by Eugenia Kim
Mr. Chae explained everything with many toothy smiles and outright laughter at his pleasure in repaying a debt to Inja’s mother. “I was the only son so I was sent to school.” He turned to Inja and said, “So you’re the daughter, eh? You should know what an enterprising woman she is.”
Inja asked Uncle what enterprising meant. He explained its meaning and said that Mr. Chae’s very appearance proved her resourcefulness.
“The winters in those hills were freezing, and the straw-and-coal-dust fuel we had was so feeble that none of us could hold a pencil for the cold.” He described how Inja’s mother cleverly fashioned the broken shutter, and that his father came to meet this teacher who was also a carpenter. “We repaired all the shutters, and from then on until the next year when they closed the school, I brought scraps of lumber and sawdust bricks to feed the stove.”
“What year was this?” said Uncle, looking thoughtful.
“I know it well—1942 to 1944—because in December 1942 I was supposed to be drafted, but for two years I never turned older than fifteen!” He laughed.
“Yaaah,” said Uncle. Inja gave him a questioning look, and he said, “Your mother was as much of a patriot as Grandfather at that time, and she created her own form of rebellion at great risk.” Inja pondered this for a while, and concluded that she, too, would like to form a rebellion someday.
When they reached Busan the following morning, Mr. Chae helped them situate and build their simple house. After that he made regular visits to the city, his lumber now in demand and selling at wartime prices. He asked Uncle to thank his sister for this bonus of work he wouldn’t have considered had he not driven them to Busan, and for adding to his growing list of things for which he felt gratitude.
Mail service in Busan was active and letters were exchanged. Packages from America began to arrive to their new home about once a week. Grandmother’s eyes were failing, and eyeglasses were impossible to acquire, both because of cost and availability. She asked Inja to read a letter received in early December during the first winter of the Korean War.
24 November 1950
Halmeoni, thank you for sending her artwork and writing. She draws quite well, better than most kindergartners, a true artist, as does Miran, both natural talents like their grandfather and uncle. I am sending you a ten-dollar bill. Please tell Dongsaeng to give it to Chae Longi. We can never repay him for all he has done for us. Though I worry every hour about your well-being, at least I am secure in knowing you have a sturdy home, small though it may be, and are far from conflict. The knowledge of your safety is my answered prayer. I mailed a package today. Perhaps Dongsaeng’s wife can sell a few things at the market to buy food and medicine.
Are you well? Is the house warm? Is there enough to eat? What kinds of things do you need? Is there no word from Cook? Is Inja taking care of you?
Yesterday was the American holiday of Thanksgiving and our missionary friend, Miss Lone, came to dinner along with a few Korean parishioners who have no family here. Miss Lone now works for a congressman—it was she who told Inja’s father many years ago about the job he now has, and she herself is an important worker in the government. The talk turned to home. You and Inja are always in my heart, and throughout the week my hopes were high that the war would end soon. With Seoul liberated and Pyeongyang captured, MacArthur said the troops would be home by Christmas, but Inja’s father says no one in his office can support that belief.
My greed for hope made me hasty in expecting war’s end. I will temper that now. But I do not want to worry you. You need to take care of yourself and eat well to get stronger to walk. I am so pleased to hear that you can stand up a little.
More tomorrow, but do tell me when you received this letter so I can know how long it takes to get there.
Grandmother smiled at Inja. “My blessings are great. No one else could take better care of me than you, my child.” She told her to fetch brush and ink, and she’d dictate a response on the empty backs of the letter just received—paper was scarce—turning the envelope inside out to use it again as well.
In those war years, Inja attended girls’ school in Busan and celebrated three of her birthdays and as many annual holidays with gifts from her mother’s packages. Among her favorite things were the surprising variety of sweets her sister, Miran, had collected on the odd American holiday of Halloween, including the Chuckles jelly candies her Sunday school teacher cut into bits so all the kids could have a taste. Everyone was certain each color tasted different. She got lots of clothes old and new, fresh pencils, white KEDS, and a can of Spam—the second most unforgettable present in her entire life, the first being the Bible storybook. Years later, even the memory of that tangy pink meat made her tongue tingle, its soft yet firm texture bursting savory meatiness with every chew. Aunt thinned the jelly juice with hot water, and they had it on their rice. For weeks afterward, Inja cut her fingertips playing with the sharp-edged tin and its little metal key wound tight inside the spiral left from stripping the can open.
