Forgotten Country

by Catherine Chung

“It can’t be that you just die, and that’s it, can it?” she asked. “You can’t just become nothing like that, can you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It was so cold, and my throat hurt. Everything ached. “Hey, can we not talk for a while?”

  She nodded. So we stood there, looking out at the valley, not talking.

  In college I’d taken a class on knot theory, and learned that sometimes a knot is impossible to unravel without cutting it apart. Sometimes it can’t be undone. For my whole life my family had been so tightly bound that we had stifled each other just trying to breathe, just trying to go our own ways. I had worried I would never get free. And now, Hannah and I would board our separate flights and cross the world and leave my mother behind.

  When we were children, my parents told us a folktale about two frog children who never obeyed their mother, but always did the opposite of what she said. When it was time for her to die, she called them to her, and told them to bury her in the ocean. She thought she could trick them into burying her close to them, but when she died they repented for how badly they had treated her, and fulfilled her final wish. They wept as they watched the water take her away. There was no grave to visit each year. They could not offer her food. This is why frogs always cry in regret, “Gegul, Gegul.”

  What I had thought of when my parents told this story was not of disobedience but of the shocking expanse of the ocean. How far away it could fling a body, how deep. And I had thought of my parents, and what a loss it had been to them to leave their country, and their parents, and the graves of their parents, the ocean always between them. And now I would leave my father here.

  “I don’t want to leave,” he’d said, the last day in our house, the sun across his face. I’d said nothing in response, unable in that moment to speak.

  . . .

  They say the earth is always moving underneath us, always shifting, but that the change happens so slowly that we are unaware. They say that, too, about gravity, the earth’s spinning, its circling the sun. When the movements are vast enough, we cannot sense them.

  I had assumed my father would prefer to be buried here, that his land had called him home. But now I wondered if he wouldn’t have wished to be taken with us instead. The thought of leaving him behind filled me with grief.

  I wanted to lie on the mound, to lay my body over his body and press my cheek into the snow. But it would be improper, I knew. So instead I sat on the hard ground next to him, feeling the cold creep up my body through the earth. Hannah sat beside me. I could feel the warmth of her body reaching through the cold ground, and filling the air between us. We did not touch, but I could feel the rise and fall of her breath.

  Past the village and the house my father had grown up in and died in, where our mother slept now, past all the fields around it, past everything we could see, a soft pink glow had started to collect above the horizon, far in the distance, on the other side of the world. I watched it spread. It intensified in color until it was a deep, deep pink.

  “Look,” I said.

  How quickly it rose. How quickly it filled the sky with light.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to give thanks…

  First and always, to my mother, Sejin Chung, and father, Moon Jung Chung, for their courageous example and unwavering love and support. To Heesoo Chung, the best of brothers: the stories we told each other were the first stories I ever told. Also to the Chung and Park clans, especially my grandmother.

  To my beloved teachers Richard Stern and Alane Rollings, Dan McCall, Stephanie Vaughn, Helena Viramontes, Alison Lurie, Maureen McCoy, Michael Koch, and Lamar Herrin. Great thanks to my champions Alexander Chee, Michelle Herman, Meakin Armstrong, Patrick Ryan, Tommy Pico, Roy Pérez, Michael Lowenthal, Martin Moran, and Jan Freeman. So much gratitude to Benjamin Warner, Michael Simons, Brian Clarke, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Pilar Gómez-Ibáñez, and Helen Oyeyemi, with special thanks to this book’s fairy godmothers: Lauren Alleyne, Autumn Watts, and Rita Zoey Chin. Thanks also to my students, from whom I have learned so much.

  These places made a home for me while I wrote this book: the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Camargo Foundation, SFAI, Hedgebrook, and the Jentel Artists Residency. Thanks also to the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation for financial support and much-needed shots of courage.

  Thanks to Elaine Wacuka Hurt, a stranger who rescued the manuscript I left on a bench in the Dupont Metro Station. Love to Jenny Tsai and the memory of Cindy Tsai. Also to Jennifer Lin, Kimberly Tsau, and Sarah Johnstone for their friendship and faith. Gratitude to the American Studies Department at the University of Leipzig, especially Anne Koenen and Sebastian Herrmann. And to the late Frank Meinzenbach, who is truly missed. Thanks also to Tomiko Jones for the most beautiful book trailer.

  Finally, endless gratitude and extra sweetness to the incomparable Maria Massie, who said this would be fun, and made it so, and to Megan Lynch, my brilliant and thoughtful editor in whose hands this book came true.