Drifting House Read online

  Tell me a story, she says to her mother. And waits for her reward.

  Her mother muses, her mother mulls. Her mother gives her a handful of chocolate tears wrapped in silver foil. Should it be the one about the evil brother who steals the good brother’s fortune? Or the one about men who turn into oxen? She looks flustered, her forehead creases with frustration as it sometimes does, when making decisions. When it is so simple! Finally, she asks, in her pleading voice, What does my princess want to hear tonight?

  You spoil her, says the man, breathing out menthol and cigarettes. She doesn’t act seven.

  I am seven! Mina says, and comes out from under the table, so he can see her full height. I’ll be eight soon.

  She’s lost a father, Mina’s mother says, which sounds like fahder when she says it. She becomes sullen, no longer interested in him.

  Mina seizes the opportunity. Tell me a goblin story, she says. She stares at the stranger’s eerie green marbles. He folds his pink hands neatly on the table and stares back. How can her mother trust a man who irons his collar crisp but overlooks what must be dirt and moss under his fingernails?

  All children like animals, the man says. When he smiles, he bares glistening yellow teeth.

  Hana has decided that everyone will like the new student Mina. When she announces that they are now best friends two days into the spring term of 1971, no one in the third grade, not even Mina, dares challenge her. Hana is too big for age eight, too certain, to contradict.

  At lunch she sits down by Mina, her body as bountiful as her personality. Her eyes open to the size of spoons when she sees the wheat sausages and rice Mina will eat for lunch. Angered by all inequality, with a flip of her sturdy wrist, she releases the metal clasp to her oversize lunch box: rice, kimchi, preserved radish, fried anchovies, fried squid, eggs, and beef marinated in soy sauce. Her large hands gesture out to her lunch box like a traveling pansori singer’s fan. She says, I give you half this universe.

  At home it is impossible to see Hana in her mother’s fat folds of flesh that smother with each hug. There are only the skirts of her mother’s stiff silk hanbok scraping against her cheeks. She says, My little genius! You’re as good as any of our boys.

  Mrs. Song’s professions of love echo as loud as threats. They are so pronounced that her voice shakes their yard cloistered by four buildings, clatters the crocks of preserved foods, and breaks through their ­fortress­like gates down to the Yeongdeungpo neighborhood’s serpentine alleys. She is so loud that the barber stops shaving his customer, a tabby cat springs toward the sound, and Mina looks behind her as the uniformed pusher pushes her mother and her onto the crowded tram, pushes them all the way in.

  Soon after Mina and her mother, Mrs. Lim, or Sergeant Brown’s woman, as the foreign community has dubbed her, arrive at Namdaemun Market, her mother pretends to inspect crates of mackerel heads. She does not want to be seen hungering for imported banana clusters by their old neighbors. The tropical fruit cluster is nearly worth what Mrs. Lim made in a day working at a laundry service near the U.S. army base. I won’t listen to their insults again, she says, and tugs Mina hard into an alley, where spools of thread and buttons to dress entire nations are sold. Her panic reminds Mina of what she already knows: if it weren’t for her birth, her mother would not have to run away from anyone.

  So what does Mina do? She runs.

  In the Itaewon neighborhood, this is what they had said: GI’s lover. A blackie’s bitch. The chortles bandied about by the neighborhood’s ­old-time Korean residents just loud enough to trail after the family.

  They had smirked hello after Mina’s father, Sergeant Brown, persistently greeted them after church with his brisk pace and friendly black face, his determined smile, like his stepdaughter’s, intact unless he was asked about his family in the United States. Then he would stop smiling and say, “That’s none of your business.” When there were no witnesses, the Korean congregation snatched away their children by their armpits and would not let Mina play with them. They gossiped about the noises from the house, not knowing that when Sergeant Brown was drunk, he tickled Mina or her mother; they did not know that he wore bifocals that divided his eyes in half, read three newspapers each morning, taught Mina how to read, and had been trying to secure a ­long-distance divorce from his first wife (a vengeful woman!), and always deferred to Mina’s mother with, Yes, my dear, as if it pleased him to lose to her. They said it was God’s will when Sergeant Brown left to fight in Vietnam; their faces twisted into grimaces as they searched for someone else to judge. How confused the neighbors were after Sergeant Brown died in action and the Lims moved away from the house near Yongsan’s U.S. military base, a trail of turquoise butterflies fluttering after them.

