Drifting House Page 16

  Her mother’s hand is over her jaw, swelling an apple red. On her neck, a cut the length of a razor blade.

  Mina knows what to do. She bites the enemy on his hairy arm just over his shirt cuff, imagining beef marinated in soy sauce, crunchy chicken’s feet, as she sinks her teeth in as far as she can. So far, it will hurt for him to pull on a sweater. With one hand he twirls her up into a merry–go–round as her mother watches. Crazy as Mommy, he says.

  My daddy will eat you for this, Mina shouts, though she was four years old when her father left home, and cannot remember what his voice sounds like anymore. She swerves out of the enemy’s grip. Her fists become a goblin’s club, but still he says, You’re old enough now, Little Miss Mina, you pretty little fool. You think your daddy’s coming back for you?

  Since Mr. Kwon has returned from Vietnam at the war’s end, his son Junho has begun stealing coins from kids younger than him. He kicks and scatters jacks across the dirt road when the kids play, although he had revered the game a month ago. His legs below his shorts are laced with ­belt-strap marks.

  What if your father had never returned? a friend asks him one day.

  Junho’s face, as long and bleak as a Goguryeo warrior in comic books, brightens. Then he wouldn’t be here now, he says.

  What shall we do about Junho’s family? As lotus lanterns are being strung across cables from street to street for the Day the Buddha Arrived, the neighborhood’s women ask themselves this. They admire the paper lanterns swinging above their heads, and share stories about the disturbances coming from his family’s house and how they have seen the oldest boy and his little brother out on the streets playing at midnight, at their age. Did you know his mother’s having an affair with the local electrician? That’s ­centuries-old news. They’ve been seen in sheds, cargo trucks, when the lover can’t scrape up the money for an hour in a room somewhere. Do you think the man pays her? They know that Junho’s father drinks away the grocery money as he flounders from bar to bar, trying to erase the war images that no one wants to talk about. All have grown up in the ruins of the Korean War, all have suffered. But this is a new Korea. The city has risen from the rubble, there are jobs for anyone willing to work six days a week, so long as you ignore the sudden disappearances of outspoken citizens. There is even money for the revived ­citywide Buddha’s Birthday lantern parade! No one wants to talk about yet another war.

  When the ­green-eyed man stops making his stealthy visits, Mrs. Lim takes Mina to wander through the corridors of the department store. It is Sunday afternoon, and some of the ­best-dressed women in Seoul have gathered at this church of fashion. Mina dashes around, furtively touching the pyramid of Spam cans stacked in the center of the marbled foyer, their tinsel a towering symbol of modernity. Mrs. Lim watches the women trapped, moving inside the miraculous wooden boxes. They look so safe, she says as her voice breaks. They look so beautiful.

  On the screens, remote women parade the perfect flips of their chignons, their bobs. Their ­black-and-white faces are more demure than the women Mina knows: the neighborhood’s ­broad-shouldered, loudmouthed ajeummas who rummage the market’s garbage for ­near-rotten stalks of spring onions and yellowing lettuce heads because they are free, and discard their dignity to work, feed, and clothe their families through the hunger years. When these women elbow their way down the aisle past the gloved ­bus-ticket girl, even the men are afraid of their forceful smiles.

  These ­black-and-white women can’t be real, Mina says decisively, and tries to find out by hugging the object of her mother’s love. The electricity tingles through her hands and brightens her cheeks as she presses against all these wives, mistresses, heroines, victims (she must ask her mother what a mistress is) as she tries to enter the screen. And she almost succeeds, she believes, when her mother lifts her off the ground with a cloudy frown and dangles her, and says, That’s very naughty of you.

  I know you can’t enter a television, Mina lies. She pinwheels her hair around a finger, trying to hide her shame. Oh why oh why can’t she already know everything?

  May I help you? A mannequin leans into Mina’s view. The broad face is painted so thickly white that at each wrinkle, the makeup has cracked into rivulets. Mina leans, reaching toward the ­wo­­man’s cheek, eager to see how deeply her finger can penetrate, but the stranger snaps back to attention. Mrs. Lim misses all the excitement; she has withdrawn her best powder compact (made in France!), which she saves for special days, from a purse removed that morning from its dust bag.

