by H. S. Kim
“I am grateful that Min introduced me to this household because . . . after my husband died, I didn’t know what to do to feed my baby,” Chunshim said.
No husband was in the picture, but she fibbed on anyway.
“Look, I don’t really care,” Nani said.
“Well, I just don’t want you to think I am going to do anything you wouldn’t like. Min has helped me lots, but he is not in love with me. He’s never done anything dishonorable. You can trust me on that,” Chunshim said.
Nani sighed after Chunshim had left. “He is not in love with me. Huh, he is not in love with me?” she imitated Chunshim sarcastically. “But maybe she is in love with him?” Nani yowled. She sprinkled sesame seeds in a pan and put the pan on the fire to toast them. “Huh, he is not in love with me, she says. I don’t give a damn if he is in love with her or with a dog!” she said and scowled.
The last time she had seen Min was the night Buwon was born. She cleaned and fed him. She drenched him with wine to ease the pain and dragged him to the storage room. In the middle of the night, when Mistress Yee screamed and awoke everyone in the house, Nani ran to Min to tell him he needed to go and hide at Mrs. Wang’s, but he had already disappeared. All he left was his vomit at the entrance of the storage room, which Nani had to clean up, then and there.
“He is not in love? He’s been in love with me all his life!” Nani said, suddenly feeling incredibly jealous.
“What are you talking about, Big Sister?” Soonyi asked, standing at the entrance of the kitchen.
Nani blushed, wondering how long she might have been standing there.
“What should I do now?” Soonyi asked.
“Once and for all, Soonyi, I want you to use your head and figure out what you should do instead of asking me constantly what you should do!” she barked.
Soonyi pouted. And then she said, “I can’t.”
Nani stared at Soonyi for a brief moment, and then they both burst out laughing.
“Go and find out if braised chicken sounds good to Mistress Yee,” Nani said, raising her eyebrows.
25
Mistress Yee took a long time over lunch. She examined the taste of each bite on her tongue suspiciously, asking what the ingredients were and sometimes spitting it out, demanding to know if everything had been thoroughly washed. Finally, Buwon was brought in. He had just taken a nap and had a bowel movement, reported Chunshim, placing him on a yellow silk mat to be viewed.
With his partially missing upper lip, he looked hideous when he smiled. Even though Chunshim was just a nanny, she felt strangely responsible for his appearance and tried to make nothing of it by smiling and clapping when Buwon stretched his mouth to smile.
Mistress Yee lowered her glance and observed her son as if an exotic fruit had been brought in from a faraway land. She showed, however, no curiosity or interest, but contempt. Buwon smiled, producing sweet baby sounds.
“What a good boy! He is such a good boy. He hardly ever cries,” Chunshim complimented him.
His head was still enormous. Dr. Choi had said that it was large because it was distressed during the birth, and he had assured her that it would shrink, by and by. But that son of a bitch had lied! Mistress Yee could see plainly that Buwon’s head was growing by the day; in fact, that was the only part of his body that seemed to grow. Mistress Yee winced.
“What’s that on his forehead?” Mistress Yee asked, frowning.
“Ah, that, Mistress, he scratched himself with his fingernails. That happens with babies. My son scratched himself at this age all the time,” Chunshim explained frantically.
“Don’t you ever bring up your son in my presence!” Mistress Yee squawked.
“Forgive me, Mistress. I will never make that mistake again,” Chunshim said, lowering her head.
“Out!” Mistress Yee waved her arm dismissively.
Chunshim wrapped Buwon in a silk layette and withdrew. Mirae took the silk mat and folded it away.
“Bring me the box,” Mistress Yee ordered, half lying on her cushion.
Mirae brought out a lacquered box in which Mistress Yee kept her secret. Dried dark green leaves were wrapped in a parchment. Mirae knew exactly what her part was. She crushed the leaves and rolled them in a paper. She licked one side of the paper to glue it to the other. She lit it and handed it to Mistress Yee, who sucked it, deliciously, with her eyes closed. Her delicate blue veins rose on her temple. “Ah,” she said and exhaled deeply, untying the ribbon on her upper garment.
