When the tingling moved into my head, I closed my eyes and almost dropped to the ground. I knelt in the entryway, feeling the floorboards rattling beneath me. Finally the floor settled, and I opened my eyes, to find the colors in my mother’s home shimmering, outlining for me what needed to be done. First I fed and watered the spirits, who grew restless in their hunger. I refilled the offering bowls, placing water and some oranges found in the refrigerator on the kitchen windowsill for the Seven Sisters. For Saja, I set out dried cuttlefish—the only meat I could find—on the steps leading away from our house.
I roamed the rooms, as if on a guiderail, checking on each of the talismans my mother had set up, making sure each was secure in its position. Only one, the red-bordered charm my mother glued to the television to counteract negative incoming energy, needed to be restuck. And then the frogs called to me, until—like my mother before me—I moved them from room to room, rotating the ones hiding behind books on shelves, or on the back of the toilet next to the extra rolls of paper, to the bedroom and kitchen so that they got their share of light.
I performed the actions of my mother, caring for the spirits of the house, in order to feel my mother once again. I wanted to be able to feel her next to me, to sense her spirit—for if there really are such things, I knew she would come to me, feeling my need for her, in death as she rarely did in life.
“Mom,” I called. “It’s me. Beccah.” I waited, closing my eyes, stretching my arms wide, waiting for her hug. I would have taken the slightest breeze brushing against my wrist or inner elbow, the slightest rustling of one of the talismans, I would have taken anything, as a sign. I held my arms out until I felt them burn, then dropped them. “Mom,” I called out once more. Eyes still closed, I rose and moved through the room. “Are you here?”
After bumping and tripping my way into her bedroom, I gave up and opened my eyes. I walked over to her bureau, where she kept a small altar for the Birth Grandmother, the most intimate of her spirits. The water in one offering dish had evaporated, leaving a faint line at the rim, and the rice in the other dish—as if feeding on its neighbor—had started to dissolve, melting down into a watery gruel. I dipped a finger into the empty water dish, then touched my tongue. I tasted only myself.
Next to the Birth Grandmother’s offerings, my mother kept a jewelry box. Made out of rosewood, inlaid with ox horn and mother-of-pearl, guarded by a lock in the shape of a fish, the box held my mother’s treasures. I knew what I would find when I opened the box with the key that never left the fish-lock’s mouth: frog pins and pendants and earrings given to her by her regular customers, assorted buttons, the gold and jade hoops that she sewed on my clothes for protection, her wedding band, a baby tooth, my umbilical cord, school pictures and report cards, her jade frog.
I rubbed the frog against my cheek and remembered that on the night Reno gave her the necklace, my mother turned toward me just as we were drifting off to sleep. She slipped the chain off her neck and dangled it above my face, so that with each twist of the chain, the little frog kicked the tip of my nose. “Little Frog,” my mother said, “I have a story for you.
“Once on a time, there was a little frog who never listened to its mother. If the mother said go north, her child went south. If the mother said go to the river, her child would run away into the mountains.” My mother bounced her jade frog up the bridge of my nose and rested it on my forehead, making me giggle.
“Am I the Little Frog, Mommy?” I said, both hopeful and worried that I might be. “That’s not me, huh, Mommy, is it?”
My mother hopped the frog over my mouth. “This is how it was between them, from the time the child was born till the time came for the old mother to die. ‘My child,’ the mother frog said, ‘When I die, bury me by the river. Do not, absolutely do not, bury me on the mountain.’ Of course, knowing the little frog, the mother frog fully expected to be buried on the mountain.”
I opened my mouth, pushed the frog away with my tongue. “What do you want, Mommy? What do you want me to do?” I said. “Ask me and I’ll do it. Okay? Just tell me.”
The frog caressed my face. “When the mother frog died,” my mother continued, “the little frog was so sad it made up its mind that this time it would do as its mother wished. He buried her at the mouth of the river, and each time it rained, he hopped to her grave, croaking and crying to heaven, worried that the river would wash up her corpse and carry it away.”
