Everything Belongs to Us

  “Do you want me to walk you home?”

  She shook her head. “You’re a coward,” she said. Her eyes were dry and her voice clear. Tiny wrinkles gathered in the corners of her eyes as she sneered at his weakness. Sunam caught a glimpse of how she would look in twenty, thirty years’ time. The same, he thought. She would always be the same. Unassailable and taut with infinite potential. “In my worst estimation of you,” she said, “I never expected you to stoop this low.”

  Sunam nodded. He let her go.

  With a sense of obligation, he watched her walk away, watching as long as he could. The bag for Busan Mother hung slack from her hand. When she reached the corner, she dropped it in the trash. A single swift motion, the way she always did things. Efficient. Decisive. She never looked back.

  The money Peter needed was for the families of workers he was educating, four men accused of antigovernment activities and now awaiting trial at West Gate Prison. Charged with violating the National Security Law, each faced execution by hanging. The wives had poured their last pennies into hiring a lawyer, and every day the lawyer’s changing projections whipped them between despair and hope. In the neighborhood, people were already acting as if the men were dead. Whatever their true feelings, they shut their doors, afraid the authorities would be watching for sympathizers. The children were going hungry, ostracized at school. And now the lawyer was hinting he would require further payment if the men were so lucky to have a long trial.

  “And if they were so unlucky to need an appeal,” Peter said, “further payment still.”

  Jisun said, “Did he actually say that?”

  “As often as he could.”

  “And will the extra money make him more eloquent?”

  “It will give the families courage.” Peter looked at her. He seemed almost translucent with grief. “We will try—I will try—but you know it is unlikely we can ever pay you back.”

  “And if you did, it would be like your father paying my father, wouldn’t it.” She wondered if Peter had even considered asking his family for help. Or was she more convenient, someone he did not have to see again if he chose not to. And was that what he had done to them already, disappeared from his family the way he had disappeared from her?

  “Is that fair?” he asked.

  “I think it is. Yes,” she said. “It is exactly fair.”

  —

  SHE HAD TWO stipulations:

  1. She would not look at any details of the account. She would sign for whatever he needed, but what he took—all or none—was up to him. He was not to tell her.

  2. He would stay away from Seoul until the trial had concluded.

  Peter tried to protest on the second point. “I can’t abandon those men. I’m the reason their lives are at stake.”

  “If I give you the money, those are my conditions,” Jisun said. “We both know you’re not safe here. And what good will it do anyone if you’re arrested too? Take the money, Peter, and come back when it’s safe.”

  She saw him wrestling with the implications. Was it a show of control—or protection?

  Love or vengeance?

  Her feelings for him might have changed, but Jisun would never forget the strength of her love or the hurt of his rejection. Those residues would linger in her memory for years. Now you know how it feels. Now you see how we’re all forced to compromise. Peter would take the money because it was the only way he could help save those families. But now he’d know what it meant to be trapped between his conscience and his pride. It was never as black and white as he thought, the decisions of love and duty.

  “And that’s the only way?” he asked, and Jisun knew he understood.

  “That’s the only way.”

  —

  AT THE BANK, the teller eyed Jisun’s disheveled collar and the plastic bag she clutched instead of a proper purse. He helped three other customers from adjacent lines, taking a long time with each one—a grandmother, a young housewife who daintily licked her finger before counting her money, and a taxicab driver who had the bleary, bloodshot eyes of a night-shift worker. Peter waited outside.

  It was her account, which her father had once called her face to the world, but she could not remember when she had last even looked at her ledger. It was long lost; she’d have to have a new one made. It was possible that in these years of neglect the account had been emptied or closed. But Jisun wagered that being a man of unerring habit, her father had continued his practice of adding money every year on her birthday. Birthdays. Graduations. Holidays. Celebrations bypassed in favor of placing money directly into her account, like dropping gold pieces into a well.

