The Kinship of Secrets

by Eugenia Kim

  The phone rang—another church member, calling Calvin to hear any news. Everyone had relatives in Korea. The Korean embassy knew nothing, could do nothing. At least Calvin had the latest news and offered prayers. Najin asked the Lord’s forgiveness for thinking that her husband was a better ambassador of Korea than the embassy staff themselves. He’d sent telegrams to her dongsaeng, younger sibling, every day, without answer or even confirmation of delivery. Neither of them could eat or sleep well. She heard him rustling around in the kitchen and went in. “Here, I’ll pack your dinner.” She filled his Thermos with coffee.

  “I meant to tell you,” said Calvin, “that American soldiers stationed in Japan are moving toward Suwon, and navy gunships have joined the battle.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better. The idea of gunfire and bombs in the streets of Seoul is horrifying. Where is my family? Where is our child? Why hasn’t he telegraphed?”

  “We’ll hear something soon, I’m sure of it, and you should rest,” said Calvin. “You’ve exhausted yourself with worry. You must pray.”

  “It only brings it to the fore,” said Najin. “I’d rather be distracted, though even then I feel bad for not being focused on this one thing.”

  Calvin donned his jacket and opened the mud porch door to retrieve his hat. “I’ll telephone you if there’s anything big that changes, and if you get a telegram today—”

  “I’ll call right away. Do you have a dime for the bus? Okay, goodbye.”

  Najin hugged her arms and scanned the backyard where Miran played near the woods. The garden beckoned her. The irises needed last year’s dead foliage cleared around new shoots, the arrow-like buds ready to burst in purple-bearded glory. Beside a low patio wall near the porch steps, the orange tiger lilies were in bloom, filling the rectangular patch edged with phlox. The slate patio reminded her of her childhood courtyard, and it touched her with nostalgia. Her stomach gripped with thoughts of Korea, and she turned to the house. The best remedy for worry was work—she could not follow her husband’s admonition to rest.

  Najin went to the basement and took the laundry outside to hang. Mrs. Bushong was gardening in the adjacent backyard, and she stopped to lean over the chain-link fence. “Mrs. Cho, I heard about Korea,” she said, tugging off her gardening gloves. “My boys were in the Philippines in the war.”

  She didn’t feel like chatting but had to be polite to this lady who had been so kind to Miran when Najin had been hospitalized. She put down the basket of clothes and waved, but didn’t approach the fence. She understood the Asia connection Mrs. Bushong had attempted, though it was somewhat off. “They too young,” she said of Mrs. Bushong’s two veteran sons who were ambulance drivers.

  “They signed up soon as they could. That’s how those boys were. You’ll have a boy one day and you’ll see what I mean.”

  Najin knew she meant well, but she felt a stab in her womb for her lost baby boy.

  “Why don’t you and Miran come for dinner tonight? My boys are out, and it’s just me and the mister. We got sparklers for the little one.”

  Najin put down the clothespins and neared the fence, hand extended to shake. “Is very kind, but I need near the telephone. Miran alone, okay?”

  “Sure, send her over.”

  Later when Mrs. Bushong brought the child home, she reported that they’d grilled hamburgers and had potato chips and Pepsi, and Miran was all smiles. Mrs. Bushong also carried a saucepan of chicken broth with rice for Najin, who forced herself to eat some of it while Mrs. Bushong was admiring Miran’s books, since she’d gone to so much trouble. The rice tasted like the cardboard box it came in, and Najin had trouble swallowing it. She prayed Mrs. Bushong would leave soon.

  After sunset when Mrs. Bushong finally left, Najin made rice without turning on the kitchen lights so the neighbor wouldn’t see her cooking. She told Calvin about the evening when he came home the next morning, and they laughed a little, but then felt guilty. Najin said, “We can’t know if Inja has rice or anything to eat. Such heartache.”

  She was worried sick, but nothing could be done. She cursed the world. Then she prayed.

  A telegram came Monday afternoon, and Najin was overcome. She shut the front door at once and tore the blue envelope open, forgetting to tip the delivery boy. Miran spied the young man pacing the porch before he left.

