by Alana Terry
So like I says, Uncle and me, we just sorta agreed that we both lived in the same house and we’d try to make the best of it on account of neither of us wanting to trouble Granny too much. And things went fine that way, ’least at first. Granny kept telling Uncle how happy she was to have Chong-Su back home from China, and she’d make me tell him about what it’s like over there, so I had to make up these ridiculous tales, and I knowed Uncle didn’t believe me on account of his mean smirk he’d put on whenever I got to talking about it. Pretty soon I started to tell Granny I didn’t remember, and she was fine enough with that and never got down the spanking spoon or nothing. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure that woman owned a spanking spoon in her whole house. Near every one she had, I figure, was for cooking or eating with, and old as she was, that Granny could cook.
Back in the old days, I never knowed what it was like to have meat every night, and when I say meat, I’m not talking about fish, ’cause I said once that hardly even counts for meat, and Pastor, he agreed with me for a change and said I was smart for my age. Which is funny on account of none of us really knowing what my age is supposed to be. But Granny, she said she didn’t like fish. Said it stinked up the whole house and she wouldn’t cook it, and that was right fine with me.
So I got to be a growing boy again, which means I got to eat near about as much as I wanted every day. Granny didn’t believe in candy, but I was so full from all her meat and veggies and noodles and whatnot I couldn’t have ate too much of that anyway. Uncle, he didn’t eat nearly as much as me, and sometimes if he thought Granny made a lot of extra, he’d frown at her and say, “Half the town’s starving, you know, and the harvest’s still poor,” and Granny, she’d smile and say, “The Great Leader has blessed us. We are truly thankful.” And then she’d slip me another spoonful of soup or another helping of beef.
One thing I liked about Granny was if I ever wanted to be quiet-like for a while, all I’d hafta do is ask her a question about the Great Leader, and she’d talk about him for as long as I could stay awake, and about his son, the Dear Leader, too. She wasn’t no good at made-up fairy tales like Grandmother had been, but when she’d talk about either of them two Kims, she’d sorta youngen up if that makes any sense, and it was more like talking to an older aunt or maybe a younger great-aunt and not an old woman with white hair you call Granny though you ain’t related none at all.
One of my favorite stories was the one where the Dear Leader gets himself born. “He was a gift to the whole world, sent to us at just the right time,” Granny’d say, and I wish Pastor coulda heard her ’cause he’d get some ideas on how to make his sermons more interesting so people don’t get tempted to nap through them so much. “The heavens knew he was to be a blessed child, and so two angels spread a rainbow in the sky so the whole world could recognize the miracle of his birth.” If she was around now, I’d ask Granny how come the whole world coulda seen it, what with the earth being round and all, but back then I didn’t right know about all that stuff and nonsense. I didn’t even know what a rainbow was exactly, so I figured it was something you could look at no matter where you was.
“The two angels who got to hold the ends of the rainbow made the other angels jealous,” Granny told me, and if it weren’t for that white hair, you’d think she was Mama’s age or maybe a smidge older on account of her talking so dreamy-like. It just didn’t seem to me like something a really old lady’d do. “So two more angels put together another rainbow, and they spread it across the sky, and the people rejoiced because they knew a savior had been born to them at last.”
And sometimes, Teacher, when Pastor’s reading us the Advent devotions he’s got or I’m sitting through the Christmas story like we’ve been doing in church these past couple Sundays, I wonder why Matthew or Mark or any of them other apostles didn’t think to include rainbows in there, too.
CHAPTER 6
I stayed with Granny a long time. It’s hard to count the years, and when I try, I’m always getting it mixed up in my head, and you already know how I’m not too good at math. That reminds me, do you think maybe math’s something like English, where I’m just doing the best I can with what I got? ’Cause if that’s the case maybe I really shoulda gotten an A on my last report card on account of me trying so hard.
