Everything Belongs to Us

  The president made the humiliated valedictorian start his speech again. He rushed through it in breathless, high-pitched agony and spent the rest of the ceremony onstage staring glumly into the crowd, flinching at any sudden noise.

  Namin had been the previous year’s valedictorian, graduating a year early just as she’d planned. Sunam hadn’t heard her speech. By that time, they hadn’t seen each other in over a year. Recently he had run into a mutual friend, Yumee, a pretty dance major who had married a commercial pilot. She now dressed like a stewardess in navy skirt suits and bouffant hairdos—too bad, because she had been sexier before in her wrap skirts and loose hair. She mentioned Namin was in medical school, then gave a frightened little gasp, apparently believing herself the perpetrator of a tremendous social blunder. “I forgot—you two used to date, didn’t you?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “But still,” the other girl said reproachfully.

  Sunam laughed. “Still—what?”

  She didn’t answer, but the implication was that he must be heartbroken—still—after all this time. He wasn’t offended at Yumee’s assumption that Namin had thrown him over. Everyone thought that, which was better than the truth.

  Many decades later, Sunam would open the newspaper in a foreign country and read that Namin had been appointed the minister of health under the new populist president. The first female cabinet member of the Republic of Korea.

  At expat reunions and alumni functions, people he had barely known even when they were classmates would suddenly recall—after a few beers and in the service of cheap nostalgia—the flimsy trivia of Sunam having once dated the current minister of health. I’m sure it’s a terrible life, public service, they’d say, extravagantly patting his back. Meaning, of course, the opposite. It was just a joke—the hilarity of having passed up on such a life. Imagine, if things had been just a little bit different, they seemed to say. Imagine.

  According to the newspaper bio, Namin had married a fellow doctor. A pediatric oncologist, who donated twenty-five percent of his time to pro bono cases. The couple lived with her younger brother, who had become something of an icon for the rights of disabled people. The article mentioned no children.

  Not every day. Not even once a year anymore. But sometimes, he’d catch a glimpse of a young woman with a certain silhouette—a red coat and a brisk, wistful set to her mouth—and there would be that dip of vertigo. The calcified edge of regret.

  Guilt, for Sunam, was never that full-bodied tragedy that could derail a life. Just a silent companion. A brief weight dragging at his heels sometimes. A ghost.

  —

  HE SAW JISUN briefly at graduation. The ceremony had ended and he had just pinned the corsage on his mother’s lapel. His brothers, looking solemn and itchy in their best clothes, had passed around the mortarboard so frequently between them—half mocking the novelty of it and half in awe of the honor it represented—that the inner cardboard was no longer stiff, but clammy with sweat. Jisun had stepped out of the crowd and offered to take their photo. He had nodded as if they had no reason to be awkward with each other. The whole family—his parents, his brothers, his aunts and uncles and grandmother—had clustered tightly around him, each holding someone’s elbow or hand or leaning over a shoulder. His mother had treasured that photo. He still had it, framed, in a drawer somewhere, the color faded and blotchy now. Sometimes he took it out and looked at it. The picture memorialized the fact that he had given his mother a corsage of yellow roses tied with a glaring pink ribbon. In his memory, the roses had been pink and the ribbon ivory white.

  After taking the photo, Jisun had returned the camera to his uncle and they had stood apart from the family and congratulated each other like children being made to apologize after a fight. “You should write. I’m a good pen pal,” she had said, because he was beginning his military service in the fall. He had probably agreed and never done it. Then, with nothing else to say, they had talked about Namin, skating around what had happened and trying to behave as if any discomfort were long behind them.

  “Have you seen her recently?”

  “Maybe if I went to the library more often,” he’d joked. But actually he had avoided the library, convinced he would run into her if he so much as crossed the threshold.

  “Not after…what happened?” she’d said.

  He shook his head.