Sometime later, Mistress Yee passed out, or looked passed out. Mirae collected the articles quietly and put them back in the box. She removed the remains of the rolled-up parchment from her mistress’s hand and puffed just once before she discarded it. She sat there, thinking what would happen if Mr. O stepped in right then. Of course, Mistress Yee wouldn’t have smoked had Mr. O been home. At the moment, he was away at the temple. He had left suddenly the other day, and only when he arrived at the temple did he send a servant to bring what he needed for a stay longer than a couple of days. Mistress Yee had told the servant to report that she was ill, very ill. So far, no message from Mr. O had come. Surprisingly, Mistress Yee hadn’t shown any signs of desperation, but Mirae knew it bothered her mistress. The only thing that prevented Mistress Yee from throwing one of her fits was Buwon, a daily reminder of her downfall. Whenever she saw him right after her lunch, she felt aghast and went hurriedly out for a walk or smoked in her room and passed out. When she woke up, her wan face looking confused, she talked funny, she called out a name no one recognized, or she acted like a little girl, and it always took a few moments for her to come to grips with reality.
Something worse might happen, Mirae’s intuition told her, but she didn’t know what or which side she would take. Suddenly, she found herself wondering what Nani was up to. She slipped out and sprinted to the kitchen where she found Nani and Soonyi laughing about the way Quince had swayed her buttocks. They couldn’t stop laughing, even when Mirae appeared at the entrance. Soonyi, covering her mouth, wiggled her tiny bottom in an effort to imitate Quince, and Nani kept laughing, ignoring Mirae.
A moment later, Mirae asked, forcing a smile, “What’s so funny?”
“Oh, one of our laundresses, she shook her buttocks in front of us, and she farted loud. Then she—” Soonyi couldn’t continue. She began to giggle, bobbing her head. She wetted her lips with her tongue. Nani giggled, too, as she dried the dishes with a muslin dishtowel.
“I didn’t hear the fart!” Nani said, gathering herself.
“Well, I did,” Soonyi said. “It was as loud as a cannonball. You-you couldn’t—oh, my—you couldn’t hear—oh, my tummy, oh, it hurts—you couldn’t hear because of the running water,” Soonyi managed to say and laughed, a teardrop oozing out of the corner of her eye.
Mirae didn’t ever find their jokes or tales funny. But she smiled, sitting on the stool, taking a dried persimmon stuffed with walnut. Nani snatched the plate and said, “There are no more persimmons after this. Mr. O is going to ask for the walnut-stuffed persimmons as soon as we run out of them. He did that last year. I had to go around the village, hunting for whatever was left. I had to barter with a chunk of dried beef for a few persimmons!”
“Does Mistress Yee want something?” Nani asked.
“No,” Mirae replied, chewing the persimmon.
Nani surveyed Mirae, who normally didn’t come to the kitchen unless Mistress Yee sent her.
Mirae wondered if she should tell them about Mistress Yee, what a degenerate she had become. But what was in it for her if she gave away the secret?
“Is she all right?” Nani asked, looking concerned.
“She is far from being all right. I don’t know what’s going to become of her,” Mirae said aloofly.
But neither Nani nor Soonyi asked any questions.
Nani sighed, polishing the wooden trays. Soonyi was sharpening the knife on a whetstone, waiting for Nani to say something. But Nani stacked up the trays and began to fold up the dishtowels, saying that the winter seemed to take a long time to say its farewell.
“She passed out,” Mirae finally said. She wanted their undivided attention.
“What do you mean?” Nani asked, alarmed.
“She passed out,” Mirae repeated.
“How?” Nani asked urgently.
“She smokes the bad stuff,” Mirae explained.
“What’s the bad stuff?” Soonyi asked, widening her eyes.
“Mirae, you need to explain in plain language,” Nani commanded her because she now saw that Mirae might be toying with them.
“Don’t you breathe a word of what I have to say,” Mirae began.
“Hold it!” Nani exclaimed. “If you shouldn’t share what you know, you can just stop right there. We are not the only ones with ears.” She was surprised to have said exactly what her mother had said once to another maid.