That night, and perhaps the night after, I dreamed of frog angels that swooped from the sky like the monkey bats in The Wizard of Oz. As my mother and I floated on a river that looked like a purified Ala Wai, the frog angels plucked my mother from the water and carried her into the sky. I watched my mother—a tiny light against their darkness—beat against the frog angels’ sticky-toed talons and flapping wings as they flew higher and higher. I watched and I cried, not knowing how to help, left behind on the banks of the river.
Now I wonder if I had been remembering the wrong story, if every time my mother said, “Remember the toad,” she meant, “Remember the frog.” And I wonder if that changes anything. I find myself second-guessing my interpretations of her stories, and wonder, now that she is dead, how I should remember her life.
I slapped the lock on the box, snapping the hinge, and unearthed something unexpected under the tangle of jewelry: a cassette tape marked “Beccah.”
I remember that occasionally one of my mother’s clients, new from Korea, would pay her to perform a blessing or an exorcism for the family ghosts left behind. My mother would ask Reno to tape the ceremony, capturing the voices of the spirits as they spoke through her. And when the trance came to an end after two hours or two weeks or however long it took for the unhappy ancestors to relay their grievances, my mother would wrap and pack the cassettes for mailing to their relatives still living in Korea. When I first saw these packages, I remember thinking they were gifts for me and was disappointed when, after my persistent needling, my mother opened one.
“See, Beccah-chan,” my mother said after I had ripped the paper off a small package and found a black cassette tape. “This one’s not for you.”
“Oh,” I said, but, unwilling to give up, asked her to play it. “Is it music? I wanna hear, I wanna hear!”
My mother slipped the cassette into our tape recorder. After a prelude of whirs and scratching, my mother’s voice—accompanied by a beating drum—waited out of the recorder.
“Yaaak!” I shoved my hands against my ears. “What are you doing, Mommy?”
My mother slapped down my hands. “You should listen, learn,” she said. “This will be you one day.”
“Not!” I yelled. “No way. I’m not going to scream like that for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” my mother said. “I am crying for the dead. To show proper respect. To show love.”
We listened to my mother’s cries and moans, to the heartbeat of the drum, until the tape wound down. I knew that as a fortune-teller and spirit medium, she was paid to console or cajole the dead. Sometimes customers, mostly the new immigrants from Korea, paid her to perform ceremonies for lost family members and the dead that had been left behind. They would record my mother’s chants to send to relatives and neighbors back home.
There’s a possibility I saw this tape, my tape, among the others, or I might have heard her making the actual recording. I would have assumed that this tape was for one of her customers, someone who had failed to pay for or pick up the merchandise. Never would I have thought that my mother performed the ceremony for herself. Never, as a child, did I think about whom my mother had had to leave behind, and whom she cried for.
Instead, when we finished listening to her customer’s tape, I told my mother, “I would cry for you, Mommy.”
“I know,” she answered. “Every year, on my death anniversary, that will be your gift to me.”
I remembered my mother saying this as I fingered the tape she had marked as mine. Under this cassette, bound with a rubber band,
was an envelope stuffed with paper and yellowing newspaper articles. I scanned the articles, most of them clipped form the Korea Times, reading what I could, and translated something about World War II, the Japanese, and camps. Unable to get far without my Korean-English dictionary, I put the articles aside for later and picked out two official-looking documents. Both, in essence, were missing-persons reports—one from the American Embassy in Seoul, the other from the Red Cross.
“Dear Mrs. Akiko (Kim Soon Hyo) Bradley, ” they read. “I am sorry to inform you that we can find no trace of your sisters-Kim Soon Mi, Kim Soon Hi, Kim Soon Ja—presumed dead or residing in North Korea. ”
I had to read these opening lines twice more before I understood who was who, that my mother once belonged to a name, to a life, that I had never known about. That the names I had known only in relation to the Seven Stars belonged to women I could have called imo, and that my mother, once bound to others besides myself, had severed those ties—my lineage, her family name—with her silence.