  It was painful to speak of those months. He and Jisun had continued to see each other through the end of the semester and once or twice around the New Year. It was Jisun who first received the terrible news about Dori. He, in turn, had heard it from her.

  That winter had been brutally cold, the streets treacherous with black ice. Everyone complained of the skyrocketing cost of coal; radio programs covered the plight of poorer families who could not afford to heat their homes. Sunam realized that Namin’s family would have been among those struggling. And the baby had gotten sick.

  “They did everything they could for him,” Jisun had said. “Nine days in the hospital. I don’t know how they paid for it.”

  Sunam would never forget the stricken look on Jisun’s face, which mirrored his own shock and sorrow. Inexplicably, he felt tied to Dori’s death, as if he had been somehow complicit in this tragedy. He had not done enough to help. He had let the child down. He had let so many people down. He knew without question that Jisun felt this same guilt. This mixed-up grief.

  “Have you seen her? How is she?” Sunam had asked. It would be a long time before either of them could say Namin’s name to each other. “She” was more than enough to signal whom they were talking about.

  “I went to see her, but she wouldn’t let me in. The neighbor told me what happened. You know her? They call her Busan Mother?”

  “Yeah,” he’d said. “I know her.”

  They must have left it at that. He couldn’t remember ever speaking of it again.

  When Jisun had cut it off shortly after that, Sunam was more relieved than disappointed. If she knew about the meeting in her father’s office, the money that had so easily found its way from the black lacquered box into his hands, she never gave any indication. The way information seemed to leak strategically between father and daughter, he would not have been surprised if she knew. Perhaps it had benefited Ahn to tell her, perhaps not. Sunam never asked.

  He packed the remainder of the money in a battered old sock at the bottom of his dresser, where it stayed when he left home for his military service. A part of him hoped it would be gone when he returned, accidentally thrown out by the maid. But it was still there when he got home, less crisp than he remembered, softened by humidity and the passing of several rainy seasons.

  In that first listless year after military service, when his life sputtered and stalled with the lingering remnants of overgrown adolescence, Sunam asked after Jisun and heard she had gone abroad. She was studying economics and German literature at the University of Chicago.

  “It snows in April here,” she wrote from America on blue airmail stationery. A single sheet folded in thirds to form an envelope she could simply affix with a stamp and mail. “There is a deep lake that looks bluer than our ocean.”

  He applied to half a dozen graduate programs in the United States and three in Europe. He was accepted at just one, the master’s of business administration at Notre Dame, which turned out to be less than two hours’ drive from Chicago.

  It took him four years to complete the MBA with a concentration in international finance. He saw Jisun a handful of times during that period, and it occurred to him that they might rekindle their former relationship. But she had changed since their university days. She was quieter now and more serious, absorbed in her studies and running a local chapter of a national charity that distributed laundry and public transportation vouchers to the poor and homeless. In time, she moved in with a philosophy lecturer, a bearded Australian who called her “love.” They invited Sunam over for dinner, where they ate impr
ovised kimchi and toasted with soju that the Australian had hunted down for Jisun.

  “Are you really going back to Seoul? You won’t regret it now that you’ve had a taste of the ‘foreign’ world?” she asked him, smiling. He heard a glimmer of her former SNU voice, when it was never clear where the joke ended and the knife edge of truth began.

  It was Sunam’s last semester at Notre Dame and he had already accepted a position back in Seoul with a British bank eager to expand its holdings in the Asian market. They would start him at the Gangnam office but hinted at opportunities for a Hong Kong transfer, where he might rise more quickly through the ranks. While he was not comfortable here in the States, so far from everything he understood, Sunam found himself attracted to the idea of Hong Kong, of living just beyond the periphery of his home country, close enough to peer over its shoulder if he wished.

  “I haven’t adapted here as well as you,” he told Jisun, partly to flatter her but mostly because it was true. There were things he loved about America—the broad public spaces, the avenues effortlessly lined with trees that had never seen war, the way drivers waved each other through intersections rather than trying to ram their vehicles into traffic if there was even an inch of room to spare. He was awed by the brightly lit supermarkets, the seemingly endless aisles of mystery food. The young mothers who seemed in constant dialogue with their children, even the ones too young to reply.

