Everything Belongs to Us

  “Birth certificate?”

  Namin unfolded all the paperwork she’d brought and smoothed the pages on his desk.

  “Kang Kyungmin—that’s you?”

  “My sister,” she said quickly.

  “Deceased?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then?”

  “Gone. In America, I think.”

  Mr. Lee looked at her squarely for the first time. He put down his pen, clasped his hands, and leaned slightly forward, as if to let the furniture absorb some of his great fatigue. Afternoon light flashed off his glasses and hid the shape of his eyes. Without curiosity, he said, “But you don’t know.”

  “No.”

  After gathering up the papers, he handed them back to her. “Miss. This is not a babysitting service. If this is your sister’s child and she is not deceased, there must be consent. I don’t know how many times relatives bring in these children claiming they’ve been abandoned and the mothers show up a month later, a year later, demanding them back. Many times it’s too late. A filthy business for everyone. Not to mention an unfortunate waste of our time and resources.”

  The agency man was clearly in the right, at least officially, but Namin felt as enraged as if she were the victim of targeted injustice. She had made the mistake of telling the truth about her sister, and now he was behaving as if she were the one to blame, as if he lived in a perfect world where children were never abandoned by their mothers. He had said so himself—relatives surrendered children all the time. Why, then, should he not take this child as he had the others?

  “You won’t be seeing his mother,” she said, remembering what Kyungmin had said. “This child has no parents.”

  Mr. Lee licked his thumb, leaving damp prints as he flipped between pages. “Here.” He scratched tight X marks as he talked. “And here. This is where we need signatures releasing the child.” He squinted through his thick glasses. “You read these? They’re right outside.”

  Namin had read about dengue fever, tuberculosis, Japanese encephalitis. She had avoided the gray brochures explaining protocols of overseas adoption. In a different context, they might have looked like travel brochures. The cover showed a flattened globe with certain countries highlighted in yellow. United States and Canada. Sweden. Germany. Netherlands. France. An icon of a taegukki, the Korean flag, waved jauntily within each country’s border. As if by sending orphans, their country had somehow colonized these luckier parts of the world.

  Namin turned Dori’s face so the man could get a good look. “As you can see, he’s American,” she said. “Hal Jackson, that’s his father’s name. You could find him. Or someone who knows him. His relatives probably don’t even know this child exists—and don’t they have a right to know? To have a chance to claim him?” She didn’t care that she was babbling. “Look at his hair,” she said. “It’s getting lighter every day. Maybe another GI couple, an American father and Asian mother—he’s a wonderful baby. He would be the perfect child for people like that.”

  The man fixed his gaze on her. “You say this is your sister’s child? This isn’t perhaps your son? He looks like you. The resemblance—it’s quite strong.”

  It was like a nightmare, one of those never-ending terrors where she was being tried for a crime she did not commit. Except this was real and she could smell the ripe vinegar scent of old kimchi from the man’s lunch. She was bathed in the animal stench of her own sweat.

  Namin clamped her hand around the baby’s shoulder, lodging her thumb under his armpit for leverage. She swung down to grab her coat, which had fallen on the floor. On the lapel was pinned her university badge and nameplate. She raised it for the man to see. “Do you see that? Kang Namin. That’s me,” she said. “This child is not mine.”

  Did she expect him to stand up and applaud? To simper and bow and suddenly remember special policies reserved for people like her, future-heavy aunts of inconvenient babies? She had come, sacrificing the last of her pride. She might not have expected moral fanfare, but was she not entitled to a sliver of recognition for her suffering? For the injustice of having to bear the consequences of her sister’s thoughtlessness when she had tried so hard to do everything right?

  She was so upset that she was nearly panting for breath, still holding up her SNU pin like a talisman against failure. But the agency man’s unmoved expression was a door slammed in her face.

  “Congratulations,” he said mildly. “In that case I’ll be straightforward. The Americans don’t want mixed; we haven’t placed a mixed-race child in three years. They want a Korean baby that looks like a Korean baby. Black hair. Oriental eyes. He’ll be here for years waiting, watching the other ones go. You can imagine how that makes a child sullen, unattractive. Take my advice. Go home. He’s better off with you.”

