by Eugenia Kim
Najin’s voice faded in and out of hearing, meaning she was pacing. “Maybe they had an accident.” So she wasn’t home yet. Pace. “Why didn’t you know about this snowstorm?” Fade and volume. “I’ll get Miran to tell me what she knows about that boy. She’s here when he’s here.”
“Yeobo, be reasonable.”
“He’s skidded off the road. She’s lying in a ditch.”
Miran heard placating murmurs from her father, and she worried that her mother had spun herself into a tizzy that wouldn’t easily wind down. Last week her mom went batty because Miran left the laundry in the washing machine overnight, but her dad told her later it wasn’t that serious an infraction, so not to worry.
“Dear God, where could she be?” said Najin. And a little later, “We should call the university.” Her father, soothing, then, “We should call the police.”
Miran crouched on the top step huddled in her blanket, glad she wasn’t on the receiving end of the barrage. She dozed and woke to “How can you nap like that?” and thought for a second her mother was yelling at her. “He’s taking advantage of her in some alley, or that roommate is. It’s midnight, why aren’t you concerned? We didn’t even meet the roommate. How do we know what kind of boy he is? Does he even exist? Why haven’t they found a phone booth to call? Something is wrong. Call the hospitals. Ask the Bushongs next door; they’re firemen, they’d know. Call the police.”
Her father grumbled a prolonged response that ended in English with “—responsible young man, driving slowly as he should in this weather.”
Similar episodes of her mother’s worry and her father’s attempts at calm were repeated. At twelve-thirty, Calvin said he’d shovel the walk, and Miran went downstairs to get a pillow for her bottom and a pair of socks for her frigid feet. At one o’clock, her father shoveled again, returned, stomping on the front porch. At one-fifteen, she heard him on the phone, apologizing for the hour and asking for Sammy Jang. “How about his roommate? Can you tell me his name?” Pause. “Is he available? No one’s there? Yes, thanks, anyway.”
“Why won’t you call the police?”
“I don’t believe they’d be able to tell us anything. If they’ve been in an accident, the police would have called us already.”
“What if she can’t remember her phone number? What if she’s been so injured, she can’t talk? What if they’re bleeding on the snow or dead?” She was shouting by the end.
At some point her father was on the telephone again, but Miran was too sleepy to listen. At one-fifty, a shout, and tire chains crunched in the snow. Miran went down to peek out the window near her mother’s kimchi-making station. The Ford Fairlane idled at the curb, and Sammy was ushering her sister to the porch as the front door opened to her mother’s cries.
“Mother, I’m fine!” said Inja.
All of the night’s worries culminated in an onslaught and the door slammed.
Her father and Sammy talked outside. Miran cracked the casement window open. Sammy’s back was to her so she only caught snippets, or maybe he was shivering.
“I’m so sorry, Reverend . . . swear we left the dance . . . snow . . . chains on. I never . . . Inja told me how you’d done it.”
“I’m glad you did, young man. It’s quite late. Come inside; you should stay the night.”
Sammy backed down the sidewalk, bowing. “I’ll be fine now with the chains, sir. I should be on my way. Tell her thank you, and please tell Mrs. Cho I’m terribly sorry I got her home so late.”
“Thank you for getting her home safely. We’ll see you next week when the roads are clear.”
The shouting escalated in the living room. Calvin stayed out by the road, hands in pockets, until Sammy drove off, chains clacking when they hit macadam where the wind had drifted the snow. Her father’s shoulders rose as he heaved a sigh and went inside.
Back at the top of the stairs, she heard her mother both shouting and crying, and Inja crying, too. Miran could neither hear clearly nor understand much of what was said, but it made her fearful of her mother’s wrath, which had never been so intense. Embarrassed by the hysteria in her mother’s voice, Miran swore she’d never be the object of that rage. She wondered what Inja herself was so upset about that she actually yelled back—a huge breach in their ingrained respect for one’s parents. Then her dad intervened with a long preachy talk and forced a prayer of reconciliation on them. Miran tiptoed downstairs and waited in the dark for her Korean sister.