Most of the clothes were distributed at their makeshift church, but the better items and special goods were bartered at the port markets a half-hour walk from Ami-dong. Inja often accompanied Aunt on these tasks to help carry bundles of clothes, bars of soap, toothbrushes and combs, the occasional luxury of a tin of talcum or bottle of cologne that could buy them a week’s worth of fish. For one of Inja’s birthdays, they received a pound of wheat flour, a tin of sugar, and instructions to make a birthday cake, but it failed because they had no fat and Aunt could only find one egg at market—and it cost them an entire bar of Camay soap. They ate the sweet biscuit thing anyway.
In the industrial section south of Ami-dong, ports bustled with towering ships delivering military vehicles and monstrous guns, and Inja would get glimpses of the big-nosed soldiers with hair of different colors and in all kinds of uniforms. She was most impressed with the Korean Navy Guard, their white gloves and helmets gleaming in the sun. The beloved MacArthur, who had liberated Korea from the Japanese, was often mentioned, but she wasn’t attentive to the details of war. The UN forces and the Americans had saved Seoul that autumn—then lost it to the Reds by winter, proving Uncle right in judging it unsafe to return home. Battles raged back and forth across and above the thirty-eighth parallel, and the Han men cheered at victories or glowered at defeats. Then came the grim reports about numberless Chinese troops crossing the Yalu River to further spread their communist dogma. When President Truman fired MacArthur, the entire city lamented, fearing that his replacement, Ridgway, wouldn’t command the same respect from his troops. Ultimately the opposite was true, and rumors spread about MacArthur’s delusions of grandeur in threatening the Chinese with the atomic bomb. Her uncle and grandfather agreed that fighting North Korea was one thing; entering war with China was something else altogether. This confused Inja, since the Chinese troops were already fighting alongside the North Korean People’s Army, but Uncle said it was politics, a term that always ended their conversations like an obstinate blockade.
Busan’s climate was milder than Seoul’s, though it did snow once toward the end of the first winter of the war. Uncle said the battlefields up north were the coldest ever—below zero—and as such, the communists weren’t the only thing killing the marines, civilians, or the enemy alike. At home in Seoul, if a blizzard rattled the doors or freezing temperatures iced the river and the streets, people would stay inside for days, but now up north, war would not wait. Icy winds howled through the hills of battlefields denuded by artillery and left a trail of deadly cold in its wake.
For Inja, the most frigid place she sat that winter was halfway down the hill, in a big brown tent holding the bare bones of a church her uncle and grandparents had formed with help from her family in America.
Days passed as before, but rougher, as if they lived the same life but on a lower, darker register. All of her classmates were equally occupied with family problems, lack of rice, today’s lessons, and who was friends with whom, so
while the children knew there was war, its movements and meaning meant little except hunger and hard times. Inja remembered the porter, Khang, and though his presence faded with time, on occasion she would smell roasted chestnuts or a citrus flower and the moment would grow heavy with yearning for Cook and Yun, for sweet slabs of remembered childhood in Seoul.
What began to matter was her absent mother, even if the packages she sent made Inja the best-dressed girl in Ami-dong. Uncle said her schoolmates teased her out of jealousy because of her connection to America. She did have that advantage, but she hated being known for it. She had clothes but little else. Textbooks were shared, white rice rare, and fresh fruit a thing of memory. Their diet was red and green mung beans and barley supplemented with vegetables from their garden, and Aunt was so dreadful at the fire-pit stove that the half-cooked beans made Inja’s belly swell.
