by Sonya Chung
“Aigoo! Owhat-goon-yo!” Chong-ho’s eldest sister, Yoko, claps her hands together, and the two walk briskly toward each other. A sliding door from the right-side wing of the U-shaped compound opens, and more relatives begin to spill out. At the sight of his mother standing by the door, choosing not to descend into the courtyard—shrunken, eyes arid and void—Chong-ho knows for certain now what’s happened: he is too late. His father has passed from this world.
“It’s a long time, Taru,” his sister says. “Almost twenty-five years, neh?” Chong-ho flinches at the sound of his boyhood name, as his sister pulls him into an embrace. That his family continues to address each other by their Japanese names should surprise him, but it doesn’t. The children puzzle.
Yoko settles Chong-ho and his family in one of the spare rooms. She is the family’s messenger, matter-of-fact. “Mother has left you behind in her heart. The rest of us resolved long ago that we have no eldest brother.” As the sun sets behind the mountain, the large room—once his father’s study before the third building in the compound was built—takes on a hazy yellow glow that makes the children look sickly.
“Father, too? He did not mention me in these last days?”
“No, Taru. Not for a long time. And no one expected him to. Nichi is prepared to perform the rites. He has taken his place as eldest son.”
“So everything is set for Saturday?”
Yoko nods. James, who is sitting on top of the duffel bag now, picking at frayed threads around the zipper, bristles; his father flashes him a look. Today is Wednesday: for James, Saturday is an eternity away. Soon-mi, sitting quietly with Hannah on her lap, meets eyes with James as well, but with sympathy. She lets out a heavy sigh, in solidarity.
“Very well, then,” Chong-ho says. “We will not interfere. But nuna, he was my father, and these are his grandchildren, and Soon-mi is my wife. We will participate as family. If my brother objects, then I will discuss it with him.” Chong-ho speaks in a tone both firm and respectful, almost magisterial.
Yoko’s eyelids are swollen with fatigue. She shakes her head. “It is not Nichi you must worry about. It is Big Uncle. Who will stand up. He will insist that you are beyond forgiveness.”
Suddenly a boyish guffaw punctures the tension. “What the h—?” James’s outburst is involuntary and gets caught in his throat. He finds himself standing and has succeeded in startling everyone in the room, including himself.
“James!” Soon-mi hisses.
Chong-ho is speechless, and his face expresses something inscrutable: it is not anger. It is closer to curiosity.
James doesn’t have time to decipher, but he recognizes that his window to speak will close in an instant. He is tired, and cranky, his inhibitions have evidently worn away. Enough already. Beyond forgiveness? What does that even mean?
The boy finds his voice. “We’re right here, I can understand everything she’s saying. How much you wanna bet she can understand, too?” James nods his chin toward Hannah, who has stuffed four fingers of her right hand into her mouth. “They’re saying Appah has to be forgiven for having us as a family, right? That we’re all mistakes, or sins, or something?”
Soon-mi looks into her lap, clenching her jaw, while Chong-ho stares straight ahead, past his sister, past the walls of the room, into some void. A beat passes, and Soon-mi looks up to see Chong-ho, still staring ahead: it is shocking, but not unwelcome, that her husband has not leapt up to silence James, one way or another.
“It all sounds like bullcrap to me.” James mumbles the final words of his monologue, receding instead of punctuating. His face begins to crumple and redden, but he holds back tears. His stomach churns; he puts his hand to it. He thinks of his mother’s anxiety and seriousness while preparing for the trip—You must behave like a grown boy. This is a time to stand behind your father. Well okay then, he thinks now. I tried.
Yoko, who speaks no English, does and does not understand her nephew’s eruption. She thinks, What kind of son is my brother and his peasant wife raising? She thinks, Taru has always had a good and solid heart, but he believes too much in freedom. Beholding James now, Yoko remembers a different boy, a toddler, shy and intent on his pile of twigs, or blocks, or chopsticks—figuring out how things went together or came apart. Chong-ho had brought the boy secretly, to meet his grandmother. It had been ten years since he’d run off with Soon-mi, since the war. Their father would have beat them all if he found out, so Yoko arranged it with greatest care, did not even tell her mother the real reason for their trip to Hwagae Village, inventing something about a new market stall with the best hanyak in the valley. Their mother had held the child, did not reject James outright; but later she told Yoko never to do that again. She had no son, no grandson, as far as she was concerned.
