by Ellen Oh
Grandpa was the best. The sharp pain of missing him is still there, but it helps to be with Grandma. Especially knowing that it’s what he would want me to do.
I am suddenly reminded of another promise I made him. To make sure I recorded Grandma’s war story. I’d tried before, but she hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Would she be willing now?
“So, you know how I did the videos with Grandpa?” I ask.
“I’m so glad you did, Junie,” Grandma answers. “It is such a wonderful record of your grandfather.”
“Well, I promised Grandpa I would record your stories also.”
“Ahhhhh.” Grandma gives me a look that says I know what you’re up to.
“No, really! He made me promise to record your war story. He said it was very important in explaining why you wanted to come to America.”
Once again, a faraway look creeps into Grandma’s eyes.
“I guess that’s true,” she says. “All right, then.”
“Great! When can we do it?” I’m antsy to get started, afraid she might change her mind.
“After we clean all these kongnamul,” she says.
Determined to finish quickly, I rip off the tails of the bean sprouts as fast as I can.
It takes almost two hours before we sit in the living room and I set up my little recording area. Grandma insisted on finishing the soup and side dishes she was going to make with the bean sprouts, and then changed her clothes and did her hair and makeup. It was a lot different from Grandpa, who didn’t even brush his hair before I’d record him.
I check the screen, and she looks beautiful as always. She’s the most nongrandmotherly-looking grandma I know. Her straight black hair reaches her shoulders and is graying only at her temples.
“Whenever you’re ready, Grandma.”
She plays with her fingers and takes a deep breath.
“I’m ready.”
I press record. “Grandma, please introduce yourself and tell us your year of birth, and where you were born. Then tell us an important event from your life. Specifically, your time during the war.”
Grandma looks at the camera with a serious expression. “My American name is Jinjoo Han. Han is my married name. But my Korean name will always be Lee Jinjoo. Because Korean women keep their maiden names.”
“Oh, is that why my mom kept hers? I thought it was because of her work.”
Grandma nods. “Yes, your dad wanted her to change it like the Americans do, but I told her to keep her traditions.”
I like that and I decide that if I ever get married, I too will keep my name. Junie Kim is who I am.
“Can you tell us when and where you were born?”
“I was born in Incheon, the year of 1940,” she says. “When I was ten years old, the Korean War began, and my entire life changed.”
Book IV
Jinjoo
June 26, 1950
“DRIED SQUID!”
“Fresh eggs!”
“Pickled octopus!”
“Blood sausage!”
“Rice cakes!”
The litany of food items available for sale in the Sinpo Market was always fascinating to Jinjoo. Dozens of little stalls packed tightly together with row upon row of food and clothing and other merchandise. The smells were both delicious and revolting, and oh so familiar. Fried mung-bean pancake with spicy sauce, wafting in the air with the bricks of pungent soybean paste hawked by a nearby merchant, so strong you could taste it. Sweet rice cakes with gooey walnut paste next to stalls of fish cake and raw seafood. This was home.
Jinjoo forgot that she was in the middle of an intense game of hide-and-seek, and instead watched the hotteok lady making fried gooey sweet pancakes. First, she pulled off a lump of the rice dough and molded it into a small pocket filled with sugar and nuts and sesame seeds. Then she threw it on the griddle with barely any oil and pressed it down with a circle spatula, crisping it into a white-and-brown pancake that she added to the pile on the side of her grill. It was still early in the morning, but Jinjoo had raced out of the house without eating breakfast. Now her stomach grumbled loudly.
“Jinjoo-ya,” the hotteok lady said. “Your eyeballs are going to fall out onto my grill if you keep staring like that.”
Jinjoo dug her hands into her pants pockets and pulled out a fistful of lint, a red ribbon, and a shiny silver coin. Wiping it against her shirt, she held it out to the hotteok lady with a beaming smile.
The woman looked at the coin with a raised eyebrow.
“Five chon? Wah, Jinjoo, you are rich today! Are you buying for your friends?”
