The Kinship of Secrets

by Eugenia Kim

  “Yah,” said Najin, her voice a warm response to Inja’s rare initiation of a conversation. “It makes me sad when I think how much of your childhood I missed.”

  “I was old enough when it happened, just a few years ago. Did the Korean newspapers here show that photograph?”

  “I’m not sure. What was it?”

  “I forget the boy’s name, but he was a village boy visiting Masan City. He and his brother had taken high school entrance examinations, and then marched in a protest against another rigged election by President Rhee.”

  “How knowledgeable you are,” said Najin. “I did hear about Masan. Seems there are always student protests in the Korean papers. But I remember that was a bloody uprising.” She tapped Inja’s knee. “Tell me you didn’t join those students!”

  “Ajeossi wouldn’t allow me to go. I was curious though. A friend of mine went.” Inja remained silent awhile, sad about Hyo.

  “What was the photo?” said her mother.

  “The younger brother—yes, his name was Ju-yeol—disappeared that night and was found a month later floating in waters of the Masan port. The photograph showed him with his arms halfway raised, as if he were calmly sitting up submerged in the black water, but he had a tear-gas shell in one eye coming out the back of his head.”

  “Aigu! That poor boy’s mother! Why would they publish such an image?”

  “I thought the same—to see her son like that.”

  “I’m sorry you had to see it.”

  “It had its effect. The shock of that one photograph rallied the protesters. It’s like in the movie how the farmer’s death and then the teacher’s death made the threat of the birds real,” said Inja. “None of us are going to sleep tonight.” Inja heard her own voice as relaxed and unguarded, and her mother must have felt it, too.

  “Are you sleeping well?” she asked. “Is it a little easier these days?”

  Something slammed in Inja’s mind. “Thank you, Mother, but I’m fine.” She felt bad a moment for her mother’s sigh but couldn’t fight the urge to hold it all in.

  They crossed from Prince George’s into Montgomery County, and Inja caught bits of explanation that her father was giving to Miran about a displeased Julius Caesar when the Egyptians presented the head of his enemy Pompey, “. . . because an assassination isn’t an honorable way to die.”

  “Ironic,” said Miran, “considering that’s how he got it himself. That head was gross.”

  “What is gross?” asked Inja.

  “Disgusting, scary, ugly, nasty, repulsive, perverse, putrid,” said Miran, laughing with each added synonym.

  “It also means a sum that had no deductions, like ‘gross wages’ in a paycheck before taxes; and it means a dozen times a dozen,” said Calvin, “like a ‘gross of eggs.’”

  “Wow.” She definitely got more than she expected.

  “That’s the problem with English,” said Najin. “Multiple meanings for a single word.”

  Inja sat back and after a while, her mother talked about the old days, as she often did as a way to find commonality between them. “Your grandfather joined the demonstrations for independence on Sam-il. Did you know?”

  “Yes. I never asked him about it, but every Sam-il, Ajeossi told me the story of how he’d shouted in the streets and was arrested and beaten, which explained his sore back when it was damp and cold. Ajeossi said he was just a baby so doesn’t remember anything.” Inja startled and sat upright. “Mother—how old were you then? Do you remember it?”

  “Nineteen-nineteen, so I was nine.” She sighed. “I only remember my father’s face when he came home, swollen yellow and purple, and his black thumbs. They’d hung him by his thumbs.” She swatted the air, as if to erase the image from her mind. “We lived in Kaesong then. Mostly what I remember is my mother holding Dongsaeng as a baby high in the air, the unison chants from the marchers, and how the yellow dust from the road coated our clothes and shoes.”

  “One night during the Seoul protests, I did sneak outside,” said Inja, “but I couldn’t hear or see anything—we lived too far away.”

  “How is the house that your father built?”

  “Probably the same. It was home.” A small pain shot through her, but at least it didn’t cause tears. Inja thought that was progress.

