by Eugenia Kim
“Yah,” said Uncle. “You’re going to have to write and ask her.”
“I think it’s very exciting, sir, and a wonderful opportunity.” He was a good friend, so positive. He added, “I believe all her classmates will be quite jealous of her going to America.”
“You see?” Uncle said to Inja, and she attempted a smile that came out as a scowl.
“Here’s where I turn off,” said Hyo. “Will she have time to come over this afternoon for another piano lesson? May we spend next Saturday together downtown?” How polite he was, and how kind.
“Of course. Her last day of school will be Friday, so everything will be normal until then.” But Inja knew nothing would ever be normal again. She bowed goodbye as Hyo walked backward to wave before he turned and strode off toward his school.
“A cultured young man,” said Uncle, his eyes teasing. Inja couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Hyo, too. Their friendship had rescued her from ridicule, and their regular little club of four had elevated her status to “sophisticated” within the girls’ school. Who now would save her from the petty meanness of girls, which she was sure existed in America as much as it did here. At least she would have parents and even a sister in the same grade. But what about her mother? Though Inja knew something of her through her letters, in reality she knew nothing about her. What did she smell like? Did she wear perfume? How did her hands move? What kind of shadow did she cast? Was she a happy person? Did she like to laugh and sing like Grandmother had? Inja knew she was industrious—always her letters described one job or another, a sewing project or preparations for a dinner or church event. She prayed her mother wasn’t crabby like Aunt.
Inja couldn’t say why she feared meeting her mother more than she did her father and sister. Perhaps it was because her mother had expressed her yearning for a reunion so often through her letters that Inja feared she would never be able to meet her expectations. What about her own expectations? All she felt now was resentment at having to leave. And anger.
The principal of Inja’s school wanted to have an assembly to celebrate her unique opportunity, but she asked if she could leave as usual on Friday without a fuss. The principal studied her for a few seconds and said, “We’ll miss the most artistically talented student in this school. I wish you well. Don’t forget us and write often.” Inja and Uncle bowed, he went home, and she went to class, aware now of her unwanted special status of being bound for America. She felt like she was on a runaway bus with barred windows.
That Saturday Hyo planned an outing at Jongmyo Shrine in central Seoul. The four friends took the tram to the shrine—which Inja had toured with her elementary school long ago—and strolled through the open gates down the main path. No one walked on the raised middle pathways, crumbing in many places but still intact, reserved for royalty. They teased each other and talked about what each of them might do their first day in America. Going to a record store was high on the list, under the assumption that being in America meant they would be rich. But soon the austerity of the budding trees and still ponds made them pay attention to their sacred surroundings. Jongmyo Shrine was the only historic site left fully intact throughout Japanese colonization and the Korean War. Its buildings needed paint, the grounds needed cultivation and tidying, but the structures and plazas were much as they had been for hundreds of years—broad cobblestoned expanses in front of elongated buildings, all their many identical doors shuttered and bolted, which contained the memorial tablets of five centuries of Yi Dynasty kings and queens. In hushed tones, Hyo explained how the plazas and certain side buildings were used for Confucian rites and offerings.
Yuna and Junghi wandered to the secondary plaza while Inja and Hyo contemplated the faded expanse of the shrine against a backdrop of gray sky. “I wish I had my sketchbook,” Inja said.
“I can see why.”
“It would be three lines of different grays,” she said. “You know so much about this; I’m surprised I know so little.” She kicked at a tuft of weeds poking between the stones at the edge of the plaza.
“You’re Christian and probably they didn’t teach you about Confucian rites on purpose.” He bent to tug at the weeds.
“‘For I am a jealous God, and thou shalt not have any other gods before me.’ First commandment, I think,” Inja said. “Exodus. I have to practice how to be a minister’s daughter.” A wan smile to cover an inner quake.
He rose and crushed the grassy weeds between his fingers. She smelled their rough and wild green.