  There were dregs beyond dregs. At the bottom, a trapdoor revealing further depths.

  Ajumma answered the door and would not let her go through to the sunroom, where she said Jisun was, without foisting on her milk in a cut crystal glass, a slice of Swiss roll cake filled with cream and strawberry jelly. “Take another one for Jisun,” she insisted. “You girls have been such strangers lately.”

  Jisun was sitting under the leaves of an enormous potted plant, reading a paperback. She was wearing a waffle-knitted sweater, ivory, and a circle skirt the same shade of green as the glossy leaves overhead. Her hair, as usual, was wild and frizzy. She looked like a heroine in a British novel, the kind who succeeded at the end while lesser characters succumbed to disease or heartache. Normally Namin would have said as much, knowing how it would annoy Jisun. Today it seemed a barb against herself. Setting the plate on the table, she said, “Ajumma wants us to eat cake.”

  “I guess you didn’t set her straight,” Jisun said with a shadow of her usual smirk. Quickly, as if correcting herself: “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “No, I expect you didn’t. I can’t stay long,” she said. She had taken days to prepare the words she was going to say and weeks to convince herself to say them. She would do it quickly, like running a knife across tautly held flesh. Hesitating would only bungle it and make it worse.

  Jisun’s face held a mixture of apprehension and defiance. Sunam must have told her—of course he had—and if Namin did not hurry, if she gave Jisun even half a chance, she would have to say something about it. Quickly, quickly. Namin took a long, shuddering breath. It was on the tip of her tongue, already wanting to be taken back and swallowed forever. She must say it before time ran out.

  “You offered to help me hire a girl for the baby and I said no. But I was wrong about it. I want to change my answer. I’d like to take the money. Soon, before the semester starts.”

  That was everything. What she needed. When, so there was no confusion. And since she was begging: a brief clear acknowledgment of error, a bowing down. Surely Jisun would not demand more than that.

  She knew immediately.

  “Oh, Namin,” Jisun said. Her face was stricken, as if she were the one on the verge of being denied and humiliated. Namin wanted to turn around and flee, save herself from what was coming.

  “The money’s gone,” Jisun said. “I don’t have it.”

  Namin saw her as if from far away: Jisun, standing in a glass room surrounded by plants of rare, outrageous value. Wearing a skirt in the dead of winter. In a mansion dug into the same mountain that also housed the president. And she didn’t have the money.

  Namin could not stop the hot tears slipping down her cheeks. They were on her chin before she realized she was crying.

  Jisun stood up to come to her.

  She put up a hand. “No, don’t.”

  “Couldn’t you have come sooner?” Jisun said, standing the safe distance away. She had let the book fall to the ground.

  “Sooner?” Namin said, bewildered. “I came as soon as I could.”

  —

  SHE WOULD HAVE let herself out through the glass door, to the terrace and around the garden to the gate
, which she knew how to operate. It was the easiest and most direct exit, saving her the route back through the house, through the long hallways lined with vases, the intricate parquet floor undulating with its ceaseless pattern.

  Only she couldn’t. It would have seemed too natural, too familiar. As if they were friends possessing the details of each other’s lives and homes. No. She was a solicitor, and solicitors used the front door.

  Namin retraced her steps. She was so tired. She carefully closed every door behind her and walked the dead center of each hallway, favoring neither the left nor right displays of precious objects. She did not run. She said goodbye to ajumma, who, seeing her leave so soon, raised both eyebrows like a startled scarecrow and tried to feed her another slice of cake, a cup of tea.

  She had left Dori with Busan Mother with the promise that she would not be more than two hours. She was vaguely, laboriously, aware of the fact that someone else in her position might not go back so promptly. What might that person do? That person who was not her, but who was in her exact position? Namin didn’t know. Perhaps that person would walk and walk until she was emptied of every thought. Perhaps she would drink herself into a stupor. Or collapse on a prominent intersection and wait to be rescued. Perhaps that girl would take up playing banjo or read Tolstoy on the lawn of the quad or throw herself in the river.