  Mina is appalled by her mother’s evident inadequacy in this palace of handbags, but she does not know how to rescue her. To the saleswoman, Mina points her finger at the store’s sign and says, Someday, we’re going to live in a house as big as your store.

  This charms the stranger into a smile, which seems strange to Mina, since the woman does not know her mother, so how can she possibly be happy for her?

  What a good girl you are, and so lovely, the stranger says, and reaches to pat her, but Mrs. Lim pulls her daughter away and begins circling the department store as if she is an actual paying customer.

  It is a perfect day when Mrs. Lim takes Mina to the zoo and insists that her daughter be allowed to mount the elephant. Mina rides around the ring, waving at the last remaining swallows in the bare trees. When she is helped off its hairy back, she says, I wish I had a granny to watch me.

  Mrs. Lim is the kind of mother who says with a hard laugh, You know that’s impossible, since I was born from an egg, like King Bakhyeok in the Old Joseon period. She doesn’t explain how strange and difficult her family was; she remains a spontaneous miracle, a mystery to Mina, a mother who has arrived from nowhere. And because she is the kind of mother that she is, afterward she takes Mina to the movies for roasted silkworms and popcorn, and later that evening dresses her daughter up in a yellow princess dress and matching barrettes and lets her eat sweet rice cakes for dinner.

  She is the perfect mother!

  She is also a mother who, at the year’s end, tells her daughter, In America every family is Christian and has a ­two-story house and Cadillac, and possesses more happiness than I ever will. She elaborates, though Mina is starting to wonder, Who are these Americans that live such gilded lives? She is a mother who, that Sunday afternoon, has her daughter kneel to pray for her father who is not her father, then for strangers: the conscripted Americans and the mercenary Koreans who have straggled back from Vietnam. The kind who tells her daughter afterward, You don’t know what I’ve given up for you, then holds her and says, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Who, that night, cries when she mistakenly believes that Mina is asleep.

  Puberty, prepubescence, pornography. This lexicon of mischief could wake the dead. Mina, just turned thirteen, is learning what these words mean. So when a ­thirteen-year-old boy whispers the word sex in music class, the disruption is magnificent. The teacher soundly beats the boy who whispered the viral word. Still, Mina mines the forbidden word; the students look at one another and see men and women, and are darkly changed forever.

  You capture a hair, you capture a boy’s heart, Hana says over lunch on the first true day of spring. She has found a short boy’s hair (though it could be from another girl’s bangs) hooked to Mina’s ear. She inspects the sliver as her eyes, wide and as innocent as soybeans, brighten.

  She raises it to her nose and inhales. It smells like passion, she declares. She says with envy, It smells like love, though she carries a tin doshirak from home with the best homemade ingredients, the most expensive art supplies, and shoes that she once confessed her mother shines every day for her.

  Mina drops the hair into her tin cup of water and pulls her face long like a horse with her fingers; she doesn’t care for boys or studying, but she loves to laugh. Sing the national anthem backward, syllable for syllable. Steal the teacher’s glasses. Reenact her favorite movie scenes for friends. Play dead. It is late spring in 1975, and by now, the soldiers commissioned for Vietnam have returned and are living
in ­indifference—to travel all that way to fight for the Americans, and lose, and weren’t they paid for their services? That is what people say, but it never brought Mina’s father back. A man who has become her secret to keep. A man to mourn.

  Love, love, I’d rather eat raw squid for lunch, Mina sings in perfect pitch into her chopstick, trying in vain to stay uncomplicated and thirteen forever.

  It’ll happen to you soon, Hana says wistfully. I’ve seen the way Junho looks at you.

  Junho comes and goes to school like an alley cat, ignoring the tolling bell. No wasted motions, no fat. A young, wheeling fury. Alkaline eyes. A mouth that does not know how to smile. Most of the female teachers, made timid by him, say nothing.

