This Burns My Heart

by Samuel Park

  Soo-Ja thought for a second, shaking her head. “I don’t know. Probably because you told me the truth and you were honest with me. You were supposed to lie to me, to deceive me. Don’t you know that’s how you end up marrying someone?”

  Soo-Ja was about to say more when she realized they had reached the right street. She looked at the signs outside the shops, and saw the one for Gai-Tan sul-jib. The lights were off. They were already closed for the night. But then she remembered what the old woman said. She looked toward the side and noticed the door to the actual house. It was behind a gate, hard to see. The people inside must be asleep.

  Soo-Ja’s heart began to do somersaults inside her chest, and she wondered what to do next. Yul moved toward the gate, to rattle it, but Soo-Ja stopped him. That would be giving them a warning. She knew if she did things the wrong way, she might never see Hana again. If she called out for the sul-jib’s owner, he could come out and simply tell her, I have no idea what you’re talking about, leave us alone. Then he could run away, move somewhere far away, and give Hana a new last name. The thought chilled Soo-Ja’s spine. It rested in her hands to do this right.

  At that moment, it occurred to her what to do. It was the simplest option.

  Soo-Ja gathered all the strength she had in her body, and she screamed, louder than the loudest blast from a train whistle: “HANA!” And then again, “HANA! HANA!”

  Soo-Ja heard back the sound of her own child yelling back, “Eomma! Eomma!”

  Within seconds, Soo-Ja saw her daughter burst out of the door and run toward the gate. The toddler was completely naked, like a newborn, her eyes bloodshot with tears and her cheeks swollen red. Yul quickly lifted the latch from the outside and tried to open the metal gate, but it did not give way. Soo-Ja thrust her arms in the direction of her child, only a foot away but impossibly far, as Hana wailed and screamed, piercing Soo-Ja’s heart with the sound. Hana kept stomping her bare feet on the ground. She shook her arms in the air, in utter despair.

  “Get the gate open! Get it open, Yul!” Soo-Ja cried out.

  Hana’s entire face was wet with tears, and her mouth was wide open, dribble slipping from her chin. Yul finally got the gate to release, and as soon as he did so, Soo-Ja swooped in and lifted Hana into her arms. Hana practically fled into her mother’s grasp, climbing onto her, horribly frightened. Her cries grew even louder once she reached Soo-Ja, and her little round body began to shake. Soo-Ja quickly wrapped her scarf around Hana. Yul also hurriedly took off his jacket and placed it over her like a blanket.

  As Soo-Ja held the child in her arms, she felt her own cheeks quickly become wet with tears. Her heart beat against her insides like a fist. She could not believe it. She had Hana back. She began to quiver, all the emotion finally coming out of her.

  “Eomma! Eomma!” the child cried, between big, hungry gulps of breath. Her little fingers were tearing at her mother’s neck and shoulders, afraid of losing her once again. Hana grabbed at Soo-Ja’s blouse, gluing herself to her. Her tiny hands were clenched so tightly they shook. Even though Soo-Ja held her firmly, Hana still kept reaching madly for her, her fingers clutching her arms, digging into her mother’s skin.

  “I’m sorry, baby, eomma’s here, eomma’s here!” said Soo-Ja, almost gasping for air. She looked at her daughter’s face—the mouth howling in anguish, the nose overrun with snot. But what almost destroyed her was seeing the look of fear in her eyes—Hana looked terrified that her mother might leave her again. Soo-Ja covered her own face with her free hand, so full of shame was she for not having protected her daughter.

  It was then that the man came outside, followed by two boys, one around age six, the other a little older, maybe ten. Wearing a windbreaker over his beige long johns, he did not look like a kidnapper. He was the most ordinary-looking person Soo-Ja had ever seen. He looked at her with confusion on his face, as if he couldn’t imagine who she was, or what she was doing at his doorstep at midnight.

  Yul moved forward toward him, making his presence known. Soo-Ja saw the two little boys cower, and she moved between Yul and the man. Soo-Ja turned to face Yul and shook her head. This was her fight. Hana was her daughter. If someone was to have the satisfaction of questioning this man, it would be she.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here? You know what time it is?” the man asked, pointing at them.