James clearly wants to flee the awkward silence, but there is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. They are like animals at the zoo here, everyone ogling them from a distance, both afraid and superior. He sits down again on the luggage.
Finally, Chong-ho says, “Nuna, please leave us.”
Yoko sits up, her shoulders back, in disbelief. The implications of Chong-ho’s words are unmistakable: he is dismissing his elder and allowing the boy to stay, unpunished. Propriety and respect have been flouted.
Soon-mi has to control herself from interjecting—No, no, Sister, I will take the children away so you two can talk. She knows she cannot do this. Chong-ho is resolved.
“And nuna, my name is not Taru. Not Kitaru. I am Chong-ho.”
Yoko raises herself from kneeling to standing without assistance, but not without pain. She takes one last look at them, this doomed family—her rogue brother and his melon-patch wife, their insolent son. Maybe there is hope for the little girl, she thinks, to fall far enough from the tree, but doubtful. “By the way,” she says, just as she steps out the door, and looking now at Soon-mi. “Your aunt is dead. The last of your lowly people are finally gone.”
The ejected family continues its procession, up the mountain road, then down again toward the lake. To passersby, they look like vagabonds. It is almost nine o’clock; they have not eaten since breakfast on the airplane.
Kim Young-shik’s wife, Yoo-na, answers the door. The village has been her home now for over twenty years (she is from Taegu, she and Young-shik met at university) but she has never met her husband’s closest childhood friend. “Yeh?” she says. Her expression is both confused and concerned as she beholds this ragged crew on her doorstep.
“I am Lee Chong-ho,” Chong-ho says, bowing. “Is Young-shik at home?”
“Yes, but …” She hesitates. The sullen boy and the moon-faced woman with sweaty hair, dusty city shoes, and a sleeping child in her arms evoke pity. “Your name you say is—”
“Lee Chong-ho.”
Soon-mi’s eyes fix on her husband. Even now she marvels at the steadiness of Chong-ho’s voice, his alarming stamina. He speaks with dignity, as if it were perfectly normal to knock on someone’s door unannounced at nine in the evening, suitcases and children in tow, in need of a meal and a bed. Soon-mi beholds Chong-ho’s straight back and his rough hands, which he holds in loose fists at his sides. It is as if no time has passed since their years of wandering, after the war, when they were vagabonds. He took care of them, every day—one day at a time, when each day felt like it could be their last—believing utterly in their survival.
The woman at the door seems now to recognize the name. “Just a minute,” she says, and disappears into the house. The screen door shuts, but she leaves the inside door wide open. There is a mild ruckus inside, a chair scraping the floor. Heavy footsteps barrel forth.
“Aigoo, aigoo!” A fat man with a crew cut, in undershirt and boxer shorts, throws open the screen door, arms outstretched. “My old friend! You’ve come! Prodigal son! It’s a miracle! Come in, come in!”
The children eat everything on their plates, and though Soon-mi has lost her appetite, she eats to keep her strength up. The men eat separately in the living room.
“You did not even sit at their meal table,” Young-shik says.
“It was not offered,” Chong-ho says.
“But you will still go to the ceremony?”
“Yes. This is between me and my father. And the ancestors.”
“And what about your uncle?”
Chong-ho scoffs, shakes his head. When he was a boy, he feared his father’s eldest brother—a wiry man with a mean, hawkish face, who lost his wife and daughter during the war; later, his son ran off to Seoul. When Chong-ho was still in touch with Yoko, she told him that their cousin was consorting with American soldiers, black men who frequented prostitutes and did drugs. All this made Big Uncle even meaner.
