I Hear Your Voice

by Young-Ha Kim

  5

  One Sunday we were watching a foreign film on TV about a man who plotted to destroy a rival magician. During a magic trick in which the rival’s assistant was to loosen her bindings and emerge safely from a tank full of water, the man made sure the tank was locked. When the woman, whom the rival loved, didn’t emerge on time, he pushed aside the drapes. He frantically bashed at the tank as his lover struggled for her life, but it was useless. Mere centimeters separated the two, but one was surrounded by water and the other by air. Her words, trapped in the tank, couldn’t escape. The two lovers couldn’t even touch hands. Only their gaze connected the wide-eyed woman, drifting like a jellyfish, and the man frozen in despair. That scene absorbed me until I was unable to follow the rest of the story. It felt as if tiny poisonous bubbles were frothing in all my body’s cells and riding through the blood vessels up to my head. My whole world turned purple. I reached for the remote control and turned off the TV. As soon as the sound stopped, my mother, who had been trimming bean sprouts, looked up.

  “Mommy,” I said.

  “What?”

  She didn’t seem to realize what had just happened.

  “Mommy.”

  “What is it, for heaven’s sake?”

  “I don’t want to watch anymore.”

  Only then did my mother scramble up from her seat.

  “You, you spoke? Can you do it again, please?”

  I kept quiet and held back my tears, but after my mother grabbed me and began shaking me by the shoulders, I had to say, “Stop shaking me. I’m fine.”

  She said I would be transferred right away from the special needs school to a regular school. I immediately resented having spoken. It was as if I’d been tricked into losing something important to me. What was so great about being able to speak? I already had friends at the special needs school. They were comfortable with my silence, and I had rapidly become good at sign language. When I first saw kids using sign language, I was mesmerized by their quick, elaborate hand movements that seemed to create invisible birds and release them into the air.

  The next day my mother rushed me to school. At the time I was obsessed with Aesop’s fables and would turn the day’s events into a kind of fable. In my story that day my mother was a greedy owner and I was an old donkey. Everyone, listen to this old tale. A fat, greedy owner dragged her old donkey to the market. Look here, he said, I have a talking donkey. At the market they didn’t believe him, saying, Nah, how can a donkey talk? I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life! No, this donkey is different. I mean, yesterday he suddenly began speaking like a human! The merchants crowded in. That’s amazing. They said, Make it speak. The owner poked the donkey’s side. Startled, the donkey brayed. The merchants cocked their heads. Isn’t that just a typical donkey cry? The greedy owner grabbed the donkey and began reasoning with it. I’m begging you, speak like a human, if only not to disgrace me. Seeing its owner’s tears, the donkey weakened and finally said a few words. The merchants were startled and the owner, exultant, said, Now, how much are you willing to pay? I’ll have to charge a high sum for a talking donkey. But the merchants shook their heads. Nah, what use is a talking donkey? If you make it work, it’ll complain. It’ll make fun of its owner behind his back. And when the owner dies, it’ll be resentful. No, just take it back with you.

  My mother halted at the school gate and looked around, taking it in as if she had come to purchase the school grounds. Then she headed toward the main building so briskly I could hardly keep up. She opened the door to the staff room and pushed me in ahead of her, then followed and stood glowering. Just then my homeroom teacher arrived. He had cerebral palsy and couldn’t use his right arm and leg easily, but he was kind to his students.

  My mother greeted the teacher, then abruptly poked me in the side. “What are you waiting for? Say hello to your teacher.”

  I made my usual small bow. When my mother pinched my cheek, I said, “Ouch!”

  “Did you see that? He’s finally talking.”

  Her loud, sharp voice echoed across the room. My fierce shame amplified my mother’s actions and voice to the tenth power. I was humiliated and wanted to die right there on the spot. She was so ecstatic that she seemed to want to show off to the idiots (she later lumped everyone in the staff room as idiots) that her son was normal. She wanted to be compensated for all her suffering. I knew too well what the teachers’ cool, sour faces meant as they looked at my mother. Like the crazy evangelizers on the subway, my mother wasn’t paying any attention to how the others felt as she threw a fit in the peaceful office. My homeroom teacher uncomfortably stammered out something at me. It was the first time I’d heard his voice, since we had always used sign language in the classroom.

  “Donggyu, are you able to speak now? Yes?”

  Before I could answer, my mother cut in and said, “I’m telling you, he does.”

  But my teacher continued gazing at me. I could definitely speak. But if I spoke, I would be banished from the class, and if I didn’t, my mother would stay put in the staff room and continue torturing me. My mother grabbed me by the shoulder and my teacher knelt (a difficult position for him) and looked into my eyes. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I looked everywhere but at him. My mother’s high heels kept up their nervous tapping. Finally, shame won over fear. I wanted to get my mother out so I said, “Yes, teacher.”

  “That’s wonderful. Why don’t you say one more thing?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  My mother interrupted again. “Sorry? What on earth are you sorry for?”