  Najin said nothing for a while, and her tone softened. “My daughter, I understand that you would have a completely different attitude about moving to America. We’ve always wanted to bring you home, but your home was also there.” Inja shifted and drew centimeters away and closer to the window. “I don’t mean to pry,” said Najin, “but your father worries, as do I, about how you’re getting along.”

  Inja blew out air, then after a moment said, “It’s better, thank you, Mother. It’s good to be here”—the last part sounding hesitant.

  “We’ve lost so much time together . . .” She stopped, and Inja heard the tears caught in her throat. Something shifted inside, but she couldn’t yet acknowledge it.

  Calvin turned off the main road and said, “We’re almost home. You two ladies doing okay back there?” Miran must have sensed something, too, because she had quieted up front.

  “Yes, Father. I’m not carsick at all,” said Inja. She thought about everything she hadn’t said since she’d arrived—five months filled with resentment, stress, and tears, the complexities of the unknown in a transition she had never wanted to make. What could she say? Only apologies, again, though it wasn’t her fault. The fault that belonged to her was her unwillingness to be compassionate to her mother’s needs, and though she tried in her mind to be compassionate, she wasn’t ready in her heart, which was where it mattered. To give up the resentment of this unwelcome passage was to give in to something she never would have chosen—but now she was seeing it differently, and her stubborn position, ultimately unsustainable, was shifting despite herself.

  In the dark Najin couldn’t see Calvin’s eyes in the rearview mirror, though she heard his curiosity about their quiet discussion. They had often talked about everything Inja wasn’t saying since she’d come home. They had, of course, anticipated an adjustment period, but it had been glossed over in the excitement of the reunion. Considering how long Najin herself had taken to “get her sea legs” in America—including a notebook filled with colloquialisms—how could she have missed planning for such a complicated transition?

  Najin thought she would adopt Calvin’s compassion and protect her daughter from bad news, from concern even about herself and Calvin; she would be foolish and generous with love. “When we first came to America,” Najin said to Inja, “your father gave me a checkbook that had no account balance. You have your own bank account now, but when your father gave me that blank checkbook, he said, ‘Whatever you want, whatever you need.’ To be honest, I thought him a little crazy to be so free with money, but his attitude actually made me more careful.” She laughed a little and twisted off a gold ring, its nickel coating to mask its real value worn through at its edges. “When he came back to Korea at the end of the war, he gave me this ring with that very same sentiment, and so that I would always have something of monetary value with me—a kind of security.” She touched Inja’s hand and folded the ring into her palm. “My daughter, keep this to remember that we are like that blank checkbook. Will you do that? Whatever you want, whatever you need.”

  Inja turned, and Najin sought her daughter’s eyes in the dark. In accepting the ring, Inja did not withdraw her hand. “Mother, I’m sorry I’ve been so— Well, I’m sorry. Thank you for understanding.”

  “You are my daughter.” The moment Najin said this, she heard her own mother’s voice speaking these words, words that hopefully Inja herself would speak one day, words that would echo through the generations. Her heart overflowed with gratitude and love for her mother, and for this gracious and fragile young lady, beside her at last.

  After a pause and with laughter in her voice, Inja said, “How about I need to go to the drive-in next weekend to
see Bye Bye Birdie?”

  “I want to see that, too,” Miran chimed from the front seat.

  Najin said, “I don’t know how you can stand that caterwauling,” and they laughed.

  Calvin pulled into the driveway, and they went inside for cake and ice cream. Najin saw Inja slip the circle of gold onto her right hand’s ring finger. It hung loose, but Najin felt sure she’d grow into it soon.

  33

  * * *

  Blizzard

  Heavy snow in January canceled school for a week, and Calvin drove to work with chains on the tires. Miran cleaned up the sewing room to transform the catch-all space into a dressmaker’s studio. At the sewing machine, Najin hummed hymns and pieced together a cropped jacket with a white rabbit-fur collar in thick pink brocade, while Miran hemmed the matching full-length sheath dress, and Inja basted a satin lining—an outfit she’d wear to her first dance. Earlier, Najin, mocking a scandalized look that made them all laugh, had deemed the pattern for the strapless dress too risqué. She added shoulder straps to the bodice and a solid inch to the décolleté.