“What do you mean?” Mirae asked.
Nani’s mom had warned her that birds and mice eavesdropped on secrets, and that they chirped and squeaked, so the whole village would know them within a day. Thinking of her mother, Nani said, “Mistress Yee would kill you if she found out what you are doing.”
“So don’t tell her what I am about to say. I am not trying to gossip behind my mistress’s back. I am worried about her. She is smoking the leaves, and sometimes the Chinese powder. When she sees her son, her spirit sinks low and she smokes. Mr. O should know about this, so that he can do something about it,” Mirae babbled. “I came in here to make some tea for her. When she wakes up after smoking, she is always so thirsty.”
Nani was dismayed. Her mother had said that addiction to opium would ruin even the emperor of China.
“Well, please don’t tell anyone. Although we might have to tell Dr. Choi about this when he comes to check on Buwon,” Mirae said. “Or maybe it’s just a phase,” Mirae added authoritatively.
Nani put a pot on the stove and said, “This is not good.”
“No, it’s not,” Mirae said.
“Is it really bad?” Soonyi asked.
“Really bad,” Nani responded, sighing theatrically.
“I know,” Mirae said.
Chunshim poked her head in and asked, “Can someone help me?”
“What is it?” Mirae asked.
“Don’t be afraid to come in. No one’s going to bite you. You always just poke your head in as if the kitchen were not worthy of your feet,” Nani said sarcastically.
“No, it’s not that. I want to be able to hear the boys. What are you all doing here?” she asked, smiling broadly.
“What is the help you need?” Mirae asked.
“Oh, Buwon has diaper rash, and I am going to need warm water to bathe him. Can you prepare water and bring it in?” Chunshim asked.
“At your service,” Nani replied.
“Thank you. I can always rely on you,” she said gratefully and ran back to the room.
“She has it real easy,” Nani said, going out with a large pot to fetch water.
“Is she always this grumpy?” Mirae asked Soonyi quietly.
“What?” Soonyi asked.
“Nothing,” Mirae replied, and left the kitchen, forgetting the tea, for she had never intended to make it in the first place.
26
After drifting many days, sleeping in barns, sustaining himself with the dried meat he had taken from Mrs. Wang, and stealing eggs from chicken cages, Min managed to arrive at the confluence of the Snake River and another river whose name he didn’t know. And there it was: Sowok Island, where the lepers were now being shipped to, for leprosy was believed to be contagious. He offered the ginseng wine as the boat fare to the rowing man in his sixties. The old man took Min gladly. He asked Min if he would pour the wine for him. They drank together in silence. The boat glided on the water smoothly. Three hawks were flying around and around in the middle of the sky that was heartbreakingly blue. Min looked up and counted the three hawks, again and again, until he got dizzy.
“Why are you going there? You look fine,” the rowing man inquired tactlessly. “It’s not a contagious disease, as far as I can tell, though. I have been transporting the lepers for a decade now. Nothing has happened to me. Their limbs fall off, like leaves in the autumn. But they don’t complain. It’s interesting: they are all quite content. There is a yellow man who lives among them. Have you heard of him? He was the only survivor of the ship that arrived this past summer from a faraway land. He was in the palace for a while, but the important members of the government council voted against him influencing the king so he has been exiled to this place.”
The boat arrived at the dock. Min bowed to the chatty old man and walked up the hill.
It was a small island. Once he climbed up the steep path to the ridge, he could see the whole island, and the silvery water on the other side blinded him as he savored the vastness of the water and the calm of the island. He descended slowly, feeling the shock of the weight of his body against the ground each time he took a step. When he reached the bottom of the hill, he saw scattered huts, and some people by the shore, fishing with their spears. He stood behind a tree, observing them from a distance. Later on, they roasted fish on a fire, and the aroma made his stomach twist with hunger. He chewed on acorns and fell asleep behind a large rock.