“And those very commandments say to ‘honor thy father and mother,’ right? Who came first,” he asked, eyes teasing, “Confucius or the Bible? They didn’t know the Christian god until Western missionaries came to the Far East, and that was only a century ago. The Buddhists and Taoists were tolerated, but Confucianism was the religion of the state long before the Christians came.”
Because of Inja’s grandparents—both educated aristocrats—Confucian thinking had always been a part of her family life. “I thought it was a tradition, not a religion.” They left the plaza and wandered in the thin woods toward a colonnade and gateway.
He took her hand. “Is there a difference?”
“There’s a difference of faith.”
“Don’t you believe all the Confucian lessons you’ve learned all your life? Isn’t that a kind of faith?”
“There’s the difference of having faith in Jesus as your savior.”
“Is that so different than having faith in revering your ancestors and their beliefs, and in that way keeping them alive, in heaven?”
Inja couldn’t answer because his logic confused her, and also because it was true that during their twice-weekly church classes that had led to her being confirmed Christian at thirteen, she’d had many questions she couldn’t formulate. She stopped and leaned against a column, and its splintered wood caught the threads of her angora sweater. The carved ceiling beams of the weathered colonnade had an elegant symmetry that repeated in a harmonious pattern growing smaller as it stretched toward the plaza. She wanted to memorize the beauty of that repetition to sketch, the beauty of her ancient background that stretched beyond where she could see, that she was just learning more about—and from which she was also on the verge of leaving.
Hyo stepped in front of her, and she found his eyes, calm and smiling, as he pressed the frown from her forehead. He neared and touched his parted lips to hers. She tasted softness and shivering. They kissed again, then broke out in laughter for the sheer joy of it. As if it were an everyday thing, they held hands and smiled at each other, America the furthest possible thought in her mind, and kissed again, once more, then turned from the colonnade to find Yuna and Junghi.
Part IV
* * *
Reunion
1963–1973
26
* * *
Family Meeting
After the dinner guests left on Palm Sunday, Calvin called a family meeting. Miran, washing dishes, knew it would be about Inja coming. For a month her parents had been talking about Inja finally being reunited with them, and now with date certain—next Friday—their excitement was palpable. Other than her old feelings of resentment and jealousy, which she recognized as being old and therefore ought to be discarded, she had no idea what to expect of a Korean sister and wanted to get a clue from this meeting. Otherwise, it’d be the usual Bible reading and singing of hymns, meaning she’d be on the piano. But she had already performed for Miss Lone and five other guests, so she hoped to be relieved of that duty, which seemed strange and pointless when it was only the three of them. Calvin sipped coffee and read the paper in the living room, while Najin boiled water in the rice pot to save the last bits stuck on the bottom.
Soon they all settled in the living room. Miran’s parents had been behaving strangely, emotional and anxious in their own ways. Her mother talked on the phone for hours and stayed up late fussing with her papers. Her parents had gone clothes shopping at Ward’s, something her mother rarely did
. And she had Miran help organize and clean the sewing room. Miran even had to clean the basement around the washing machine and kimchi station. Her father painted the downstairs bedroom, washed the car, repaired the dripping bathtub faucet, waxed the floors, dug in the garden, mended the porch screens. She didn’t find helpful clues in their behavior about what it would be like to have her Korean sister at home, except things were cleaner and in better shape than before. Apparently royalty was coming.
“How is school?” said Calvin.
“Good. Mrs. Samson is going to send one of my etchings to the Montgomery County Fair.”
Najin mentioned something about there being two talented artists in the family.
