by Paul Yoon
A train whistled.
And then he was there. He picked up.
I held the telephone and looked out.
Dad, I said. I’m by the sea.
THE MOUNTAIN
I.
She had been at the stop since before the morning. She was often there, sitting on the bench, avoiding the rain. If she had enough coins she bought tea from the vending machine. If she didn’t she waited to see if someone would give her some coins. She had nowhere to go. She stayed until someone noticed or until it got too dark or when, on a rare summer night, it got too cold. Even then she stayed a little longer, leaning into the hum of the vending machine, the brief air of a bus’s open door.
One day a young man approached her about a job. He had been watching as all the buses picked up and dropped off passengers while she stayed, the tips of her shoes drenched by the spray of the tires. In her years in South Korea she had never been approached about anything except by men who asked her if she was lonely and wanted company. She felt the small knuckle of the pocketknife in her boot as he approached. She started to lean down but changed her mind. He waved a piece of paper at her in a way that reminded her of a long-ago friend whose face she could no longer recall, only that gesture, a wave before they went swimming.
He was wearing sunglasses even though there was no sun that day. He was young and handsome and smelled like an expensive fragrance. He also had on the sneakers she saw on the television at an electronics store downtown. A music video with dancers. A good song. She tapped her foot to the remembered beat as he stood at a respectful distance and opened the paper, which was a pamphlet, and showed her photos of an apartment complex. A great river. Parks.
Then he spoke in Mandarin, which surprised her. She spoke in Mandarin back to him. She said she liked his sunglasses.
He laughed and bought her tea. He sat down. A puddle began to form on the uneven road, catching a portion of the sky. He said it was okay if she no longer had her documents. He said they would take care of her. On the back of the pamphlet was the name of a ferryboat and a pier number in the harbor. Below that was written a time and day.
She looked away to cough and wiped her mouth, swallowing some phlegm she would spit out if he weren’t here.
Come back home, he said.
He didn’t wait for her to answer. A bus pulled up and she watched him get on, still stunned by what he said, still confused. She wondered if he meant the city. She looked down at the pamphlet, searching the photos, not yet recognizing the river. Then she did and even though she knew the stranger was gone she leaned forward to follow the route of the bus as it made its way down the hill.
She wondered if they had met in an old life. He wasn’t the friend she used to swim with, she knew that, but she wondered all the same if this man knew her in some way, had known all of them who used to swim there, waiting for their fathers. Where were all of them now? It felt as though she hadn’t thought of them in years. She tried again to place the man she had just met, tried again to place him in that river.
It was only after the bus vanished from her view that she noticed the sunglasses. They lay on the bench beside her. They were like the ones from the movie about the American Navy. She left them alone, counting the raindrops falling against the plastic shelter above her. She watched the surface of the puddle as it kept breaking. She coughed again and spat out her phlegm. The advertisement screen switched from an energy drink to the new camera she had begun to see on the streets and the boardwalks. Anyone who could afford it was buying one.
She finished her tea and then put the sunglasses on. There was a nice weight to them.
Her name was Faye. She was twenty-six. She had been in South Korea for over ten years. She was in the port city of Incheon and she could see the harbor from the stop.
In the puddle, two birds moved from one level of sky to another.
•
She thought she would see the man again but she didn’t. She took the ferryboat with six others and entered the sea. She thought they would leave in the dark or that they would be hidden somewhere far below the deck, the way she had come years ago, but neither happened. They left in the bright of day, the captain and the four crew members wearing shirts that advertised a tour group—Sunshine Tours—and one even had a loudspeaker and began to talk about Incheon during the war.
There were more women than men on board. Most of them spoke Mandarin though there was a Korean man and a Russian. Some were bored by the slow trip; others were eager or anxious. There were two women who whispered often to each other. They were frightened as the coastline vanished and the hours passed. Frightened because it might not be a factory they would be working at. Or an apartment building they would be living in. That they had been tricked like so many others. It must have occurred to them before they had agreed to come and yet they had come to the dock just like Faye.
It had of course occurred to her. That all of this was something else. But she still boarded. She boarded after studying the photos. She had slipped her father’s pocketknife into her underwear as she walked across the gangplank but they didn’t check her body or even her bag. On the ferryboat the closest anyone ever got to her was when they passed out water bottles. Or helped them hours later as they switched vessels far at sea.
On the new boat, as the day ended, they listened to a crew member repeat a few Mandarin phrases for the ones who didn’t speak the language. All the passengers took turns saying them. Even Faye, who hadn’t spoken certain phrases in a long time. She felt her tongue loosen. A familiar turn of her mouth and her voice. A slipping into years she had stopped thinking of.
They were given a dinner of gel packets. The gel came in a foil pack the size of a playing card you tore at the corner and sucked on. The shelters carried them and so did the vending machine at the bus stop. She chose the shrimp-flavored one. Her father would have liked the sweet potato.
She kept the sunglasses on. She thought of the young man and his friendliness and wondered if it was sincere or whether talking to people like her was something he did. She knew it was the latter but wondered all the same.