  And now she was dredging it up, an eerie feeling like stealing from a ghost, a fictional character with her name and identification number. Was it possible to steal from yourself? A police car sped past, sirens screaming. Startled, Jisun caught the inside of her cheek between her molars. Thinking they were coming for her, the thief. She poked the ragged flesh with her tongue and tasted blood.

  On the other side of this transaction was freedom. Grief, sorrow, guilt, on one side. Freedom on the other.

  And the cost?

  With this money Peter would be connected to her forever, not as a friend or compatriot in a cause, but as her counterpart in a great debt—with all the unwilling obligation and forced decency that that relationship entailed. After this week, it was unlikely they would see each other again. But the debt would stretch between them like a lifelong tether.

  Only money could do this, binding them together past the usual limits of time and distance. Persisting, whether they acknowledged it or not. As strong as blood.

  Finally, the teller gestured that it was her turn. Jisun forced her legs to approach the window. No more than a dozen steps, but a huge distance, spiraling her back in time. Her mind flooded with the numbers of her childhood. The interest rate in July 1970. The spring of ’71, when her father deposited and withdrew the same amount four times, testing her attention. The number 732: no other details, but the sense of it, recalled in her throat like a phantom fish bone.

  With shaking hands, she slid her identification card and stamp through the slot. Her signature stamp, a gift from her mother, was carved from luminous jade more blue than green and shot through with white veins like sunlight over water. It was as slender as her pinky finger, but heavy like gold. Everyone, even children, had a signature stamp to mark official documents. For most children it was merely a plaything, given to them to mimic the business of adults. But Jisun’s stamp was the single extravagance her mother had bestowed, an object of beauty by any measure. The actual signature had been designed by a famous calligrapher. Jisun remembered her mother had been upset that it was not more abstract and stylish, the only time she had wished for fanciness and received plainness instead.

  “I lost my account book,” she said.

  The teller examined the jade with myopic concentration, rubbing it appraisingly with his thumb. “Real?”

  “Probably just resin.” Her voice sounded robotic. “Cheap.”

  He nodded as if to say he thought so, too. “Wait here, I have to get it approved.”

  As he stepped away, Jisun suddenly remembered where her old account book must be. Stashed in the cover of her high school yearbook, crammed into her bottommost drawer with the other useless mementos of childhood she had been happy to leave behind. The money—or the idea of money—had not propelled her into the future, as her father had hoped.

  The same teller returned with a new book and an entirely different demeanor. A new voice. A pronounced sniffing tic, as if he thought that constituted an aristocratic manner.

  “If only you would have made a sign, I would have helped you right away.”

  She stared. “What kind of sign?”

  “Or—said something.”

  He slipped her stamp and ledger through the slot with a cunning, obsequious bow, using both hands to push the small objects forward. “I hope everything is entirely in order. If there
is anything else—”

  “Thanks.”

  Outside, she handed Peter the account. She watched the blood drain from his face, the transmogrification of numbers turned to money.

  He dragged his eyes over her face. “You didn’t look?”

  “No.”

  “You really don’t know.”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Jisun. Is this truly what you’ve decided? Are you sure you don’t want…any of it?”

  She shrugged. A world lifted off her shoulders. Now it was his burden. His to carry, measure, explain. She was free.

  “You once said the difference between you and me—what was it? That I was willing to be rescued and you weren’t? I remember, Peter. I’m out here on my own, you said. I’m not looking for an almighty hand to save me if I get in trouble. You made yourself so superior. You broke my heart.

  “Take it all,” she said. Because he was still waiting for permission. Still wanting an answer to his question, mistrusting her. “Does that make it clear? I’ve said it a hundred times and still you don’t understand. That money has nothing to do with me. Take it all.”

  Namin dragged herself to the end of the semester like a combat soldier trapped behind enemy lines, inching toward home. Exhausted beyond tears, she had no use for anything except sleep, even food a waste of time and energy better spent lying down, unconscious. She had lost so much weight that none of her clothes could be worn without the use of multiple safety pins cinching the bands at her waist. When she managed to wash her hair, she came away with clumps that wrapped around her fingers. Dreams crowded the edge of her waking mind.

