Drifting House Page 17

  Don’t you dare smile, the teacher says.

  But Mina is used to taking care of herself; she believes she isn’t afraid of anything. She raises her chin so her smile is more conspicuous.

  When her teacher goes to the desk for the rod reserved for boys, Mina flicks her tongue out at Hana; it is covered in purple ink.

  Junho comes and goes to school at will. Sometimes he leaves in the middle of class for a glass of water or returns with a snack. Some say he works several ­part-time jobs to help his family, since the government ignores the war veterans, for hadn’t they volunteered and accepted American dollar bills? My mother said the war never happened, Junho says, but it’s still happening to me, then hits the wall with his knuckle. Still, the teachers pretend not to see and do not wield their rulers or bats. How can they, when he has grown facial hair since the sixth grade? When he does not care what happens to him?

  After school he snatches taffy out of children’s mittened hands. Late at night he hauls crate after crate of canned drinks, gulps soju from the bottle. He sits and stares at the moon. He watches the sun rise with his eyes closed until his father finds him and drags his son indoors.

  Yet another night when Mina’s mother is still not home, the shadows look like ­twenty-foot mountain rabbits with bristly fur and incisors the size of doors. You’re not even tigers, Mina says, feeling five years old again. She could flash as many teeth as she can, and kick them in their swollen rabbit stomachs. Instead she thinks about Junho.

  Finally Mrs. Lim returns from a dinner held by a foreign church congregation member and dispels the shadows. Her hair is spiraled up like a western staircase, her face is as smooth as a Korean radish. Her hourglass figure is shrouded in a black wool coat. She holds her hands up helplessly and says, The only one who wants to marry me is Jesus.

  What’s so great about marriage? Mina says. Her hand aches as she pushes away a jar of peanut butter and reaches for her mother, a beauty that Mina cannot believe does not mean more to the world. But her mother says, Don’t touch me!

  Mina hides behind her palms as her mother tosses her purse across the room. Copper coins twirl across the floor, do their dance, then tinkle to a halting stop. Her mother says, I’m a mother with child. There will never be new beginnings for me. Do you understand that?

  Her mother’s gasping fish face, its terrible need for oxygen, makes Mina feel cold. Her body shivers with hurt. Her mother wants pity, but for once Mina cannot speak. She hides behind the peanut butter and stares into its terrain: plateaus, cliffs and craters, an endless, treacherous desert. She swirls her finger in, sucks on its creaminess. The sweetness explodes in her mouth. The kitchen light above is how she imagines the eye of God. Stickiness stitches her mouth together and holds in the anger and the sadness, as she waits for her mother to love her again.

  Somewhere, fathers are bankers and mothers shuttle their kids to the sea. But here, boys blow up a frog to see how many pieces are created. There is camaraderie in robbing small shops at knifepoint. An actress makes love to an amorous producer on the set, while a few respectful yards away, the staff waits; a few blocks away, a real estate agent advises sons and daughters on how to confiscate their parents’ property. North Korea hijacks a plane. Men beat up their wives, their wives beat their children, the children beat their friends, and they all help Mina fall asleep to their nightly music. But even here, in the crowded subway, a boy sits on his friend’s lap, a Buddhist monk makes music tapping on a gourd, a coin is found on the street, the dried pollack cart man sells his day’s stock early, a couple touch each other all night long and forget to sleep, an elderly woman plants red peppers to make kimchi, and Haam! Haam! the groom’s friends cry, as they wind through the chilly alleys carrying a ­pearl-inlaid chest with coarse silk, coats, and jewelry for the bride’s family. Children play jacks with stones warmed by the sun, and everywhere there is the pungency of bbeondaegi and soondae, there is decency, there is hap­piness.

  Mina visits Itaewon, where the American military men drink with paid women. Behind a large black man in green fatigues, she imitates his walk, imagines what it must be like to be his daughter. Her feet are so heavy with sadness that when he turns around and sees her peeking from a furry hat, she cannot turn away. He smiles, even laughs, and speaks babble in a friendly voice before he returns to his friends. She wants to say, My father who’s not my father, they say he’s dead in Vietnam, but there’s no proof. But she no longer knows the right words.