It was a larger boat and to keep active they were encouraged to pace the deck. She walked back and forth as the sun was setting. She never saw the ocean that first time, leaving, hidden below the deck. Now she was embraced by a vastness she hadn’t imagined. It covered her. It left her breathless and distracted.
The crew members appeared. They gathered at the center of the deck in a circle and huddled together. With their bodies leaning toward each other they resembled a tree. Or a closed flower. She recalled the strange tree from when she was younger, bone white and disfigured. How they had found her father collapsed there. Where had that been? Where was that tree? A field. The low sun on him. That river.
The crew members were still huddled together. Then they all leaned back suddenly and looked up. She saw an arm lift, a palm open, and a metallic ball flew above their heads and hovered for a moment before it shot up into the air. It flew in silence. Or if there was a noise she couldn’t hear it. Only this thing the size of a child’s fist shooting straight up into the sky and vanishing.
It returned a few minutes later. It drifted down, touching the hand that sent it up. She could now see the bracelet the man was wearing and the ball landed on that. She heard a click and a whirring. Everyone on deck gathered as the man tapped on the bracelet and from the ball a video of the sea projected into the air. The image was colorful and textured, their boat the size of a thumbnail, the fading wake.
It could have gone higher, she heard one of the crew members say.
It’s still cool, someone else said.
Faye walked closer. As the video zoomed in on the boat she recognized her own shape on the deck. The top of her head. Her arms and her hands. The other passengers as well, all from above and scattered. Then the video tilted and caught the sun moving down past the horizon.
Faye looked out across the ocean, the sun now gone, only the remainin
g light.
She asked the men where in the ocean they were but they couldn’t tell her that. They seemed disappointed in her in some way she didn’t understand. They turned the camera off and dispersed. The passengers continued on their walks around the deck. The Russian practiced Mandarin.
It was summer. Faye returned to the railing. She caught the first stars. The sudden moon.
She had only wanted to remember. And come back.
•
In the morning they entered a quiet bay somewhere south of Lianyungang. She could see fishing huts behind a copse and rafts on the sand. The smell of a grill made her mouth water. They disembarked onto a small motorboat, three at a time, and climbed the beach toward a van that was waiting for them. The driver said something she couldn’t hear and pulled opened the side door.
Faye was the last to get in. As she watched the boat turn and motor away, she was struck by a sudden hollowing, as though her chest was caving in. As though there was a core part of her that was still far at sea. Why had she come back? She was no longer sure. A dull pain rose from her side. She rubbed the space and coughed, swallowing the phlegm. She looked around at the beach and the huts. Two children wearing shirts but no pants were looking back. She heard the flap of their sandals as they jumped on a log and regained their balance.
She felt a hand on her arm. One of the women from the boat was reaching down. The woman didn’t appear to be frightened anymore. She was a little older than Faye and said, Come on, and Faye climbed into the van.
They drove for many hours. They drove without stopping. If one of them had to use the bathroom the others turned and pretended to ignore the sound of piss hitting the bucket. The only windows in the back of the van were on the rear doors, so whatever Faye saw of the road and the landscape was as it was pulling away.
They were heading south into Shanghai. It was where she was born, where her father had been born and where they had once lived, the two of them, first in the city and then farther out, closer to the chemical plant, Faye always at home and her father at work. Faye’s mother left them a long time ago.
The driver turned on the radio and they listened to pop songs. Some of them were K-pop, and the Korean man sang along holding an imaginary microphone. He claimed to be a karaoke champion, which made some of them laugh, even though they couldn’t deny his voice was beautiful. Deep and lulling, like the water on some days.
She would never know his name but she would always remember him, even much later, when her life and her days were so far from how she ever imagined them. For his singing that calmed her while she gazed out the window, where there was the country that used to be her home, receding, where there was nothing familiar on that first day, not even the trees and the different-colored fields, the horses and the river, road signs and businesses, fluorescent lights still on in the daytime.
II.
They never told her what part of the camera she would put together. That first day she was brought to the factory, was given a uniform, and sent to the production floor. She hadn’t slept. She followed a woman to a track. A siren blared; the belt began to move, and blue bins appeared. She watched as the woman beside her picked up a small pin and inserted it into a chamber. That was all. Every day a pin and a chamber.
At first she hurried. Then the woman told her to slow.
It’s okay, the woman said. They don’t want your hands to cramp.
She spoke from behind her mask. They were all wearing masks. And hairnets and eyeglasses and gloves and aprons. She had yet to see the woman’s face. The woman had yet to see hers. She heard someone across the track complain about the mask but Faye didn’t mind. She liked the anonymity of it, of not knowing who was working beside her.
She assembled the parts all morning. No one spoke. On occasion the floor manager checked on them, tapping on a tablet, and the woman beside Faye looked up at him whenever he came close, but for most of the hours they were left alone.
It was a vast space, with different sections, sections she would never visit or see, with different belts and machines. Above her hung a galaxy of lightbulbs. All around them were high, narrow windows, too narrow to see anything outside, though there was the occasional shadow, the shifting daylight. She grew used to the steady whir and the hum of gears, the track belts and the robotic arms. Sometimes a door at the far end opened and workers exited, pushing carts with white boxes wrapped in cellophane.
