The Kinship of Secrets

by Eugenia Kim

  Inja and her mother were not quite friends, because while her mother spoke freely to her about whatever was on her mind—church, neighbors, the old days, and even Father—Inja was circumspect about what she told her. Najin was someone Inja was growing to love, and for that, and especially after the shame she felt for her own yelling that night, she would protect her mother from her own foibles and hurtful thoughts.

  Miran was accepted at a small college in a tiny town in Connecticut, with scholarships and work-study stipends, but Inja chose to attend the University of Maryland as a commuter, primarily because she felt she couldn’t leave her parents after a mere two years since her arrival.

  They discussed it one rainy day in the final months of her senior year at Blair, driving home from a site visit to the university. “What did you think?” asked her mother in the front seat.

  “They’re so welcoming, and those studio classes are huge. I can easily see myself there.”

  “Are you certain?” her father said. “Your sister’s going to be leaving, and you might feel lonely downstairs. I know a man who runs the new Asian Studies Department at Colgate, and I could call . . .”

  “No, Dad, I’m sure. I doubt I’d get in with my grades. I can think about going out of state after I take some advanced English-language classes. I want to be able to read big books, like Miran. I’ll have our bedroom all to myself and can put in a drafting table.” Also, the in-state tuition was cheap, and she was offered a minority scholarship and work study in the Art History Department, like Miran.

  Najin turned fully around to smile at Inja. “I didn’t want to influence your decision, but it makes me very happy that you’ll be home. Maybe I can take English with you—but you’re already more advanced than I am!” Her musical laugh blended pleasantly with the sound of rain.

  “You should take a class in art,” said Inja, remembering that Hyo said art didn’t need English. It surprised and pleased her that thinking about Hyo brought no residual feelings of longing or resentment. “I bet you can paint just like Ajeossi.”

  “Maybe,” said Najin. “There’s a woman Mrs. Kim knows in Silver Spring who teaches Asian brush painting.”

  “Then it’s settled,” said Inja. “We’re both going to school in Maryland.”

  “I don’t know, church business . . .”

  “I agree,” said Calvin, pulling into their driveway. “Church demands are never going to change. We’re the ones who have to change, so it’s settled. I’ll drive you to Silver Spring, and we’ll buy a used car for Inja. If the timing works out, she can drive you sometimes on her way to classes.”

  By summertime, her father bought her a used beige Volkswagen Beetle, and Inja learned how to drive a stick shift and to maintain the simple engine. For two years at the University of Maryland, she drove back and forth in her reliable Bug to the sprawling campus, content to find her place in art and in industrial art classes, where she was the only female.

  Inja introduced her parents to Patrick, one of the many industrial arts young men who clamored for her attention. He was a urologist’s son, and a huge disappointment to his parents for choosing art over medicine. Inja’s parents liked him because he pruned their hedges and was a former altar boy. Neither he nor Inja mentioned to her parents that he was now anti-religion, anti-war, and anti-establishment. He was smart, narrow-faced handsome—he kept his long locks in a ponytail around Calvin and Najin—sweet to old folks and kind to the stray cat in the neighborhood Najin fed on the mud porch. In her parents’ view, his only shortcoming was his blue eyes—“Too bad he’s not Korean.” He and Inja were considered boyfriend-girlfriend, but she wasn’t long-term serious about him. Nobody was long-term serious about anyone those days. Inja brought him home because she knew he would pass muster. Plus he was a talented craftsman—and a great kisser and lover, and believed in feminism probably more than she did.

  Miran wrote despondent letters from college and came home every holiday and college break, saying she missed Inja but was happy to be away from their parents. At some point during those college years, Miran told Inja she had adopted a facade in dealing with their mother. She saw herself as an American soul in a Korean body—a state of being she called “the Great Pretender,” after the song made popular by Sam Cooke, meaning she always felt as if she were acting at being either Korean or American, and as a result always acting at being anyone at all. It made Inja wonder if her being abandoned by her blood mother had this kind of lasting effect—a constant search for an identity that was both secret and forever lost to her, but somehow known in the heart. Could infant abandonment result in lifelong alienation? Pop culture had taken the biblical phrase “The truth shall set you free” and made it into psychedelic posters. Would it help if she knew the truth?