“My uncle likes order, and authority; as my father did. They chose the Japanese, and General Park, because they believed that hierarchies and power would bring greater stability for country people. Perhaps they were right, strictly speaking.” Swaths of rice fields and the armies of orchard workers with their buckets flash across his mind. “At any rate, my uncle also hates the rebellious son who leaves his home village for a different life.”
“He is a tough sonofabitch, your uncle. Your father was tough, too, but your uncle, he has that nasty streak. He takes money from the officials, you know. Ever since Yushin. It’s more than just support for Saemaul now. He’s become a part of the machinery. We call him deputy around here.”
Chong-ho nods. None of this surprises him. It was his grandfather’s trait—the conviction that some ruinous wrong had been committed against him, and the resulting hunger for power—that his uncle inherited. Chong-ho’s grandfather came to the country from Seoul, dispossessed of prestige; the details were never spoken of. “My father and uncle lived with their father’s discontent and sense of inferiority. They came to understand that, for a man, being able to choose his work, his life, is everything. But then, when it came to love, my father, he just never imagined … he was too proud.” Chong-ho does not look in Soon-mi’s direction; there is no need, their story is all too known. “Perhaps someone more gifted in argument and proofs could have changed his feelings. I did not have that gift or temperament.”
“You know you never did make it easy on them, my friend.” Young-shik lights a cigarette and leans back, laughing. “Everything was a battle for you back then.”
Chong-ho laughs, too. “We were all in it together, weren’t we? You were our instigator. Those pranks against the Japanese administrators at the school? And remember Oo-ri Hangul? That was your doing.”
Young-shik holds up a finger and stands to leave the room. When he returns, he has a slim book in his hands. The back cover is plain black linen, the front embroidered with a green-and-blue geometric pattern. He hands the book to Chong-ho, whose mouth hangs open.
“You’ve kept it all these years.”
Young-shik nods. “I look through it every so often. To remind me. It was all so urgent back then. We knew what we were fighting for, and against.”
Chong-ho remembers clearly that day, their last year in high school, 1942, when ten of them together planned the moment they would drop their Japanese readers onto the hard dirt floor of the classroom. Then they would stand, each reading a short passage from Oo-ri Hangul, the chapbook of stories and poems they had written themselves. They were works about liberation, about the Korean spirit of resistance, of han. They were love poems to their homeland, to independence and human dignity. Five of the poems were Chong-ho’s—more than any of the others. All of it was written in hangul, their native alphabet.
Chong-ho runs his thumb over the book’s spine. “Does it still feel present to you? Do you remember?”
“How can I forget?” Young-shik lifts his undershirt and twists to show his bare back: two purplish stripes, slightly raised, diagonal from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, like fat earthworms burrowing under the skin. Lower down on the right, a smaller scar where he’d been kidney-punched several times: they’d rushed him to the hospital, the kidney was removed.
“They picked you because you were the easiest target. We all got beaten, but you … they were like savages.”
“Well, like you say, I was the instigator.”
“We all did it.”
“I was the fat boy.”
“Despicable cowards.”
“You were the real leader. I felt I was playing my part by taking that beating. You may not have survived it. I could take it.”
Chong-ho too lights a cigarette, and they smoke in silence for a few moments.
“They are good poems,” Young-shik says.
Chong-ho smiles a sad smile. “I’ve written better ones since. About Soon-mi, about our journeys. Refugee life makes for good art.”
“You have many tales you have never told. I can see that. Tales of hardship.”
“We all have them. Ours are no different.”
“But they are. Yours are tales of exile. Here, when the Reds were finally gone—most of them, anyway—we still had whatever family we had left. We helped each other. But you two … we all wondered about you. Were you alive? Were you dead? If you were alive, what kind of life could you be living?”
Yoo-na brings a tray of soju and persimmons. Chong-ho looks up but doesn’t see her; he is too deep in thought, in memory. What kind of life? He puts back the shot of soju, absorbs its warmth and sting. Not life, he thinks. Lives. He and Soon-mi—before the war, during, after; all those years they lived like nomads. Then, their sojourn to America. He is forty-nine years old and has lived a dozen lives; has died as many.
