Everything Belongs to Us

by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

  She claimed she had raised eleven younger siblings while her parents worked at the port of Busan. She had stood at the stove since she was five years old and pounded laundry and hauled yeontan coal bricks for fuel and done everything a mother did—aside from nursing them at her own breast. Her stories were mostly unverifiable, but people believed her. She would have raised eleven younger siblings, they said. How else did she know the price of everything from needles to eels?

  Busan Mother was willing to keep an eye on the baby when Namin was on campus. “An eye? More like half an eye,” Namin told Sunam later, explaining the arrangement. “An eyelash.” For this, Namin’s mother negotiated a price, heavily padded with her cooking.

  But the extra outings when Sunam wanted to take Namin on a date, a real date, when he was tired of seeing her at home—the two of them plus Dori, as if they were playing some terribly realistic game of house—were separate negotiations. Ever canny, Busan Mother made it pay.

  “Seems like I saw some nice beef at the market,” she’d say.

  She eyed Sunam and then Namin, keen to judge who would be the weaker of the two. She always seemed to prey on him first, as if sensing his willingness to play the hero. “It’s been a long time since my little ones had a treat like that. You gotta eat meat to grow up tall like this young man.” She squeezed his arm, the soft flesh just under the biceps. “Not just rice and vegetables. Protein! Your mother must have fed you well, young man. Beef every week, eh? Twice a week?”

  Sunam knew Namin would not have the money to buy the meat Busan Mother wanted. Namin complained about how much formula cost, even the cheapest kind, which she suspected must be cut with powdered rice or flour. There was absolutely no extra money, especially not for extravagances like beef. The Kang family never went hungry—her parents ran a pojangmacha, after all—but they ate the day’s leftovers. Noodles and fish cakes, tteokbokki, mandoo, jjigae, and tofu. Cheap, tasty dishes anyone could afford. At the cart, they served the kind of meat that went well with soju. Blood sausage, pork skewers, whole dried squid charred over the fire. Chewy bits best served under dim lighting and doused in hot orange sauce.

  The kind of meat Busan Mother wanted—kalbi—would cause a ruckus in her family. The kids would fight over it and talk about it for days, and the neighbors would sniff the air and wonder, Who…? It was an unreasonable, exorbitant request, but Busan Mother had the power of gossip on her side. She telegraphed this without having to say a word. Who else would agree to bring a bastard child into her house? And not just a bastard, a GI baby, with his pale skin and unmistakable wide-eyed look. Lanky as a weed—his daddy must have been a tall one. She had kept quiet about him, hadn’t she? She hadn’t stirred the pot the way some other people would have. She hadn’t asked if the kid would grow up next door, mixing with her children all day. Such a confusing influence for them. Really, she had been quite understanding. Her gaze lingered over the SNU badge on Sunam’s coat. An SNU couple. The two of them must have such a bright future ahead. How lovely.

  “So the beef,” Busan Mother said, her eyes hardening. “I can rely on it for dinner?”

  And of course, Sunam had the money. Ahn’s money. He could feel the bills practically rising from his wallet into his hands like a magic trick. He could pay Busan Mother’s bribe twice a week for the rest of the semester, the rest of the year, and not feel a thing. Maybe this was how he would make it up to Namin, since he still had not figured a way out of his predicament. It occurred to him that the money would far outlive their relationship, yet on days like this when it felt almost normal between them, Sunam wondered if he could somehow make it right. It was a dilemma he could not unravel. But the kalbi was easy, a quick solution among all the other unsolvable problems. Although he knew he shouldn’t dig himself deeper into her life, forcing gifts that would make her feel indebted to him in just the way she’d hate, he couldn’t resist the temptation to be the big man for once.

  “Is it kalbi you wanted, Busan Mother? If that’s what you’re in the mood for, we can buy some on our way home. Sure thing.”