  Like an archer in ancient Greece wielding a large bow, my homeroom teacher thrust out one leg and used that tension to heave himself up. Then after patting me on the head, he returned to his desk and filled out my transfer documents. My mother must have keenly anticipated congratulations and praise because, once disappointed, she began subtly attacking the staff, suggesting that a perfectly normal child had attended a special needs program due to the school’s mistake. My teacher silently withstood the criticism, adding only one thing: “Isn’t it a relief that he can speak now?”

  My teacher signed all the necessary documents, inserted them into an official school envelope, and handed it over. My mother removed the documents and returned the envelope to him. I wanted to say farewell to my classmates, who were always warm and gentle, friends who were nearly all dumb, but my teacher didn’t allow it.

  He said, “With your mother here, I think it’s best that you return home today. Why don’t you visit another time?”

  I felt as if I’d been targeted and banished. At the school gate, my mother halted and spit in the school’s direction, as if protecting herself from the source of a life-threatening infectious disease.

  The first day at the regular school, I covered my ears to endure the clamor around me. Recess felt like torture. The kids shrieked like cicadas. Seeing me with my ears covered, they surrounded me one by one. They began poking me the way you would a dog in a pet store’s display window; they were curious about what kinds of sounds a donkey who’d transferred from a special needs school would make. Instead of answering, I punched wildly at them. A kid I hit lost a front tooth and began crying, so a teacher rushed over and soothed him, saying, “Don’t cry, it’s okay, you’ll grow a new one.” She then lifted me up and isolated me from the others.

  “Why did you hit him?” she kept asking.

  I clammed up.

  My teacher leaned in close and said, “If you keep acting like this, you’ll be sent back to the special needs school.”

  That was exactly what I wanted, so I clung to my silence. But my silent protest ended when my swollen-eyed mother and my grandmother showed up at school.

  When I went outside at recess, I ran into Jae.

  “So you’re talking now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You seem like a different kid.”

  “No, it’s still me.”

  Jae’s eyes narrowed as he studied me. He said, “Let’s wa
lk home together.”

  “Okay.”

  “Something’s off.” Jae stared at my lips.

  “Why?”

  “I feel like you’re speaking in English,” he said, “and I’m understanding what you’re saying.”

  6

  Just after I began talking, my father and mother separated. It was a coincidence, but from a kid’s point of view, it was clear everything started going wrong because of me. One night when I went into the living room, I saw my uncle down on his knees. My father was sitting on the sofa tight-lipped with his eyes fixed to the TV. After kneeling on his numb legs like that for over an hour, my uncle dragged himself out of the house. I never saw him at our place again, not even on holidays or at ancestral ceremonies. My mother returned to her family’s home in Busan. I began hearing the word “divorce” a lot inside and outside the house.

  After the Guam accident, Mama Pig drifted from restaurant to restaurant; it was right after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, so work was erratic. She began drinking soju every night. Her snack of choice was raw garlic dipped in spicy pepper paste, and Jae had to learn how to cook hangover stew. After waking up early and pan-frying dried pollock to make a soup, he woke Mama Pig, made sure she ate, then went to school. Whenever she was drunk she sat Jae down and told him how she had taken him from a bathroom in the Seoul Express Bus Terminal.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “If I hadn’t done that, you’d be somewhere better.”

  Jae didn’t believe her, since she told that story only when drunk. But after repeated retellings, he started to wonder if the story was actually true.

  The city began redeveloping our neighborhood into apartment complexes. The residents formed an association, people diligently made rounds collecting signatures, and hung signs. Shouting broke out from the neighborhood’s alleys and fights happened every day. Our once peaceful neighborhood turned into a chaos of factions. Even kids took sides. Kids whose families were homeowners and kids whose families rented stopped playing together. Homeowners received substantial compensation and the option to move into the newly built apartment complex, and renters didn’t, so they faced dramatically different circumstances. We owned our house, but because we had invested a lot of money in remodeling it into a multi-unit, we would have very little cash after we returned the renters’ deposits. Jae’s situation was even worse. After full-scale relocation started, renters like his family would receive next to nothing and be forced out.

  When we entered the fourth grade, Jae and I ended up in different classes. As usual, my father rarely returned home. At first one of my aunts came by and helped with the housekeeping, but over time she rarely visited. Mama Pig continued drinking. As the number of Chinese-Korean migrant workers increased, restaurant work became even scarcer. Mama Pig began living with a younger man whom we called Meth Head; widespread rumors of his meth addiction followed him. He was an instructor at a driving school and didn’t even seem to care about the World Cup. When Jae was watching a match in the living room, Meth Head walked past, somehow unaware that the Korean team had made it to the quarterfinals. Mama Pig was no different. Both would walk past Jae, enter and lock their bedroom door, not emerging until well into the night. Sometimes their door stayed locked till morning. Jae skipped meals more often than he ate, and regularly went to school without proper supplies. At some point Meth Head stopped going to the driving school and stayed cooped up at home. They were clearly surviving on whatever income Mama Pig earned.