Miran wondered, who was the better artist? She wanted to be the best, as she was among the best in school. She wondered if Koreans drew differently but figured that was a ridiculous idea. Drawing was drawing; it was the individual artist who made art different. She didn’t like the feeling of competition that rose inside. She said to her father, “After school’s out we’re going camping at Swallow Falls, the second weekend in June, and I need a permission slip and ten dollars dues. Is that okay?” She knew it was queer of her to still belong to Campfire Girls, but it was one of a few places she didn’t feel a self-consciousness so awkward that it was as if she were seeing herself in the third-person point of view she’d learned about in English class—from distant and critical eyes that were never her own. The only other time she could sort of relax was with her school friends. And now this.
“We’ll see,” he said. “Which leads me to our discussion about your sister.”
Practically speaking and based on her experiences, Miran dreaded yet another Korean person who’d stay for weeks or months—and now, forever—taking the sewing room and all the attention in the house, of which there wasn’t much anyhow. She’d have to cook extra and clean extra and be extra nice to the guest who didn’t speak a lick of English. “Has something changed?”
“No,” said Calvin. “It’s still next Friday, but we should nail down some details. We’ll all go to the airport to meet her, but now others will be joining us, some church people. I’ll give you a note to excuse you from school.”
“How’s she getting here?”—a question for her dad, who loved timetables and maps.
“She’ll be flying from Seoul to Tokyo, to Anchorage, Alaska, to refuel and go through customs, then land here at National Airport on Northwest Orient Airlines—an almost nonstop flight. One of these days they’ll make it nonstop, I’m sure.”
“Sounds like a long trip.” She pulled at a run in her nylons at the knee and made it ladder up under her skirt.
“Considering it’s taken more than fifteen years to bring her home, I don’t think seventeen hours of flying is going to matter too much.”
“Wow,” and, “how old is she now?”—a mistake.
“Aigu! How can you not know?” said Najin.
“I get confused with the twin thing.” But she remembered sending Inja a self-portrait on a recent birthday. “Her birthday’s September 24 so she’s still a year younger,” Miran said, redeemed. Inja had sent back a portrait of herself, and Miran liked it, as if they were pen pals. She thought Inja looked very Korean, more than she herself did. She recognized the oddity of this thought. She didn’t write her again—they couldn’t read each other’s letters so what was the point? She could have sent more drawings, but again, what was the point? She hadn’t expected the oft‑mentioned reunion to ever happen—the boy who cried wolf, a broken record, promise the moon.
“She was one when we left?”
“That’s right,” said Najin.
Miran thought a moment and discovered she and her sister were ten months apart. She had never made this gestational connection between their birthdays, and it now made her squirm. She scratched her knee and made another run. “Where’s she going to sleep?”
“We thought we’d let you decide,” said Calvin, beaming.
My clever father, she thought. The natural location was the tidied sewing room, but her own room was freshly painted and huge. She believed her teenaged sister would prefer being farther away from her parents than the sewing room, just as she herself did. And her mother stayed up until the wee hours sometimes sewing in that room. “She can have one of the bunks. We should take them apart.”
“Agreed.” He looked pleased, so she knew she’d guessed right. “Take school off the week after to show her how things work at home and to get her acquainted with the neighborhood. I’ve already enrolled her in all your classes so you really will be like twins.” He slapped his newspaper on the armrest. “Help your mother this week making the house ready. We want to make her feel completely at home, though it will be a very different sort of home for her. She’s lived a hard life in Korea, and she has lots to learn from you. Be kind to her, okay?”
“Yes, sir.” She washed her face and left the bathroom synthesizing memories in the new light of Inja’s actual presence in the house, her brain clacking like the Jacob’s ladder toy that flipped its wooden panels over in surprising ways within its bands. Inja would be a sad person because she’d lived with their grandparents her whole life, now both gone. She’d be skinny from hunger, but she’d have good clothes, and probably bad teeth from all the candy they’d sent overseas. Miran laughed at herself. In her parent’s bedroom hung a hand-tinted portrait of Inja at nine or ten years old, curtseying, and she looked completely normal, though not much like a twin. She was rounder from eyes to cheeks to body shape. Who would be taller? Being the eldest, she hoped she was.