  Namin had shot him a look he wished he could have captured in a photo. Incredulousness mixed with horror mixed with…gratitude? Admiration? He also savored Busan Mother’s reaction: the surprise of a cat that had accidentally caught a fly out of midair. A big fat fly now buzzing between her teeth, rendering her speechless. All around, it had been a satisfying moment.

  The minute they closed Busan Mother’s gate behind them, Namin grabbed his arm. Whatever positive feelings she’d had had evaporated, and now she appeared on the verge of tears. “Don’t you know we’ll have to bring it every time after this?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “You should have talked to me first.”

  “It’s a gift,” he said. “You don’t talk about gifts, you just give them.”

  “I don’t see how I’m going to be able to keep this up. I told you how she is.”

  “Listen to me. It’s not a problem,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  —

  BUT NAMIN WAS right about Busan Mother. She might have been surprised the first time, but after that she bargained as boldly as if they were at a real market. The rate of inflation was high throughout Seoul, but at Busan Mother’s house it was astronomical.

  “You know, this is the most difficult age. He doesn’t sleep as much and cries like a blue chickadee. For attention, of course, not that he ever goes wanting.” Her clever words tightened like a coil fastening around her goal, the money in Sunam’s pocket. “You know how my little ones treat him like a precious doll. Watching everything he does! Hounding me like little devils the minute he’s wet. You’d think he was a little lord, the way they fight to feed him. You never saw a baby eat so much! He’s getting so spoiled at my house.”

  Sunam knew how the little ones dragged the baby into their street games and dropped him in the dirt when they grew tired of him. The youngest, Namin said, had once tried to feed Dori a “kimbab roll,” a leaf stuffed with dog droppings.

  “I saw some nice fish at the market today, Busan Mother,” Namin said.

  “Oh, but the children had their hearts set on beef. You know how children are when they’re disappointed. They go on for days, begging and whining, giving a person such a headache.”

  “Of course, Busan Mother.”

  Having settled her dinner menu, Busan Mother bared her teeth jubilantly. “Have yourselves a nice long date. Don’t worry a bit about this baby. He’s like a little prince in Busan Mama’s house. Our sad little Western prince.”

  Energetically, she shimmied Namin’s waist with strong brown fingers, a broadly suggestive gesture apparently for Sunam’s benefit. Someone else must have done the same to her once, six children ago. She winked to make her meaning doubly clear. “You have a nice time now. Handsome young men like this don’t turn up every day, eh?”

  —

  “I HATE HOW she does that,” Namin said as soon as they were out of earshot. “Holding you over my head like a punishment.”

  “More like a prize.” Sunam winked. “A handsome young man like me.”

  He looked at her. She was not smiling. “Come on,” he said. “In a few years you’ll never have to think about her again. Her or her six thousand children or what she eats for dinner. And you can buy me three kalbi dinners for each of the ones I bought. By that time, it won’t even be hard for you. It’ll be like buying a cup of coffee.” He poked her mouth and pushed up the corners with his fingers. She batted his hand away, but he persisted.

  “Come on, it’s done. What’s the point of being miserable about it?” There it was. A smile. “Just remember,” he said. He slung an arm around her shoulders and held her tight, even though she tried to duck away. They were still in her neighborhood, and she liked to pretend they were not a couple, just friends, to keep the gossiping ajummas at bay. “I plan to charge you interest. Heaps and heaps of interest. You’ll think Busan Mother was a saint compared to me.”


  “I’ll remember that,” she said. It was a real smile this time. “I doubt it, though. I don’t think you have it in you to be so mean.”

  “Do you know about that guy Jisun is seeing?” Sunam asked her one day. They were sitting on a park bench, so cold that he was shivering even as he smoked. When he exhaled, the wind instantly whipped the smoke over their heads. Namin could almost get as much vapor from her breath as he could from the cigarette.

  “Sure,” she lied. She couldn’t remember the last time she and Jisun had talked without arguing. Didn’t Sunam know that? Or was the gossip such common knowledge that he expected her to have heard about it anyway? She was too tired to parse it out. “They getting serious?”