As if she’d spoken the words to a magic spell, all three of Jinjoo’s friends suddenly appeared at her side.
“Jinjoo, where’d you get so much money?”
“Jinjoo, can I have a hotteok too?”
Jinjoo looked back into the surprise and awe of her friends’ faces and felt her chest puff out in importance.
“Father had me deliver a watch to an important client on the other side of town yesterday. You know, where the Japanese tile houses are,” she said. “The lady gave me five chon for bringing it so quick.”
“Wow!” The friends edged even closer, staring at the coin as intensely as Jinjoo had stared at the hot hotteoks. Jinjoo had to bite her tongue from bragging that five chon was nothing compared to how much her father used to give her. But that had been over a year ago, when there were more wealthy foreigners around with fancy watches they needed fixed. Nowadays her father hardly gave her any change because of her mother’s disapproval. Her mother didn’t like the way Jinjoo was being spoiled by her father.
Don’t just give it to her! Make her work for it, her mother always said.
Which was why Jinjoo had been so keen to deliver the watch.
Feeling incredibly generous, Jinjoo ordered two hotteok, and wrapped the second one in paper and carefully placed it into her deep pants pocket. The heat of the hotteok burned comfortingly against her leg.
“Why aren’t you eating that one, Jinjoo?” the hotteok lady asked.
“I want to take it home to my eonni and brothers,” she replied.
“You’re a good kid, Jinjoo.” With a smile, the hotteok lady gave her one more of the piping hot cakes and shooed the kids away.
Taking the delicious-smelling hotteoks, the group of friends dashed through the crowded road and sat on the curb of the sidewalk. They waited patiently as Jinjoo carefully split the two cakes into four even pieces and shared it with her friends. The first two to Taeyoung and Taemin, fraternal twins, who looked exactly alike except that Taeyoung wore her hair in long braids and Taemin kept his head shaved due to the heat. The third one to Yohan, Jinjoo’s favorite friend, who lived the closest to her and sat behind her in class.
As they gobbled up the last of the sugary treat, they watched the busy streets filled with pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, bicyclists, and every now and then a fancy automobile from the rich part of town.
“Who do you think that is?” Taeyoung asked.
“Maybe it’s President Rhee,” Taemin said.
“President Rhee?” Jinjoo snorted. “He’d have a whole street full of cars with him! My father said he doesn’t go anywhere without a bunch of people to lick his feet clean.”
“Not just his feet,” Yohan said slyly.
They all snickered. Even though Incheon was close to Seoul, most people despised the tyrannical old guy with the foreign wife. They heard the grumblings of the grown-ups. It wasn’t just the Communist supporters who hated Rhee.
“It’s probably some rich bank president or hotel guy,” Jinjoo said. “Or one of those Japanese rich guys . . .”
“Probably not Japanese,” Yohan replied. “They all went back to Japan after they lost to the Americans.”
A sudden cloud of dust enveloped them, and the kids leaped to their feet. A shopkeeper was vigorously sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store.
“Hey, ahjussi, you got us all dirty!”
“G
et off the sidewalk! Filthy urchins,” he muttered.
The children glared back. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“Let’s go to the park.”
They ran down the middle of the road, dodging pedestrians and bicyclists and rickshaw men. They ran down Bank Street, named for the series of fancy banks in gray concrete buildings that lined the street. Once Japanese banks, now Korean independent banks after World War II had ended. Incheon was an important city port where many westerners arrived in Korea. It was a mix of old and modern. Of ancient Korean houses and tall westernized buildings.
Finally, they climbed all the way to the top of the park and looked out over the view of Incheon port.
“Wah! Look at those American ships!” Taemin yelled out in glee.
“They’re not American,” Yohan corrected. “And those are freighters, not passenger ships. To carry cargo.”
“How do you know?”
“Look at the flags, silly!”
One had a big red flag with a thick blue cross outlined by white. The other one was red with four small stars in a semicircle to the right of a big star. Jinjoo didn’t recognize either flag.
“So where are they from?” Jinjoo asked.