  After two years at Maryland, Inja felt wings of independence itching on her shoulders, and for her junior year applied to and was accepted at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, a costly college made affordable by scholarships and continued work study. Since RISD was a short train ride away from Miran’s college, and the trains were convenient for trips home, Inja sold her car.

  By 1967, “the Summer of Love,” Miran was a hippie leaning toward socialism, moratoriums, Eastern religions, and psychedelic music. She wore bell-bottom blue jeans, construction boots, a beaded headband over long flowing hair, and wire-framed glasses. She smoked marijuana, tried LSD, and Inja didn’t know what else. Inja, too, had tried pot, but it gave her a headache and made her nervous, ruined for the eight-hour Painting Foundations class the next day. Almaden Chablis was her choice for an altered state, and only on weekends.

  The first time Miran visited, Inja dragged her to the free clinic in Providence to get her on the pill. “If you weren’t my sister,” Miran said, “this would be too weird and totally gross.” Inja took that to mean they were great friends with double benefits of sisterhood—the flower-child sisterhood in addition to the literal sisters they were.

  Being apart from her mother allowed Inja to understand that Najin had tried to mother her as Grandmother had mothered Najin, but that model fit neither this country nor this time. Inja was one of three female students in RISD’s graphic design program, and their little triumvirate had big New York design firms in their sights—not marriage.

  One winter break at home, at the kitchen table over tea, her mother told her how scandalous her own marriage was at the ripened age of twenty-four. She had deferred marriage in favor of education and work—and said her father had tried to marry her off at age fourteen to a nine-year-old boy. In the style of the many conversations about Korea they shared at that Formica table, Inja told her Grandmother’s version of the same story, and that Grandmother had said, “It’s the first time, and maybe the only time, I openly defied your grandfather, but not only had I transferred all my dreams for education upon my child, I could see how thirsty she was to expand her mind.” They had a solid cry in that sun-filled kitchen remembering and missing Grandmother in the separate yet similar ways they knew and loved her.

  In that moment, Inja remembered wrapping Grandmother’s feet and the smell of wet willow bark, and her desire (Uncle’s too) to protect her mother from knowledge of this suffering, a secret Inja had easily agreed to keep. Her mother as well as her father had their secrets—about Miran, and Inja couldn’t know what else. These were all precedents that venerated keeping secrets from her mother as being rituals of love.

  On the train ride back from DC to Providence that winter, Miran napping beside her, Inja gazed at the melting snow in industrial backlots. Her mother and grandmother had risen like dragons from the sea floor of a centuries-old, neo-Confucian culture of female oppression. She had been given a tremendous gift of two unique women whose lives—whose Korean lives—had already exemplified for her what she could learn from the burgeoning American feminist crusade.

  Upon graduating from RISD, Inja landed in New York aiming to find a good-paying job in order to go back home, to visit Seoul. Her portf
olio was polished enough to impress a RISD alumnus who was the creative director of an eminent firm with significant corporate clients. She was hired for paste-up and whatnot, and became a thrilled and energetic New York City girl, riding the crosstown bus to Park Avenue, striding the streets in her camel-colored maxi coat, long hair swinging as her boot heels echoed in the windy alleys, returning home at night to a small apartment on Twenty-Eighth Street.

  The rent had stabilized at $145 a month, and though the teachers’ strike, then the sanitation workers’ strike and the rising crime did little to endear the city to tourists—or her parents—Inja loved the crowded sidewalks at rush hour, the cheap luncheonettes, and ready access to friends from work and college. Familiarity with her neighborhood made it a home that was hers alone, and one not layered with painful memories or hindered by negotiations to prevent more pain for her parents. The city suited Inja, but two years later her low-paying job hadn’t moved her any closer to flying back to Korea. She knew it was time for a change. She would never be assertive enough to advance in the cutthroat culture of the Big Firm, and for all the praise she received for overtime and dedication to her advancement as junior assistant designer, her creativity was credited to the person several rungs above her lowly position on the ladder.