  As for us, our family left the neighborhood. Now that we attended different classes and lived in different houses, Jae and I grew apart. While the rest of the world was going wild about the Korean soccer team making it to the semifinals, Jae lived day to day, feeling as if he were holding up a massive coffin lid by himself. The teachers found Jae disagreeable since he came without the required school supplies, and the other kids ignored him. Still, school was better than home. He couldn’t breathe at home. Not knowing what to do, he’d hover outside his mother’s locked bedroom door, the symbol of complete rejection. Mama Pig’s gasping carried through the walls. He was old enough now to know exactly what weird act had played out between Popeye and the witch in the liquor storage. When he was hungry, he thought about the hostess club’s bountiful kitchen. And he began to suspect that the story Mama Pig told him whenever she was drunk might actually be true.

  7

  Soon after Jae entered middle school, his home­room teacher called me in. His hobby was photography and he sometimes entered his work in amateur photo exhibits, half-forcing the students to attend. We had to write reports about our thoughts on his photos of a heron perched in white rapids and homeless people in a drunken stupor. The teacher was nicknamed “Bald Eagle” for his baldness, as well as “the bald homo,” but I don’t know if he was actually gay.

  When he asked me if I knew why Jae had been absent for more than a few days, I realized that I hadn’t seen Jae at school for some time.

  “I don’t know. We’re in different classes and different neighborhoods now. I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  Bald Eagle looked at the computer. “But you two have the same address.”

  “Teacher, that’s an old address. We moved.”

  “Does Jae still live there?”

  “I think so, probably.”

  He twirled his pen and muttered to himself, “Can people still live there?”

  I shouldered my way past the cram-school shuttle buses at the school gate that snatched up each kid who exited, and headed toward our old house. I followed a line of well-built structures along a narrow back road until I came to a six-lane street. The neighborhood was surrounded by a makeshift two-meter-high barricade, but there seemed to be no real effort to hide it. The dirty, battered fence was merely a sign that the neighborhood would be demolished soon, and until a decent apartment complex was constructed in its place, this was a useless, temporary landscape.

  Jae could be somewhere inside those barriers. I debated several times whether to turn back. Honestly, I really didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. I now had friends in middle school who lived in my apartment complex and went to the same cram schools. They were ordinary kids, and I could have ordinary friendships with them. We laughed and talked as we flipped through comic books, or formed teams and played computer games. That complicated life with Jae was behind me. But deep down, a part of me knew I owed him. I hadn’t forgotten that back when everyone ignored me, Jae had stuck by me.

  I took the crosswalk and headed to where I thought Jae might be. Each empty house had a big red X scrawled in paint across its doors, which meant the house could be demolished. Some roofs had already caved in; I saw a dirty teddy bear missing its eyes and Barbie dolls with broken necks, scattered. The redevelopment association and the construction firm had put up signs between the telephone poles. In the deteriorating neighborhood, those new signs gleamed with messages written on white backgrounds: WE WELCOME THE BEGINNING OF RELOCATION AND HAPPINESS IS JUST AHEAD OF US. What they actually meant: “Please cooperate and leave quickly so the new apartment complex can be built. Then we’ll be one day closer to moving into proper homes.” Someone had handwritten BULLSHIT in red marker. Beside that someone else had scrawled FOOL, GO AHEAD AND SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE POOR.

  I felt suspicious gazes coming from some of the still-occupied houses. Peering out from the dark, and seeing that the visitor was only a middle school student, they relaxed and receded back into the shadows. Wherever full-scale redevelopment began, no one bothered to repair or rebuild their houses, so the streets resembled an old photograph. The contours were familiar, but the neighborhood’s faded appearance felt alien. It reminded me of strange streets from my nightmares or from historical sets in documentaries meant to replicate the Goryeo and Joseon periods.

  Before I knew it, I arrived at the house where I’d been born and raised. A red X was slashed across the rusted steel gate. It reminded me of a biblical story I’d learned when I briefly
went to church. The story told of the Israelites, a chosen people who saved their children by marking their front doors before a wrathful angel came to kill their enemies’ children.

  I opened the gate, walked into the yard, and saw in the flowerbed a toy car missing its wheels that I’d played with as a kid. There was no sign of life; I suddenly felt scared. There wasn’t a single person around and even if I screamed, I was sure no one would show up. I would have fled if it hadn’t been my house. I worked up the courage to go to the second floor where Jae’s family had lived. The stairs were much narrower and more dangerous than I remembered, and there was no noise coming from inside. I cautiously tugged at the doorknob. It didn’t open; it was firmly locked.

  “Jae.”

  No one responded.

  “Are you inside? It’s me, Donggyu.”

  I rang the bell and knocked but as expected, no one answered. This hideous-looking neighborhood with its oppressive silence pulled me back into the trauma of aphonia. You could call aphonia a mental form of claustrophobia. It’s a feeling as if my heart were a black hole sucking my words back into me. The gravitational pull was so strong, it had seemed impossible to send anything outward. The memory alone was suffocating. I ran back down the stairs. It wasn’t like I had an obligation to find Jae. I raced down to the first floor and headed toward the gate, but someone grabbed me by the waist of my pants and pulled me back. I lost my balance and tottered, then was dragged in.

  “Keep quiet.”

  Jae didn’t bring me to his apartment, but to the semi-basement unit that Pakistani family had once rented. Jae shoved me inside, scoped out our surroundings, and then closed the door.