by Alana Terry
That reminds me of a story from school, actually. When I heard about Charlie Mansfield missing class to go to his grandpa’s funeral, I made a point to go up and tell him I’m sorry the next day, and he didn’t shove me away like I thunk he might. He just muttered something about me having slanty eyes and an ugly ear, and then he wiped his nose on his sleeve and sorta walked off. But that don’t got nothing to do with the rains, and I can’t even remember now why I brung it up.
Anyway, when the rains came, at first we were so happy, me and Min-Jung both, we took off our shoes, and we splashed around in all the puddles, empty bellies and all. It’s the only time I remember my sister laughing. I’m sure there musta been other times, but that’s the only one I got to carry around in my mind, which when you think about it is sorta sad, isn’t it? So anyway, this rain, it come and come for days until you’d step down and hafta be careful or you’d sink in mud all the way to your knee. And by the third day with it not letting up, the road was more like a little stream and the adults got worried, and Mama told Papa maybe he should stay in, but Papa was anxious about the boat and wanting to check on it. Neither one of them was happy now ’cause it was so much rain that it would drown the crops, and at first you couldn’t play outside on account of dying of pneumonia or tracking in too much mud, but then it started pouring so hard you wouldn’t have wanted to go out anyway. So the grown-ups went from fretting over no rain at all to wishing it would stop, and Mama was so angry-like on top of being scared, and I couldn’t go more than a few minutes it seemed without her getting down the spanking spoon.
By the way, I was looking ahead in the science book, Teacher, and it looks like we’re gonna be talking about flash floods soon, except the book leaves a lotta stuff out. It don’t talk about how a whole river can change so that one minute it’s down in the riverbank where it’s always been, and the next minute it’s rushing through your living room and toppling you down sideways until you don’t know which way is which and it don’t seem to matter none anyway because you’re afraid you’re gonna drown whether you’re upside-down or not. ’Least that’s what happened to me. I tried holding onto Min-Jung when it came, this giant wall of water that knocked our house flat down, but that’s something else your book don’t say. You think of water like the kind you swim in, and it’s all nice and easy so you can splash in it and push through it to go wherever you want, except in a flood it’s the water that’s telling you which way to go, and the only choice you really have is if you’re gonna try to hold your breath the whole time or if you’re just gonna act like you’re a fish that can breathe under water, and really it don’t matter ’cause you can die either way.
As for me, I remember the water crashing into the house, and I remember screaming for Min-Jung, only it didn’t make no sound on account of me already being underneath, and the next thing I knowed it was nighttime and I was in some strange bed, and this lady — she was old like Grandmother, except her hair was white and Grandmother’s had been black — and she leaned down over me and said, “Chong-Su?” So at first I wondered if maybe I was at the hospital and she didn’t know my real name. Then I started to feel scared that maybe my body died and my soul found another little boy’s body to go ahead and live inside of, except that boy’s name was Chong-Su instead of Woong. But I felt myself all over real good, and I couldn’t find no differences except all the cuts and bruises from getting dragged down with the river. And my head hurt fiercer than a tiger, so I finally decided it would be best to stay quiet and wait for Mama and Papa to come and clear up the mistake.
The old woman, she was sitting by my bed, and the first thing I seen was it’s a real bed, not just a little cot like me and Min-Jung used to share. The woman held my hand in hers, and her skin was all leathery and hard, not smooth and soft like Grandmother’s had been, and she kept calling me things like “Precious Baby” and “Sweet Little Blessing,” and I didn’t know what to think. But the bed was real comfortable, so I sorta lain there and waited for my family to find me.
“Why were you out there swimming in the rain?” she asked me, and it made me kinda wonder if she even knowed what she was talking about, ’cause she spoke in that sorta mumbling way out the corner of her mouth so as to make you hafta guess if she was all right in her head or not.
By and by, she said something about her little Chong-Su needing food, and ’course I weren’t about to argue then no matter if she got my name wrong, and when she brung me a bowl of soup, I looked at all them vegetables swimming in the broth, with little fat droplets floating up to the surface. And I asked myself if maybe this was something like heaven, my reward for being such a good boy even if I did make Mama angry too much. I figured maybe I had died in that flood, except my body still hurt all over, and I could poke my finger in the back of my thigh where a rock or something musta scraped off a chunk of my skin, so I knowed I was still alive.
And then the old woman asked about my ear and said, “How’d you get hurt? Did that happen in China?” And ’course she was talking about the part of my ear that got tore off, and that happened when I was really little and fell off a tree, which was even before the floods and the curse only I forgot if you already knew that. But I couldn’t figure why this woman was asking me about China, so I didn’t say nothing.
“I made your favorite soup,” she said next, and she had this smile on her face, so I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t have a clue who she was ’cause if she knew the soup wasn’t for me, what would stop her from taking it away and sending me out so I had to find somewhere else to wait for my parents to pick me up?