  Adolescence has not been kind to Junho, Mina decides as she watches him sleep on his desk. His face reminds her of the carved masks used in farmers’ harvest dances: an elongated shape, crudely drawn–in lips, pupils so black they absorb the classroom lights. He looks like a horse, and there is nothing worse.

  They sit in polar corners of the room. Her chatter accompanies his angry silence. When she brushes hair out of her eyes, he flicks an eyelash off his nose. She fidgets throughout a chemistry exam; he sleeps inside the leaves of his comic book. If she catches a cold, he develops a headache. After the music teacher slaps him in class, she praises Mina for her singing voice. Mina thinks, We’re nothing alike, but cannot stop watching him.

  Alone girls are different. Jiwon tosses the cotton balls that flesh out her bra to the bathroom floor, Mija lights a ­cigarette—an activity banned for women, Gangin prays before she drinks a carton of soy milk; between classes, Mina jumps up and down in the bathroom stall to wake herself up. Outside, the Seoul sky smells of pepper gas and burning trash, but in the mirror there are only girls looking at one another, eager and afraid of growing into women.

  The mirror in Mrs. Lim’s room faithfully reflects misery and magnificence: a pyramid of her dresses, a nest of souvenirs, a portrait of Jesus hanging off a nail. A stopped wristwatch, a body’s impression still visible on the cotton yo spread on the floor, the worn blade of a used razor, a cluster of black ants in the corner, the blood of a crushed mosquito staining the wall, Hana in her frilly bra and panties, and Mina, tottering, perilous in her mother’s yellow platform heels, imagining the world looking at her.

  It is electrifying to try on her mother’s swishing satin skirt, her coat as long as a wedding gown, to imitate the way her mother’s age and life story change each time she speaks. She imagines herself dancing with Jongpil; with Hyeongmin, with Junho. She imagines her father clasping her hand. It seems impossible to think that one day Mina will fill these shoes.

  At Mina’s house, Hana has decided that they should study each other naked in the bedroom mirror. She says with authority, We have to be as honest as rice cakes. So we can improve ourselves.

  Mina’s finger circles her own breasts, her curious artifacts that are half the woman her mother is, those indecisive lumps that developed before her classmates. Short, stocky Hana inspects her own chest. Hana, whose parents take her to Mozart symphonies. Hana, a girl who beats the boys in arm wrestling and bicycles with no hands and gets stomachaches when she doesn’t complete her homework.

  Mina’s eyes are on the tiny nodes of life rising from Hana’s chest. It hurts, doesn’t it? she asks, her hand now on her friend’s sweaty breast. Hana nods, turning up her ­full-moon face that smells of butternut squash, no matter the summer heat.

  Mina points at the sock she has jammed down the front of her underwear, and strides across the room with the swagger of a military man. She points a finger down at Hana. Down here. She adopts a teacherly frown. This is where men put it. She knows this because she has spied, just once, on her mother.

  Hana shrieks, That’s where I go pee!

  It’s where the baby comes out, Mina says, her voice smug with knowing.

  Hana said, Your breasts are beautiful, like an icy milk bar.

  Mina squeezes them until they turn blue.

  Hana’s giggles bubble out past her hands. My mother wouldn’t notice if I grew three breasts. She’s ­so—so abstract.

  Mina says, My mother’s a ­nine-tailed fox. She drinks the blood of men. Like this, she says, and kisses Hana on the lips.

  Mina’s sallow breasts, her purple nipples ringed with budding hair, are bewildering protrusions. They are the same breasts that her mother scents with roses. The limestone and ocher of the Venus of Willendorf’s most ancient breasts. The breasts that babies suck. The breasts that men love and Saint Agatha of Sicily cut off for her faith. Kannagi tore off one of hers to fling at the South Indian city of Madurai, sacrificing her breast for a curse. The medical practitioner James Guillimeau, in 1612, believed that through a mother’s breast, her body’s imperfections transmitted to her babies. Parmigianino, Isoda Koryusai, and Pablo Picasso immortalized the breast. They are the breasts that Junho asks Mina if he can touch that summer, that will grow into perfect bell shapes. Mina does not see much in breasts. They are sore, they are impossible. That is, until Hana cradles one of Mina’s breasts. They look like vanilla pudding, she says.