  Mrs. Lim is calling for Mina somewhere in the labyrinth of ­Namdaemun Market’s crates of spoiling vegetables and fresh pig’s heads, but Mina forgets this as she wanders through stalls of fermented mackerel, dogs hanging by their hides, jars of alcohol with snakes coiled inside, army uniforms and canned baked beans smuggled off the army base, and 101 varieties of pickled vegetables.

  Lost, she swerves into an ancient man in a horsehair hat and bumps into his cart of squirming squid, hops over a rat sniffing into the mouth of a blowfish, skittles past naked mannequins and stuffed tigers. When she feels fear, she pinches her thigh to distract herself.

  Boys don’t cry, she says out loud. Spring’s first dandelion seeds flit across her nose and make her sneeze.

  You lost, little girl? says a shopkeeper with the white whiskers of a mouse. His face softens as he gazes at her.

  No! she says. I’m never lost! She impales him with her glare for noticing.

  When he hunches to her height, she runs, with her companions from her favorite folktales: the ­garlic-eating bear, a pipe-smoking tiger, a fox ­shape-shifting into a beautiful woman. Mina is a warrior with a quivering bow, an iceberg, a tortoise barricaded in his gunmetal shell; she is invincible. She is almost as brave as her father. But an hour later, she is alone, zigzagging from alley to store to escape her shadow.

  What a beautiful child! the dried pollack vendor exclaims after she nearly steps on the sleeping girl’s ­egg-shaped face. Mina, the size of a sack of rice, is prostrate beside boxes of body-scrubbing cloths. Her cheeks bloom with a garden of color, her two pigtails of hair curl into question marks. Disappointed by the two sons the vendor has raised into ingrates, she dreams of taking the girl home and dressing her up in yellow ruffles and bows. Maybe even parading her loveliness on one of those newfangled black-and-white machines called televisions. In her trance, the vendor leans to snatch the girl up in her arms, but is too late.

  The girl’s curtain of eyelashes flies open, revealing the ambers of her bright, friendly eyes. She says, Have you seen my omma? and yawns with such a stretch of her arms that her top jacket button pops and rolls across the alley’s pavement.

  After Mina has been warmed by the smoky coal grate and tucked into bed, Mrs. Lim trundles through yet another market and buys thread and buttons in bulk. Soon, she thinks, as she passes women carrying wooden A–frames loaded with fabric, women whose cracked, lined faces have been ravaged by their hard lives, soon I will be one of them.

  The ­fortune-teller, the closest thing Mrs. Lim has to a friend that late spring, sniffs her as soon as she enters. Smelling the bowl of ­home-brewed, milky makgeolli that Mrs. Lim consumed before arriving, she says, Mrs. Lim, you’ve been drinking.

  Mrs. Lim digs into her tumultuous purse, sprays herself with a vial of lilac. She says, How can I not drink when I’m afraid of my dreams? Each night she imagines what must be her man’s toothless jaw trying to speak from under Vietnam’s jungle. The rusted clutch of some booby trap around his feet. The gobbets of his brave flesh stuck in camphor trees. He was a good man, and she had imagined another life for them, another country. Now she fears her family’s bad luck is following her; she has had fortune with her dreams.

  The old woman squints, and knits her painte
d eyebrows together. She mumbles, War after war after war. They’re bleeding our continent. She fumbles with her book of numbers and reconfirms Mrs. Lim’s time of birth, day, month, year. When she opens her mouth to speak, Mrs. Lim says, I never wanted to go back to the family farm; I wanted to be somebody. And now it’s the end of love, the end of guarantees. She raises her enameled nails beseechingly. So don’t deny me. Still, after several apologies, all the ­fortune-teller claims to see in the numbers is the ruins of time. A time of money and of speed, though men and women dare not hold hands in public, a time when people do not ask audaciously what is happiness. She says churches will protect the dead and the living, the country’s people will rise and be crushed by the government, and time will swallow up Mrs. Lim’s beauty.