  He was looking at her so strangely. “Seems like it could be. Or maybe she’s just sleeping around,” he said after a minute. “If that’s what you mean by serious.”

  Sleeping around. It was odd how he said it so casually, as if people they knew did things like that. Or maybe Sunam wanted to make it seem that everyone else was doing it to make her feel guilty for being so stingy with him. Namin did feel guilty. But—she thought about Hyun and she thought about her sister, and she knew it would never be worth the risk. She had to be different. She had to make sure what happened to Kyungmin would never happen to her.

  She yawned and leaned her head on his shoulder. “You know Jisun. She probably wants people to think she’s having wild affairs, but you’d be surprised how chaste she really is. She’s quite old-fashioned about love. Really, she’s the type to obsess over just one guy privately for years.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said. He threw away his cigarette without putting it out. It rolled away from them, the burning end still glowing in the fierce wind.

  “And what about you? Are you the type to moon over a guy for years?” he said, smiling too brightly. His face became a series of muscles in movement, lacking true warmth. Namin braced herself for the conversation she feared was coming. She couldn’t believe he would bring it up at a time like this. Now? Right before meeting him today, she’d had to scrape shit from under her fingernails where it had gotten lodged doing the wash. She needed to buy some new rubber gloves. Gloves were what she needed. Not sex.

  “Depends on the guy,” she said. She still remembered how hard he had tried to impress her in the beginning, how grateful and surprised he’d seemed that she liked him, too.

  “How about a guy like me?” he said. Again she could not decipher his tone. In the past he would have said it flirtatiously, probing for affirmation. But now his voice was flat.

  “A guy like you would know without asking,” she said, to buy herself more time.

  “You think a guy like me is worth the trouble?”

  Namin thought of her sister, who had gambled on that question, hoping the “trouble” would land her a husband and ticket to America. Was that the kind of trouble he meant? She looked at him and tried to wipe those reckless thoughts from her mind. Of course not. Sunam wasn’t crazy and neither was she. They both knew no one was worth that kind of trouble. She tried to keep her voice light. “Hey, you’re no trouble. I’m just trying not to break your heart.”

  “Right,” he said. “I’ll be watching out for you.”

  She hugged his arm tighter, turned her face into his coat. It should have been an affectionate, cuddly gesture, a cozy winter couple braving the elements just to spend time together. But it was more like hiding, swallowing the things she wanted to say. They sat like this for a long time, neither one of them speaking. She wished she could pitch them forward in time, intact, just like this. If only they could catapult past these obstacles, if only he could just have more faith in the future.

  “It’s going to be worth it.” Her voice was muffled against the thick blue wool of his overcoat. “You’ll see.”

  This was all she could say, hoping he understood.

  He looked at his watch. “We’d better get going. Busan Mother will be waiting.”

  “This wasn’t much of a date,” she said apologetically. “For how expensive it was.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. He got up first, brushing the errant bits of tobacco from his lap. She wished he wouldn’t say that, Don’t worry about it, as if it were remotely possible. How could anyone not worry, with so much money flying out of his pocket every week? She should have stopped it the first time. But she had been desperate to get away. More important, she had sensed his pride in being able to pay. She saw how necessary it was to accept this gift, which made up for the times he might have felt flattened by her, by Juno, by all the others who didn’t matter to her.

  But the actual cost of his pride, the money changing hands at the butcher to bring home the prize to Busan Mother, who did not deserve it, sent spasms of anxiety down her back. She had considered it a one-off—surely no one could afford it more than once—but Sunam continued to insist. He made it a weekly occurrence. It seemed the two of them, he and Busan Mother, were matched in a perverse partnership against her. Haggling in such a way that Namin felt she was a hostage held for ransom. How much this week? Too much. The more he paid, the more distant he seemed. Although she would never be able to pay him back, she kept a mental record of how much he had spent. An outrageous figure that grew in tandem with the baby. Both in leaps and bounds. Where did he get the money? She wished she had no idea, but she suspected Jisun must have something to do with it. Was she funneling the money through Sunam since Namin had refused to take it herself? Were they discussing her problems behind her back? Every time she thought about confronting him, she thought how humiliated he’d be at the suggestion that he wasn’t capable of doing something like this on his own.