  The long respite of winter break would give her a chance to collect herself, to rest rather than simply survive. She scraped by the final days of exams and collapsed for nearly twenty-four hours when it was over, sleeping so soundly that she did not hear the baby wailing at her side. Busan Mother came and took him while she was sleeping. “He was choking on his tears, the poor thing,” she said later when she dropped him off. “Screaming like a devil. You were dead to the world. I thought no one was home.” Namin had not, in fact, noticed he was missing. Instead she had woken up in a panic, realizing that she had forgotten to attend her German final days before. She had been so consumed with her major prerequisites that she had completely overlooked the language exam. She tore out of the house wearing the clothes she had fallen asleep in the day before, not even pausing to grab a coat against the frigid weather. On the bus to campus, tears streamed down her face and dropped into her lap. Tears of terror, like a child lost in an endless dark city. Like a child, she had no plan, only hoping for rescue.

  When she arrived on campus, the professor was not in her office and there was nothing to do but leave a letter begging to reschedule the test.

  That night her mother called Namin into her bedroom and suggested she take a semester off. “We could use you home. We could save a little money.”

  For weeks she had had no tears—not even that afternoon when Sunam said Just sex in the street. That day she had stumbled home and waited for the tears. Waited and waited, her face completely dry. She had buried herself in quilts, her cheeks incandescent with rage. Her heart pumped to the size of a volleyball, set to explode. No tears. She had not cried for Sunam once. And now twice in one day, enormous drops fell from her eyes.

  “What difference does a semester make?” Namin said. “He’ll still be here in three months—it’ll only be worse when he starts crawling and walking around. You’ll have me staying back another semester. ‘Until he’s walking.’ ‘Until he’s out of diapers.’ ‘Until’ when?” She looked at her mother. “He’s not my responsibility. Finishing college is. Our future is. That’s enough for one person.”

  “Since you know everything, what should I do, fling him out into the street?”

  “Fling him somewhere,” Namin said bitterly. “Just don’t fling him at me.”

  —

  IN THE MORNING, her mother had deep shadows under her eyes as if she had not slept at all. Silently she watched as Namin brushed her teeth and washed her face. She handed Namin her towel, heated by the ondol floor in her room. Burying her face in the warm cloth, Namin wished they would all go away and leave her. She didn’t need much. The minimum in food and water. A roof. Just a little quiet, so she could fix her life.

  If her mother thought a warm towel would begin to change her mind—

  “I heard about the Chang girl,” her mother said in a low voice. Namin didn’t look up, though she understood the significance of her comment immediately. The Chang girl had gotten pregnant last year when she was only fifteen and refused to name the father despite vicious beatings from her parents. The ongoing ordeal—the secret pregnancy, the public beatings, the neighbors becoming reluctantly involved, and the bitter altercations that ensued—had captured the attention of the village for the better part of a year. Everyone heard about the Chang girl. Eventually they heard about her baby, too, the child who was so dark-skinned that the mother would not allow her daughter to breast-feed the infant for fear the color would somehow transfer. The infant was given up to an orphanage in a matter of days.

  “The Chang girl” quickly became code for a certain situation. And Namin understood what her mother meant by it as clearly as if she’d spelled it out.

  “Do you need me to come with you?” her mother asked, taking back the towel. It was no longer warm, hanging limply from Namin’s hand.

  “No, I can do it.”

  Her mother did not ask when she planned to go. She could do it tomorrow or she could drag it out for months.

  Namin remembered that day long ago when she had played on the floor with her dolls while her mother said goodbye. Was her mother thinking of that now? And Kyungmin—wherever she was, did she ever think about that day? Another boy. Another ghost. Life was not long enough to redeem all the things you lost, and yet it would leave her stranded at the start if she did not keep up with the necessary decisions.