Anyway, I know I was there with Granny ’least a few years ’cause that’s how long I had to go to school. Granny lived in Chongjin — I remember the name from living there so long — and it’s a big city, but I don’t expect you ever heard of it. There weren’t too much fishing in Chongjin, even though we was right there by the water, but my old teacher told me it used to be a fishing town until them evil ’Pansies came. That’s what we called the bad guys from Japan who tried to steal our country from us a long time ago before I was born and said it was theirs all of a sudden. I say evil ’Pansies, except that’s not the word she ever used. I know how to say it in English, by the way, but I’m not supposed to write words like that, so you’ll have to pretend there’s a badder word there, and that way I won’t get into trouble.
So I went to school, except this Chong-Su boy I was expected to be, I figure he musta been older than me, ’cause they put me in a class with all the kids who had taken a year of school already, and if that weren’t unfair enough, they expected me to know how to read on top of that. So I had to pretend a lot of the time, which might not have been so bad, except it were on account of cross-eyed Ji-Hoon.
Ji-Hoon had a meaner face than Chuckie Mansfield, and he was a worst fighter too, and by worst I guess I mean better ’cause he beat me up more times than Chuckie ever did and even knocked a tooth out once. Ji-Hoon, he didn’t like me from the first day, maybe on account of me being so small, but what do you expect when you’re younger than all the others and growed up eating hardly more than plain fish all the time? And he didn’t like my ear neither, the one that got its bottom half tore off. So he come to me and he said I hafta do his assignment for him or I’ll get pounded, and he handed me this paper with all kinds of symbols on it that didn’t make no sense to me. I just sorta stared at it ’cause I wanted to do his homework for him on account of not wanting to get beat up or whatnot, but Ji-Hoon saw me looking at it and laughed because I had the whole darned thing upside-down. You’re a smart lady, Teacher, and I figure you musta been a smart girl and never woulda made a mistake like that, so you probably would hafta use a lot of imagination to guess how low I was feeling then. And things got worst when Ji-Hoon punched me a few times in the stomach, and I hadn’t been ready for it so it took out my wind, and I was gasping there and his friends thought it was funny, so they each took a few turns at me, too.
I went home that day, and it was one of the afternoons when Uncle was there instead of at work or wherever he went when he was out. I figured he’d see me and get even madder than normal on account of me having got beat up, except he didn’t. He looked at me, and then he said, “Didn’t you ever learn how to fight?” and I said no. So he took me outside and showed me a few tricks, and I figure that’s the nicest thing he ever done to me ’cause now Chuckie Mansfield can’t get me too bad, especially if I’m ready for him, and for that afternoon, it was kinda like he was my real uncle, but only for that half an hour or so.
School was bad, not only on account of Ji-Hoon but on account of the learning. I figure if maybe I had started with kids in the beginning grade it woulda worked out ok, but with Granny being convinced I was Chong-Su and all, I was sorta screwed from the start. Sorry if I’m not supposed to use that word, by the way. I sometimes forget which ones are the really bad ones and which ones are mostly ok but you shouldn’t say in church or places like that. But school in Chongjin was pretty different than here in Medford, on account of it being all right for teachers there to use bad words as long as they’re talking about the evil ’Pansies or the Americans or stuff and nonsense like that. Which gets me wondering, Teacher, do you even know what the really bad words are? ’Cause if you don’t I could spell them out for y
ou without actually saying them, and that way if one of your other students like Chuckie Mansfield tries to write them in a paper or whatnot, you’ll know he did something wrong so you could send him to the principal.
Anyway, I hated the learning part of school near as much as I hated the getting beat up part. My first teacher there was more like Mama and less like you and Granny, only it weren’t spanking spoons she used but things like wooden sticks or what you’d think of as a tiny wrist whip or whatnot. That first year was mostly basic and got a little better, I suppose, once I figured out the reading part of it, but I still didn’t like it. Too much stuff and nonsense like memorizing the Dear Leader’s favorite things to say. Some of it was all right though, like if you wanted one day at recess I could teach you a poem about the Dear Leader that I bet you’d say was pretty. Except the poem’s in Korean so maybe that wouldn’t work on account of the words not rhyming if I told it to you in English, so never mind.