I sat, surrounded by the papers, by the secrets she had guarded and cultivated like a garden. I sat and I waited for some way to understand, to know this person called Soon Hyo, thinking that I had always been waiting for my mother, wasting time in the hallway of her life, waiting for an invitation to step over the threshold and into her home.
16
SOON HYO
My mother died more than once in her life.
Before she died with her head in my hands, leaving me with an emptiness so big I would never fill it until the birth of my own child, she died in March of 1919 on the streets of Seoul.
In the weeks following the signing of the Korean Declaration of Independence, she and her friends from Ewha College joined the throngs of displaced farmers, out-of-work merchants, and idealistic students celebrating in the streets. Day after day, on the corner of her street, she met the boy with whom she hoped to make a yonae, a love match. Holding sometimes a red banner, sometimes a flag, he would wait on the corner with some of their friends, to throw off the gossips. Under cover of their friends and a flying red cloth, they would link arms before becoming part of the river of people meandering through the city.
We were happy, my mother would tell my sisters and me. Not just me, not just my friends, but everybody who marched in the streets. You can’t imagine how close we all felt.
Of course, my mother added, either in explanation or in mockery, I was in love.
The first time my mother was dragged home dead, her own mother had had a premonition. Don’t go, she told my mother, I beg you. She wrapped her arms around her daughter, trying to anchor her to the earth of their home, to hold and protect her. But my mother only pushed at the grasping hands, hauling my weeping grandmother across the room and out the door. When my mother finally broke away, my halmoni shouted after her a warning and a curse that sealed my mother’s fate: Watch out for him, that no-good, do-nothing-but-yell boy! He’ll ruin your chances for a decent match!
My mother—dressed in her pleated white skirt that swung like a bell against her legs, her hair carefully braided and tied with a red bow to catch the eye of her boyfriend—followed where the crowd took her. She dodged the children who sang “San Toki, Toki Ya!” and jumped like mountain jackrabbits, jackrabbits ya! in and out of the parade, and she stole glances at lovers stealing kisses behind their flags. Maybe she thought her own boyfriend would try to kiss her that day.
Several groups of people around her chanted slogans, each trying to outshout the others until their words would be the only ones heard. Her own group of friends were arguing about whether to chant Korean Independence Forever! or Long Live Korea for Ten Thousand Years!—Man Sei, Man Sei!—when my mother became aware of an undercurrent of noise, a strange murmur trickling down from the direction of the Chang Duk Palace grounds, the planned gathering place for the independence celebration.
Listen! one of the louder students said. It’s the ghost of the idiot king, farting along the empty halls and wailing about losing his country!
After laughing, perhaps wanting to reassure my mother, my mother’s boyfriend explained: Probably just the students from the other side of town.
Their slogans must be louder and better than ours, someone else joked.
Then, over the agreements of Yes, yes, more students, someone and then another someone yelled, Soldiers! but the crowd continued to surge forward.
My mother said that when the people recognized the troops of Japanese soldiers in their Western uniforms, armed and mounted on sleek horses as if ready to charge into battle, a cry went up from the multitude. But instead of sounding angry or fearful, the cry was strangely happy, like one that lovers might utter after a chance meeting in the street.
And then it happened.
In unison, as if from some invisible command, the troops, sabers flashing, fell forward, sinking into the crowd. Amidst wordless screams, my mother heard people shouting, Stand! Stand! and for a moment the marchers stood and the soldiers stood, unable to force their way through the compact press of humanity. Then somebody up ahead threw a curse, and somebody else threw a rock or maybe a shoe, and somebody who was close enough cracked a flag stick against a slashing sword.