All the girls walked to school with their mothers, sometimes an aunt or grandmother, and in the afternoons, the women waited outside the school to accompany their children home, to ask about their day and coo and praise artwork and checkmarks on papers. Outside that circle of women—in rain, snow, or shine, during field trips, on picnic days, and at school functions—there was Grandfather, silent and stately in his hanbok, and in inclement weather a gray fedora, his arms at rest behind his back or tucked inside his sleeves. When school let out, he would greet Inja with a solemn nod and they’d walk home. She wondered if he dreaded that moment as much as she did, all eyes turned to them. She could almost hear the tongues of the mothers clucking in their throats, the children smirking behind their hands. But she grew to love her grandfather’s quiet dignity, a refuge from the critical stares that continued throughout those Busan years.
Life in the close quarters of their two-room house often erupted. The biggest fight happened when Uncle received fifty dollars from Najin and gave it wholly to the church. “All that money!” said Aunt. “A rock instead of rice or a hired girl.” The church laid a granite cornerstone inscribed 1952 with the pen names of Inja’s uncle and mother, which became the name of the EunCheon church, meaning “hidden brook.” Nothing was hidden in that little wooden house. Every shout rattled the walls and shook Inja’s bones. But afterward, days would be filled with a veneer of calm, all the sharp edges in the house softened in the way that the ash from the crematorium’s chimney covered the hill.
Inja had at first believed the smokestack just beyond the ridge belonged to a leather factory, hence the odors, but it didn’t take long to learn what it really was and why so few others lived nearby. Every day, army trucks trundled up the rocky dirt road to the “factory,” gears whining. During the monsoons their first year in Busan, a nine-year-old boy had hopped on the back of a truck, slipped off the ramp, landed headfirst, and drowned in a flooded gulley. The newspaper reported he’d wanted a ride, but the neighborhood kids said someone had dared him to slap a body bag to prove he could survive such proximity to death. The boy’s death confirmed everyone’s innermost fear of the dead. Most of the children had seen and smelled corpses somewhere on the journey south, but revulsion of dead bodies went deeper, a long-held traditional fear of disease and decay that unnerved even the most Christian of them, like Inja’s family, who never talked about the white powder coating the cabbages and peppers in their kitchen garden, the flakes they combed from their hair, the mounds of gray cut through by their footpaths, the particles that seeped into the house and dusted their floors and cook pots, which they wiped clean every morning.
10
* * *
Dog-and-Pony Show
A cold snap in early October 1952 made the leafy canopy of Takoma Park brilliant with magenta and gold, the perfect backdrop for the Halloween parade on the elementary school grounds. Miran wanted to go as a war refugee, but Najin said, though it was an original idea, it wasn’t something fun and shouldn’t be chosen as a costume. “Go as a Korean princess instead—it’s prettier and we have lots of hanbok. They’re so colorful, no one will know it’s not how princesses dress.” But Miran knew, and in answering the questions about her costume, she said, “I’m a Korean girl.” The irony was missed by everyone, including herself. She didn’t win the first-grader’s prize—a robot child did—but she went trick-or-treating with the neighbor kids until nine-thirty that night, and Najin didn’t notice until she got home with toffee stuck between her teeth and a pillowcase half-full of candy and popcorn balls. Seeing her mother’s alarmed expression that was turning dark, Miran offered the pillowcase and said, “I got it for my sister.” She had so much candy, she really didn’t mind giving away most of it for the packages going to Korea, whose frequency had increased to once a week, sometimes two at a time.
Though Miran disliked having company for dinner since it meant she had to sit, quiet and still, while her parents had long conversations at the table in Korean, she enjoyed Thanksgivings both because Calvin cooked most of the feast and it was easier to be his helper than her mother’s helper. Plus their number-one guest, the bilingual former missionary Miss Edna Lone, made an effort to include her. She worked on Capitol Hill for a congressman from Maine, her original home. Whenever she visited, it was Miran’s joyful task to print Miss Lone’s outlandish utterances in her mother’s notebook, and this time she went on a riff of animal idioms for the child’s benefit, and they both laughed over:
Don’t have a cow
Kill two birds with one stone
Blind as a bat
Busy as a beaver
Mad as a wet hen
There’s more than one way to skin a cat
Dog-eat-dog world
Dog-and-pony show
The radio predicted a blizzard of epic proportions for Thanksgiving weekend, and a powdery snow was falling when the other guests arrived—two exchange students from Adventist College, and the Kims and their daughter, Sarah. When Miss Lone dug into her mashed potatoes, she said, “My mother would go to hell and back to make gravy like this!” Miran dropped her fork at the bad word and everyone laughed, even Najin.
