Everything Belongs to Us

by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

  “Don’t you ever do terrible things to people you love?” Jisun said. “Or maybe I don’t know what love means. I always thought I knew.”

  Sunam felt the weight of the sky pushing him down and swallowing him up. It was the closest he’d been to the stars, but instead of any great transcendence or grandeur, he felt inescapably pinned to himself. This flawed and limited body.

  “Between sky and land, I’d always choose land,” Jisun murmured. “Up there, it seems so crowded.” She curled herself under his arm. Pressing her back against his ribs, she seemed to fall asleep. Her slow, soft breathing vibrated through her spine into his side. He kept absolutely still, afraid even to flick a strand of her hair from his face.

  Already he felt how the guilt would become his intimate shadow, beside him when he opened his eyes in the morning, putting him to bed each night. He tried to match his breathing to Jisun’s, desperate to sleep just to escape himself. He succeeded in catching moments, bare preludes of subconsciousness, before jerking awake, dehydrated, disoriented. He dreamed he was drinking rain but woke up with his molars clenched.

  The bus roared onto the highway, scattering traffic, achieving more noise than acceleration. The axle clanged and vibrated, bouncing him against Namin. Sunam shifted closer to the window, his eye on a red hatchback stuffed with an entire household packed and dressed for the Chuseok harvest holiday. Three generations, the kids deposited on women’s laps like handbags. The smallest child smeared the contents of his nose on the window. His mother talked while applying lipstick.

  Namin said, “It’s not as bad as you think, where my sister lives.”

  The child licked his finger to the second knuckle and drew lopsided stars on the glass.

  Already Sunam regretted the moment of generosity that had culminated in this reality. It was only because he felt guilty—he owed Namin this, at least—but he was not really interested in knowing more about her sister or becoming further implicated in her family’s troubles. Secretly he had made himself a deal. Go to Itaewon, do this thing she wants. Then he could end it with an appeased, if not clear, conscience.

  Across the aisle, two GIs in fatigues occupied four seats. The smaller of the two had his elbow propped against the window, supporting his head like a loose bracket. His body jerked and realigned with every bump in the road. He stared out the window as if cursing everything he saw. His companion dozed, cap pulled down over his eyes.

  “You ever talk to an American before?” Namin asked, as if the question had just occurred to her.

  “Don’t be stupid. Of course I have.” He had decided to be nice, but deciding and doing were two different things. Under the veneer of Namin’s usual composure, he could sense her anxiety, her desire to interpret these moments for him ahead of time. It made him snappish and unreasonable, determined to foil her even at his own expense. It made far more sense to let her prep him—what did he know about Americans? The only ones he had ever spoken to were teacher types, who probably talked in the simplest baby English in order to be understood. There had been that chaplain at his high school, Reverend Ellerton, who sang with a womanlike vibrato and cried during the Lord’s Prayer. Also, his English-language teacher, a young Korean woman who wore high heels in the classroom, had once hosted a photographer from New York. They sat in the darkened room while the foreigner showed slides of Gyeongbokgung Palace and the Seokguram Buddha, as familiar and uninteresting to them as pictures of their own mother and father.

  Namin said doubtfully, “Well, Hal doesn’t speak a lot of Korean.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He had no reason to speak to this Hal or even to know him at all, and it peeved him to think Namin presumed otherwise. As far as he was concerned, he was just the man who had gotten her sister pregnant, who would likely disappear before the baby was born. They were living now in some army housing, supposedly married, although no one had been invited to any ceremony. Namin herself admitted doubts. “Maybe she meant they’re going to get married?” He couldn’t tell if she was actively obscuring the truth or if the vagueness was secondhand, carried over from her sister. Either way, there was no reason she should act as if he and this Hal should have anything to talk about. They were not relations, quasi or otherwise.

  But he had decided to be nice. If only for the future, for Namin to look back and concede, Well, at least he did this for me. He wasn’t a total jerk.

  He softened his expression. “Then how do they speak to each other?”

  “She just talks. In Korean—what else is she gonna do? She says he understands anyway.”