  Calvin, who was working a double shift again, came home at five o’clock with a rolled-up map that he spread on the dining room table. Miran kneeled on a chair and studied it with her parents. “The red dots are where battles have been reported,” her father said.

  “So many near Seoul,” said Najin. They talked about the other dots on the map, including green for American bombings. There were several mentions of Russia.

  Miran wanted to ask if the maps meant the atomic war was coming, but her mother told her to bring the magnifying glass from her father’s bureau in their bedroom. When she handed it over, her father was drawing a wavy line in yellow grease pencil down the peninsula to a green dot he called “Daegu,” and her mom bent close with the glass, saying, “Chowol, Chowol‑ri.”

  The telegram fell from the table, and Miran nabbed it. She found a piece of blue construction paper from her room and worked hard to copy the telegram’s heading, EAST WST GLOBL SERVICE TO CALVIN CHO TAKOMA PK MD FR KNG TEGU, in green crayon, and the strange message in brown letters: FAMLY SAFE CHOWOL RI WLL WIRE END. She showed her facsimile to her father, who taped it to the kitchen door and held her up to see it. “This means your sister is fine. They got out of Seoul before the invasion and somehow ended up in a tiny village somewhere north of Daegu, where we know the UN forces have gathered. We have no idea how it happened or who sent the telegram, but it’s good news.” He squeezed her and set her down, and the loss of his herbal smell, his strong arms and solid chest struck her with the surprise of an unknown need inadequately met. A tear sprang from her eye, and she grabbed his pant leg.

  He patted her head. “I have to go back to the office to bring home a more detailed map for your mother to find that village. But I have tomorrow off after lunch, so we’ll see the fireworks at night like always, okay?”

  “What about the parade?” she said, and regretted it when he frowned. She had been such a good girl lately, so invisible, and should have remained that way. “Maybe your mother will go, but if she can’t, I’ll ask Mrs. Bushong if she’s going and can take you.”

  On the muggy morning of July fourth, Najin said she needed to stay at home to wait for a telegram—the telegraph office never closed. Miran thought about the delivery boy pacing the porch and how her mother was now pacing similarly. Telegrams did that.

  Mrs. Bushong took Miran up the street to sit on the curb and watch the colorful floats, marching bands, cars with local dignitaries throwing candies, convertibles with lodge princesses, and the concluding fire engines. She came home in high spirits, gave her mother a pocketful of candy, and demonstrated bubble-gum blowing, her teeth stained blue, her fingers and cheeks sticky sweet, thanks to an indulgent Mrs. Bushong.

  She played outside with neighborhood kids all afternoon and was so sweaty that Najin gave her a bath before sundown and the fireworks. When Najin poured bathwater over her head and shoulders, she seemed unaware of the soap getting into Miran’s eyes and was absentminded with the rough washcloth. Though Miran knew she had no right to call for her busy mother’s attention, she had to ask, “Did the messenger boy come?”

  Najin smiled, surprised. “He didn’t come today. Maybe tomorrow. He brought good news yesterday, and we hope he will bring more.”

  “A red-letter day,” said Miran, and was gratified to have made her mother laugh.

  Calvin made popcorn, and they took the bus to the school field for the fireworks display. Things seemed like normal then, lying together on a blanket oohing and aahing over the fireworks. With fingers over her ears against the booms, Miran claimed the blue ones, then the red ones as her favorites. Her mother liked the green bursts, and her fathe
r laughed that only white was left for him. On impulse she asked, “What would be my sister’s favorite?”

  Neither of her parents answered or spoke for a while, and all the fun left their little family island on that blanket. If Miran’s ears hurt with these explosions, what was it like for her little sister where real bombs with real explosions were going off? She feigned a big yawn and said she was tired. They left before the grand finale, and no one spoke the whole way home. She knew it was her fault.

  5 July 1950. I long for more news of my daughter. What use is it to write letters? My heart does not know what to do. How big a resentment and bitterness Inja must have toward a world where her mother and father left her to suffer. There is no way I can help her, or make her understand, to ease her pain for the fate I put her in. A few nights ago, many scenes from the past of her infant face, of her growing, passed before my eyes. In the afternoon I had a fever since I did not sleep. Poor pitiful child, there is no way to bring her here. My heart burns knowing I made a lifelong wrong decision. Is this our destiny for years to come?