  The government’s swallowed up my son! Mrs. Jang shouts at the neighbors. She has taken to standing at the street corner, railing at passing pedestrians. Her ­nineteen-year-old son has disappeared; tears the size of salmon eggs squeeze out of her eyes as she curses the government. Her diffident husband, afraid that she, too, will be arrested, pulls timidly at the flaps of her sleeve.

  Give me back my son, she says, and lifts her husband up by his shirt. She stands outside until her shoes are worn away by June’s monsoon rains. As the fierce summer heat sets in, her wringing hands become leathery in the sun. Her dark hair turns hoary white out of grief, her brown eyes fade to gray. Mina, Hana, and the other kids in the neighborhood slow down, listening, as they pass her on the way home from school. Sometimes they bring her a few rice cakes or a bowl of leftover rice porridge from home, as their mothers instruct them to. To the curious children, the only ones unafraid of her grief, Mrs. Jang relays her story of how the ­black-suited men took her son away because he had been seen handing out political pamphlets.

  Which of you reported him? she demands.

  I didn’t report him, Hana says, so upset by Mrs. Jang’s tale that she shivers in the white heat. I promise.

  Everything he said is true, Mrs. Jang says, as her anxious husband tries to pull her back into the house. You’ve made him disappear for telling the truth.

  Across the street corner from where Mrs. Jang spends most of her days, the ­mini-mart keeper washes dishes and sweeps for his wife, gives her back rubs, and makes all the women envious. While Hana hides in the aisles, Mina watches Junho, a boy in their third grade class, fishtailing across the ­mini-mart floor. His face is ecstatic, a fleshy plum. Mina barricades herself behind an aisle of shrimp chips and bags of rice crackers as tall as her, her large eyes lit like tinder, her grip a tourniquet around a tin of tuna. Someday, she vows, she will resist Japanese colonists, fight in wars, come back a war hero, be equal to the boys.

  Mina, here I am! Hana’s voice calls from behind packets of dried cuttlefish, as Junho heaves like the rough East Sea, rubs his body up and down against the blackened tiles. It is the first time Mina has ever seen him smile.

  When their parents have completed the honor rituals to their ancestors and are sleeping off the Lunar New Year’s feast, the neighborhood’s children try to catch the moon. One of their fathers said that the Americans have learned to walk on its cratered surface, so they are determined that at least the Koreans will be the first ones to catch it. Hana will buy the successful boy or girl coveted ­silver-foiled Hershey’s chocolates off the black market; Mina has promised a kiss to the victor. The moon looks so close. It seems entirely possible.

  Boys take turns releasing the swing and gliding as high as they can. Girls jump from the top of the gleaming slide and fling a fishing net into the sky. Still, the universe is too large, and they land, dusty and defeated in the sand. Within an hour the seven of them line up on the chilly bench, somber with disappointment. Junho, the oldest by three months, says, I knew it was impossible. The youngest at seven, a girl so poor she was once caught eating leftovers from a garbage can, begins to cry. She casts a fistful of sand at him, and makes the sky cloudy for a moment.

  Mina kisses the girl. Of course it’s possible! she says. Here it is! And pulls the net over Hana’s solemn ­moon-shaped face.

  Mrs. Lim is convinced that the moon looks more beautiful in other countries. Look, she says. Look how ugly our moon is. And as she holds Mina up, she makes her daughter reflect on its dishwater color, its streaky gray surfaces.

  While Mrs. Lim searches for a new moon with the ­green-eyed man, Mina tells a story. Though the outdoor toilets used by the tenants smell like winter’s roasted chestnuts and ammonia, the number of children grows in the neighborhood’s ­kitchen-size playground.

  Mina stands on a plastic horse, her feet sway in the pink stirrups. The kids facing her sit on one another’s laps, on the swings and slide, expectant. Jungsu, who tries to touch everyone’s butt while laughing; Eunhee, a girl with no eyebrows and skin so pale it looks bleached; Gyeongjin, a boy who once tried to share a chicken bone in his mouth as a gesture of love; a gaggle of older girls who like to braid Mina’s hair and dress her up in their outgrown clothes; and others. The only one absent is the one that matters most to Mina: Hana, locked up on a Saturday afternoon at an abacus class, with her brothers.

