by Eugenia Kim
“This is worse than usual. He’s dissolved the National Assembly and undoubtedly plans to rewrite the constitution once more so he can be president for life. It’s simply not safe for you to go at this time.”
Resistance swelled in her throat. Even with the Vietnam War moratoriums downtown last summer, the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics, and Watergate, she hadn’t once considered the obstacle of political hostilities. She wanted to argue with her father, remind him she had lived through worse and came out okay, and it couldn’t possibly be that dangerous for a young woman whose only interest was to visit family. What did all her work and independence mean if she couldn’t pursue this principal desire?
He read her silence and said, “These things come and go. As you know, it’s been like this for years, but at the moment it’s dire—the last vestiges of democracy may be crumbling, and the climate is too uncertain. We think there are blackouts on news from Seoul. I’m not saying you can’t go, just not right now.”
Inja wiped her tears and runny nose on a tea towel and forced an even-toned response. It wouldn’t do for him to know the depth of her disappointment. “Okay” was all she could manage.
“I’ll be the first to tell you when it’s stable over there. Perhaps next summer. That’s not so much longer to wait, and we can bolster your savings by then. See if you can find Korean newspapers in Chinatown to monitor what’s going on. In the meantime, I’ll talk it over with your mother, so she knows it’s on your mind. Agreed?”
She muffled the handset, coughed out the letdown, and blew air to clear her larynx. “Agreed, Father. The newspaper is a great idea. Okay, thanks, I’ll call on Sunday as usual.”
She lay in bed that night with the longing for home as heavy in her spirit as it was that first year in America, and when Miran came home and asked if she was awake and how the call went, Inja didn’t answer.
35
* * *
Home Visit
Miran and Inja went home for Christmas 1972, and along with the gift of his old Zenith television to Miran, Calvin gave Inja an all-clear for springtime in Seoul. Martial law had been lifted on December 13 and the crisis had, once again, moved into a phase of relative calm.
By mid-January, Inja had convinced Miran to go with her, especially since their father would pay half her fare and they’d stay at an inn rather than at Uncle’s. Miran had been reluctant because the shame amassed over the years for not speaking Korean lay inside her like an immovable boulder, but she chose to go knowing Inja wouldn’t embarrass her as her mother had. In her youth if she was with her mother among Koreans, Najin would say with a joking tone and a frown, “She doesn’t speak; too stupid to learn.” Miran surmised, in retaliation, this was her mother’s way to cover her own inability to have taught her daughter Korean, though she was a skilled language instructor. Oh, the irony. But sarcasm couldn’t gloss over the blame she cast upon herself—those dining-room lessons when she was a kid were boring and pointless, and she had clamored to be outside playing; then later, she wanted to learn French like everyone else in school—and each similar decision prompted by the need to fit in added another barnacle on the boulder of the Great Pretender.
In March she and Inja went home to see their folks a month before the trip. Inja admitted to the need to visit Takoma Park on the eve of returning to her first home, to assuage feelings of guilt over her divided loyalties. Miran spent the long weekend at home sewing a few skirts, while Inja and her mother hung out in the kitchen and talked. In a quiet moment between seams, Miran overheard Inja asking something like “Mom, is it okay if I go? Don’t you want to go back?”
Najin answered with a word and tone that implied “Ugh, no thanks.” Their conversation continued in Korean too fast for Miran to grasp, but her mother’s strange response piqued her interest.
On Saturday evening before dinner, with Inja and Mom fussing in the kitchen, she brought her father coffee in the living room and sat nearby to hem an A-line skirt, the radio tuned low to classical music.
“Dad, can I ask you something? How come you haven’t ever gone back to Korea? Doesn’t Mom want to see her brother or home or anything? Don’t you want to go?”