Yohan scratched his head sheepishly. “I’m not sure, but I think one of them is the new flag of China.”
Jinjoo narrowed her eyes suspiciously at her friend. “Which one?”
Yohan didn’t respond, and Jinjoo crowed in delight. “Ha! You don’t know! And if it is for cargo, what’re those people doing on it?”
They all peered down to see people boarding the freighter.
Suddenly, Taeyoung shouted, “Look at all those buses and cars!”
A number of vehicles were pulling into the harbor lot and unloading even more people onto the pier. From their vantage point, the children could make out the khaki uniforms of American soldiers escorting women and children onto the ships.
“Huh. Those look like Americans heading to that ship,” Jinjoo remarked. “Lots and lots of them.”
Peering closely at the cars, Yohan pointed to one with small flags on its hood. “You’re right. See the red and white stripes with a blue corner and lots of stars? That’s the American flag.”
“What’s going on?” Taeyoung asked. Her eyes were round with worry. “Why are they all leaving?”
They all watched as buses and cars, even trucks, kept driving up as close as possible to the ship. Soon hundreds of people were gathering around the ships. Men, women, and children of all ages. Jinjoo and her friends watched for over an hour as they loaded more and more people on the ship with the blue cross. Even though it was full, they kept boarding.
“I don’t get it. Why don’t they get on the other ship? It’s empty,” Taemin asked.
“That’s the Chinese freighter,” Yohan said decisively.
“I thought you didn’t know,” Jinjoo said in suspicion. “What makes you sure now?”
“Because they’re avoiding it,” Yohan replied. “Westerners trust other western people but not Asians. That’s what my father said.”
Yohan’s father worked at the city government office, so he would know.
Jinjoo turned her attention back to the ships. She could see the crew of the empty ship talking with some men who were trying to convince some of the people to board, but everyone refused. They kept boarding the blue-cross vessel. Taeyoung and Taemin got bored and moved away to play in the shade, but Jinjoo was fascinated by the activity going on in the harbor.
“How many people you think got on it?” Jinjoo asked.
“More than five hundred, maybe six,” Yohan said. “Although it’s a freighter, so it’s used to carrying heavy cargo. But definitely way more people than should be on that ship. I guess they’d rather risk sinking than get on a Chinese boat.”
“That’s so wrong,” Jinjoo said in disapproval.
Yohan agreed. “Americans are funny that way.”
They could hear honking as a few more cars pulled up to the harbor.
“It looks like all the westerners are leaving Korea,” Jinjoo said.
“Maybe the Reds are invading!” Taemin announced with a laugh.
“Bite your tongue, Taemin!” Yohan shouted. “That’s not funny. We don’t want North Korean Communist pigs here!”
The words sent a chill through Jinjoo’s spine. It was a worry that her parents talked about constantly. Her mother had begun trying to persuade her father to move south, but business was still decent. Not as good as earlier years when the streets of Incheon were filled with foreigners, but enough to feed his family. Her father worried that if they left Incheon, he would not be able to make enough money to buy rice, like so many other poor Koreans. But her mother worried that they were too close to the thirty-eighth parallel that separated North and South Korea. Too close to the Reds, she would say. And with Incheon being a hotbed of Communist supporters, she didn’t feel safe.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Jinjoo said, motioning her friends to leave. “I think we should go home now.”
They could turn on the radio and listen to the news. Maybe then the sick feeling in Jinjoo’s stomach would abate.
Junie
“So what country was the blue cross flag ship from?”
“Norway,” Grandma responds. “I found out later that it was full of fertilizer and that it had to be emptied out completely for the evacuation. Over six hundred people, a lot of them women and children, boarded that freighter, which took three days to travel to Japan. Apparently, many people got sick from the smell of the fertilizer and overcrowding.”
“Huh, they should’ve gotten on the Chinese ship,” I say unsympathetically.
“NORTH KOREA HAS INVADED! SEOUL has fallen!”