  But these were details he collected in order to report to his family back home, a kind of prerecorded memory in anticipation of leaving. He would never relax here the way Jisun seemed to, soothed by the diversity of neighborhoods and people. She was content to mingle and sometimes disappear, a drop in the giant pot. For him, America was too big, too boundaryless. He was acutely aware of his own lack of history here, his existence as rootless as the leaves that fell in fiery, mountainous heaps each November.

  “And you—will you stay?” he asked Jisun. He could not bear to use his broken English with her, always addressing her in Korean even when there were only other English speakers present. She answered in English, for the Australian’s benefit.

  “I don’t know if I’ll stay here forever, but I won’t return to Seoul,” she said.

  “Won’t your father be disappointed?”

  She smiled. “I’ve done my degree. He is contractually forbidden to be disappointed.”

  He nodded, not quite sure what she meant by that comment but unwilling to pursue it. When it came to Ahn, there were secrets he had no wish to uncover.

  Sunam returned to Seoul in the summer of 1988—to a country drunk with Olympic fervor and high on the limelight of international attention. He put in his hours at the office, taking lunch with everyone else, each meal a great migration of dark-suited men trailing fumes of garlic, cigarettes, and chili. Meals followed by compulsory after-work drinks, followed by promotions, followed by more hours at the office. More meals, more drinks.

  He allowed himself to be introduced to a suitable wife. He had a son.

  Was it enough?

  At some point, he ceased asking himself the question.

  —

  HE PLAYED THREE times a week now, an old-timer at the baduk club in Central, Hong Kong, where the young guys played with music blaring into one ear. The little white earbuds broadcast the tinny bass line of whatever American or Korean pop they were listening to these days. After the first few weeks, Sunam gave up making small talk and motioned for them to put in both buds if they wanted.

  “Sure?” they asked in English. He nodded, sure, sure. More than the music, he was annoyed by the automatic judgment on his Cantonese, which was not so bad, he thought. Better, in fact, than his English.

  He won most games easily. They were beginners, drawn to baduk by some idea of sharpening their business skills, honing the killer instinct. Maybe some boss of theirs, a big-shot managing director, had shamed them into thinking more in terms of risk. He knew the words that activated this bunch, words that had suddenly lit up their corner of the world with unforeseeable success. Capital. Leverage. Outsize returns in volatile emerging markets. They came into the club dissecting the latest trades they’d put on, talking in single-digit numbers that really meant millions or billions. None of them were even thirty. They wore Hermès belts and custom suits with the dry cleaner’s tag still stapled to the inner label. They read The Art of War and the biography of Steve Jobs, quoting from both as if success were only a matter of gaining a critical mass of ego.

  This was a new generation that would have pleased his old sunbae, Juno. And like Juno, they saw their careers spike early and flame out just as quickly, the rest of their lives left murky and blank ahead of them. The 1980s had been loud with talk about Juno heading up massive construction contracts for Ahn in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Libya, where a generation of Korean laborers worked through the night in continuous shifts while their Western competitors slept or demanded costly safety precautions. Newspapers speculated as to Juno’s future in Ahn Kiyu’s chaebol, printing his photo next to Min’s, the playboy heir apparent. But before long, new faces replaced Juno’s, a revolving door of bright young men Ahn used to keep his empire fresh.

  “How long you been in Hong Kong?” the young men asked Sunam. They didn’t know not to tap the board with their finger, not to shuffle the stones in their cupped fists as if they were preparing to throw dice. This is not Macau, he wanted to say. Not Las Vegas. But there wasn’t a still-sitting one among them, not in this under-thirty crowd. They were all amped up: finger-tapping, leg-shaking, gum-chewing, mobile-phone-checking machines. Their lean, efficient bodies generated a constant excess of energy, conditioned as they were for prosperity. How long had he been in Hong Kong?