  Mina waves her wand, her mother’s bamboo spatula. The wind bites her nose and ears red, lifts her hair, and transforms her into a witch. She waves her wand again and casts her enchantments.

  The audience is listening; she is ready to begin.

  It is there, it is real, when Mina promenades across the playground, her head high. They see Mrs. Lim with rose of Sharon growing in her hair, from her shirt, from her very toes. The girls lean forward, entranced as Mina walks delicately across the pit of sand.

  Where are you going? they ask.

  To Texas, of course! she says, naming her father’s hometown, where he had promised they would live someday after Nam.

  Why Texas, they say, when our country’s the best in the world?

  Over there, she says, now curled up in the woolen lap of an older girl, houses are built for giants, and families use ­walkie-talkies to talk to each other. One cow is big enough to feed the whole Korean army. And there’s never any winter!

  A few more minutes of this, and the children are convinced that Texas is where they want to be. But when they ask her how she knows so much about America, Mina remembers that she is supposed to keep her father a secret, which angers her. She begins to act out the way her father will escort her mother back to the neighborhood that evening. There will be, she promises, a ­red-and-green palanquin with silk ornaments dangling from its four corners. The kids are breathless, their eyes straining to see this man that no one knows anything about.

  They watch the tongue of the alley, waiting for the fans made of peacock feathers and the ­wood-carved marvel carried in by the four assistants that Mina has promised. They wait, the tips of their toes and ears white with cold. They wait and wait, but no palanquin comes. Still, no one remembers this when with the wave of Mina’s wand, snowflakes fall into their hopeful palms.

  When Mina wakes up in darkness, the smell of rice wine curls off her mother’s breath and surrounds her like a fuzzy blanket.

  Tell me a story about my father, Mina says. And waits to be dazzled.

  Don’t ask me about your father, Mrs. Lim says. She twists off her wedding ring that Mina insists she still wear, at least at home, and holds the gold band up to the ceiling light. Her smooth face sags as she tucks her chin in; it is the size of a raindrop in the band’s reflection.

  She says, I’ve told you and told you again. He’s not your real father. And he’s dead.

  But he is the only father that Mina remembers. The portrait of the man that she has grown up with has been turned over; she turns it upright so his wide ­almond-shaped eyes and his white teeth gleam back at her. Somewhere off the grid of the picture are his large brown hands and the glowing brown shoes that she likes to stand on top of. Her mother says he has gone from Nam to heaven, but Mina refuses to believe that he will not return to Seoul.

  Don’t cry! Mina says
, her face deep in the folds of her pillow. If you don’t cry, he’ll come back. Why are you crying?

  I’m crying because I’m sad.

  Mina is an unsympathetic ­nine-year-old. She bolts up, crosses her arms, and says, You shouldn’t bring strange men to Daddy’s house.

  The shouting surges from the bedroom at sunrise and continues past noon. In the refrigerator Mina spies a tub of dried anchovies, puffed rice, a plate of dried cuttlefish, and leftover fish egg stew. No real food, no creamy chocolate milk or hot dogs, none of the foods that her father used to produce from brown paper bags. She lies flat on the floor and pushes around in a protective circle while listening to the enemy’s voice barrel through the door. Something is thrown, broken. A slap, a scream. You think you’re the only woman in Seoul? the man with ­sunflower-colored hair says. Then her mother’s voice:I knew you were another American, too soft to fight his own wars alone so you make our people go.

  You think anyone wants this war?

  Mina chants her hand into a bamboo wand, commanding the cuttlefish to change into Hershey’s chocolate, for the shouts to become a song, but all that transforms is the door now gasping open and the man’s bare toe, a raw ginseng stump that reminds her of a goblin’s lump, boring into Mina’s rib cage.

  He is Mina’s avowed enemy, the slouching American soldier with eyes as green as sea grass who has begun appearing whenever her mother sings, I’m lonely, I’m so lonely, over breakfast. He calls her mother the shirt lady because he picks up his laundry from her every week. He says it unkindly. He has her father’s stubble of hair but not his kindness, and a laugh gloomy with the war living inside his organs. Nam this, Nam that, is how all his sentences begin. Mina wants to meet this Nam.