  Soo-Ja could see him better now: he was tall, in his early forties, with beady eyes and a hangdog expression on his face. His name, she found out later, was Dae-Jung. “I am this child’s mother!” Soo-Ja barked at him. “And why is she naked? If I find out that you hurt her, I swear I’ll kill you!”

  “You’re her mother? I don’t believe you. Look at the way you’re making her cry.” Dae-Jung made as if to take her back, but Soo-Ja immediately turned her body to the side, shielding Hana.

  “You have no business believing or not believing. She is my daughter. And you, you are a kkang-pae, kkang-pae. We have to call the police. Right now!” Soo-Ja was yelling at him. If Hana had not been in her arms, she would have punched him in the face.

  “Call them. Call them. All I’ve done is rescue this child who was dumped on the street,” he said, looking at Soo-Ja with contempt, his head slightly raised.

  “Dumped?” Soo-Ja spat the word out, stung by it. She would have expected Dae-Jung to either run away or bow in shame. Never this.

  “Yes. Dumped. You said you’re the girl’s mother? What kind of mother leaves her child alone in a busy market?”

  “Don’t you dare speak to her that way,” said Yul. “Let’s get the police here, see what they say.” He started looking around for an officer, and Soo-Ja could see Dae-Jung panic a little.

  “Call them! Who do you think they’re going to side with? Me, who serves them drinks every night, or you, from God knows where, who’s disturbing the peace? Everyone knows I have a kindly disposition. I was taken in by this abandoned girl’s smile and decided to give her a home. If there’s a victim in all this, it’s me, who tried to help a child and instead of thanks, I get a crazy woman yelling at me.”

  Yul advanced toward him and grabbed him by the top of his shirt. “You’re not allowed to talk to her like that, you understand?”

  Soo-Ja couldn’t stop him, and Dae-Jung struggled to break free.

  “And who are you?” asked Dae-Jung. “Because you’re definitely not the child’s father. I could tell that from a mile away. But I guess you can explain to the police when they come here. I’m sure everybody in town will want to know what you two were doing running around at night like this.” Dae-Jung turned his head to his son. “Bae, go call the police.”

  The boy hesitated, and it was a studied hesitation, as deliberate as a gesture by an actor in a bad play. But at least it gave Soo-Ja the chance to step in.

  “I have Hana, Yul. And I want to take her home now. I don’t want to spend hours in a police station explaining what happened. Let’s just go home.”

  Yul weighed her words and she could see his reluctance as he gradually let go of Dae-Jung, finally tossing him back like a dirty towel.

  Hana’s crying had subsided a little now, and she buried her head on her mother’s shoulder. Soo-Ja felt disappointed in herself for not taking revenge. How could she not put this man behind bars for what he’d done? How could she simply walk away? But this was Pusan. This was how things were done. If a man took your daughter and then gave her back, you said thank you and bowed your head as you left. If she took him to court, the judge would say, Isn’t it enough you have your daughter back? What more do you want? They might even ask her to give him some money, for the food and lodging he had provided.

  “Let’s go, Yul,” Soo-Ja repeated, and turned toward the street. But as they started to make their way out, she heard Dae-Jung’s voice behind them.

  “And where do you think you’re going with her?” he asked, his voice tinged with an odd sense of conviction. “You didn’t prove that you’re the girl’s mother. You think I’m going to
let a stranger just take this little girl?”

  Soo-Ja looked at him in utter disbelief. She had never felt more anger toward another human being. As she drew near, her fist about to punch him, one of his boys—the one who looked to be about ten—stepped forward, standing between them. He had a shaved head, to prevent lice, and a jacket that was a couple of sizes too big for him.

  “Appa, I will go with her. I will go see where they take Hyo-Joo.”

  It took Soo-Ja a second to realize “Hyo-Joo” meant her daughter. So they had already given her a new name! What else had they taught her, Soo-Ja wondered, in those twenty-four hours? Maybe to stay away from windows and not long for your mother, who will never come…

  “All right,” said Dae-Jung, too quickly, glad for the “compromise,” glad to let his version of events come to a logical end.

