by Eugenia Kim
They turned the corner toward home, quiet, and neared their small front yard edged with hedges. Najin said, “You mustn’t forget your language; we’ll go home soon—perhaps later this year.”
Miran ignored her; she’d heard this so often it had lost its meaning. It meant her mother was missing her family, primarily the baby—her little sister—left behind, but Miran was thinking about the baby they’d lost at the hospital and how the water had run as red as a valentine when her father had hosed off the brown stains on the sofa cushions.
On this companionable walk home in the bright morning, even while planning squash soup for Miran’s father, they couldn’t have known that at that moment at the Voice of America he was poring over the AP, UP, and BCC teletypes. Calvin Cho worked as a translator and broadcaster at the VOA Korean Service during the week, in addition to his pastoral duties at the Korean church. As the teletypes ticked, Calvin juggled the shifting reports of attacks, counteroffensives, retreats, impasses—and worse, his own fears about his daughter living in Seoul with his in-laws. He hadn’t told Najin about the North Korean invasion earlier because he assumed the action would end up being another inconsequential skirmish. But now he feared the worst, God forbid, a communist aggression that could slide into a devastating nuclear world war. This news was too important and fraught with miscommunication for a telephone call; he would tell Najin about the invasion when he got home at dawn. She would be frantic with worry about Inja and her family in Seoul, and he would have to give her assurances that—except for his enduring faith in God’s mercy—he didn’t have.
3
* * *
Southbound Journey
Tuesday morning in Seoul, the sun rose to light the way for a trickle of people leaving their homes, soon to join like-minded travelers on the main road to the train station and other points farther south. Smoke fringed the northern skyline above the hills, deceptively graceful tendrils billowing from missiles and fires lit by the invading Red Army. Worry creased the brows of those who saw the dark clouds, and rumors swirled as the day progressed. Soon, hundreds upon hundreds of Seoul’s citizens mobbed the roadway, all fleeing south to perceived safety. A wave of confusion marked by shouts surged from the left, and hysteria seemed to balloon until a man bellowed, “Calm down! Panic won’t move you any faster!” The refugees settled down and trudged one foot before the other, men’s backs and women’s heads laden with bundles, suitcases, urns—all manner of valued possessions.
Amidst the thickening crowd, a two-wheeled oxcart piled high with the Han family belongings juddered on the dirt road. Inja perched on its front ledge, and her pant legs snagged splinters on the rough pine. Her uncle held the position of the ox, the cart shaft tethered with a rope harness around his chest, his shoulders and legs the primary source of locomotion. Aunt and Grandfather each carried a basket of provisions strapped to their backs and pushed from behind. Grandmother sat atop. To see the scores of refugees allowed Uncle his righteous harrumph to Aunt that the decision to leave was well supported, but their sluggish pace allowed Aunt her righteous argument for staying home.
They neared the main paved road, and Uncle strained against the ropes into the turn. The cart slid into a rut and jostled its cargo. Something thudded into Inja’s back and shot her face down in the dirt. A wheel spun out of its rut and gained speed inches from her head. She screamed. The wheel groaned over clods of dirt a finger’s width from her hair, and she tasted dust, a millstone crushing bone. Her own cries, mixed with Uncle’s shouts, sounded far away. He grabbed her and drew her to his chest, his body wedged against the cart. Grandfather tugged from the rear and Aunt snatched wooden blocks and chocked the wheels. The crowd parted around their rickety wood island with its mountain of bundles. Grandmother hung on to a rope with one hand, the other covering the fear she held in her mouth.
Inja’s arms clamped around Uncle’s neck, and her legs strangled his waist as her tears soaked his shirt. He hugged her hard and squeezed between the cart and the sea of refugees to deposit her next to Grandfather. She leaned against her grandfather’s thighs and was moored by his newspaper-and-tobacco smell, his long artist’s fingers firm on her shoulders. Uncle climbed on the cart, untied its crisscrossed rope, and handed a domed iron pot to Aunt. “Not that,” Aunt said. “That’s the best one.”