  Namin, numb to possibilities, did none of these things. She rode the bus to her neighborhood. She arrived at Busan Mother’s door. Exactly ninety-six minutes had passed since she had dropped him off.

  “Back so soon?” In the past, Busan Mother always made sure to come to the door holding Dori, as if she had not put him down for a second for all the hours she was away. Now, as there was no kalbi, she did not bother to flatter her with charades. The baby was probably at the bottom of a heap of her youngest daughter’s dolls. The child had lately discovered the miracle of stacking, and Dori was always the first layer underneath it all: dolls and doll clothes. Regular clothes. Pillows. Last time the child had buried him and gone out to play, forgetting all about her earlier game. Dori was so quiet at the bottom of that mound, it was half an hour before Busan Mother thought to unearth him there.

  “Another test?” Busan Mother asked. Last time, Namin had left him to take her rescheduled German final. She had been gone four hours and Busan Mother had hinted that the food from her parents’ cart, however nice, was a disappointing trade. “Considering our earlier arrangements,” she’d said, “this seems somewhat…lacking.

  “I suppose you’ll be a doctor soon enough. Making big money, eh? Hope you remember your old neighbor Busan Mother. Hope you don’t grow too important to say hello to her in the street. Oh, I suppose you’ll be living somewhere much fancier by then.”

  It was not just idle banter, and Namin knew Busan Mother expected to be paid. If not now, then later. In that later future, when Namin was someone worth knowing.

  “So I wonder, do we have a deal?”

  “What kind of deal, Busan Mother?”

  “Oh, we don’t have to be so official. Don’t be so alarmed, child. Just a little joke between neighbors.”

  So it was an open-ended deal, this little joke between neighbors. Unbounded and liable to drag into her future as far as Busan Mother could sink her pointed nails. But what else did she have with which to barter? Her future was the only valuable thing Namin owned.

  “No test today, Busan Mother,” Namin said. “Just—an appointment.”

  “A date?” The thick skin of her nostrils flared with eager anticipation. Another kalbi suitor? Or the same? No matter, she would take what came.

  “No.”

  One of the children appeared with Dori, and Busan Mother plucked him up before Namin could do it herself. She cradled the baby possessively, her hips turned away from the door.

  “Too bad. Haven’t seen that nice boyfriend of yours lately. I thought he was quite the keeper. Go catch that handsome boy before someone else snatches him up,” she said. She switched Dori to the opposite hip as if to add punctuation to her advice. “Remember, I can watch this one for you anytime. He’s no trouble. No trouble at all.”

  —

  NAMIN NO LONGER seemed to sleep. Her eyes were perpetually open. Her mind was a solitary machine, whirring with great effort in an empty room. The product was survival. Was she surviving?

  It was the year of the sheep, that dull-faced creature whose gray wool was always bunched with dung. A zodiac year seemingly designated for suffering. A year to endure, not live. In the Kang household there was no special food or celebration for the New Year, which seemed a grotesque expenditure of energy no one wished to spare. Namin’s father went alone to the family’s grave site to pay respect to his parents, as if by leaving the rest of the family behind, he could trick the ancestors into overlooking the missing daughter and orphaned grandchild. He returned before dark with soju on his breath, the trip made so quickly that Namin dimly wondered if he had even gone at all.

  They were sheep, driven back by the tiny being eating, sleeping, pulsing, at the center of their house. Rooms became closed doors, cells. Namin learned to read in the courtyard with a flashlight, dressed in all her warm layers and her quilt lashed around her shoulders like an Everest explorer. The cold froze her eyes wide open and kept her from falling asleep, which was how she would die if she was not mindful. Every night she survived was a feat against nature, against herself. In the morning icicles variously dripped or broke, grew longer and twisted or wider and smooth. The child stubbornly expanded. He grew hair that curled up from his skull. He was a striver for things just beyond his reach, his fists grabbing air with misplaced certainty.

