Everything Belongs to Us

Ahn replaced the lid and it shut with a soft click. A subtle sound of closure that struck Sunam as supreme luxury, confidence that did not require a double check.

  “There’s no point discussing things that will never happen. The timeline is four years. I find that very generous.

  “I will leave you now. When you have made your decision, you may see yourself out. If you have taken the money, I will consider my terms accepted.”

  Ahn left the room. Sunam sat for what felt like a long time, staring at his hands, the money on the table, the box gleaming where Ahn had left it, so confident that it would not be disturbed. He noticed his shirt was dotted with sweat and he could not think a complete thought through, could not link from one consequence to another. It was money he had not earned. It was money that didn’t matter. Whether he took it or not, whom would it hurt? It was not a contract, not really. He could stop seeing Jisun tomorrow. Conversely, she could refuse to see him anytime, today even, and the money would still be his. In good faith. And if she refused to see him—today, tomorrow, a month from now—and he had walked away, leaving that fortune on the table, it would have been the most foolish decision of his life, a moment to regret for the ages. Jisun might even be pleased if he took the money, any loss of her father’s being her gain. Jisun was a surprising girl. Perhaps if she were sitting here with him now, she would laugh at his indecision and goad him to take it. The truth was he didn’t know her well enough to know for sure what she’d think.

  Sunam picked up the bills and hefted the soft, solid weight in his hands. The corners were so taut and sharp, he could run his thumb along its edge and feel the nick.

  He tucked the stacks in his satchel, first one and then the other. Thinking it was not yet decided. He was still testing it out.

  He slung the satchel over his shoulder and strode out of the office, down a clanging metal staircase, into the street. At the corner he hailed the first taxicab he saw, but when the driver asked where he was going, Sunam could not recall his own address, where he had lived all his life.

  “Where you going?” the driver asked again, the surly kind who would kick him out in a second if he did not speak up.

  Sunam started to laugh, a rumbling rising from deep within his gut. “Driver, the strangest thing just happened to me. You’ll never guess.”

  “Get out.” The driver threw the car into gear. He would speed off the minute Sunam opened the door. He looked at Sunam’s packed leather satchel, disgusted. Another privileged college kid, not knowing the value of real work. “Meter’s running. Get out now before I charge you for my time.”

  Sunam opened his bag and peeled off the top note in his stash. “For your time.” He put the money in the driver’s hand and stumbled out of the car. Sweat ran freely down his back, emitting a green metallic smell like river mud, like iron. The car sped away. He was still laughing, his body convulsing as if in tears.

  Jisun was ten years old when her father presented her with her own bank account.

  “This is your future, which you must nurture and protect,” he said. “Open that book, what does it say?”

  She opened the ledger, a palm-sized booklet bound in flannel-soft cardboard. It had a soft green cover stitched with white.

  “At the top,” he prompted.

  “It says my name,” she said.

  “Which means you must know everything in this booklet as if it is your own face. Remember—this is your face to the world,” he said. “I will test you. I expect you to pay attention.”

  Every month that first year, her father asked the closing balance on her account. The interest she had accrued. The rate.

  It was meaningless to her, this column of numbers. Up. Down. Red. Black. Even when she made a genuine effort, the numbers seemed to fall from her like water through a sieve.

  “February balance.”

  “Around twenty thousand won.”

  “Two three three six four. You just lost over three thousand won. Three thousand three hundred sixty-four, to be exact. That’s what happens when you don’t know. You get cheated and robbed.”

  It took Jisun months to realize there were deposits and withdrawals from her account that she had not made. Her father, simulating thefts and windfalls, had engineered these fluctuations as a teaching tool. He had expected her to catch them right away, but she had not noticed until he pointed them out in anger.

  “Three thousand three hundred sixty-four,” he said, enumerating the extent of his disappointment in her. “By tomorrow you will produce a list of one hundred separate things you can buy with that money. One hundred things.”

  Where did one find out how much a hundred different things cost? The next morning after breakfast, Jisun asked ajumma how much it cost to buy the breakfast they had just eaten.