“In the past few years, I’ve asked your mother now and then, but she always says no, her home is here. We didn’t live in Seoul for very long, and it’s a completely different city now.” He explained that Najin had grown up in Kaesong, and he’d grown up in a fishing village and in Pyeongyang, all now in North Korea. After Najin’s parents had died, her only desire to visit Korea was to see their graves. “You’ll agree that’s not exactly an international flight-worthy trip. But you’ll visit the graves and can take pictures for her. I’m of your mother’s sentiment—our home is here, and it would be difficult for me, as a federal employee who often broadcasts anti-Park views, to travel without attracting unwanted attention.”
“You’d be in danger?” Was her father’s news program that big a deal?
“No need to take risks when we have little interest in touring Korea at this time. We’ll drive up to see some old friends in Long Island, and we’ll say goodbye to you at Kennedy Airport. That’s about as close as we’ll come.” He smiled at his silly joke.
Miran sewed awhile. “So . . . why doesn’t Mom want to go? Gosh, she hasn’t seen her brother for a gazillion years, and Inja says she’s never met his kids.”
Calvin sighed and set the paper down. “You may as well know they’re like oil and water.”
“No kidding.”
“Nope. Completely opposite in personality. Not close like you and your sister are.”
Her father was clueless about lots of sister things, but he was right that they were close, so she believed the oil-and-water thing. Plus, after Inja came, there were fewer letters to Korea and no packages, telegrams, or phone calls. The blue aerogrammes with her uncle’s handwriting lay unopened on the sideboard with the junk mail for days before her mother read them.
“It’s a little different now,” said her father. “Your mother respects him for the fine job he did in raising your sister. But that, too, isn’t reason enough to visit Korea.”
There was truth to that statement about how Inja was raised. Miran knew for certain Inja was more confident and self-aware than she herself was. People would say things like “That’s who I am” or “That’s not who I am,” and it would only reinforce Miran’s alienation from herself. She had no idea what it meant to say things like that. Who was she? Who wasn’t she? How was it that Inja seemed to inherently know and she did not? It may have been their different upbringings, Inja having a sentimental uncle and Miran having an anti-sentimental mother, or it may have been as simple as her sister both looking Korean and speaking Korean and therefore being Korean, while she herself only looked Korean. She felt it had more to do with her childhood of silences, the reservoir of words dammed in her throat.
“Okay,” she said, gathering up the hemmed skirt and pincushion.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’m glad she’s not upset that Inja’s going back to Korea.”
“I wasn’t aware it was a concern. She’s actually quite excited for your sister’s sake. And yours, too, of course. Look here.” He showed her a headline: “Nixon Orders New Watergate Probe.” “You can ease your mind about the Senate hearings—they won’t begin without you.”
Part V
* * *
Home
1973
36
* * *
Customs
The requirements Inja listed for their two-week journey were reasonable. Miran agreed to keep her long hair neatened into a braid or knotted in a bun, wear skirts and dresses—ergo the sewing—never to curse in any language, eat everything offered but not the entire portion, avoid blowing her nose as if it were a trumpet, avoid laughing out loud and showing all her teeth, and to not smoke cigarettes, which an hour into their flight was Miran’s most difficult concession. Trying to sit primly in coach class in her skirt and scr
atchy sweater, shoulder to shoulder with Inja, she chewed gum with vigor to overcome the nicotine cravings.
“And don’t chew gum like that,” said Inja. “I can’t stand you chewing without me. Give me a piece.”
Miran shared her Teaberry. “Is this anything like your first flight?”
“Honestly, I barely remember. I was too miserable to know what was happening.” Inja sat by the window, and leaned back to show Miran the cloudscape of wispy peaks. “Beautiful,” Inja said. “I had a window seat next to a nice women who gave me gum, but don’t remember seeing anything like this, though I must have. I was too nervous to eat or drink anything because I was afraid of the bathrooms on the plane. Too naive.”