  “You think he does?”

  She shrugged and gave a little smile. “Maybe it’s better he doesn’t.”

  “But she knows we’re coming.” It was a statement rather than a question. It seemed to him a visit like this should be prearranged, all parties in agreement. He was a little squeamish, too, of bursting in unannounced. Would she be lolling around in a red smock like the one Young Ja wore in the movie? Would she laugh in that fake openmouthed way, showing all her teeth and flicking her tongue? He stopped short of imagining how Hal might be. In his mind, American men were all movie stars or soldiers. Best and worst. To imagine one at home, boots off, pretending to understand his Korean-speaking girlfriend, was like trying to peer beyond the frame of a Hollywood set. He preferred the mirage.

  “Of course. She asked for you specifically.”

  “Me—why?”

  “Guess she wants to check you out, see what the fuss is all about. She is my sister.”

  Again Sunam, rather than feeling flattered by the implied compliment, bristled at the presumption. She wanted to check him out? Not once since agreeing to come to Itaewon had it crossed his mind that he should be the subject of scrutiny or judgment. Why should he worry about making a good impression?

  The bus stopped to pick up a group of factory workers wearing light blue polo shirts and tan pants. The women didn’t bother to cover their mouths when they laughed. A soft-faced man, bespectacled, with a shaving cut near his lip, was the loudest, calling everyone “yah!” regardless of age, as if they were all schoolchildren on the playground. Sunam had never heard a grown man talk to a woman that way, but no one seemed offended. One of the ladies, vigorously poking at her incisor with a toothpick, said happily, “I love that place. Worth every bit of the bus fare.”

  “These stinking people,” growled the soldier. The women flicked their eyes at the sound of his voice. “Can’t stand this country, this whatchacallit shit they eat. I’m suffocating, man.”

  His friend adjusted his cap lower on his face. “You know what it’s called,” he muttered. “I’ve seen you eat it and like it.”

  “Could say the same about you.” The GI sneered and spit between his feet. “How many times you gonna pay for that little girl? What is she now, twelve? She’s a child, man.” The dozing soldier lifted the cap off his face. He peered with a bloodshot eye, the other eye squinted against the sun.

  “She’s eighteen.”

  “If she’s eighteen, I’m Santa Claus.”

  Namin gripped his elbow. “Don’t listen, it’s filthy.”

  Sunam shook her off, his blood thumping in his ears. “I thought you were worried about my English,” he muttered.

  The factory woman behind Namin tugged her shoulder, whispering, “What’s that they’re saying, student?”

  “Nothing, ajumma.” Namin smiled brightly. “I just meant the spit.”

  “Never seen such dirty people. Do they act like this at home?” Sunam shifted away from the woman’s breath. She must have eaten raw onions at lunch, but even that didn’t mask four decades of smoking. “Still, I guess we should be grateful. Think where we’d be,” she said. She folded her rough brown hands in a surprisingly prim position over the back of the seat. When neither of them responded, she gave them a sharp look. “Don’t you think we should be grateful?”

  “Certainly,” Namin murmured.

  “To think we need foreigners to pr
otect us from our own people,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful, I’ll be grateful until the day I die, but”—she grimaced at the GIs slumped in their seats—“some of them don’t act right. You have to be careful, student. A young good-looking girl like you, especially. You have to watch yourself. Now if only we could convince those Reds to come to their senses. What a shame, the same people—brothers—needing a foreign army between us. We need to remember who we are, we need to—”

  Sunam sensed that she would continue to lecture for the foreseeable future if he didn’t intervene. She was a living embodiment of those patriotic essays assigned to them in school. Inevitably, she would start listing the achievements of their shared history. She would catalog the natural resources found in the North versus those found in the South, how joining them was the key to gaining first-world status. There would be a sure mention of Kumgangsan, the peninsula’s tallest peak immortalized in paintings, poems, and songs—it, too, lost to the North. And a greedy eye toward the long boundary with China. A particularly fervent classmate of his had won the high school essay contest three years in a row using his trademark mention of the Chinese border. Sunam even recalled his finer points verbatim: “Though we are bitter enemies now—one day following a victorious reunification led by the South, anything is possible, even the reinstatement of the great Goguryeo border.” The boy, a son of a local government officer, always used the cash prize to pay other students to do his homework for the rest of the year. Sunam had been happily in his pay until he was supplanted by another classmate, who tucked such idiosyncratic errors in the copied work that no one could ever trace them back to the cheater.