  It made me so sad to see a photo of some mother and daughter in Korea who had drowned together in the river. What guarantee is there that my Inja, my parents, and my brother are not in the same predicament? Who knows the void in my heart?

  Only when I think of how good Miran has been behaving does my mind ease and I can have some comfort.

  The wind has turned and the curtains billow with the smell of summer rain, wetting the floor. I must close the window, but I give this last prayer: Forgive me, Lord, if in the darkest places hidden deep in my heart—hidden even from my own sincerity—there should reside the thought that I have brought the wrong daughter to America.

  A week later on Monday the tenth, when Miran returned home from sneaking out to the park, Najin told her they’d gotten a good telegram and asked if she wanted to go to the library. “We haven’t done many things together this summer, and I think you need books to keep you near so I know where to find you.” But she wasn’t at all angry at Miran and showed her the telegram. “I will read it to you.”

  ALL WELL INJA FINE STOP ONE WEEK AT REFUGEE CAMP TOO CROWDED STOP SEOUL EMBATTLED FLED SOUTH STOP COOK MISSING STOP NEED MONEY NABI INN AT CHUNGBOOKDO UMSUNMYON GUMWANGLI ADVISE NEXT END

  Miran understood the first few words, but the rest made no sense. She gave her mother a questioning look, and Najin said it was impossible to write Korean in English. “You’re such a good English speller that when you’re older, you can turn it into the same spellings for the whole world.” Miran beamed, though she knew it meant she’d have to learn Korean, and this was another reminder that she didn’t speak it.

  “This says”—Najin folded the telegram—“that your sister is safe at an inn in a little village, as are all your relatives from Seoul. It’s a miracle they got that far on foot, and you should pray thanks for their safety in the middle of wartime.” She gave a quick spontaneous prayer, and they walked to the library, eight blocks away.

  Miran checked out ten children’s picture books, five on her card, five on her mother’s card, and did stay home reading for several days. But as the week progressed, the relief and ease of that library-going Monday slipped into a renewed kind of tension, with much talk of President Truman, something called “a police action,” money, kimchi-making for money, sewing for money, discussions that touched on edges of anger, which quieted everyone for a time, many mentions of her sister’s name and her mother blowing her nose, then her own name mentioned for unknown reasons—until it all stopped. She never found out why.

  By Friday, Calvin said the war still had not advanced to Geumwang village. How long could they live at an inn? The longer the war went on, the more impossible it would be to pay for an inn. What would stop the communists from taking the entire peninsula? Calvin reported that the UN forces in Busan had built a stronghold in Daegu and would soon travel north for certain victory. Then Najin’s family could go home—everyone could go home, the nation united. But Najin trusted nothing when it came to war. She had known its desperation, its deprivation, its shifting disposition. Something must be done.

  She grabbed the Yellow Pages from the telephone table and sat to pore through the restaurant listings. Surely there would be a Chinese or even a Japanese restaurant who might want to buy Korea’s famed kimchi. She wrote out a list of a half-dozen Chinese and one Japanese establishment. Calvin could later make the sales calls. He could also find a wholesale market to buy cabbages and spices in bulk, though it would cost extra to have them delivered.

  Satisfied with the earning potential of gallons of kimchi (aware that she was counting her chickens before the eggs hatched), Najin went downstairs and cleaned up the utility sink area, where she would fashion a work station for her kimchi-making business. Then she went around the house watering her many plants: philodendron, African violets, purple coleus, and ferns. Mrs. Victoria Kim had started her with a few cuttings when they moved to DC, and now she had pots full of lush plants. What a luxury to have greenery in the house! She emptied the watering can in the ferns and thought, I’ve fed Miran, her father, and now these plants, yet I can do nothing to help my family in danger. The fears she’d swallowed made the porch floor spin, and she knew, because she felt helpless and fragile, that she must lie down.