Inja sniffled and blew her nose when she entered their bedroom. Mostly she felt guilty for having screamed at her mother. You never should’ve left me behind, then! But Mother had been equally unreasonable, Inja rationalized. Lots of venting about those fifteen years of worries and casting blame over the heartache she’d suffered—crazy talk, things her mother never would’ve said if she wasn’t so worked up over nothing. None of it was Inja’s fault, nor was it her mother’s, though. She sighed and tossed her notebook diary on her bed.
Miran seemed asleep but was too still, meaning she was feigning sleep. Inja hung up her dress, and the hangers squeaked on their closet pole, then she turned on her bedside lamp.
Miran turned over and said, “What the hell, are you okay?”
Inja sat cross-legged atop her bed perpendicular to Miran’s, her red and swollen eyes at odds with her attempt to smile. She capped her pen and closed the spiral-bound notebook. She hadn’t written in it for months. “Did you hear?”
Miran sat up and coddled the blankets around her legs. “Yeah. Pretty bad.”
Inja teared up, blew her nose again, and tossed the tissue box atop her notebook. She sat like Miran, legs triangled beneath her blankets, and the lamplight struck the panes of her cheeks like moonlit wax. “I shouldn’t have talked back, but I couldn’t help it. She’s not making sense about the whole thing.”
“You mean the dance?”
Inja sighed. “That, and everything else.” She put her pen and notebook away and turned off the lamp. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she felt her disquiet ebbing into the intimate shadows of their bedroom. Sometimes when Miran came back late after having sneaked out with her friends, they’d sit in bed like this and talk. Usually Inja would scold her a little and tell her how impossible it would be in Korea to behave that way—being deliberately bad. Other times Inja would talk about their Korean relatives. She had told Miran about their fierce aunt and loving uncle, and had described the dreams about Grandfather’s watery grave, and Uncle’s and their mother’s letters crossing in the mail—Miran said she knew about the dream, and Dad had told her about the letters. Inja also related their grandmother’s pregnancy dreams predicting the sex of Uncle and their mother, and before she thought more of it, she told Miran their mother’s dream that foretold Inja would be a girl. “I know the story so well because I read that letter over and over again.” She described how their mother dreamed she was at a beach and waded into the sea. The sunrise revealed the sea floor for a long distance, even through the waves. There on a bed of pebbles, she saw an abalone shell, and its mother-of-pearl bowl shone like the moon. She reached for it and the tide washed it away, but the next wave dropped it right into her hands. When she lifted it high, the outer surface was polished like water and the inside shone with the light of stars.
“That’s how she knows I am girl,” said Inja. She caught herself and added, “I don’t know if she dreamed about you, but I’ll ask her.”
“That’d be cool, I’d like that,” said Miran.
Inja grimaced at herself for telling that story.
“So how was the dance?”
“Fun!” she said, relieved. “Watusi and twist, but Sammy couldn’t do mashing potatoes. He likes to slow dance. I learn the swim—very hard in that dress.”
“Good music?”
“Loud, and everyone seems to like it. My hair doesn’t stay like pouf, but the girls in the ladies’ room helped teasing up, and they have hairspray in their purse. They like my dress a lot. Who thinks to bring ha
irspray?”
“College girls.”
“They very nice to me and don’t laugh at my accent. And I tried beer.”
“Oh wow. Did Mom smell it on your breath? I can teach you how to cover up beer or wine breath.”
“Yes, you are expert, but I only had two sips—terrible tasting. Sammy finished my beer so I think he feels courage to slow dancing with me.” Inja laughed.
“Gross.”
“Do you mean like counting pay or twelve dozen?”
“Ha-ha. Do you like him more now?”