Once I finished eating and the woman washed the bowl, a man come into the home, taller than average. When he opened the door, I saw right away that the rain stopped, so I figured that was good news ’cause my parents would be looking for me, and I didn’t want them getting any wetter than they had to. So the man, he stopped in the middle of the room when he saw me, and the old woman said, “Look, Chong-Su’s come back to us, and he was out playing in the rain just as naughty as ever.” Then the man patted the old woman’s hand like she was a pet dog or something, except he didn’t smile none but just kinda gave me a mean sorta stare, and the woman told me, “Say hello to your uncle,” so I did.
The lady looked happy and said, “Isn’t it good to have Chong-Su home?” and he muttered, “Yes, Mother.”
Then she said in a kinda wispy-like voice if you can picture what I mean, “It’s a blessing from heaven. Maybe the Great Leader himself sent him home to us.” And I was about to tell her the Great Leader was dead. It was his son, the Dear Leader, that we all had to bow to now and hang pictures of up in our houses, but then the man, he glared at me so mean-like I stopped myself.
No one talked for a while after that.
I was ready for another bowl of soup by then, but I didn’t want to trouble no one, and the old woman’s son didn’t seem too happy to have me there, so I waited and wondered what was taking Mama and Papa so long finding me. After he ate, the man helped the old woman take down her hair and get out of her sweater, and he walked her over to another bed and lain her down and put a blanket over her just like he was her parent and not the other way around. Then he sat with his back to me and smoked a cigarette, and I musta drifted off to sleep because the next thing I remember he was kinda kicking me awake and saying, “Tell me who you really are. What game is this?” And he talked with a kinda snarl that made him sound like an angry dog, and I couldn’t remember the last time I talked to an adult outside of my family besides Mrs. Nosy. (The mudang doesn’t count on account of her being the one to curse me back in the old days.)
I didn’t answer right away, and that made him even madder, so he said, “You think this is a home for beggars? You think you can come in here and lie to my mother? Who told you about Chong-Su?”
And at that point, I was so confused I wanted to ask him to please tell me where my mama was, and then I started to think about Papa and his broken arm, and how could he have swu
m with it being all busted when that river came through the house? So I started to cry from fearing that Papa mighta got drowned, and maybe that’s why nobody had found me yet. Well, that didn’t make the man any happier, but ’least he leaved me alone for a little bit, and when I woke up in the morning he was gone. But the old woman was there, sitting by my bed with her face and eyes both full of smiles, and she said, “Good morning, Chong-Su. How did you sleep, sweetie?”
And that’s how I come to live the life of a stranger I’d never met.
CHAPTER 5
The old lady — Granny she told me to call her — she made me stay in bed for a whole week. She said that an angel brung me to her doorstep and she wasn’t going to lose me no more and I had to sleep and eat as much as I could, and that was right fine by me.
Granny didn’t do much but sit by my bed those first few days. She told me about my mama and said things like, “I missed the two of you so much,” and told me how sad and lonesome she got when we sneaked over the border to get to China, but she was sure I’d come back and see her in her old age, and she got to rattling on so much that I got scared to tell her I wasn’t her real grandson. Funny thing is I look on that time, and I don’t think of myself as Woong near as much as Chong-Su, and I’m sure Pastor, he’d tell me I was wicked to let her believe I was someone I weren’t. But Pastor’s probably never met someone like Granny, who’s so kind and sweet to just sit by your bedside and make sure you’re sleeping good and always giving you plenty of food, but then when she gets to talking it gives you this sense like she doesn’t quite know what’s been going on around for the past few years, so you end up feeling a tad sorry for her too.
Near about every day, she’d get to talking about the Great Leader — he’s the one that died, but she talked about him like he was still sitting there in Pyongyang watching over the country. “The Great Leader knows we have to endure hardship before coming to the blessings he’s promised us,” she’d say. I couldn’t figure what sort of promises a dead man could make, but I didn’t want to tell her that ’cause when she talked about him, it felt like she knowed what she was saying, even if it was probably all stuff and nonsense when you think about it. Besides, I remembered her son looking so angry-like the first night when I was gonna tell her about the Great Leader being dead and all, so maybe I got to thinking it was a little secret she wasn’t supposed to know.
Granny, she wasn’t much of a talker except when she was talking about one of the Kims and saying real fancy things like, “The Great Leader is a father to us all.” That’s the way she spoke, ’least when she was talking about them two. “The Great Leader teaches us the things we need to know and cares for us out of his own abundance of love and wisdom.” Well, I coulda told her he may have done those things all right, but then how come he couldn’t cure my curse from the mudang? But that woulda took too much explaining to do and I didn’t want to bother her with none of that.
Truth be told, Teacher, I come to kinda like her talk of the Great Leader. I recognized him by his picture, but I never knowed much about him except for him being dead. We had his portrait up at home, in the old days, I mean. I guess it don’t exist no more on account of the flood knocking our house flat, but I couldn’t tell you for sure ’cause I never did go back. Can you believe that? Sometimes I wonder if maybe Granny was my only family and she raised me since I was a baby, and maybe it was lonesome-like for me being there all alone with an old lady for company, so I made up a story of a mama and a papa and a sister who liked to knock my wind out. But then I thought on Granny’s son, and ’course that always reminded me I weren’t really part of their family. I weren’t really Chong-Su, convenient as that woulda been.