Min opened his eyes to find a crowd of people standing near him, looking down, examining him. They were happily surprised. One said he was mute. Another said he was also deaf. Min almost fell back at seeing the foreign man, hardly yellow actually except for his hair. He was ashen white, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in years. What haunted Min even more were his large blue fish eyes, which moved just like normal eyes but seemed to conceal his feelings.
Min panicked when they took hold of him, remembering the time of his apprehension for having helped the head of the peasants’ revolutionary group. He had delivered the pamphlets explaining the condition of the peasants and the unfair tax system and the minimal wages. He had posted warning announcements for the government officials to reconsider. But all had failed, and the leader had been decapitated soon after the arrest. Min was beaten up, but he had been released when they found out he was deaf and dumb. He wished to have been a martyr, too, but his disabilities prevented even that wish from coming true. The officers had assumed he knew nothing about what was going on. After his arrest, he had been dragged, just like now; many hands grabbed him and they were looking down, studying him, except that these people were not cursing and slapping him to speak. All were silent. He was taken to a hut and fed fish and boiled radish. He ate hurriedly in front of them, bearing their stares. No one made any comment.
He spent the night there in the hut with the yellow man, or white man, whichever—it didn’t matter really.
In the evening, the man scribbled fiercely for a long time in his leather-bound book. It was not in any language that Min recognized. He closed his eyes and thought of Mrs. Wang’s diary. Hong was her name. The other day, when he had reached the start of the Snake River, an elderly woman informed him that the woman named Hong had moved away to the island called Sowok, where lepers were quarantined. Min had never been curious about his birth or his birth mother, who had abandoned him. What had driven him all the way to the island was his curiosity about his father.
After his release from the police, he received a new assignment from the peasant revolutionary group. He was supposed to set Mr. O’s house on fire. He couldn’t possibly do it as long as Nani lived there, and besides, when he had snuck into the house, Mistress Yee was having a baby. He couldn’t bring himself to carry out the order. Seeing Nani also affected him. She had sobbed when she saw him bruised all over.
> When he read the page that Mrs. Wang had left open, he couldn’t breathe. Did she know his intention to set the house on fire? Was that why she was revealing the secret of his birth?
In the early dawn, the blue-eyed man was cooking in the kitchen. He made porridge with salt and sliced a piece of fish, not cooked but marinated in salt and vinegar. He brought it in on a tray with two spoons and one pair of chopsticks. Min and he ate together. The porridge tasted bad and the fish worse, but Min was grateful that the man didn’t speak. Judging by the way his eyeballs moved, he wasn’t mute; he was a normal man. When the meal was over, Min grabbed the tray, for he wanted to do the dishes.
Later in the morning, the lepers were lining up outside his hut. And the foreign man took one person at a time. He examined the person’s tongue and eyes and gave the person some white powder to put on his or her wounds. Min went out the door and gagged when he saw a person missing three fingers and half of a nose. And he was wondering what that white powder did to the patients.
Sometime past noon, after the last person had been treated, the foreign man and Min sat together by the fire, roasting their hands, observing each other’s faces.
There was something repugnant about the colors of the man, Min had to admit. Tinted yellow hair and the carp eyes, but the most poignant part was his bloodless skin color. It was like death itself. And it saddened Min. He was probably dying like the lepers but with a different disease.
The man went fishing. Min went up the hill, caught two snakes, and skinned them. Outside the hut, he seared them on wooden skewers and offered them to the foreign man when he came back without catching any fish. The man looked at the meat and ate it with Min, cautiously. Min missed eating rice and kimchi and hot soup.
In the evening, the foreign man scribbled again in his book. Sitting in the corner, it dawned on Min that his profession might be along the lines of Mrs. Wang’s. Perhaps he was writing about his patients. A little later, the man pulled out a map and spread it on the floor. He pointed with his pen to where they were, and then he pointed to another place far away, indicating where he came from. The man’s eyes immediately reddened, and Min’s chest knotted with sympathy. The map of the world was a beautiful thing to look at. But the words were written in another tongue. Min hadn’t known that there were so many different places all over the map. There must be people in all those places, living and dying, with stories as painful and strange as his and this man’s.