Miran was fine with the week off from school to help her sister get acclimated. She was used to this hospitality, having been asked twice by the principal to befriend the foreign exchange students and show them around. She was proud to be chosen for this task until she gleaned how the new students were considered nobodies, and her association with them added zero merit in the popularity department, which she was failing miserably anyhow.
Miran hung up her skirt and blouse, and pushed her clothes to one side in the big closet to make room for Inja, the wire hangers screeching on the wooden dowel. She reclined in her lower-bed alcove to read another chapter of Charlotte Brontë’s gothic novel and fell asleep wondering if her new sister was like Mr. Rochester’s mad wife, Bertha, in the secret rooms at Thornfield Hall—a constant, but hidden, threat—the knowledge of whom would only cause unhappiness, as it had for poor Jane Eyre.
27
* * *
Departure
The morning of departure Inja woke at dawn, her eyelids like scale weights dredged in sand, her chest tight as if a dream-bear were hibernating on it. She wondered how emptiness could feel so heavy. She listened to the morning and was flooded with an intense longing for Grandmother’s steady breaths shushing in the quilts. Sparrows tittered in their mad clusters in bushes, the willows trembled, a truck lumbered up the road, and its diesel exhaust stained the reassuring scent of her room. From down the hall, Uncle mumbled something about a special breakfast, and Aunt replied, sleepy, “Ara can do it.”
“How can you sleep on this day?” They grumbled at each other until he shuffled off. Inja felt certain she wouldn’t miss Aunt at all, though she would miss seeing her new baby, due any moment. She hoped it was another boy. She’d make Uncle swear to take pictures and send the film to her so she could develop them and have photographs for an album she’d make of her Korean family.
She focused on every inch of her body, hoping it would absorb the sensations of her bedding, the floor, the air, the room that would never again be hers. Her eyes roved the walls and corners and ceiling, to press their cracks and crags into memory. Tears crawled down her temples and into her hair, as every breath, throat raw from crying, inched the day forward toward leaving. She closed her eyes to the swirling gray of grief and touched her lips to remember Hyo’s kisses. Her lungs flared with warmth, then frustration rose at the unfairness of her life.
She sat up and shivered in a lin
gering nighttime chill. A thin pink light seeped through the high window, and she folded her bedding, conscious that each act of her daily routine would soon be replaced, forever, and by something unknown.
Uncle would send her steamer trunk separately, and she’d get it three weeks later. She unlocked it and removed two woolen skirts and a bulky sweater to pack the old Bible storybook, sketchbooks, and the ink sticks and brushes Uncle had made for her. She wanted to bring with her all that she’d known here, which was everything she’d ever known, but she only had a steamer trunk and a heart full of pain. She locked it and slipped the key into a small suitcase she’d carry on the plane. Uncle had bought her three Hershey bars, and she packed a scarf from Yuna, the book from her English-language class, the sketchbook and pen from Hyo, a handkerchief, brush, and comb, the rose-pink lipstick Aunt had given her on her sixteenth birthday that she had yet to use, and a worn pair of Grandmother’s thick cotton socks so she wouldn’t forget her and the secret of her frostbitten feet.
Though Grandmother had endured far greater sacrifices than she had, for her mother and her father’s sake, Inja would follow Grandmother’s example of hidden pain and never tell them how devastated she was to be leaving Uncle and home. The long flight would give her a chance to mold her sad face into acceptable features of a daughter happy to be reunited with her family, though she was resentful and afraid of so much in America, so much unknown.
Ara made fresh rice, and only Inja and Seonil were served the remaining pieces of chicken from last night’s farewell feast. Inja had no appetite then or now. Ara sat with them, speechless, weeping, which made Inja equally miserable. When Uncle said, “It’s a long flight,” she forced in a few mouthfuls and took special note of Ara’s light touch with garlic and soy sauce—skills she wished she’d taken the time to learn. Too late now.