“Not that way, but maybe Mom thinks so and why she worries.” She sighed, chin on knees.
They had no windows in their basement bedroom, but Inja believed she could hear the snow falling, or at least she felt a shift in the sound of a night now whitened and cloaked with snow. She checked the glowing alarm-clock dial, past three o’clock.
Miran murmured, “They were both worried because you were so late. You’re the first one to go on a date, you know.”
“Yes, but still it was too big upset. Punishment does not fit crime.”
“Yeah. Did he get stuck in the snow?”
“Only once we slide into curb. He drives slow, like turtle, and he laughing and making jokes, but his hands are white on steering wheel—is what made me nervous. It took a long time to put on chains, but I remember how Dad spread them out and drive over them. Very hard on a snowy road, so Sammy waits until we go under a bridge. He is smart and a gentleman, but his head is like a globe!”
“A worldly Korean Charlie Brown,” said Miran, and they laughed.
“It was very beautiful outside—snow shining in streetlights against black sky like so many stars and remind me of home . . .”
“What made you shout back at her?”
Long silence, then rustling of blankets. Inja remembered saying to Mother, If you had let me stay in Korea, I wouldn’t be treating you like this either. Whose fault is it now? Of course she regretted it and apologized as soon as she said it, but all her frustration had boiled over in the moment. Now she thought of how Uncle had always framed the story of her being left behind as an act of great love and sacrifice on his sister’s part.
“I will tell you something you should know, but let’s light a candle.”
Miran fetched a candle from the basement windowsill, stashed for power outages in lightning storms. She dripped wax on a chipped saucer taken from beneath an African violet and set it upright on the night table between the foot of their beds.
Inja scooted halfway down the bed wrapped in her blankets. Miran did the same.
Inja’s voice was as soft as the candlelight. “Did you ever wonder why you go to America and not me? Why not two daughters?”
“Gosh, no, I never thought about it. It was just always that way.” She paused. “I guess I was never curious because I had no cause to be curious. Also, I miss a lot—Mom’s Korean and her constant frustration with me. She used to scold me about how beautiful my Korean was. I wonder if that’s why I have so few memories of childhood because I understood the language back then but don’t now. Weird thought. I do remember when I was little, they talked about going back.”
“Yes, they think only a few years then going home.” Though Inja had decided to tell her Uncle’s version about their separation as infants—nothing about the adoption, of course—now, after what Miran said, she would tell her something that would bond her closer to her mother. “They take you because you almost died as a baby, and they still worry you get sick, and also you are oldest so you could know about them leaving you. I was too young to have that thinking.”
“Died? Wow.” Miran thought awhile. “I guess I had the usual kids’ illnesses: chicken pox, measles—normal except for the scarlet fever. I have a total of two memories from before we moved here: a glimpse of a lawn in sunshine with Mom sitting on a rock, and waking up somewhere and looking for Dad—Mom said it was on the ship coming over. That’s the sum of my earliest memories. How come I didn’t know? What kind of sick, and how did you know about it?”
“You didn’t know because you were baby, and I always knew because it is why I am staying behind with Uncle,” said Inja. “You didn’t eat, something wrong inside, how to say, stomach isn’t working right for a long time. Mom stayed up night after night taking care of you, the sick baby, so weak and close to dying.” She also said their parents never told her this because she was fine now, strong and energetic, an unspoiled and thoughtful young lady, and who wants to think about hard times?
“Hah. Maybe that’s why I get carsick.”
“No joking. They worry a long time about you as baby. Uncle said it proves how much Noona—that’s what a boy calls his older sister—how much Noona loves him, because she took you to America and left me behind.”
“That’s so weird—it doesn’t make sense.”
Inja told her how Grandmother, in light of losing half her family, feared they would never return, and said of the decision that had determined their identities, “So they think to leave one child behind like, uh, a swearing to return.”
“A guarantee.”
“That’s it. You’re lucky this did not make changing your life, and come to America so much later like me.”