  When a small protest against the ­president-turned-dictator Park ­Chung-hee flames up on the streets, Mina and Hana are in their favorite corner of the Namsan Library. They press their noses to the window and see the city center crowded with police surrounding a few foolhardy protesters. Will we ever go home? Hana says, shivering. Will we ever reach nineteen and enter college and vote?

  Mina says, Of course. Though she isn’t sure if she wants to grow up.

  Mina ensconces herself on half the sofa with a book on Mars as if it is an ordinary day; Hana sits on the other half with a history book, but she flips the pages so quickly she cannot be reading.

  After a time Hana says, Everything will be okay. We’ll become judges.

  Mina touches Hana’s fingertips.

  We’ll change the court system.

  Hana touches back.

  We’ll change the laws.

  We’ll be law professors!

  They laugh.

  We’ll ­be—

  What will you be for me? says a man, peering from behind a triangle of newspaper. He has gray eyebrows and a sharp, toothy smile. His hand is moving so fast that the sheaf of newspaper rustles, the print moves up and down. Hana hides behind her arms but Mina watches, fascinated by his joyful distress, until she feels herself inside the seasick letters, capsizing.

  Junho is afraid of his father. The ­sixty-two students in his homeroom class are privy to this because every month or two that fall, his father, the Vietnam veteran, stumbles in waving a bottle of soju as if it were thetaekguki the students pledge loyalty to every day. Each time, Junho becomes smaller, his arms wrapped around himself in a protective lair. That day, his father comes waving paper, saying, Junho, your gijibeh of a mother’s run away! Since his return he has never had a job. Everyone knows this because he is a morning drunk who sobs through the neighborhood housing blocks. He used to be nice enough, the neighbors say, then go back to throwing out the trash.

  Mr. Han scans the room as if looking for his wife, then slumps into an empty chair. Even when the homeroom teacher stands as close to him as she can, he will not move.

  Mr. Han, she says, how thoughtful of you. You’re only interrupting exactly ­sixty-two students from studying.

  He looks up. The only subject worth studying is the military, he says. Look at our president! I promise you, those ­strong-armed boys will keep this country going.

  Students shuffle in their seats. One bold student whispers, Drunk gaesaekki.

  Junho does not look up. He has become stone. A rock jetty.

  Even after Mr. Han is persuaded out of the classroom, Junho stays marooned to his desk, his head slumped into a textbook. He lets out an occasional sound resembling a snort, but Mina understands.

  Teachers tell the students that they live in a democracy. That means, according to the present practice, you are prosecuted f
or criticizing the government. If you make friendly comments about North Korea, the police label you a Red and you are sent to jail. The authorities arrest you for appearing suspicious, which means you look like a union worker, an intellectual, or a student. The most dangerous activity is not skydiving but mobilizing. If you are male with hair long enough to brush against your shoulder, the police intercept you; students in Mina’s class have seen two college boys sheared on the street. And the teachers! They demand ­thank-you money in envelopes from each parent and become rich. Everywhere placards read: DO YOUR CITIZEN’S DUTY. REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY. Anyone can be a spy, Hana whispers at lunch, but who is the enemy?

  Teacher Roh is known to refuse the envelopes of money, an understood obligation if you don’t want your child bullied or overlooked. If you come to class two minutes past the bell, she beats you as you crouch with your buttocks in the air.

  Chalk flies as she prints across the board. But when Teacher Roh turns, she catches Mina reading Hana’s note. Mina crushes it into her mouth and begins chewing it like stringy dried squid.

  Spit it out, her teacher says, and holds out her hand. Who wrote that thing?

  She points at the class motto above the blackboard that reads: YOUR TEACHER IS YOUR THIRD PARENT.

  In this country you have so many parents to pay respect to, from the president, the elderly who know what is best for you, your relatives, your teacher, your mother and father, down to your older brother or sister whom you call by their titles.

  Mina swallows; she protects those she loves.

  The ruler slashes once, twice, striping her cheeks scarlet. The students cramped against the back wall strain to look. Junho wakes up from his nap in time to see Mina smile.