  In early spring of 1971 on the steamy bus after work, Inja shook the classifieds open and scanned the A columns for advertising artist, C for commercial artist, D for designer, G for graphic designer or graphic artist, and finally the scant I category for industrial artist, groaning at the multiple classifications of her profession. By the time she got home, the newspaper was a jumble and her fingers stained black, but she had four torn clippings folded in her checkbook and a lighter step into the elevator toward her junior one-bedroom on the sixth floor, certain it would soon be the sole “junior” in her life.

  Inja took the job of marketing designer in the public affairs department of the Port Authority in April 1971 and walked the easy four blocks to work, until two years later when their offices were moved into the newly opened South Tower of the World Trade Center. Antonio from the Italian market up the street turned out to be quite a handyman on multiple levels. Free love was everywhere, adventurous and noncommittal, and the attention from this beautiful man boosted her confidence and softened the seediness of the city for three glorious seasons.

  After Miran had finally graduated—she’d grown lax with her studies and needed another semester—she’d fallen in with a guy who made sandals, belts, and leather wristbands. They took long motorcycle rides to craft fairs, took drugs at rock concerts, and he took all the money she earned as a drugstore cashier. Inja and Miran both agreed she was headed to nowheresville, and Miran came to New York. In Inja’s apartment, Miran unpacked her many boxes of books onto new shelves the building super had allowed them to build, with Antonio’s help, on the living room wall behind the couch. Inja bought another twin bed, and since they had shared a bedroom, each understood the necessary etiquette for close-quarters living. Miran’s new job at an international art dealers’ association had little to do with art and everything to do with meeting planning, but the commodity was ultimately art and soon she was in the know for the very hip and growing gallery scene in SoHo and the East Village.

  At last, with Miran’s help with expenses, Inja’s savings account grew. Her satisfaction with work and the growing closeness with her sister renewed her yearning for Korea. They discussed it one night in late October 1972 over a bottle of Ruffino.

  “If I go this winter, it should be cheaper,” said Inja. “Nobody wants to travel then.”

  Miran lit a cigarette. “You can’t possibly leave with what we’re learning from Deep Throat.” She referred to the Watergate break-ins, and her tone turned gleeful. “G. Gordon Liddy’s got to go to jail. I almost wish I were home.”

  “I can’t keep track. Korean politics was always like that.”

  “You have to vote for McGovern before you go, promise? Don’t do the Dad thing and pull the lever for Nixon.” Miran and her father had become naturalized shortly before Inja arrived. He had registered Independent, though he’d leaned toward Republican ever since Eisenhower, and Miran had registered the same because she liked how it sounded. Their mother and Inja had sworn the Oath of Allegiance to the United States soon after Inja’s five-year permanent residency date. They, too, followed Calvin’s precedent as Independents.

  “I wouldn’t! But I’m thinking of going after New Year’s, or in February. Do you think I should tell them?”

  Miran got up and went to the window. “We have to go downstairs to watch the news with Derek.” Derek was their Vietnam vet neighbor directly downstairs, whose copious marijuana aroma wafted up through their windows in summertime. Miran had gotten bold and introduced herself when she smelled it week after week, and she slept with him on occasion. She turned to her sister. “When are we going to buy a TV?”

  “When you earn more than one-twenty a week. Use your own savings. So should I tell them?”

  “Our parents?”

  “I don’t want to hurt their feelings after all they’d been through to get me here.”

  “I’m asking for a TV for Christmas.”

  “Miran, listen!” Inja cracked a window to release cigarette smoke and lit a candle in an old Chianti bottle. “Do you think I should tell them?”