Soon-mi and Yoo-na chat quietly in the kitchen. Soon-mi tells of their journey from Maryland, about the plane ride and how her heart skipped when she saw Jiri Mountain in the distance. She is careful not to say too much. James snacks on persimmons while drawing in his sketchbook and seems calm now, oddly at home. Soon-mi stands and cradles Hannah in both arms, the child’s head hanging over Soon-mi’s arm, neck exposed, like a rescued drowner. Hannah is getting too big for this, but Soon-mi is slow, will always be slow, to see her daughter as she is. She swings the girl’s legs up in the air, almost to vertical, her head dangling inches above the floor. “Uy-shah!” Yoo-na claps her hands, playing along, and Hannah, red-faced, opens her eyes wide to the upside-down world while her mother readies to swing her once more.
5.
Both Suzanne and Pauline could be trusted not to tell Dorothy Mattison, but Pauline was the one to voice her “concern.” She warned Alice to be careful. She did not say about what, exactly. Maybe the dangers could not be parsed out, maybe it was the whole-thing of it: a soldier, overnight in their house, in Alice’s bed. Three times this month. Strictly against the rules, playing with fire. Alice might lose her job; worse, she might be discharged dishonorably, if that was even possible for a DoDEA employee. Certainly it was for a private in the Eighth Army. The stakes were higher with the government, a red mark following you around. Maybe that was what made Alice shrug it off; by now she’d had quite enough of good order and discipline.
That Charles was black was the unspoken part. Alice wasn’t sure if it was because of Mrs. Mattison, or Pauline’s own prejudice. Suzanne played it nice, wouldn’t dare come forth with anything overtly racist. Pauline had less self-control; Pauline was more honest. Alice in fact appreciated this. That part of “be careful” was Pauline’s way of saying, Don’t be naïve. She said once, half mumbling, “Opposites attract, but you can take that too far.”
Alice awakes in Charles’s arms. The sky is still dark, a faint glow rising. She sits up and pulls the covers over her bare shoulders, squints to see movement—frenetic white dots—through the window. Snow. Tiny flakes, spilling rapidly, like a waterfall. Charles lies next to her, filling all but a narrow sliver of her twin bed, lightly snoring.
The toilet flushes across the hall; the patter of slippered feet— Suzanne, whose bladder rarely made it through the night. Charles stirs, opens one eye. Alice leans over him, letting the blanket slip off. Charles opens both eyes now, then closes the
m. He reaches around and gathers Alice in. She listens to his chest: Charles breathes deeply and slowly, infusing pulsing veins with air, and life, and calm. This arouses Alice—the way Charles contains his own arousal until just the right moment. He is good at waiting, and stillness. No one ever told her that this was what to look for in a lover.
Yes, lover. For longer than a month now. It had started before the overnights. Today is two weeks to Christmas. They crossed the threshold on a rainy night just after the leaves had peaked, and fallen: It was a heated, clunky, and thoroughly ecstatic affair one evening, after hours, in the Quonset hut that was Alice’s classroom. He wanted to see the school, Charles said, what the semi-civilian parts of the base were like. Even on post, each had his place, and everybody stuck to their assigned areas. Alice still has no idea where the barracks are.
Twice after that, they rented a cheap room at a yeogwan—a 10×10 windowless box with a thin foam mattress on a hard, heated floor— just outside the base. Finally, Alice insisted he come to the house on South Post, to “meet the girls.” If he came for dinner, then stayed over, he wouldn’t be wandering South Post after dark.
It seemed fitting, anyway—that they would continue to meet in forbidden territory. It was how they first came together. The Angel Club, Alice learned later, was whites-only. Charles, too, had been unaware of the owner’s reputation for bouncing black soldiers. Whites-only meant that neither black GIs nor Korean men were allowed; as white women, Alice and her roommates were an odd sight but were left alone. After midnight, though, the hostesses would have started eyeing them down; they’d want unencumbered access to Andrew and his friends, and the owner would back them up. The sexual ecology of the place was crucial for business.