The soldiers charged for a second time, their weapons hacking a path through the street. In front of her, my mother could see people she knew being sliced and gutted, bleeding and screaming and falling as they tried to turn away. But what was worse, she said, was that behind her, people still did not know what was happening and continued to laugh and shout Korea! Korea! and push forward in their happiness.
One of her friends, maybe her boyfriend, yelled: They’re killing us, they’re killing us! Break away! And as if releasing a deep breath, the mass of people behind them surged and finally broke, becoming a tidal wave, immense and unstoppable in their efforts to escape.
Caught in the rush, my mother and her boyfriend stumbled against each other and, their bodies careening out of control, pushed into and over others—I know what it feels like to step on a human body, to feel the rush of blood flood into my shoes, my mother once said—beibre they finally pitched forward into an alley-way. My mother managed to cover her head and curl her knees into her stomach, waiting to be trampled, when her boyfriend fell on top of her.
When she could breathe again, her breaths sharp with the scent of smoke and blood, she asked the boy to move off her. Only after my mother asked him to move a second and then a third time did she become aware of the comforting feel of his blood blanketing her arms and torso. She said she knew he was dead, but instead of feeling fear or revulsion, instead of pushing away the weight of his body, she wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into her. His stillness and his blood made her feel safe, almost cherished. Nestled beside his cooling body, she slept, until she heard silence and realized her eyes were open. My mother said that from that day on she never closed her eyes, even in sleep.
From underneath the dead boy, from the sides of her eyes, my mother said she saw streets littered with the bright fragments of clothes, hats, shoes, strips of fabric torn from banners and flags, and bodies. And wading through air thick with groans and smoke from burning churches and the fertile smell of blood, the spared and the wounded came to reclaim their dead.
My mother held on to her body and waited.
When my mother’s eyes could see again, my grandmother was wailing the death chant and clipping her fingernails to bury next to her.
Never cut your nails at night, my mother would break into this part of the story to warn my sisters and me. Sign of a life cut short.
My mother said she tried to take back her hands and tell my grandmother she was not dead, but according to the story, my grandmother pushed her back down and hissed, “Yes, you are!” Then she wailed loud enough for people on the next street to hear. When she was supposed to catch her breath for the next death cry, my grandmother hissed, “Stupid girl, I’m saving your life.”
In order to protect her, my grandmother killed her d
aughter off. She sent my mother north, to Sulsulham, to marry my father.
It was because she loved me so much, my mother explained. They were burning the homes of suspected revolutionaries and arresting or shooting the people who ran out.
In her special box, in which my mother stored treasures from her past life or for her daughters’ future ones, my mother kept two types of clippings. Among the first was a newspaper article from the June 1919 issue of the Daedong Kongbo denouncing the official report of the arrest of young hoodlums rioting in the streets and said what my mother said: Most of the city was dead. Churches and homes burned. Forty-six thousand, eight hundred forty-seven Korean nationalists arrested. Fifteen thousand, nine hundred sixty-one wounded. Seven thousand, five hundred and nine—including one boy significant only to one insignificant girl—dead.
The second type of clippings: the burial nails her mother pared from her fingers too soon.
When she arrived in Sulsulham to marry a man she had never seen, someone that had not even been picked out by a matchmaker, who at least would have ensured that their Four Pillars—the year, month, day, and hour of their birth charts—were well aligned, my mother felt her life was over. She was so alone that she knew she could cry forever and never again would there be anyone to comfort her.
My mother did not make her yonae love match, nor did she receive a chungmae, an arranged match, complete with the ceremonial exchange of gifts and celebration. When she arrived in the dust and dead of night, my mother was rushed to her future husband’s home. She did not have time to wash or eat or change into her own mother’s red-and-blue wedding dress, a dress that should have come as a gift from the groom. She had time only to listen to her future parents’ lecture: Marriage is not about love but about duty. About having sons. About keeping the family name. My mother bowed twice to her new in-laws and was married by morning.
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