  Though Miran had only been to a few school dances, she declared the gown was perfect for the University of Maryland’s Winter Ball, to which Inja had been invited by her English tutor, the Korean Charlie Brown, whose name was Sammy Jang. When Inja had asked permission to go earlier that month, Dad had approved against Mom’s demurral, saying it was what American teenagers do. Miran was certain her mother’s misgivings were based on Ann-Margret’s bold behavior in Bye Bye Birdie. Further assurances came when Sammy announced that it was a double date, he didn’t drink alcohol, and he would pick up and drive Inja home in his roommate’s big four-door and safe sedan.

  Miran tied off a line of stitches and read the Winter Ball invitation, “‘Formal dance in the new ballroom at Stamp Student Union, free soda pop and cash bar.’ And cool, there’s a live band, the Chessmen.”

  “They are rock-and-roll?” said Inja. “What kind of dancing, like twist?” She spoke in English, accented but much improved, to Miran and switched to Korean with her mother.

  “I don’t know how you kids can stand that caterwauling,” said Najin on cue, to laughter.

  Dad had bought a tabletop Zenith TV the previous summer to see the national broadcast of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Or so he said. Based on his devotion to Westerns and his love of NASA launches, Miran was sure it was otherwise. If she watched TV when she was supposed to be practicing piano, her mother said she’d take a baseball bat to it, but since they had all witnessed the live assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy funeral—her mother peering into the screen to see the cortege and Jackie’s veiled face—she knew it was an empty threat. Plus, Najin had discovered televised beauty pageants.

  “Yup, rock-and-roll dancing,” said Miran. “On American Bandstand they do the twist, the wah-watusi, and mashed potatoes.” She stood up and executed a few well-practiced mashing of potatoes from hours spent in front of the mirror. Inja got up and danced hand in sleeve with her jacket lining, twist-kicking.

  “Wow, that’s great—you already know it!”

  “I learn the mash dance at ho— in Seoul. You do it well.”

  “I studied the kids dancing at the mixers. Nobody danced with me except teachers.”

  Najin said, “I didn’t know that. What an honor!”

  Miran said to Inja as if her mother weren’t there, “She has no idea. It puts a target on your forehead that says ‘loser.’” She laid fingers shaped in an L on her brow.

  “You just too shy for boys,” said Inja, patting her shoulder.

  “Dates are icky anyhow.” She wouldn’t admit that a date was exactly what she dreamed about. She’d never wear a dress like Inja’s, though. She couldn’t imagine who’d be attracted to her, or who she’d be attracted to, for that matter. She supposed she’d be attracted to anyone who was attracted to her, as if that would ever happen.

  “Wait your turn and changing mind.”

  “Doubt it, but no biggie. Mom, the hem’s done.”

  “What is nobiggie?” said Inja.

  “Not a big deal, not a problem, nothing to worry about, who gives a hoot, I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  Inja laughed and shushed Miran, who had lowered her voice for the last example.

  “Let’s see how it all fits together.” Najin frowned as she inspected the hemming, and Miran sighed, seeing this prediction of criticism.

  But Inja said, “Mother, she did well; brocade isn’t easy to sew.” She tossed off her clothes and slid on the sheath and the high heels that her mother had expertly glued with matching brocade, including perfect square bows she’d made for the toes. While their mother pinched and pinned seams, Inja showed Miran the poufy hairstyles she could copy from the models on the Butterick pattern. “We can tease up and shape like this with rollers; you can help me, okay?”

  “And lots of hairspray,” Miran said, grateful for her intercession. Her sister’s effortlessness with her appearance and body both awed her and made her envy her perfection, as well as her growing ease with language, boys, grownups Korean or American, and her easy acceptance of being different from everyone else in school, in the entire neighborhood, and probably the entire city of Washington, DC. Maybe it was because she was so different, that she never knew she needed to fit in. For Miran, that yearning was nearly unbearable, unattainable as it was. There were too many hurdles: not only was she Oriental and her hair wouldn’t curl; she was skinny with oily skin that she battled with Sea Breeze, and she made her own clothes—the final nail on the coffin of forever unpopular. She roamed the worn linoleum of Blair High School’s hallways, hugged her textbooks to her cleavage-less chest, and kept her eyes down—a loser in every sense, and one who fit best into the books she read.