  For the sake of survival, they were all suffering. The flashlight batteries died out and she switched to an oil lamp, which had the benefit of heat but created new hazards. Freezing to death. Death by burning. She imagined a scenario in which she first froze, then burned. She could not remember when she’d last slept more than two hours at a time. All the hours the baby slept was sacred time for studying. All the hours he was awake was time she had to bargain and steal, shutting her ears to his demands, shutting her eyes to his needs. A child could grow, she realized, with such minimal encouragement. You never knew how indestructible an infant was until you held his life in your hands.

  In the night sometimes he sputtered and coughed. Namin heard him vaguely as she studied on her Everest perch. He sputtered and coughed and righted himself again, resuming that silent slumber that still held a pitch, inaudible to everyone except the one who was listening, dreading the interruption. Her jagged mind braced against the wail, which was always ringing in her ears even when there was nothing to hear.

  —

  IN THEIR FUTURE house, she and Hyun would build a movie room lined with aisles, each seat convenient to come and go. They would line all four walls with screens, each playing a different film.

  Choose, he’d say.

  I’ll watch this one for a while.

  Then I’ll watch it with you.

  She had once seen a young woman seated at the back of the theater, directly below the projector’s window. A young man stood by her wheelchair through the entire film. When it was over, he carried her in his arms like a bride while someone else brought the folded wheelchair the half flight down to street level. She had been wearing a skirt the color of marigolds that gathered below her knees as he held her. A dazzling skirt, like something out of an Audrey Hepburn film. On her wrist was a thin gold chain that glinted in the light. Namin remembered that touch of embellishment, a humble luxury that seemed the embodiment of all her aspirations.

  Wouldn’t it be enough? A normal theater with one screen, where they could watch the film together at the back. She would not mind standing for the entire movie. A theater with no stairs and double-wide doors. Namin remembered there must have been a car waiting to pick up the marigold bride. A bus had steps and would not endure the delay of a handicapped procession.

  They, too, must have a car, she an
d Hyun. At least money for the taxi, both ways. And it must not seem so costly as to distract from the enjoyment of the movie.

  A gold chain. A car.

  She was like Dori grasping at air.

  In the night, the oil lamp flickered and showed her everything she did not know. The endless pages to slip into the exhausted caves of her brain. The long road left to go.

  At graduation, someone set off a smoke bomb during the valedictorian’s speech, and the poor guy—Sunam never knew him—screamed and crouched behind the podium as if he believed himself the target of an assassination attempt. It had been over a year since President Park’s assassination by his chief of intelligence, but in the audience the gist of the boy’s panic was immediately clear to the graduates. They snickered loudly at his reaction. Sunam, too, laughed at the comments, circulating thicker than the smoke. “Who does he think he is?” “That’s what happens when your head gets so big, you think every shot and bang has your name on it.” “Must be pretty nice to feel so important.”

  The bomb put up a good show at first, but it was small and homemade, emitting just a single column of dirty gray smoke that dissipated quickly into the clear sky. Only the smell—powdery, damp, and faintly sulfuric—lingered and blew back into the stands. Behind Sunam, someone joked that the lasting feature of his university education would be the ability to differentiate among various explosions by scent. “Better leave it off your résumé” was the wry response.

  The university president had taken over the podium and commanded everyone to return to their seats. He gripped the microphone with a white-gloved hand and seemed to wish he had a gavel to pound. His satin fist gleamed ineffectually, bouncing on the podium. Still, order was quickly restored. Only the students in the front rows had had time to scramble from their seats, and they gamely complied, straightening upset mortarboards and mimicking the speaker’s frantic response. (Ahhhh! I’m hit! Am I bleeding?) Someone said, “If only we had known he had such quick reflexes, we would have made him shortstop.” In the commotion, the three bomb setters had loped off, shedding their robes like black shrouds. Two of them managed to slip away, unimpeded. Uniformed guards tackled the last and dragged him away.