I had to call Granny’s son Uncle, even though he and I both knowed from the start there weren’t never going to be no real niceness between us. Uncle was a big man, liked to smoke, and he near always wore a hat. I don’t know for sure if he worked a job or not, but I figure he musta and that’s why him and Granny had so much food. ’Least in the early days they did. He came and went, and I learnt to ignore him and he learnt to ignore me, and we sorta had an agreement about that. It wasn’t like me and Min-Jung, where we were always fighting and punching and kicking and sometimes even biting and most always yelling at each other, but still we were together more often than not. Uncle, I didn’t even want to fight him, not even when he made me mad on account of him being rude to Granny when he got her dressed or whatnot. There was something mean about him, like a dog when you see the hair on the back of its neck standing straight up and it don’t even hafta growl, and you just know it’s telling you to stay away.
Uncle was so different from Granny, I sometimes had to wonder if maybe he had showed up on her porch one day after a flood too, and she adopted him and that’s why they weren’t nothing alike. But there was this sister they talked about, the one I figure Granny meant when she asked me about my mama, and before long when she said mama I’d get to thinking about that lady I’d never met and not my real mama from back in the old days.
Do you think it’s wicked of me, Teacher, that I don’t think about her more, my real mama I mean? It’s not like she was the nicest lady in the world, but then again she was my mama and she did all right at that, ’least as far as she knowed how like Grandmother told me. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel bad that I never cried about missing Mama. I cried about missing Mr. Mittens ’cause I never seen him again after the flood. And I even cried every once in a while about Min-Jung, but that was in the winter when it was cold and I was on the streets and didn’t have nobody to keep me warm. Once Pastor and his wife took me to an aquarium — that’s where they keep all kinds of fancy fish and sea things and stuff and nonsense like that, and it’d probably be a fun place for a field trip — but somehow that got me to thinking about Papa and his fishing boat, and I got a little sniffish. I still cry today if I get to thinking too much about Grandmother. But I never did cry for Mama. Maybe if you remember you can tell me if you think that’s wicked of me or not.
It’s strange how after a while you get someone calling you Chong-Su all the time and not your real name and talking about your mama who ran off to China on some errand or other and forgot to return, and eventually you start to accept it even if you don’t actually believe it. It didn’t take me long, like I said, before I was thinking of myself as Chong-Su. I sometimes wonder if I’d stayed there forever if I woulda forgotten all about being Woong and how things was in the old days.
Granny couldn’t see real good, so I probably coulda gotten into a lot more trouble than I did, but Pyongyang-perfect truth is I liked Granny and didn’t wanna be very naughty. She didn’t have to feed me so good, but she did. She never complained about how much I ate neither, so I sometimes didn’t even feel bad asking for more if I was done with what she given me and was still hungry. Every once in a while I thought maybe she knew I was really Woong, but she wanted an excuse to cook for me so she pretended we was related. And other times I’d get scared she’d find out the real truth and turn me out. But then I look back, and I think if I just told her I was really sorry on account of her not knowing where her daughter and grandson was, but my real name was Woong and would she mind calling me that instead, I think she woulda kept cooking for me and watching me sleep and fretting over me even after I dried out from that flood and didn’t need as much looking-after.
The funny thing is I belonged at my old home with Mama and Papa, but when I was there back in the old days before the flood, I was always getting spoon spanked and there weren’t never enough food to eat. Here at Granny’s, I didn’t really belong but I was good as an angel — Granny’d tell me that all the time, used those exact words — and I don’t remember ever being hungry. ’Least not that first year or so. Sometimes I lain awake wondering ’cause I still didn’t know what happened to Mama and Papa and Min-Jung. Sometimes I thought they musta drowned in the flood, and sometimes I thought that was impossible. Then I’d start wondering what if Mama showed up at Granny�
��s and wanted to take me home, and what I’d do if Granny said the choice was up to me, did I want to stay with her or go with my real family? I had dreams about it, too, and I always woke up fretting more than normal on account of not knowing what would be best. I knowed what I’d want to do, and I knowed pretty good what I’d hafta do, and I figure it’s one of those times when you make the choice to either do the right thing or the thing that’s going to make things turn out best for you in the end.
Much as I liked being at Granny’s, though, I sometimes felt guilty thinking maybe she loved me more than I could love her back. But what do you expect when someone thinks you’re her real-to-life grandson, only you know you’re nothing more than a stranger who happened to end up on her doorstep after near drowning in a flood?
That’s the other funny thing I forgot to say, Teacher. Granny wasn’t even in the same village as Mama and Papa. She didn’t let me outta the house for a week or so ’cause she was scared that the floodwaters’d gotten me sick, but when I finally went outside, I seen we was in a totally new place. And she came out and sat in the sun with me and said, “China must be a lot different. What’s it like there?” and so I pretended to be too busy hunting for bugs to hear her, but it weren’t as fun playing with the beetle I found on account of Mr. Mittens not being there with me.