s cheese,” he said, and stepped into their living room.
My mother had laughed out loud. How grand he thought he was, with his gift of cheese! How proudly he stood, like a gamecock. It offended her, to see him standing there as if he were the man of the house. She had already held him up as he stumbled, she had already watched him sleep. Now she wanted to show him how unimpressed she was. She tried to hold her head in such a way as to communicate her scorn.
But my grandmother had already been won over. My mother snorted when my grandmother thanked him so warmly for the cheese, as if he had brought them a bar of gold, as if it was indeed the treasure he meant it to be.
Later, my mother said, she found out that my father had spent hours at the specialty store trying to pick out that cheese. He had never had any before, himself: it was too extravagant. The cheese he brought her was the first cheese he’d ever tasted: he’d gone to the market and looked at dozens of varieties in their rinds. He was baffled by them: hard and soft, yellow, white, orange, speckled blue. He called the clerk over and asked which was best, but the clerk had never been able to afford such luxuries himself. Together they looked, hefting each specimen in their hands, one at a time. Finally, he permitted himself to buy the smallest one of the most expensive kind.
When he finally had his first taste he found he did not like it, and he wondered if he had chosen poorly. When he returned home, he told my aunt, who broke down and cried a little, because he had never bought her anything so fine.
It hurt my mother afterward to think of his sharp pride at having brought something so small. It pained her to think of how she’d laughed at him, and to remember the look her mother had given her that had stopped the laugh in her throat. After they were married, after they moved to the U.S., he would watch her cut slices of cheese with a knife and eat them piece by piece. But still, the ludicrousness of it pained her, how precious a thing he thought he had brought to her. When she remembered his pride, she could still see it there in his face, like a light.
. . .
While my mother told these stories, my father’s relatives came to visit every day. They stood over my father’s bed while he lay rigid and unmoving, and my mother’s voice strung story to story together. They frightened me with their intense, c
ollective watching. They shook their heads, murmured, touched everything in the room tentatively—including us. My father’s friend Mr. Lee drove five hours to see my father, and then wouldn’t come in the room but stood outside the door, wiping his eyes.
My uncle came; my grandmother did not. She’d been furious when we drove out to the countryside without telling her, and my uncle hinted that she was not doing well herself, but we did not inquire for more details. He said she wanted to come, and I thought that we should let her, but my mother was firm.
“Jeehyun,” she said, when I protested. “She’s not well either, and I can’t take care of her or deal with her coming every day and worrying. Maybe later, but right now I just can’t do it.” So we put off everything outside my father’s room for later; we would be able to deal with everything after we had seen this through.
“Right before we moved to America,” my mother said to Hannah and me one day, “I went to the DMZ. Perhaps you remember, I stayed away one night and didn’t come home. Your father was so angry at me.”
“I remember,” Hannah said. “You didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t know where you were.”
“You were so young then,” my mother said. She sounded surprised.
“I had bad dreams about it for years,” Hannah said.
“Me too,” I interjected. “Dad called the police.”
“Yes, he did,” my mother said. She sounded embarrassed.
“So what was it like?” I asked.
“And why did you go there?” Hannah added.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “It seemed—when we left Korea it seemed irrevocable, like we were leaving forever.” She was quiet. “I can’t explain it.”
Forgotten Country Page 23