“And brave,” said Miran. She scratched her back against the seat. “Do you know what’s weird? I’ve never really thought about what it was like for you, but considering all the brouhaha in getting on this damned plane, you must’ve gone through a worse ton of crap to take an overseas flight back then.” She saw Inja’s lips tighten to restrain a warning and more behavioral cautions. “Oops. Christ. Jeez! Crap!” They laughed.
“What is brouhaha?” said Inja.
“It means ‘crazy big fuss.’”
“Like Mom made when we left.”
Miran sighed and kicked at a lumpy food bundle stuffed beneath the seat in front of her. “Right on.”
On the day of departure, almost as if it were a reverse of Inja’s arrival, their parents and the Long Island friends with whom they were visiting met them at the airport. Najin had created a brouhaha at JFK International while they waited for the call to board the 707. She insisted they take the big basket of food she’d prepared for the journey, but both were reluctant because of its impossible mass and the pungent kimchi she had surely packed in a leaky jar. Inja conceded by wrapping half of the food in the small tablecloth—a tablecloth!—Najin had tucked on top of the travel-picnic masterpiece. It didn’t fully satisfy Najin—“Take fruit, apples, banana!”—but they got away with leaving the kimchi behind.
“She can’t help herself,” said Inja about their mother’s aggressive hospitality. “She didn’t think about customs, either.”
“She didn’t believe they’d feed us, but the stewardess said it’s three times for this trip.”
“Are you hungry?” Inja leaned toward the bundle under the seat.
“No way. Every time my toe touches it, I get a whiff of garlic.” Miran opened her book, The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Inja glanced at it and said, “Appropriate title for our trip.”
“Hah. It’s science fiction—is that inappropriate too?”
Inja said of its lurid purple cover of a dragon, “Maybe you keep that in your suitcase while we’re there.”
“Christ, are we going to a nunnery? Oops.” Miran acted out zipping her lips.
“Something like a cloister.” Inja smiled. “I haven’t been there for ten years, so I’m not sure what to expect.”
Miran closed her book and turned it face-down. “Might as well get into practice. Take a guess at the worst to prepare me.”
“The worst will be if the house is a wreck, but Uncle says it’s all modernized and they have a refrigerator and electric stove. Dad built that house, did you know?”
“You said something about that once, or was it Mom?” She couldn’t remember details of the story—more likely she couldn’t understand the storyteller’s tongue.
“The second worst thing is if our hotel is dirty and awful. I think Uncle booked us into a traditional inn, meaning we’ll sleep on the floor.”
“I wouldn’t mind that, unless there’s bugs.”
“Right. We have a fund—what’s the word—contingent money, but not much. The inn is about twelve dollars a night. Uncle wanted us to stay with them, but Seonil comes home on the weekends from university and the girls are still children. Seonwu is ten because she was born a few weeks after I left—wow, it’s been so long . . .” Inja quieted awhile and gazed at the clouds. “I think the baby’s six—hardly a baby. I can’t wait to meet them. Your cousins!”
Miran’s nervous shame surfaced at the prospect of meeting relatives—even children—with whom she couldn’t communicate. She would definitely be an idiot in Korea. “If there’s a youth hostel, those are a couple of bucks.”
“That’s actually the least of my worries, so let’s make that the third worst thing. Then the second worst thing is if they fight all the time. I’d be sad to see them fight and embarrassed for you.”
Miran wrapped her chewed-up gum in paper and took out a fresh piece. “No hints from his letters if they’re still fighting?”
“I wish you could read his letters. Next time I’ll translate. He’s sweet and sentimental. After he gives me news about the family, he fills the rest with how much he loves us, his sister—Mom—especially.”
“From what I’ve seen, she doesn’t exactly reciprocate,” Miran said, remembering what her father had said.
“They’re like reverse yin and yang—he’s the soft loving side and she’s the hardworking practical side.” Inja shifted to catch her eyes. “Do you remember when you told me neither of our parents ever said ‘I love you’ and you’d never heard them say that to each other?”