  How amazing that even in matters of child kidnapping, one still had to let the other person find a way to save face.

  “Your father, is he good to you?” asked Yul.

  The ten-year-old looked thoughtfully at him and nodded. They were walking, the four of them, back to Soo-Ja’s uncle’s house. As they moved through the night, Soo-Ja could feel a familial closeness—the boy, at least for now, was clearly on their side.

  “Yes, he treats me well. But not my brother,” Bae replied. In his tattered clothes, he resembled a street urchin.

  “Is your brother naughty?” asked Yul.

  He would be a good father one day, thought Soo-Ja. He had a natural ability to talk to children.

  “He’s not. He’s the same as me,” said Bae.

  “So he’s a father who takes the rod out on one boy, but spares the other. Why do you think he doesn’t beat you?” asked Yul.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  At this point Soo-Ja felt as if Yul had given her enough of an opening so she could ask the boy some questions. “Why did your father take Hana? What did he tell you?”

  Bae contorted his neck, weighing his loyalties, and took a while before he finally began to speak. “My father is not a bad man. But sometimes he does strange things. Things that we don’t understand, but in his head it all makes sense.”

  “Why did he take Hana to your house?” asked Soo-Ja.

  Hana lay in her mother’s arms, afraid to let go. She grew heavier with every block they passed, but Soo-Ja swallowed the pain. In spite of Yul’s offers to carry her, she knew it was best for her daughter to stay with her.

  “You see, ma’am, we’re all boys in the house. Me and my brother. And my father always wanted a girl. So he said this was God’s way of giving us our wish. But I think he did it because of the way she was dressed. He kept saying, ‘Look how nice her clothes are, she must come from a good family!’ He was excited to have a girl from a good family.”

  Soo-Ja looked over at Hana, wondering how much of this entire ordeal she understood. Bae stopped talking and watched her as she watched Hana. Soo-Ja turned to him again. “Go on, Bae.”

  “He told us to be very careful with her. That a girl isn’t like a boy, you can’t be rough with her. He also told us if anybody asked, to say she was our sister, but that her mother wasn’t our mother, which I didn’t understand. If my mother isn’t her mother, then how can she be my sister? But I suppose it makes sense, since you’re Hana’s mother and you’re not my mother.”

  “Would you like her to be your mother?” teased Yul.

  So this is how you talk to boys, thought Soo-Ja. You tease them about girls, even if that girl is your mother.

  “Yul! Please,” Soo-Ja admonished him, though she did not really mean it. It was the first smile she’d seen on Yul’s face this entire time, and it made her glad.

  The boy immediately nodded. “Yes! Yes, I would. You’re very pretty, agassi.”

  “It’s ajumma. I’m not too vain to say it. I may be young enough to still be agassi, but I’m a mother now, and ajumma and eomma sound the same to me,” said Soo-Ja. “But Bae, go on. What else happened?”

  “We all gathered around Hana. I know boys are not supposed to like girls, but she was very entertaining, we couldn’t stop watching her! It was like having a rabbit in the house. And she cried. Oh, she cried so much in the beginning. And then my father said, if you keep crying, your mother is going to get really mad, and she won’t take you back. That’s when I knew something was wrong. But I couldn’t say anything.”

  “And where was your mother through all this?” Soo-Ja asked as they kept walking, the streets completely deserted in front of them.

  “She was serving customers. I think she was mad at my father, and was avoiding him. She looked horrified when Father brought Hyo-Joo, I mean Hana, home. She said, ‘Why would you bring me one more mouth to feed?’ And my father said, ‘She’ll earn her keep. She can work at the counter and serve customers when she’s older.’”

  Soo-Ja tightened her grip on Hana when she heard this. Did her little girl know the life she had been spared? Of course she did, thought Soo-Ja, the way children always know everything.

  “She’s a very clever girl, your daughter,” said Bae, smiling and showing his teeth for the first time. It seemed that he was enjoying being the center of attention. “This morning, she finally stopped crying. She said she liked it with us, and that the house was good. But could she please get some air? She said that it was stuffy in the room. So my father said all right and let her go outside.