  “I’ll go next week,” Namin told her mother.

  “I can get more formula. If it’s only a week.”

  —

  IN THE WAITING room, Namin read from a textbook on viral infections. There were other pairs of adults with children, but no one spoke except when necessary to a child. Namin read about meningitis. She let a little girl, a toddler wearing yellow corduroy pants and a floppy hat, crawl over her shoes. A very old man, wearing a traditional hanbok and horsehair hat, held the hand of a boy who had to be at least seven years old. Too old. The boy chewed gum with a mixed expression of anxiety and pleasure.

  Lunchtime passed and Dori grew restless, but no one called Namin’s name. She read about influenza. She had packed a tin of rice in water, which she spooned into Dori’s mouth. The utensil was too big, but he managed in his way, never having known any better. The old man and the gum-chewing boy had been called through the blue swinging door. The boy pushed the door with both hands, fingers widespread. Reveling in the novelty of a swinging door. She now saw that the grandfather, seemingly hale enough while sitting, had a painfully bowlegged, tottering gait. His skin, the color of tanned cowhide, was slick with perspiration.

  A long while later, he came out alone, somehow even older and smaller without the boy at his side. Namin buried her attention in her book, erasing herself as witness. She made herself block out everyone else in the waiting room, the people who came and went through that blue door, which swallowed up children and spit out adults.

  At three o’clock, when the assistant called her name, Namin had waited nearly five hours. She had long ceased trying to soothe the child and let him cry and whimper in her lap while voiceless admonitions looped in her mind. Try. You want them to like you, don’t you? Pull yourself together. To whom these warnings applied, her or Dori, was unclear. At least he had ignorance to shield him. No culpability other than being born.

  The assistant wore white rubber shoes that squeaked on the linoleum. She was dressed like a nurse even though i
t was not a hospital. Not much older than Namin, she had a strict, streamlined movement that made her seem far more mature and in possession of great authority. She waited while Namin gathered her things and met her at the door. Before they went any farther, she set alarmed, disapproving eyes on Dori’s bottom. Her nostrils flared. “Just a minute. You can’t go in like that.”

  So much time had passed that Namin no longer discerned his smell. Although she was grateful, this intervention was yet another humiliation, pointing out how unacceptable they were already. Namin felt as if she, too, not just Dori, were smeared with shit.

  She was directed into a tiny room furnished with a cot and metal table, where she could clean him. Immediately her eyes snapped to the stack of fresh diapers. Disposable diapers, each one’s stretchy backside stamped with a parade of lilac-toned elephants and periwinkle hearts. If the elephants had started speaking, she could not have been more astonished. Decorations on a thing designed to be filled with excrement and thrown out. She laid Dori down and changed him with deliberate slowness, savoring the pleasure of the immaculate, padded plastic. She looked at him, lying there dressed in his American diaper. Already he looked so much more valuable.

  Before leaving, she ran her finger down the remaining stack, admiring its perfect white folds, counting and calculating how many days they would last if she used only one a day. One a week. She dropped Dori’s soiled cloth diaper in the trash, too ashamed to bring it out with her. She would not need it after today, but it still felt wrong to leave it behind. A permanent property, traded for a disposable convenience. Such a waste.

  “He must feel better now.” The assistant didn’t smile or touch him the way most people did with babies. She didn’t direct any affection to Dori at all.

  “I didn’t realize we would wait so long.”

  “Mr. Lee will see you now.”

  The office smelled strongly of stewed kimchi, as if the man had finished eating it minutes before. In fact the dirty dishes were stacked by the open window, the white bowls stained with a rim of bright orange. Mr. Lee himself was a slight man swathed in an enormous shirt and brown-patterned tie that seemed to drag at his neck. He had smoky, square-rimmed glasses and thin, obedient hair that swooped over his forehead in a perfect parabolic curve.