  “Next week I’m busy with exams,” she said. Think of all the money you’ll save. “So I’d better stay in and study. Dori and I will be wearing matching sweatbands. I wonder if he’s any good at memorizing equations.”

  “You sure?”

  “Without you to extort, Busan Mother will be feeling lean,” she said. “She’ll have to eat gruel. That’s satisfaction enough, isn’t it?”

  “She’ll find a way to charge double next time,” he said. “New rates for skipping a week.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Let her dare.”

  Sunam laughed. She realized it was the first time she’d heard him laugh in a long time. Hearing the familiar sound loosened the tightness in her chest. Maybe she had been too quick to worry, too quick to succumb to the doubts and uncertainties tangled up with exhaustion. Maybe she was the one losing faith too soon.

  He took her hand. “Let her dare,” he said.

  In the beginning, Jisun thought about Peter every day.

  Although she never went anywhere he was likely to be, she prepared herself to run into him, dreading and hoping in equal measure. Seoul was not an infinite city, even for two people avoiding each other with assiduous diligence. Each day she imagined facing him on the sidewalk, in a bus, at a lunch shop. The simple thought brought icy sweat to her palms, a painful pleasure like sucking blood from a cut.

  Alternatively, she tortured herself with the possibility that she would never see him again, that their last encounter was already behind them at the UIM office the morning after her arrest. That, too, was unlikely. Her despair was formed on this unique paradox—that two opposite fates were equally bound to happen and that she could not be ready for either case.

  For months she followed a series of superstitions, which might variously determine her future. Riding on the right side of buses. Walking with her eyes straight ahead, resisting the urge to look for him. She counted steps as she walked from corner to corner, feeling irrational bursts of triumph if she arrived at the curb on an even-number step. She believed there must be a balance of scales, some spectral reckoning to tally the marks for and against her. To give her what she deserved. Which was—what? Their relationship was irreversibly broken, yet she could not help hoping for some measure of redemption.

  The idea that she could si
mply get on a bus and ride to the UIM annex or the steel mill where Peter met with the workers or the union office—simply choose to see him again—seemed inconceivable, as far-fetched as streaming to the moon.

  Instead Jisun developed her own system of faith, of divining signs and symbols.

  A bright red leaf planted like a hand on the sidewalk.

  Three consecutive nights of dreams about the same abalone-inlaid box, which opened the first night but not in the subsequent two.

  A child with a mouthful of candy crying on the street.

  A bus driver who demanded absolute silence in his vehicle. A commuter crowd who miraculously obeyed.

  Collecting these events, Jisun sometimes felt a flush of unity and texture in the world. A sense of possibility, if not of hope.

  What did she want?

  —

  WHEN IT HAPPENED, there was Peter Lowell, waiting for her in her neighborhood. It was windy and his coat was pulled up over his ears, his long body hunched in a manner of exhausted perseverance. His hay-colored hair glowed in the streetlight. Having feared and imagined this moment for so long, Jisun expected to feel a rush of emotions—anger, relief, nervousness, joy. She braced herself for it, expecting to be wholly upended. Instead there was only a brief inward jolt, a recognition she might feel for anyone she hadn’t seen in a long time.

  She knew him. And yet she didn’t.

  Peter turned around. He opened his arms, an uncharacteristic gesture that she did not question. It didn’t matter what it meant. She stepped into them instinctively.

  She buried her face in the smooth weft of his coat. The smells absorbed in the wool recalled vivid memories: kerosene fires, newsprint stacked on concrete floors, garlic chopped by a blunt-edged knife. But there was also an unwashed smell she had never associated with him. Peter, who was so fastidious in his American way, who had once joked that the pleasure of the public bath was the real reason he had decided to come to Korea.