The talk at the table grew serious, as it always did, and the language shifted to Korean as if only that language could contain the complexities of war and politics. Miran and Sarah cleared the dishes and made faces at each other. Then they threw snowballs outside until it got too wet and cold. Miran didn’t own a collection of Madame Alexander dolls like Sarah did, but they had almost as much fun with her Sears catalog cutouts.
Two weekends later, Najin dressed her up in Korean clothes almost as if it were Halloween, except she herself dressed in her best winter hanbok. Calvin said they’d be giving a presentation about Korea and the war for Miss Lone’s Red Cross Volunteers’ club, and her mother smiled and said in English, “A dog-and-pony show.” John, one of the exchange students, came with his car, and they packed his trunk with a roll map Calvin had brought from work, Korean display dolls in glass boxes taken right off the mantle, baskets emptied of their sewing notions, and lacquer and mother-of-pearl boxes. Miss Lone introduced them, and Najin gave her daughter a tiny prompt to start the program. Miran stood and sang the children’s songs “Mountain Rabbit” and “White Butterfly,” thoroughly charming the audience. While her father spoke, Miran sat still on a chair up front, her gloved hands folded in her lap, and sensed the approving eyes of her mother. She heard her sister’s name mentioned and listened.
“. . . our youngest daughter, Inja, who just turned six, is one of those Korean refugees forced to flee the communist invasion. For more than two weeks, my wife’s family went a hundred miles on foot with two elderly people and our daughter, from Seoul to a UN-protected village, while the capital city became a battleground for democracy. They are fortunate to be alive. And we recently learned that my wife’s cousin also fled Seoul days after the June invasion with her six-year-old daughter, but in the crowds of refugees she lost hold of her child’s hand, and to this day has not found her. These are the daily tragedies of the beleaguered Korean people . . .”
This last story
captured Miran’s imagination, and she visualized that poor girl of her same age wandering a desecrated Korean countryside in her hanbok, crying for her mother.
Calvin asked for donations of clothing and dried goods to send to the refugees, and they stood with John and Miss Lone to sing the Korean national anthem. Miran didn’t understand the words, but she knew the song well enough to sound out the syllables, and she saw that the soaring drama of its melody made her mother’s eyes fill with tears. Her own heart surged with a strange kind of pride and a complexity of emotions she was too young to untangle.
Thus began a series of presentations at civic clubs, churches, and community centers, and boxes and bags of donations soon filled the living room and spilled onto the front porch. The work to sort, clean, mend, pack, and ship was endless, and Miran began to dread the meetings for the constant coordinating of transportation—John, Miss Lone, a volunteer from the hosting organization, or the bus—and the tons of stuff they yielded. Then, that Christmas, Dr. Kim gave her father his old Plymouth Road King, saying he needed a legitimate excuse to buy himself a Cadillac Coupe de Ville with power windows, and this was the least he could do for the refugees. After several polite back-and-forths, Calvin accepted, and Miran became queen of the back seat, starlet of song and stage, never mind that her repertoire was nursery songs, her venue a church basement.
On Sunday, December 14, 1952, in the third winter of the Korean War, Najin hosted a few families to celebrate Miran’s birthday, two days late. Four girls—Miran, her friend Sarah, and Gloria Park and Susan Lee from church—sat at the kitchen table with special birthday food while their parents ate rice and Korean side dishes in the dining room. Najin had seen a picture in a donated Ladies’ Home Journal of hot dogs made to look like sailors in their bun jackets, banana slices for their hats, mustard faces and buttons, and dollops of ketchup for the sailor knot. The kitchen was decorated with balloons and crepe-paper streamers, and Miran couldn’t have been more pleased. Everyone gathered when she blew out her seven candles, and the child was so happy with her present of a fur-collared winter coat—new, from the store—that she refused to take it off, even though she was sweating, making Najin laugh.