Things didn’t go much better after that first year of school, neither. I think I had two different teachers, or maybe it was three, but then one of them quit in the middle of the year and had to get replaced on account of her not showing up for work one day and nobody seeing her again after that, so it’s hard for me to say how long I was there since I may have forgotten one or two of them. But in case that got you worried, Teacher, I promise I’m never gonna forget you, and when I grow up and get married, if I have a baby girl I already figured I could name her Mrs. Winifred on account of you being so nice to me my first year in Medford and whatnot.
One of the things I didn’t like about school was learning about the Peninsula War when the Americans came and attacked our country and made us split in two. Hearing about it made me sad ’cause I know Grandmother was alive back then and so she coulda teached me about it all better than my schoolteacher did, and that made me miss Grandmother, which made me miss Papa and Min-Jung and even Mama a little, which is funny, isn’t it, ’cause she was always the grumpiest of the whole lot.
My teachers in Chongjin, I think they tried to do a good job, but it mighta been easier for them to teach us if they didn’t need to throw in all the speeches and stuff and nonsense by the Dear Leader. And did you know if I was back in Chongjin and I called it nonsense there, I could get such a good whipping they woulda sent me home to recover for a few days? ’Cause over there you can’t say bad things about the Dear Leader or even his dad even though he’s already dead, so he couldn’t really do nothing about it if you did. That’s why it was so weird for me when I learnt English and Pastor was listening to this radio program in the car, and it was this angry-sounding man talking about the President and what a stupid mistake he made about some stuff and nonsense. I got kinda scared for Pastor and asked him if he’d get in trouble for listening to that, and he laughed, but his wife Miss Sandy, she made a little sniffing noise and it got real quiet for a few minutes until she reached over and put on some of that Jesus music she likes.
Anyway, we wasted a lot of time at the Chongjin school learning about the evil ’Pansies who took over and about all the brave Koreans who finally fought them off. And then it was the same thing over again, except this time it was the Americans who were the bad guys and we still fought them off. Pastor said once it wasn’t really like that, but I expect maybe he weren’t around back then or was too little to remember it proper-like.
So school was school, and I started to do all right once I learnt about the reading part of it, so maybe that means my grades’ll be better in your class too once I catch up. ’Least I hope so on account of Pastor promising to take me to the movies over Christmas break if I’m doing good enough, so if he calls you to ask you could just tell him I’m making the most out of what I’ve got, and maybe that’ll be enough so we can make it to the theater. Anyway, couldn’t hurt to try, right?
So like I said, Granny and Uncle were pretty well off, and I guess I sorta forgot about the famine for the most part. I mean, I could tell a lot of the other kids in class was hungry, but maybe I figured their parents just didn’t take time to send them to school with enough food or something like that. Well, pretty soon kids started to notice how Granny always packed me plenty to eat, and so they’d fight to see who got to sit next to me at lunch time, and pretty soon after that even cross-eyed Ji-Hoon was asking me if I wanted to pick something out of his marble collection or whatnot, only I never shared my food with him hardly as much as I did the others.
It’s funny how fast you can get yourself popular if there’s a famine and your granny’s the only granny in town with food to spare. Before I knowed it, kids were begging me to play with them after school, and whenever I brung them over, Granny’d put out a little snack of something, and we’d play sometimes for a whole hour. Those were fun days, what with the hide and seek and bug hunting and top spinning and sometimes, when it was the right season, kite flying. Sometimes now if Chuckie Mansfield’s been particularly mean or whatnot, I just remind myself that things started out pretty bad-like at the Chongjin school too and then they got better, so maybe they will here in Medford. That’s why I think the cafeteria rule that you can’t share your lunch with nobody is stupid, ’cause how else is a new kid supposed to make friends if he don’t have nothing tasty to pass around?
Well, I didn’t notice it, ’least not right at first, but Granny was eating less those days. She’d still make dinner, but then she’d say something like, “Oh, I’m so tired after listening to you and your friends run around the yard all day, I couldn’t eat even if I was dying of hunger.” And she’d put her food in a special little wrapper or whatnot and send it in my lunch the next day.