  “But then as soon as she got outside, she tried to run away. She reached to undo the latch on the gate, but it was too high for her. My father ran back out to get her, this look of panic on his face. He couldn’t believe that a three-year-old could be so clever. That’s why he made my mother take off all her clothes. So she couldn’t go outside. There was nobody to watch her, so we had to leave her alone at times, you know? My father just stuffed her under some blankets and she stayed there the whole day. And he was right. She didn’t try to escape with no clothes on. But I swear, I could see in her face that she still hoped to figure out a way to escape.”

  So that’s why she was naked when she came out of the house, thought Soo-Ja. She breathed a sigh of relief. She knew this boy was telling the truth. Besides, if this man’s intentions had been bad, there just hadn’t been enough time, what with a small house full of boys and his wife and the customers drinking next door.

  Soo-Ja looked at Hana again, who looked back at her with a pained expression on her face, as if to say, Eomma, how could you leave me? Do you not know what I went through? The tears had stopped, but her face was still wet.

  I know, baby. Eomma knows everything. And eomma was bad, to let this happen to you. But now you can sleep. Eomma is here. You can sleep like a child again.

  When they arrived in front of her uncle’s house, Soo-Ja lingered for a moment to give either of these two men the chance to leave. Was she being considerate, sparing Yul from bad company? Or was she afraid they would ask him questions, maybe adding two and two? The boy looked at them awkwardly, and she saw in his eyes that he didn’t want to go yet. He wanted to trade as part of some parent-child swap program and come live with them. But, child, she would have to say to him, Yul doesn’t live here with me. I live with some other people. This makeshift family you experienced on our way here, with the four of us, it was as new to me as it was to you.

  Yul also seemed to sense the boy’s hesitation. “It’s time for you to go home,” he said, and his firmness came as easily as his teasing earlier, and was just as effective, as the boy bowed to them and started to leave. But before he was gone, Yul reached into his pocket and gave Bae some money. “This is for you. Don’t show it to your father.”

  The boy bowed again and—this is how Soo-Ja knew that what he’d told her earlier had been true—he smiled at Hana and said, “Good-bye, little sister. Be nice to your mother.”

  Soo-Ja and Yul watched Bae run home, into a dark she found very foreign. After Soo-Ja and Yul could no longer make out the boy’s shape in the distance, they finally turned to each othe
r. So this is that scene in the movie, thought Soo-Ja—the good-bye, first to the less consequential character, then to the important one.

  Soo-Ja had felt this before, and she felt it again: that she was always saying good-bye to the only man she truly cared about. But she was wrong. For each time she said good-bye to Yul, he was a different man—one she knew even better, and for whom her feelings had grown deeper. Now she loved him the way a wife might love a husband after a few years—love him after watching him perform an act of kindness, love him after seeing the way he is with other people, love him for the quality of his heart. But he was not her husband; she was not his wife. It was wrong to even think that way. But what was it that counted in the end, the life you lived in front of other people, for their benefit, or the life you lived in your own heart—where she loved him and he loved her back. And could she help it if that life just felt so much more real? Yet whatever happened in that other version of her life—kisses, sighs, joy—in this one he was just a friend, standing in front of her, unsure if he should go in or not, maybe suddenly remembering he had patients, a wife, a life to step back into as soon as he stepped out of hers.

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to thank you enough,” said Soo-Ja, speaking softly. Blankets of fog shifted around them, and she felt as if they were wading through clouds. She could see sliced sections of tree branches and the gates of houses, but nothing whole; they seemed to float, all light and watery, without their usual density.

  “You don’t need to. We’re friends. Friends take care of each other,” said Yul, as he reached for her and rearranged the wrinkled collar around her neck. He then gently patted Hana’s head; she lay asleep, wrapped in his windbreaker. Soo-Ja made as if to give it back to him, but he shook his head.

  “Do you want to come in and meet my in-laws?” asked Soo-Ja. Even in the dark, she could see the sadness ebb and flow on Yul’s face, like the waves in the sea.

  “What would you introduce me as?”

  “It depends,” Soo-Ja said softly, looking into his eyes. “If I want to lie, or if I want to tell the truth.”