“The other one’s buried. She’ll sit up here with Halmeoni. Carry the pot or leave it behind.”
“Inja can sit on it—she’s small enough to sit inside. She should’ve held on tighter. We shouldn’t have left home—this awful crowd!”
“Yah, do you want to carry the pot or your niece?”
Inja hid her face in her grandfather’s hanbok, his Korean gentlemen’s clothes, and he patted her shoulder.
“I’m already loaded like a mule,” said Aunt, snatching the cook pot. “We can’t leave it—she can carry it in her lap.”
“Woman! Then tie it to the shaft, but leave me enough rope.”
At the front of the cart, Aunt threaded rope through the pot handles, griping. “We’ve already been walking an hour. Who can keep up with all these people shoving and pushing? We’ll never make it to Suwon like this. Didn’t I say we should’ve stayed home? The hardship! Traveling with two old folks and a child who isn’t even ours. And what about the servants—a woman and her skinny brat at home—so who’s going to protect our house, and who can trust the president, and why should we trust that you know where you’re going . . .”
“Enough!” said Grandfather, a scolding so rare it stopped her rant.
Uncle hefted Inja high next to Grandmother, who tucked her hand with Inja’s under the rope. “Thank God, you’re safe. Hold tight and you’ll be fine,” she said, hard consonants hissing through lips weakened from last year’s stroke. “We ride like royalty, eh? Usually an all-day walk to Suwon.”
Inja welcomed the warmth of Grandmother’s hand. “Why are we going to Suwon?”
“There are rumors that President Rhee moved the government to that city, so we will all be safe there.”
“Where will we sleep?” Inja said.
Grandmother’s smile deepened the intricate web of wrinkles around her eyes. “Your mother once worked at an orphanage near there. The jeon you give at church feeds those poor little orphans. The man in charge is an old family friend.”
“Will we meet the orphans?” Inja had never met an orphan. Were they dirty and scrawny like the kids on the roadside who begged and scratched their lice-filled hair—or did they look a little like her? Earlier in the spring, a teenage boy in her Sunday school had called her an orphan as if it were a dirty word. The children were playing team tag during the grownups’ fellowship hour. Inja’s teammates trapped this boy in a circle and she tagged him, but he said it didn’t count to be tagged by a mongrel orphan. Everyone laughed, and Inja said that she did too have parents—but her throat burned. Their teacher also heard him and forced him to apologize, but Inja had heard the sneer in his “sorry.”
“Yes, we’ll visit the children,” said Grandmother, “and though we aren’t at all rich, you’ll see how much poorer they are. They may crowd around you and stare, so be polite and treat them nicely.”
Inja blurted, “Will they know we’ve gone to Suwon?”
“Your mother and father?” said Grandmother in her usual considered way.
Inja nodded. She knew the question made little sense, but she worried about the thread between her parents and herself and how easily it frayed to nothing. Days, even weeks would pass before she thought about her family in America until a letter or a package came. She was just a baby when her parents had taken her older sister, Miran, to America with them. They were supposed to come back soon but never did.
“I’ll write to your mother when we get to Suwon,” said Grandmother. “We’ll stay a week, two at most.” All her wrinkles curled in her smile. “Even if your mother doesn’t know where you are at this moment, God always knows.”
Inja hid a frown. Grandmother said this of
ten enough to make her uncomfortable, like God was a mosquito bite one forgot about until it itched again. When adults asked her if she missed her mother and father, she readily said, “Yes,” but surely God knew she didn’t have an answer. Would he think she was lying? Perhaps he understood that she didn’t know what it meant to miss one’s parents.
Grandmother tucked Inja’s hair around her ear. “Your mother may not know exactly where you are or what you’re doing, but she has you in her heart always. She prays for you and knows you’re safe with family.”
This oft-repeated sentiment soothed Inja deeper now than when Grandmother expressed it after a package from America was delivered. She curled her hand into her grandmother’s dry and scratchy palm.