  “Sixteen. No, seventeen years.”

  “Like it here?”

  His wife had stuck it out for three years, the contract of his original transfer, then returned to Seoul with their boy when he reneged on his promise. The boy was fifteen now, halfway through high school, and his mother fasted and prayed at every temple in Seoul, asking Buddha for a second-generation legacy at SNU. Separated fourteen years, they had never divorced. She was a farsighted woman, spartan in her own needs but willing to use any resource toward the boy’s future. She treated their son as if he were a burgeoning economy requiring heavy interference: tutors, special programs, trips abroad, and a wardrobe worthy of Prince William.

  Did he like it here? The fiddle-footed young men were waiting for his answer. “Like? It’s business.”

  They nodded, replacing their earbuds. Familiar story.

  He walked home after a game or two, stopping to have a drink if he felt too alert and pessimistic about sleep. His wife allowed the boy to spend summer and winter vacations here with him, emphasizing—as if some other benefit were required—the advantage of his hearing and learning Chinese in its proper elocution. “Speak it at home. No Korean,” she instructed. “And make sure he does his work. No slacking.” As if Sunam were just another tutor, those ungodly extortionists charging mortgage rates by the month. Of course, he and the boy disregarded her completely: they spoke Korean, and sloppily. They watched kung fu movies (with the subtitles on). He allowed beer within reason, but not cigarettes. The boy was lazy—as Sunam had been at his age—but bright and easy, somehow unfettered by his mother’s claustrophobic ambition. He would get into SNU if that’s where he wanted to go.

  Certain days, when the sky was clear, Sunam crept up to the roof exit in his high-rise apartment and climbed the stairs marked clearly with forbidding signs. The ledge was high, not dangerous, unless someone wanted it to be. He rarely looked out over the city, though the view at this height was panoramic, a galaxy of human achievement. Instead, he lay on his back with his face turned north, instinctively searching out Ursa Major and Minor. A long time ago on an important day, someone had pointed it out. Let’s look for that bear-y thing. He never remembered if they had seen it.

  To my parents, Jaseup and Young Il Kim, who always told me stories.

/>   To Rob, who makes real life better than fiction, even for a dreamer like me.

  Thank you to my agent, Suzanne Gluck, for some of the most exciting, unforgettable days of my life. Thank you, Clio Seraphim, for your guidance throughout this process. The amazing folks at Random House have been a dream to work with. Thank you, Andy Ward, for the brilliant suggestion of the title. Thank you, Rachel Ake, for the gorgeous cover design. My endless gratitude to Avideh Bashirrad, Jessica Bonet, Susan Kamil, Leigh Marchant, Sally Marvin, Shona McCarthy, Kaela Myers, Melissa Sanford, Lucy Silag, Sona Vogel, and Alaina Waagner for their enthusiasm and hard work. Enormous thanks to my editor, Andrea Walker, who is a superhero and made this book immeasurably better.

  I am indebted to many books for historical research, but two in particular were essential: The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea, by Namhee Lee, and Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation, by Hagen Koo.

  Thank you to the writers, faculty, staff, and director of the NYU MFA program. Particular thanks to Emily Barton and Susan Choi, who are inspiring, generous humans in addition to being brilliant writers and teachers. Thank you, David Lipsky, for such relentlessly careful readings of my work—I still debate whether to use “the” or “a” (not to mention all the other word choice dilemmas) in certain sentences because of you. Thank you, Aleksandar Hemon, for your class on editing, which changed how I think about writing.

  Thank you to my first writing teacher, Anya Ulinich. Your humor and encouragement gave me so much courage. Thank you to fellow “Anya’s Kids,” Jason Merrell and Lori Azim, who are the closest people I have to office mates with our online shenanigans. I would be much less cheerful without your wacky loveliness.