  Ajumma looked at her, eyes narrowed. “It cost enough.”

  “But each thing separately,” Jisun said. “How much do those fried fish cost?”

  “They don’t sell them fried, young lady. Didn’t you see them sizzling at the table? I fried them myself.”

  “Raw, then,” Jisun insisted.

  “Those are jogi. Four hundred won apiece.”

  “How about the spinach.”

  “Ten won.”

  “Only ten?”

  “Would you like them to cost more?”

  “How about that apron, the one you’re wearing?” she asked. “What does it cost?”

  “Are you planning to become a cook?” ajumma said, exasperated. “You don’t need to know how much these things cost.”

  “Abba says I do,” she said. “He says I need a list.”

  “The apron was fifty-five won last spring.”

  “So little?” Jisun asked, thinking of the fish. “But surely an apron must cost more than a silly fish.”

  “That fish is a king’s meal. I used to dream of them as a girl.”

  “Do you eat them all the time now that you’re a grown-up?”

  “When young ladies don’t finish their portions,” ajumma said archly.

  “I wouldn’t eat mine at all if I knew how much you liked it. I don’t like fish anyway.”

  Jisun looked at ajumma. Every day she wore the same kind of apron, and a predictably shapeless dress in brown, gray, or green, and white slippers that shuffled on the brightly polished floor. “Ajumma, do you earn a lot of money?” she asked.

  “Your father knows how much I earn, you don’t need to write it on his list.”

  “But I don’t know,” she said. “The list is supposed to teach me, not him. I’m sure he knows how much a jogi costs, and spinach.”

  “Surely he knows,” said ajumma with an unreadable expression, a mixture of fatigue, admiration, and something else—possessive fear. “Your father knows the price of spinach before I do.”

  “But what does he pay you?” Jisun asked.

  “Six thousand won a month.”

  “Six thousand.” Jisun thought of the number in her account and the number she had theoretically misplaced by not paying attention. “Is that a lot?”

  Ajumma folded the flowered cloth she was using to clean the table, efficiently halving the rag once, twice, before wiping the surface clean a final time. “If it isn’t, I wouldn’t know. Now go upstairs, I’m busy.”

  1. Eight jogi fish, raw

  2. Three hundred sixty-four sides of spinach

  3. Sixty-one aprons

  4. More than half of ajumma’s monthly salary

  5. Fifty pounds of rice

  6. Twenty-nine school notebooks

  7. A leather-bound English–Korean dictionary

  8. Monthly salary, pesticide-spray truck driver

  9. Seven pairs of indoor rubber slippers

  10. Six hundred thirty-two aspirin pills

  It was supposed to teach her the value of money, but Jisun learned instead that money was the least reliable measure, sliding from great value to worthlessness depending on the spender. With the same amount of money, you could feed a family for a month or
a single person one extravagant meal. You could pay a man’s wages or unlock two thousand pages of vocabulary, an entire universe of words. You could clothe a soccer team. You could save someone’s life.

  “You did well,” her father said. To prove her ease with his purported punishment, she had far exceeded one hundred items, squeezing in calculations in the margins to check her arithmetic. The last line she scribbled before handing him the page was: 137. The amount of money someone could have taken from me without my knowledge. Whether he interpreted the line as an apology or forgave it as mild impertinence, Jisun had the satisfaction of knowing she had added her signature to the punishment. A proper flourish.

  “This is your inheritance,” he said. “Not only the money, but the knowledge”—he ruffled the page—“the discipline, to protect it as you would a member of your family. Inheritance is family.”

  Despite earning her father’s approval, the list did not make her pay closer attention to her account. The following month, her guesses were further off the mark than ever. Assuming she would be watching, her father had made even more numerous, significant changes. Jisun, making the opposite assumption—that he would leave her alone now that she had passed his test—never saw them.

  Over time, the monthly questioning stretched to bimonthly. Then became more infrequent still. Jisun could see her father’s expectations, his stock in her, waning. She did not need a ledger to see that.