Out on the streets the local Communists were celebrating the news of the Red invasion with a makeshift parade. They wore red armbands and were setting off fireworks. Jinjoo could hear them from her house, which was on a side street several blocks from the main thoroughfare. Jinjoo hadn’t left the house in days. Her mother had been too afraid to let them out ever since the North Korean Army had advanced into Incheon. Inside the house, they’d heard shooting and loud explosions. The soldiers had been going to houses and stealing food. They’d come to their house and ransacked everything. Jinjoo and her sister had kept their brothers inside the bedroom, too terrified to make a sound.
When they’d left, Jinjoo had walked out to see their kitchen and living quarters in huge disarray. Pots and pans thrown everywhere, their mother’s pretty dishes smashed on the ground.
“Why did they do this?” Jinjoo asked.
Her mother and Shinae eonni, their live-in maid, were busy cleaning up. Jinjoo’s mother was tight-lipped and angry. “Filthy animals! They took all our food and even your father’s watchmaking tools.”
“Is there no food for us?” Jinjoo’s sister, Eunjoo, asked with worry. She was holding little Junha, who was crying, while Junsoo was running around picking up items on the ground and bringing them to his mother.
“Jinjoo, please take your brother inside before he gets hurt,” their mother said, ignoring Eunjoo’s question.
Jinjoo caught her brother, who struggled against her. His little four-year-old body was no match for Jinjoo’s brute strength, and he, too, started to cry.
“I said take them inside and keep them quiet!”
The two girls rushed their little brothers back inside.
“Eomma is mad,” Jinjoo whispered inside their living room.
Eunjoo frowned. She put Junha down, and then plopped some wooden puzzle toys in front of him and Junsoo. They both stopped crying as Eunjoo began playing with them.
“I think it’s because the North Koreans took all our food,” Eunjoo said in a worried tone. “What will happen to Junha? He’s just a baby.”
“He’s not a baby! He’s almost two! What about me?” Jinjoo asked. “I’m bigger and hungrier!”
“But you can go without food for a little bit. J
unha and Junsoo can’t.”
“Food, food, food!” Junsoo repeated as he galloped around the room.
“Let’s wait for Abeoji,” Eunjoo said. “I’m sure he will know what to do!”
After a while, Shinae eonni came in and brought them corn cobs broken into small pieces. Eunjoo helped Junha eat his corn, while Jinjoo and Junsoo devoured their pieces.
“Eonni, where’s Eomeoni?” Jinjoo asked.
“She went out to your father’s store to get some money,” Shinae eonni replied. “Then she’ll go to the market for food.”
Junsoo reached for the other corn, but Jinjoo stopped him. “No, Junsoo, that’s Eunjoo noona’s corn.”
“It’s okay, Jinjoo. He can have it,” her sister replied. “I’ll just eat the rest of Junha’s.”
She handed it to Junsoo, whose lip stopped quivering. Jinjoo eyed them both angrily.
“This is why you’re so weak, Eonni,” Jinjoo said. “You don’t eat enough food.”
“Leave her alone, Jinjoo,” Shinae eonni said. “Eunjoo, you are a very kind girl.”
Eunjoo winced as Shinae patted her on the head a little too roughly. Jinjoo narrowed her eyes and glared at Shinae, noticing how the older girl had taken two of the largest pieces of corn for herself and eaten them all.
Jinjoo had never really liked Shinae eonni. She’d come two years ago from a small town far south of Incheon to work for their family after their first maid got married. Perhaps because Jinjoo didn’t like her, she found her unattractive. She was lazy and sneaky in little things that she thought Jinjoo’s mother and father probably didn’t notice. Like always blaming broken things on little Junsoo, when most of the time it was her own carelessness. Or taking more food from Eunjoo, because she knew Eunjoo didn’t eat a lot. They were small things that Jinjoo always noticed and despised, but that her mother would never listen to her complain about.
“Jinjoo-ya, Shinae has no family,” their mom would say. “We’re her family now.”
What could she say to that? Nothing. So Jinjoo kept quiet and just watched her. She hated that she had to call her eonni out of respect, especially given that respect was the last thing Jinjoo felt for the older girl.