  Prone on the couch, Miran playing nearby cutting pictures out of a Sears catalog, Najin searched her memory for people she knew from Chungcheongbuk Province or even the neighboring provinces. She thought back to the time during the depression, soon after her family’s move to Seoul, when she’d left to work at the orphanage in Suwon. Perhaps the director was still there. His name popped into her memory at the same time she recalled she’d been forced to leave the orphanage when he professed his love. Stupid man! He was married, too, and with her husband absent—in America—she was too vulnerable for this unwanted attention. Those beloved orphan boys were lost to her because of his weakness.

  She went to the kitchen sink to put dishes away and looked outside to the cloudless sky, a brief prayer on her lips for the boys, now men if they’d survived the Pacific War, and now this invasion. Thinking of the orphans and Suwon brought back the eager eyes of other children from her first teaching job after Ewha College—in Yeoju County near Icheon—and in that instant she found the solution for her family. According to Calvin’s description and the map he had drawn for her, her family would have passed through Icheon on their journey south.

  In the remote mountain village of Wolsong in Yeoju County, she had been principal, teacher, and hunger-staver for a one-room classroom of eight girls and five boys, aged seven to fifteen. She taught them grammar, arithmetic, history, and geography, and showed the older girls how to find and prepare edible plants in the forest and meadows. After sending money home to her father for her brother’s college tuition, she spent her remaining spare wages to buy barley and dabs of miso for soup to feed the children. In her first winter in that tiny village, a fallen tree had shattered a window. She lamented the loss of glass but created a sturdy shutter by refashioning the wooden drawer from her desk.

  A fifteen-year-old student, a boy named Longi, was so impressed with her ingenuity, he described it to his father, who owned a lumber mill in the neighboring town, Icheon. The next day Longi brought a few boards and hand tools to make shutters to protect the other windows, and the added insulation kept her classroom warmer for the remainder of the season. As principal, she was required to report to the Japanese when youths turned sixteen, the age for military conscription, but in her two years there, until her post ended from lack of funding, somehow none of the students, including Longi, grew older than fifteen. Longi’s father came to see her before she left, told her his name and how to find him should she ever need to fix more shutters or any other sort of assistance a grateful mill owner could provide.

  Icheon might be less than forty kilometers from Geumwang village—and the inn. She couldn’t remember the father’s name, but wrote down Chae Longi in her di
ary, underlining it twice. She calculated he’d be about twenty-four years old now, and as the only son was undoubtedly running the mill with his father. With Calvin’s help, she could find him . . .

  9

  * * *

  Busan

  Between the Nakdong River delta and the busy ports in Busan lay Ami-dong, the small Ami neighborhood. Only the poor had lived on its precipitous hill, but now, with this southern city congested by refugees, all available living space was crammed with ramshackle dwellings occupied by rich and poor alike. Still, in the sheer inclines toward the summit, pockets of meadow remained, and Inja’s family made plans to build a small house there. Its undesirable location was further underscored by the odorous and ashy emissions of a tall smokestack just over the crest—a tannery, Inja was told.

  Sufficient wood, brick, and mortar were acquired from the man who’d rescued them from the inn at Geumwang village, where they’d lived for several worrisome weeks, waiting for some kind of answer, and money, from Inja’s parents to whom Uncle had sent a telegram. The inn’s inflated fees had drained most of their cash, and Uncle wanted to continue journeying south, but ahead lay the Sobaek Mountain range, and, besides, the cart axle had snapped.

  Then seemingly out of providence itself came an old truck, its bed half-filled with building materials and a cheerful driver at the wheel. “Inja’s mother sent me to take you all the way to Busan!” he cried at their perplexed expressions. For the first half of the ride, Inja’s grandparents and aunt rode in the back of the truck along with their belongings and the dismantled cart, and Inja sat up front with Uncle and the driver, Mr. Chae. His father was the millwright in Icheon, about fifty kilometers from the inn. Inja sat on her hands to soften the bumpy ride. They passed rock walls with determined bushes sprouting from crags, an old pine forest, and after the road flattened she saw villages in the distance, rice fields, occasional groups of refugees walking south, a bloated dead mule covered with flies.