  “Surely it’s a matter of time before reunification,” Sunam said smoothly. “Sometimes a little competition is beneficial. It forces both sides to push harder to excel.” And because he saw that the ajumma would interject and launch into a detailed rebuttal, he quickly added, “And think how one day when we’re able to bring them back into the fold, we’ll have both superpowers as allies. The U.S. and China—an unthinkable position. Unique in the world.”

  She nodded, pleased with his logic. “And when the North develops the bomb, we’ll have everything we need when we are reunited. Even nuclear weapons! We won’t be so little anymore, eh?”

  “I doubt they’re truly close to developing the bomb,” Sunam said. Even though the two Koreas were brothers with shared blood, culture, and history, the North had the greater natural resources and had suffered less wartime damage. It had taken the South much longer to recover, and progress would have been slower still without President Park’s aggressive economic measures dragging the country toward development. It wasn’t until 1974 that the South had managed to eke out a higher GDP than the North, and while Sunam might look forward to a unified Korea like everyone else, the two sides remained fierce rivals. This ajumma, old enough to remember predivided Korea, might consider North Korea’s nuclear arsenal “half theirs” if they succeeded in developing it first, but Sunam was not ready to feel so neighborly. What was to stop Pyongyang from turning such weapons against Seoul if they had them? Reunification or not, he would be happier if the North never developed the bomb. “I’m sure they’re nowhere close,” Sunam said. This time he was more emphatic.

  “Surely it’s a matter of time,” she said, repeating his earlier phrase. He decided to leave it alone. He was weary of these speculations and the people who spent their lives indulging in them—as if there weren’t enough to concern them in the present time.

  “Anyway, we’re going to Itaewon to meet her sister,” he said.

  There was a flinch behind Namin’s eyes—perhaps he imagined it—but she stayed composed otherwise. He could see the ajumma’s forehead creasing, the mental effort of reorganizing information around this unexpected news. “Her sister?” They seemed like such nice young people.

  Namin said simply, “She’s having a baby.”

  “I see.”

  For long minutes, Namin stared straight ahead and said nothing while the ajumma resumed chatting with her group. They were talking about a new night class advertised around their factory. “Union or Jesus?” said another lady, not the ajumma they’d been speaking with.

  “Probably both,” said the soft-faced man.

  “No, no, this one’s strictly union. College students. Talking about workers’ rights and the ‘class consciousness.’ ”

  “The Jesus ones came with the same thing. Class consciousness. Labor unity, industry cooperation, that kind of thing. Actually it’s not so bad.”

  “They must think we’re unconscious, eh?”

  “What factory did Jesus work at, anyway?”

  They were still laughing when the bus arrived at Itaewon. Namin was still quiet, but not in a way that felt directed against him. She had either forgiven him for telling the ajumma where they were going or decided it was just a mistake, not intentional. By the time they’d climbed off the bus, he’d convinced himself it was fine, a normal thing to say to a stranger. They would never see her again. Anyway, Namin had never said it was a secret—and she had volunteered the part about the baby herself.

  Sunam made her wait until the soldiers trudged wordlessly around the corner, their shadows darkening the width of the sidewalk. “You didn’t have to tell her about the baby,” he said. He had meant to sound apologetic, but it came out sounding as though he were blaming her.

  “If you’re not ashamed, neither am I,” she said. “It’s a baby. Not something you can exactly hide, anyway.”

  “People hide babies all the time,” he said.

  She looked at him. “People you know?”