  “All I know is that—based on these cover-ups and conspiracies—whatever you try to hide is going to come out eventually.”

  “I know, but—”

  “How could Dad vote for Nixon when all his cronies were spying on the Democrats?”

  “Nixon said he didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Hey, getting a little Korean in you wouldn’t hurt to clean up that mouth.”

  “I’ve got more than a mouth,” and Miran flipped her the bird. They laughed.

  “You should come with me,” Inja blurted.

  “What?”

  “You should come with me! You’d have until February to save up. It’s cheap then to fly. Come on, it would be fun for you to meet Uncle and see the house Dad built.”

  “I don’t know, but you’d definitely have to tell them if I went.”

  “I will, and I’ll help pay your way.” This would cut into the amount she’d set aside for Uncle, but maybe she could work in a store for Christmas.

  Miran stood and folded the newspaper. “I’ll go if you come downstairs to watch the news right now.”

  “Outstanding! Bring the wine.”

  A month later when Miran was out having pizza with Derek, Inja called her father. It was the week before they’d go home for Thanksgiving, and she figured he’d be in a good mood, his man having been reelected president in the biggest landslide in history. Plus it was Wednesday and he’d be working on his Sunday sermon and near the telephone. He would know how best to tell Najin. Inja worried that her mother might feel betrayed. Her father, like Uncle, had always been supportive of her desires, so she feared his reaction less.

  After the usual catching up, Inja shifted on the kitchen stool by the wall phone, looking out the window at a brick wall. “Dad, what would you think if I planned to go back to Seoul to visit Uncle?”

  “Why, I think it’s a fine idea. Your mother and I have often talked about sending you back.”

  “You have?” Her heart opened to hear this. They knew her better than she thought.

  “Of course you’d want to go, and I’m sorry we haven’t been able to afford it. Every time we save a few dollars, something goes wrong in the house or the church needs an influx of cash. It gets more expensive to fly every year, and you couldn’t go empty-handed. It would take some planning.”

  She was relieved they’d be on board and touched that they’d considered it. “I’ve been saving now and have enough for airfare. I can stay with Uncle. This winter? February? Early March? It’ll be beautiful in March.”

  “I see,” he said in his measured way. “I’m impressed with
how you’ve managed to save and prepare for a trip like this, but I’m afraid the climate isn’t right. I can’t allow you to go.”

  Her ears didn’t register this kind of restriction coming from her father to his twenty-six-year-old daughter, and she went on. “I haven’t told Uncle—I wanted to run it by you first, and Miran’s been thinking about going, too, and that way I won’t be traveling alone so you don’t have to worry about that part.”

  “Inja, daughter, you are not hearing me.” His pulpit formality made her sit rigid on the stool, as if she were back in a church pew working to digest his heavily theological sermons. Poor Miran hadn’t understood one whit of his talks all those Sundays but had had to sit through the service all the same. She’d read through the Methodist hymnal while congregants pretended to look awed or at least engaged out of respect. Back then Inja could almost hear the distractions floating in the air: people’s to-do lists, worries about their kids losing Korean language, the youth culture that drew those kids away from the church, what to make for supper, how was it that it was only two minutes into the sermon . . .

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” Inja said.

  “To put it bluntly, I forbid you to go.”

  “Forbid?”

  “Hold on. I’m impressed you’ve been planning so well on your own, and I do think you should go sometime, just not now. Korea still doesn’t get attention from American newspapers. Earlier this week, President Park invoked martial law.”

  “Again?” She didn’t know much about South Korean politics anymore, except that tremendous modernization occurred hand in hand with protests about fixed elections and Park Chung Hee’s intransigency, including imposing martial law when it got too hot, then lifting it once the populace had been tamed.

  “Yes, again.” His voice shifted as he tucked the phone on his shoulder and shuffled papers. “It’s not even in the Korean newspapers.”

  “There’s always that kind of trouble there—it’s been like that since I left.”