“But it did,” said Miran. “You would’ve been my sister my whole life instead of only this year. I would’ve liked that much better.”
“I know. Me too.” The candle flickered with Inja’s sigh. “Anyway, you can remember this, how Mother took such good care of you, how much they love you and make you stay alive in hard times.” Because of the gaping language differences between their mother and Miran, she wasn’t sure if she should tell Miran to keep this knowledge—a slanted truth—secret. But her revelation needed some kind of protection; she didn’t want Miran asking their mother about the choice to take one daughter over another. She also remembered the sense of privilege she’d always gained in learning and then keeping secrets. “When Mother gets mad at you, you remember this as secret; how she works hard to make you stay alive.”
“A tall order.”
“What is tall order?”
“Something big and hard to do. Strenuous. Challenging. Onerous. Pain in the ass. Not really. It means ‘hard.’”
“Yes, tall order, but we can do together and keep secret you know this story, okay? No need to worry them about old hard times.”
“Okay.”
When Miran nodded, the flame glimmered in Inja’s dark eyes, and Miran felt the intimacy of kinship in a secret shared. Until this night, she hadn’t consciously known how vital it was to recognize love, but the lasting power of this image of a mother’s love, and herself as the needy child, struck her spirit and opened her heart to new depths layered with glimmers of self-acceptance. So striking was this knowledge that many years would pass before she was able to articulate the certainty gained this night that she was loved, that she herself could love because of it, and that she did love this Korean sister.
34
* * *
Plans
30 September 1965, to Ajeossi,
How are you? How is Aunt and Seonil, Seonwu and the new baby, Seonmi? How old is your baby girl now? Mother told me but I cannot remember her birth date, will you send it to me? How is Ara? Is she still living with you? Mother tells me only a little news from home, but she did not know Ara. I am happy to be writing to you as a college student at the University of Maryland to study art—the same kind of art that was your work, though here they call it commercial art, or graphic design. It is a very big university with a big art department, and I am living at home. Miran went away to school and is living in a dormitory. I hope you do not mind I write to you now. I am sorry you did not write many times to Mother also, and thought it must be for the same reason, which is my fault. I do understand why we could not write to each other for those years, and though it was very hard in the beginning, it must have been all the harder for you, Ajeossi, and I am as sorry it was hard for you as much as I know you are sorr
y it was hard here. That doesn’t make much sense, but you understand me.
Actually, it is wonderful to be in America, speaking English well enough and going to university, and most of all it is especially wonderful to know my mother and father and sister as well as I know my first family in Seoul. So you were right.
I would like to send my cousins presents. I remember how much we enjoyed opening the packages from America, and I do not recall seeing Mother send you a single package since I left home.
My first goal is to study hard and finish college. Though I did not have the best grades in high school because of my language problem, I had high marks in mathematics, and made all the posters for the school plays, and paintings and drawings, many of them from memories of home. I worried at first that Miran would be jealous that all my designs got turned into posters, but she won for her abstract oil paintings, so we were both winning prizes, like you used to win prizes with your art. This makes me so happy to be like my uncle in his artwork.
I want to tell you my second goal. After college I will get a well-paying job to earn money to fly home and see my Korean family, whom I miss very much.
With love, your American Korean daughter, Inja
After that horrible evening following her first American date with Sammy Jang, Inja’s perspective about her mother shifted. She had regarded her as being the obstacle to her returning to Seoul, but that blowup made Inja see her mother less as the unwitting agent of her unhappiness, and instead someone who could be funny, a great storyteller, as creative as Uncle, as industrious and devoted as Grandmother, and at the same time flawed with impatience and temper flare-ups as sudden and violent as Aunt’s, though it never happened again. No one said anything the next day, or ever after, about the shouts and tears, but Miran was unusually solicitous of their parents, and the house was subdued, as if the world had quieted under concealing veils of snow.