  The last test she remembered—she was thirteen, it was the spring she had been reprimanded at school for letting her hair grow half a centimeter beyond the compulsory length—her father closed the account book and left it on the table between them. Again she had failed. And this time, his disappointment boiled over into anger.

  “Go outside,” he said. It was after dinner, the windows opaque against the night. Outside, the air was chilly and damp with impending rain. “I want you to stay out there and don’t come in until—no, don’t take a jacket. I paid for that jacket with money. Money you don’t care about.” He picked up the account book and slapped it hard against the edge of the table as if confirming a prior agreement, a deal gone sour. “Inside doesn’t exist without money. You know what buys this roof? These walls? What does it cost to buy a roof, Jisun? What does it cost to buy a jacket?” he said. “Go outside and think about it. See if you don’t care when you’re cold and miserable. Don’t come in until you do.”

  “Until I what—die?”

  “I assume you’ll be smarter than that. Let’s not make this an unnecessary contest of wills.”

  Jisun was tempted to go outside and stand in the middle of the garden like a tree. Or to start walking and not stop at the gate but continue on into the city, into the world beyond the reach of her father.

  But it was raining and cold. And she realized her father expected her to make a spectacle of her defiance. He expected her to suffer to make her point. He assumed that much about her character.

  They both knew exactly how it would go. She would go outside, fuming. She would vow to stay out there until she died, frozen like a shrimp curled against the foundation, seeking whatever vestigial warmth might seep through stone and brick. Ajumma would come with a blanket and contraband jacket and whisper harshly that she must apologize and get into a hot bath immediately. And her father would pretend not to know what was happening, though there was nothing he did not know that went on under his roof.

  And what would any of it prove other than that Jisun was willing to inflict pain on herself in order to spite her father? He had already won his point.

  So she got up, walked briskly to the door, and opened it, letting in a gust of wind. With one hand still on the doorknob, she stepped outside. She counted one beat, then came back inside, letting the door slam.

  “Good enough?” she asked. She could not tell if she was trembling from frustration or cold.

  “ ‘Good enough’ is why anyone can steal your money. You haven’t learned anything.”

  “It’s not my money, it’s yours,” she said. “And they can have it.”

  The baby had no name, first or last. The birth record, when Namin tracked it down, simply listed the infant as “Baby Boy.” The mother: Kyungmin Kang. The father: Hal Jackson. He was born, also according to the record, on the morning of October 16, weighing 2.4 kg. Until Kyungmin showed up at their door—feverish, her milk dried up, the baby wrapped in her coat and wearing just a soiled diaper drooped to his knees—they hadn’t even known he was born. They focused on the immediate crisis. Put the sick girl to bed. Check the baby for fever. Is he hungry? Will he drink? He suckled their littlest finger with desperate focus. Namin ran out for diapers, formula, bleach. Although the items were urgent, she walked to a different neighborhood where she would not be recognized. Waiting for her change, she felt the shopkeeper’s assessing curiosity: a girl too old to have an infant sibling, too young and obviously unmarried for a child of her own. Namin fought the urge to protest. It isn’t me. But who? My sister came home with a baby. That was no better. She pushed down her pride and clamped her mouth shut.

  Of Hal, Namin could make out from Kyungmin only that he was tied up in America. That he was coming.

  “So he came back, then, from furlough? He saw the baby?” Namin asked, surprised and relieved.

  “On his way,” Kyungmin muttered. “On his way.” She closed her eyes, falling into the kind of sleep that barely seemed to breathe.

  They had never seen an infant so dirty. His pale skin had a sickly blue cast and was stained with watery feces and yellowed spit-up. Weeping rashes bloomed behind his knees. There was a constellation of blisters, adult sized, under his chin, where Kyungmin’s thin milk had become trapped and gone rancid.