The cart creaked and lumbered to the rhythm of Uncle’s stalwart shoulders and able legs making way through the crowd. Inja relaxed at her higher vantage point and counted the princess trees rising above roadside walls, the sweet perfume of their bell-shaped flowers wafting amongst the smells of sweaty people, tobacco, and sewage. Though a few vendors hawked cigarettes and whatnot, most shops were shuttered and gates padlocked, unusual for a weekday morning. She shifted her bottom and admired her blue KEDS sneakers in the sunlight. They brought to mind her pre-dawn inventory of the things her mother had sent her and what she’d left behind, and she remembered whom they’d left behind as well.
“I miss Cook and Yun. I wish we didn’t have to leave them,” she said.
Her grandmother sighed in answer. The warm air whirled with noise—shuffles, snatches of words, babies crying, complaints, hums, the creaking cart. “Your mother didn’t want to leave you, either,” said Grandmother.
Inja’s eyes opened wide. Perhaps because we choose to be ignorant about things we most fear, she had never before considered to ask why she hadn’t gone to America, too.
“You should know this.” Grandmother’s eyes shifted to an unknowable distance, as if to gather words from the past. “It would have been a difficult overseas journey with two babies, your sister just out of diapers and you just weaned. They promised to return in a year or two, but I had a premonition before they left that I would never again see your mother or you two girls. Your sister was a sickly baby and had almost died—”
Inja’s ears grew as alert as a rabbit’s. “Is that when she had the scarlet fever?” She remembered that story because she’d imagined her sister as a little red girl.
“No.” Her lips softened. “This is a story about you. I had a dream.”
Inja’s family attended to their dreams. In the letter that came with the Bible storybook, her mother had described a dream she had when pregnant with Inja, foretelling that she would be a girl. Her mother had learned to be alert to her dreams during her fourth month of pregnancy because Grandmother’s own fourth-month pregnancy dreams had accurately predicted her children’s gender.
Among the sea of heads, baskets, and bundles surrounding them on the road, Grandmother said, “The dream was troublesome and I prayed for guidance. I was in a factory filled with broken looms and spindles. There were no workers, and though the machines’ arms were split in pieces, the looms clacked and the spindles spun on their own—so noisy I couldn’t hear my footsteps. But I could hear a baby crying and knew it was you. The racket grew louder, as did your cries, and I was in a panic to know which way to turn. I woke up then and thought little of it. But when I fell back asleep, and for the next two nights, I dreamed the same thing, and each time my panic grew until I woke to find tears on my cheeks.”
Inja sat still, her round eyes wide.
“Yes, dreams are sometimes more real than life. If something worries you for days, you must free it from your heart before it becomes the splinter that festers into a wound. Do you understand?”
She nodded. She’d seen the crown of thorns piercing Jesus’s bleeding heart in her Bible storybook.
“I told your mother and we prayed together for many days, and she decided Miran should go, but you should stay with us.”
The cart jolted and Grandmother grabbed Inja’s knee, but both sat securely. The crowd surged around them.
“So don’t blame your parents,” said Grandmother. “It was as much my doing as theirs.”
The many questions this story raised only increased Inja’s confusion. How did the decision rise from the dream? She also hadn’t known that blame was deserved, or even how to blame parents who were ghost people. Perhaps if she’d been older than the child she was atop that cart, she could’ve vocalized what lay inside her unformed heart: what did this half-told story mean? Why her sister, Miran, rather than herself? Everybody wanted to go to America. Mountains of gold, streets strewn with coins, heaven on earth were the sayings, though her mother wrote that it wasn’t at all true.
Grandmother closed her eyes, and Inja held her hand to ensure she wouldn’t topple over as she dozed. With her grandmother’s warmth beside her, her confusion subsided. She had everything she needed.
4
* * *
Duck and Cover
In the kitchen Miran and her mother ate lunch by themselves after Calvin called to say he’d be working a double shift. Miran was glad because they would save the awful-colored squash-blossom soup for when he came home that night. He usually worked the night shift at the Voice of America, coming home early in the morning to sleep until after lunch. But he hadn’t come home at all that morning, and phone calls were exchanged between her parents. This in itself was unusual—her father rarely called home because of the cost—and though the calls were short, her mother’s initial shout, then her terse Korean alerted Miran to unknown tensions.