  And now, with her Korean sister’s easy deflection of her mother’s fault-finding, Miran thought of Inja more as the best friend that she’d never before had.

  On February 8, the evening of the Winter Ball, snow still covered the ground and most of the side streets, but Sammy Jang arrived promptly in a big Fairlane at seven. Miran pitied him, stiff in his rented tuxedo in the living room surrounded by her family, his round head shining with embarrassment. Najin took the corsage he offered to Inja and pinned it to the rabbit-fur collar of Inja’s brocade jacket. She barraged poor Sammy with questions, instructions, and jovial warnings that teetered on the edge of being threats. Another snowstorm was predicted tomorrow, and he was made to promise to have her home by ten, but Inja pleaded with Calvin and they compromised with eleven-thirty. Somehow Inja was able to get permission from their parents that Miran never had the guts to ask for, resorting instead to lying or sneaking out the basement door to meet her friends. They’d sip on a week-old bottle of Lancers Rosé and smoke Winstons, trying different cool ways to hold the cigarettes, coughing, laughing at themselves. It was okay to feel foolish and dumb with her friends, because they all felt that way.

  Miran took many photographs, and the flashbulbs and oohs and aahs made the occasion more festive than a birthday. As if the couple were celebrities, her family clapped when they left. The gallant Sammy offered Inja his arm when they went down the stairs, and he opened her car door. Inja waved with her evening-gloved hand and blew them a kiss, which Miran knew was meant for her. Earlier when Miran helped fix her hair, she teased her, “Is Sammy going to kiss you?”

  Inja had laughed. “We friends but I don’t think of him that way, but maybe he is thinking of me like that because I see he is color change when I read poetry in our lessons. I read ‘She Walks in Beauty,’ and he blushes. I said yes to the date because I like to get dress up and go to college dance.”

  Miran sprayed the heaped curls while Inja held a tissue over her made-up face. “Careful,” Miran said, “it’s what they mean by leading him on.” Together the two often read Teen magazine, and Miran would define words like comb-outs, beehive, popularity, and kissable. With her sharp angles and awkwardn
ess, Miran was certain she wasn’t at all kissable, but Inja was eminently kissable with soft curves and black-lined eyes on a perfect complexion with full pinkened lips.

  That evening at nine o’clock, in the guise of not waiting for Inja to come home, Miran joined their father to watch his favorite show, Gunsmoke, while her mother, pretending to be busy in the dining room, got up every five minutes to check if they’d returned. Halfway through the show, Najin came in, arms crossed. “Yeobo, it’s snowing. Should we be worried?”

  He smiled and said, “You’re already worried,” and looked out the window. “It’s not heavy and it’s melting on the road. They’ll be fine.” Miran got up to see, and the streetlight illuminated the snow swirling like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil, sticking to the sides of trees and telephone poles. She believed they ought to be worried—she had just completed driver’s education and had seen the gruesome auto-accident film Mechanized Death, which gave her nightmares. Inja, who said the film wasn’t that bad, had to take the written part twice, but they had both obtained their learner’s permits.

  The snow thickened and was accumulating when Marshal Dillon and the good citizens of Dodge got justice in the time-honored formula of what goes around, comes around. Calvin turned on the radio for the weather report, Najin paced, and Miran wished it weren’t snowing so she could sneak out for a cigarette. She went downstairs to read until Inja came home.

  She dozed and was woken by her mother shouting. She thought she was dreaming until she heard her father’s voice, too. It was eleven-forty-five, and perhaps Inja was home and getting yelled at for being late. Her mother had been yelling a lot lately. Miran wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and crept to the top of the basement stairs to listen. She felt a kind of evil glee that finally her sister was getting yelled at, not just her.