This went on a good while, with me bringing more and more kids home and Granny always being there with snacks, only before long she stopped cooking quite so much at dinnertime, and there wasn’t much extra to pass around in my school lunches neither. So I started to wonder what would happen to all my new friends if I stopped feeding them. I didn’t want to start getting beat up again every day, ’cause you know them tricks I said Uncle teached me? Well, sometimes they worked, and sometimes they didn’t, and you never knowed which it was gonna be until you were either getting yelled at by the teacher or you were bleeding and having everyone around call you a cry-baby.
Well, one day I brung some friends home after school, only Granny come up and whispered that we all needed to play outside, and I said, “Sure, Granny. You can just bring the snacks out there.” And she got this little bit of sadness on her face, and she said, “No snacks today, Chong-Su. Your friends will have to eat at their own homes.”
And I tried to explain to her that none of them had any food at their own homes, that there was a famine in Chongjin in those days, but she pushed me outside even though she was near weak as a teeny tiny breeze, and she shut the door. It was the first time since I got to Chongjin Granny didn’t give me what I asked for, and it was hard-like to grasp at first. So we played with sticks — bug hunting was harder those days on account of some folks stealing them for food — and then my friends sorta looked around at that closed door and went off one by one long before sunset.
I was pretty mad at Granny, and I was planning to tell her she had embarrassed me, and why else would anyone be nice to me if it got around that Chong-Su’s granny didn’t pass out free treats anymore? But I got in the house, and she was sitting in the chair just sorta crying-like, real quiet so you wouldn’t have even knowed it unless you saw her. And I sneaked by and drawed some pictures in my notebook until dinnertime and forgot about yelling at her like I planned.
Granny cooked noodles that night and nothing else, and she scooped some on my plate and some on Uncle’s plate, and she always gave him more than me, which I thought was weird ’cause didn’t she know I was a growing boy and needed it the most? But I never complained since more often than not she scraped some food off her plate onto mine a little later on, so I ended up with enough.
Only that night, Granny said she wasn’t hungry, and she put the spoon back
in the bowl, and I saw right away it was empty even though she hadn’t given me or Uncle any more than usual and hadn’t taken none for herself. And that got me a little worried ’cause what if things at Granny’s ended up like they were in the old days when our house was haunted and Papa broked his arm and couldn’t bring home no more fish? And I sorta wished Papa were around to catch us some fish ’cause by that time I was a little smarter and knowed plain old fish beat belly aches any day of the week. And I was still embarrassed that my friends didn’t get their snacks that afternoon like they expected, and I was even more embarrassed that I had almost yelled at Granny for it and had sneaked in to see her crying, so I was feeling pretty miserable already on top of being hungry.
Well, Uncle, he just kinda glared at Granny’s empty plate a while and then said, “Boy, give her your noodles,” and Granny started to talk in that soft-like voice of hers saying, “Now then, I said I’m not hungry, and Mrs. Song next door invited me for tea later,” but he interrupted her and said, “Mrs. Song moved away ten years ago.”
And I expected her to look startled, except she didn’t and only said, “I know that. I just forgot.”
Then he looked at me and said real mean-like, “Give her your noodles.”
And I didn’t quite understand what he meant, so I looked at him and wondered why in the world a growing boy who didn’t even get a snack after school would hafta give his plain noodles to an old lady who’d said more than once she didn’t want them. But Uncle was going at it, saying how I was a thief and stealing all their belongings and bringing my no-good buddies over to sneak food right out of Granny’s mouth, and I looked at Granny, and she looked so sad and skinny that I couldn’t help myself from sniffling even though I was way too big for that by then. I knowed she didn’t want me to give her my food, but Uncle took my plate and shoved it into her hands, and I think he probably woulda scooped them into her mouth if she hadn’t started on them herself. She took one slow, sad kinda bite after another, and I saw her hands trembling like mine used to when I got an especially bad case of the hunger-weakness back in the old days, and that made me feel even more wretched on top of everything else.