“Was that in candlelight in our bedroom or hiding out in the woods, avoiding chores? Oh, ha. That’s right. You’re the good one who loves washing dishes and vacuuming.”
“I love that miracle machine.” Inja reached up to twist open the fan. “But we were talking about love. You said you couldn’t remember the last time they hugged you, and I was amazed. Uncle is the complete opposite. I can also see how it’s so different here for Mom that she would stay old-fashioned—waiting for me, she once said about not being diligent with English. It’s ironic to hear her say that Grandfather was the stubborn, old-fashioned one.”
“She’s always been grossed out by all the love love love shit on TV, and she acts disgusted when she sees people kissing or hugging.”
“Upper-class propriety is important to her, Miran. It’s pure Confucian to assume parental love without showing it.”
At such moments when Inja sounded exactly like their mother, Miran felt excluded and American-ugly. But she preferred not to talk about love either. In that way, she supposed she was her mother’s daughter.
The stewardess served beverages and peanuts. Inja said, “I can’t believe I didn’t eat or drink anything on the flight over. When I was a kid, we used to beg for a single piece of gum, and they served many entire meals for free on that plane that I was too afraid to touch.”
“What do you mean you begged for gum? On the streets? You were that poor?”
From then on and in the hours between the movie, the first and second meals, nibbling on treats from Najin’s food bundle and fidgety upright napping, Inja talked about her childhood and youth in Korea. Entranced by the stories and struck by the poverty and making-do of the way they lived, Miran’s memory expanded when she connected the packages sent to Korea as being useful not for the generic Korean orphans for whom she cleaned her plate, but for her sister’s family and their entire church community. Some of her earliest memories were about cartons going to Korea. How could she have known so little about her own family, even the names of her first cousins, and about her country of origin? The last was easier to answer: because, duh, her country was America.
37
* * *
Seoul
A delay in Tokyo made them an hour and twenty minutes late, and though Inja had told Uncle they’d take a taxi from Gimpo, she knew he’d be at the airport and probably with a small crowd of people from church. It would be similar to how they’d departed JFK with brouhaha, and how she’d arrived in America with hullabaloo ten years ago. A transpacific flight was no everyday event, and her return would be as big a reunion with her Korean family as it had been with her American family. Though the years of separation were fewer behind this reunion, the circumstances were fraught with as much e
motion and expectation as was the reunion after fifteen childhood years apart from her parents. The captain announced the imminent landing, and the stewardesses roamed the aisles to check passenger protocol. Inja shook Miran’s elbow to wake her.
On the 707’s approach to Gimpo, the view was clear—and completely foreign. It was April, the same as the month she had left. With this thought a flash of memory surfaced from when that plane had ascended—the mountains and countryside surrounding Seoul beginning to green with trees finally reaching maturity after the devastation of war. Now the view was gray and ugly, crowded with buildings and industry, raw clusters of high-rise apartments, and as they descended, road congestion and black poles strung with crisscrossed wires.
“Wow,” said Miran, leaning in to look.
“I know. Not terribly inviting.”
“But I’m glad we’re here,” she said, being kind. “It’s wild and different, and an adventure not only for me, but for you, too, after so many years.”
They deplaned, and going through customs took forever since they had extra luggage filled with wrapped gifts, but it all passed muster with their American passports. Inja couldn’t remember what credentials she’d traveled with to America, but in order to acquire her passport, her father had found in his filing cabinet old affidavits about her birth, and her certificate of naturalization. As the officials inspected their luggage, Miran hung by her side wide-eyed.
Inja’s first shot of home warmed her—the familiarity of her own language all around her, the signage and crowded sense of space. She got a porter for their numerous bags, and at last they swung through the glass doors and into a mass of people craning their necks looking for those who belonged to them. And there was Uncle with his graying crown of hair—a little wild and exposing a balding head—his unmistakable huge grin and arms opened wide to take her in.