  Namin and her mother bathed him, handling his limbs as if he were a damaged bird. He lay still in the tepid water, watching them with slow, blinking eyes. Namin held his head and upper back while her mother washed around his neck, in the hollows under his arms, and around his wrinkled, swollen testicles, as purple as August plums. Namin didn’t say it, but he had his father’s long, skinny limbs. There was a slant to his chin that perfectly reflected Kyungmin, her sharp obstinacy and intelligence. Namin’s mother swirled the short hairs on his head, cupping water over his soft hairline. Pulling him dripping out of the bath, she said, “Well, he looks like us, anyway.”

  That day, Kyungmin slept for nineteen hours straight. When she woke up the following afternoon, she went out claiming she was in the mood for an ice cream.

  Namin, watching her leave, said, “At least put on a pair of socks. It’s freezing.” After a golden summer that seemed to linger well into October, the weather had recently turned bitter. Overnight, white silvery frost gathered on the windowsills and blackened the last of the pepper plants, which had produced for months as if they would never stop. The peppers left on the vine became shriveled and surprisingly sweet, their natural sugars crystallized by the cold.

  Kyungmin replied she was only going around the block; she just needed a bit of air. She left in the same outfit she had arrived in, dragging her shoes with the crushed heels through the November slush, her ankles white under a long knitted dress. They let her go without a fuss, thinking ice cream was a positive symbol of homecoming, signaling a return of normal appetites.

  When there was still no sign of her by the second morning, Namin took the bus to Itaewon, to the apartment she had visited with Sunam. At 5U, there was a yellow and blue tricycle parked in front of the door. She could plainly hear the children’s voices inside—the yodeling prattle of a little girl and a younger child of indeterminate sex, shrieking. She rang the bell anyway. A young blond woman came to the door, huge pink rollers attached to the ends of her hair. “Oh,” she said. Her blue eyes jumped at Namin as if they’d met before. The children stared from the mouth of the hallway, the exact spot where Namin had once examined a photograph of Hal with his family. “Yes?”

  “Nothing,” Namin blurted. It was the only word that came to mind. The lady started to cl
ose the door, her lips drawn tight against her teeth.

  “Wait,” Namin said. “Where is the owner?”

  “We live here now.”

  “I meant owner of the building.”

  “Rental office is on the first floor. Ask them there.” The lady shut the door. The children resumed yelling. After a few seconds, as if the pink-roller lady were on the other side listening for her footsteps, Namin heard the dead bolt turn.

  She walked down to the ground floor, trying to postpone the inevitable conclusion. Her sister was gone. This apartment was the only place she knew for sure Kyungmin had lived, but it was clear she hadn’t lived there for some time. She had been gone long enough for a new family to move in and unpack, for the children to leave toys outside the door.

  The rental office was staffed by a dark-haired American man, wearing a short-sleeved khaki shirt despite the frigid weather. “Hal Jackson? Hasn’t lived here in a coupla months. Can’t say where he might be now. Girlfriend of his”—he made a gesture over his belly, indicating her pregnancy—“she probably went back to her folks….You a relation?”

  “Yes, her sister.”

  “Well, then you probably know better than me where she is.”

  “Thank you.”

  Namin went home. She tried to convince herself that her sister would be there. With no money, she couldn’t have gone far. She had probably gone to pick up her things and the baby’s clothes. Maybe she had gone to find out about Hal. Maybe he had been transferred somewhere south that required a long bus ride. Kyungmin had been so delirious, maybe she had meant to tell them but forgot. She would get in touch soon.

  In her heart, Namin knew none of these scenarios were likely. What was the point of inventing stories and lying to herself? It doubled the work of dealing with the obvious reality. She stopped pretending. Her sister was gone.

  At home, her mother was boiling the new diaper cloths in bleach. They took turns stirring the pot with a long wooden paddle. Huge plumes of chemical-smelling steam rolled into their faces. Namin told her what she could: how she knew where to go, the new family living there, Hal’s vacancy as of two months ago. Her mother asked no questions. She fished out a diaper as if she did it every day, examining it to see if it was white enough. She waited until Namin stopped talking and said briskly, “I wouldn’t bother yourself. Either she’ll turn up or she won’t. She knew what she was doing when she left.”