So when Najin brought her sewing to the sofa beside the big shortwave radio, Miran asked if she needed help threading needles. “Yah, good girl.” Her mom gave her the pincushion and a spool of green thread. “This is for you and your sister.” She displayed two cotton dresses.
Miran hated green, Najin’s favorite color, but she said, “They’re pretty. We’ll be like twins.” She would appreciate having a sister at home, and a twin would be a bonus. Would it be like talking to oneself in the mirror? Miran never talked to her mirror image—too shy even to talk to herself out loud.
On the couch she rearranged the pinheads on the tomato-shaped pincushion to make pleasing concentric circles, but her mother didn’t notice.
Najin said, “Your sister is so far away, we worry. There’s trouble in Korea.”
She didn’t know how to ask about her father’s phone calls, or why they’d worry—her sister had always been far away. She knew what it meant to be in trouble—playing too loudly or straying too far to hear being called. But she couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble Korea could be in, so she squinted her eyes and licked the end of the thread. The radio was tuned to her father’s VOA station, and when her mother turned up the volume, she heard his melodious formal Korean, tinny through the speaker. “Is that Daddy?”
“Yes, but this is a rebroadcast. It’s nighttime in Korea, and he’s not on air right now. I wanted to hear the news; I missed hearing about the invasion, or I heard it and thought it was nothing—though it’s nothing for you to worry about.” But her mother sounded jittery, almost angry.
Miran’s uneven comprehension of her mother’s sentences, plus what meaning she discerned from tone, combined with the building strain of the day to yield a pervasive sense of dread. She wished her fluent-in-English father was home so she could ask if the Russians were going to attack with atomic bombs. Every morning in nursery school before milk-and-cookies and recess, a siren blared from a flagpole on the playground for the atomic air-raid drill. The teacher would yell, “Drop!” and all the children would crawl under their desks, fold up their bodies, hands behind necks, until minutes passed and the siren sputtered to silence. At first she thought it was a game, but by winter she’d seen the Bert the Turtle filmstrip called “Duck and Cover,” and she grew afraid. Flying glass, rampant fire, walls collapsing—she hustled under the desk, her mind filled with image
s of mayhem like in the paintings of Hell found in the art books on the shelf below the shortwave.
Calvin came home midafternoon and had a short but intense talk with Najin, his tones soothing though officious. Najin turned and said to Miran in an angry voice, “Your father and I will get the laundry. You stay inside.” Miran was certain she hadn’t done anything to make her mother so angry as to be red in the face, so she sneaked into her parents’ bedroom to peek out the window into the backyard, wondering if her father would get a scolding. They were taking shirts and towels from the clothesline, and her mother’s voice rose and fell, impassioned and questioning, against his steady, placating tones. Then her mother snatched a washcloth from the clothesline so suddenly the clothespins popped off. She covered her face with it, and her shoulders shook. Witnessing this strange behavior made Miran both afraid and guilty, and she hurried back to the living room to tidy up the sewing notions.
Calvin went to bed until suppertime. Later at the dinner table, he asked Miran what she did that day but wasn’t focused on her answer. He launched into a prolonged conversation with her mother, and Miran grasped that their relatives were in trouble, not because they’d done anything wrong, but because Korea was fighting with itself. Sometimes her father lapsed into English, as he often did when repeating himself, and she heard, “Your brother knows better. He’s lived through war, and he’ll stay put,” and, “I’m sure she’s safe. He would’ve telegraphed if there was need.” Her mother’s tone in response was scornful and impatient.
She wondered if it meant more packages would be sent, checks in airmail envelopes, telegrams, or the most costly means of communication—an overseas telephone call that took hours, sometimes a day, to execute. Her mother ate little, not even the ugly soup she’d reheated, nor did she chastise Miran for not touching hers. Miran would wait until she had her father alone doing the dishes together as they always did. But he went back to bed after dinner, and she and her mother put away the food and cleaned the kitchen without talking.