  He didn’t reply. He wanted to ask what they were doing there, really doing. By bringing him there, she was making him half sidekick, half future fiancé, when he was properly neither of those things. Neither someone who could disinterestedly accompany her from point A to B nor someone who could shoulder the burden of her future. Maybe it was some survivalist instinct pushing Namin to gauge his commitment to her. Desperately, he wanted to come clean about Jisun. He craved the end of this relationship, which he was already cataloging as memories in his mind. But he owed Namin this. At least this. Today, he had to be nice.

  Across the street, a lanky teenager was watching them, one foot propped against the building behind him like a stork. He had dark skin and tight, curly hair, but Korean features. The boy slowly closed his hand into a fist and raised his longest finger. His eyes flashed at Sunam. He did the same with the other hand. Clenched fist, longest finger up. He danced the fists in front of his face.

  “What does that mean?” Sunam demanded. Laughing, the kid disappeared into the building.

  Namin shook her head. “He’s just a kid,” she said. “You shouldn’t have stared at him like that.”

  Sunam shoved his hands into his pockets. “Why don’t you tell me how I should act. From now on,” he said, “don’t leave anything out. I’ll do exactly as you say.”

  “For starters—”

  “For instance, how should I walk?” he continued. “How should I breathe?”

  “No one forced you to come. I know I asked, but you agreed. No one kidnapped you.”

  “But do we really need to do this?” he asked. It was cowardly to make her say it again—why this was so important to her, why it was necessary for him to meet her sister. All things she had made clear so many times. Almost from the instant they’d met, before they were even romantically involved, Namin had been obsessed with the notion that there would be no secrets between them. I don’t want anyone saying I tried to trick you. He had been flattered, this stunning girl laying out her life to him. Giving him the power to judge, yes or no, good or bad. Sunam had wanted only to be worthy of that gift. He had wanted to be worthy of her. But now, he was desperate to be released from her trust. “It doesn’t seem right for me to be here when your parents won’t even acknowledge her or the baby,” he said. “Who am I? I’m nobody to her—why do I have to come?”

&nb
sp; “You’re my boyfriend, that’s why,” Namin said. “You’re somebody to me.” She didn’t have to say anything else. The rest, which they both knew so well, was written in her eyes.

  He should have told her the truth weeks ago. He should never have come. “All right. Let’s go,” he said. Today, it was too late.

  Namin’s sister lived in a concrete apartment block, painted flamingo pink like a cheap cocktail. But it was clean and modern, more prosperous looking than many of his friends’ homes. It came to him like a photo in sharp focus, this building and this life, side by side with the life that Kyungmin had recently left. He sensed that she must love the pink building, the freshly paved parking lot with the numbers painted in white between the lines.

  Namin punched the number 5 on the elevator panel. It was really the fourth floor, but the builders had skipped that number, considered unlucky because it sounded like the Chinese character for death. He wondered if the Americans knew that or if they thought it was a mistake, something else to make them feel superior. He felt faintly ashamed stepping out into the hallway marked with the number 5, as if he were participating in that lie.

  The units were packed close together, doors lining an outer corridor that overlooked a playground. The halls had been recently swept. A single brown leaf scuttered in their wake. When they rang at the unit, he noticed two packed army bags marked H. Jackson. Duffel bags large enough to contain the full extent of a soldier’s belongings. Namin surely noticed it, too, but said nothing.

  Kyungmin opened the door, and Namin gave a little cry.

  “I cut it,” Kyungmin said calmly. Her hair circled her face in a feathery halo. Her lips were painted a deep red and seemed to take up half her face. Between the makeup and her immense pregnant belly, Sunam felt as if he were looking at a naked woman. He didn’t know where to put his eyes.

  She shuffled back into the apartment, leaving her guests in the narrow space inside the door to take off their shoes. The area held a tumbled disarray of combat boots and brightly colored slippers, which Namin automatically started matching and shoving into a low cabinet. Sunam stood by and tried not to look past his immediate surroundings. He had put off meeting Namin’s sister for as long as he could, but now he realized it would have been better to come earlier, when Kyungmin wasn’t so hugely and unavoidably big. Everything about the place seemed pregnant to him, as if the apartment itself were pregnant with the consequences of Kyungmin’s actions.