It was the cleanest place Faye had ever worked. It smelled of nothing. The air cool and pleasant on her neck and her wrists. The sun went down a bit and she found herself standing on her toes, hoping to catch its path.
Earlier that day they had gone to the apartment complex. It wasn’t like the photo in the pamphlet at all. It was tall and wide, made of concrete, and was farther up the river, on the border to a forest. There were outdoor corridors on each floor like at the motel where she once worked, cleaning the rooms, pocketing the small bottles of shampoo. Sometimes she stole naps on the motel beds, watching the ceiling fans spin, the shadows of the blades moving across a wall light and a painting.
Those paintings. They were always of the sea.
She had only one bottle left of the shampoo.
The morning shift ended. There was a vending machine in the locker room. They had been given some coins and Faye bought a gel pack. She took off her mask. The woman who had been working alongside her took off her mask, too. She was pretty and a few years older than Faye. Her name was Yonha and she was Korean and they sat on the bench in front of their lockers and they ate and talked a little about themselves.
Yonha started working at the factory six months ago. Before this she had been in the city. Faye said she came from South Korea and they talked about that, too.
Faye asked if she lived in the complex. Yonha laughed.
Yes, she said, Of course. Everyone does. I’m on the floor above, the seventh. You’ll hear roller skates. All morning and night. My daughter. As though she owns no shoes.
Yonha bought another gel pack.
Do you party? Yonha asked.
Sure.
Yonha said it was better here. The city was better here. The men were better here. Yonha said this and laughed again. Faye liked her laugh. Her ease. Yonha sucked on her gel pack and said she liked Faye’s name. Was it an American name? She wished she had an American name.
Faye wasn’t sure. She nodded anyway, not wanting to disappoint her. She was named after an actress in a gangster movie whose title she couldn’t remember, the one her mother liked to watch while she got stoned. It was dubbed, so Faye never knew what language the actors were speaking, whether it was English or some other language she didn’t know.
The food made her sleepy. Sleepy from the journey. The day. The production line. She looked around and searched for the others who came with her but couldn’t find anyone. She rubbed her side. She coughed.
They heard a whistle. Next shift.
She watched Yonha put up her hair. She noticed a tattoo behind the woman’s ear. She wondered if her daughter looked like her. And what she was like.
They got back to the floor. The siren blared and they got a new bin. From behind their masks they looked at each other and began to work again.
•
All that week it was the same. They took the bus down the river road, checked in with the security guards at the gates, changed, waited for the bins. She and Yonha shared a locker. Some days they stood beside each other; others days the floor manager came in and sent Yonha somewhere else.
She bought gel packs from the vending machine. She worked all day. At the end of the shift she waited in line for the X-ray machine and the scanners to move up and down. None of the guards were ever there, only a security camera in the high corner. Once, when no one was behind her, she peeked at the screen, thinking she would see her skeleton. But there was only the heat of her, in layers, like the weather maps she saw on the channel her father used to watch, the pale storms pulsing, aswirl.
It t
ook her a moment to get used to the outside. To get used to the sun if there was sun. Rain if there was rain. Smog from the city. Air. For her eyes to adjust to the late day, the remaining light. She felt a hand slip under her arm. Yonha pulled her across the lot, waving to the guards and their floor manager, and they crossed the street toward the bus stop. In the distance, far beyond the road, were the skyscrapers of the city defining the horizon. As a child she had only spent a few years there. She wondered if it was all the same or whether it would be unrecognizable if she ever went back.
The bus was always full. Yonha sat on her lap. She smelled like almond soap. She wanted to ask where she got her soap but grew shy. She held Yonha and watched the river as they headed toward the complex. There were boats pulling cargo. Benches holding couples and their private happiness. The distant hills. Workers used to call this river Factory Row. Her father had worked at the chemical plant farther down, deep in the country.
She still thought of the man who sat with her on the bench. She still wondered if she would see him again. Yonha had liked the sunglasses, too. When they were dropped off at the complex Yonha took them from her and danced in the playground near the river, humming a song. Someone had gathered old tires to build a fortress. Yonha climbed them and shouted up at the men looking down from the apartment balconies. She was asking them for money so they could head to the city nightclubs.
It grew dark. The skyscrapers in the city grew brighter. The apartment complex, too, tall above them with all the windows and the outdoor corridors, some lined with old, blinking Christmas lights. She could make out clotheslines. Curtains of beads hanging on some entrances.
Faye watched as a child, a girl, appeared on the playground, roller-skating. It was Yonha’s daughter. They had yet to meet. She was seven, Faye thought. She looked at her mother still on the tire fortress but didn’t stop and skated up the river road. When an old woman appeared, pushing a cart, the child stopped and waited for the woman to pass. The cart was full of house supplies and clothes and she was calling out to the building, wondering if anyone needed anything. Faye saw someone on the first floor call her over. She saw the old woman lift a pair of sneakers with blinking lights on the soles, streaks of blue in the air.