  All winter they have waited for spring, but now that it is here, the yellow cloud of Gobi Desert dust still mists windshields and makes everyone strangers to their own faces. Nineteen ­seventy-six is the season of freedom, as Mina’s mother leaves for days at a time to be with a male friend. The season of beginnings and of ends, as dictator cum president Park ­Chung-hee mourns his wife killed one year ago by a bullet meant for him. It is a time of protest poetry, of Hana’s notes to Mina saturated in purple and yellow ink, of air fragrant with cherry blossoms, of miniskirts that have the police racing for rulers, and of fresh octopus still writhing on ice and soju by the river in the ­all-night hum of covered drinking tents. It is a time when North Korea’s tunnels dug into the South are discovered, and South Korean fishermen are kidnapped by agents from the North to study how the culture of their southern enemies was changing. And red is everywhere, in the raids the police make to uncover communists, in late girls squirming in the stink of their first bloodied cloth napkins, in Mina’s cheeks when the teacher reads out the students’ ranking, from the first, to Hana, who is second, down to Mina’s name, which follows the ­sixty-one other classmates in grade seven. Mina had stayed up the night before the first day of exams waiting for her mother’s return from a prayer retreat, so had fallen asleep during the test. Now she stoically takes a public beating in front of the class. No one’s remembered for getting good grades, she says cheerfully, leaning against Hana as she hobbles out of class. Besides, someone has to be last.

  At last Junho gives in to the new boy’s wishes. In an alley yards away from the school they circle. Circling, the school’s best reluctant fighter and the one ignorant enough to challenge him. Junho’s feline eyes, his skinny grace, give new boys false confidence. Junho squints into the sun just above the blue roof tiles; he tenderly plucks a sprig of purple daisies growing from a crack in a wall. Hold this, he says, and rests it on an underling’s attending palm.

  Students circle them, waiting to see if totalitarian governments can be overcome, if a new order is possible. They wait for Junho to whiplash the boy with his fist, or for the new boy to twist Junho’s wrists back until they snap and have to be wrapped in a cast. Girls bet on how long the new lamb will stand.

  The boys circle. The new boy thrusts with his predictable bulk. He misses and is punched in the gut. Boys stomp their feet. Someone whistles. When Junho’s fists batter the new boy into the wall, Hana frets that this is such a waste of energy, but Mina wonders, How can you not admire Junho’s lightning fists, the whip of his feet that move with medieval brutality? Junho moves casually in and out, transforming the road of potholes and smoky brick walls into his personal theater. That is, until Hana stands between the boys, determined to stop this endless violence. Her hands are raised like a traffic warden and her eyes dilated with fright, as she says, You’ll have to hit me first.

  One day in May with a sky as brown as sandpaper, Mina sings, Go home! to the schoolboys who pursue her. They just want to visit a tearoom with her, they shout, trying to look dignified as they run stiffly with backs straight and black school hats cocked to the right. Hana, tough and sweet with too many teeth in her smile, gasps, Can’t we just meet them? I’m going to blow away with the cherry blossoms. But Mina continues to run because she is really a crane, at ease among the clouds, high above the city choking in coal and industry.

  They backtrack the streets they know well past Chinese delivery boys plying the sidewalks on bicycles; they flee through serpentine ­one-way alleys that smell of its out
houses, past ­two-person factories cobbled together with tin and scrap wood and men with pebbly faces huddled over bowls of steaming noodles. Once the girls lose the boys, they stop for snacks at a stall peddling boiled silkworms and spicy rice cakes on a stick for less than an oshipwon coin.

  If I were half as fast as you, Hana says, baring large, square teeth coated in chili pepper. Mina laughs, and flaps her arms to cool herself in the rising humidity.

  If I were half as beautiful as you, Mina says. Nearby, a man streams urine into the gutter, then flicks the last of it off with his index finger. Such indignities sadden Hana, but Mina is too happy to notice the ripening smell. She drinks ­red-rusted water out of the community pump, then runs again because she is young. They trample across the ancient city of Hanyang that is now Seoul, that is becoming a maze of construction projects; they pass aged women who have lived through Japanese colonization, a civil war that smashed the country into two, and now the American presence and flushing toilets; they pass kids sucking on icy ­jju-jju bars and boiled silkworms in paper cups, panok houses built of cardboard and tin cans of baked beans where entire extended families live, then a shiny shopping mall. The girls’ eyes are as bright as firecrackers, and in their breath grows a garden of roses.

  They dash along the main road and pass Mina’s favorite local movie theater, pass a pork dumpling stand older than the girls, until they are stopped by a van plastered with campaign slogans.

  Elusive local politicians predestined to win by ­ballot fixing have reappeared with their theater of megaphones, presents, and trinkets worth the cost of a bus ticket that ­middle-aged ajeummas in floral pants scramble for. Here are the politicians standing in front of waving banners and chanting, Remember number two on the ballot, or number four, their mouths like trumpets. The blood vessels in their eyes are inflamed, and their bellies cumbrous with dog penises and deer antlers for their libidos. From the tops of vans painted with campaign promises—LOWER TAXES! LOWER MILK PRICES! A ­SIX-DAY WORKWEEK! A HOUSE FOR EVERY FAMILY!—they wave their fat fists to the neighborhood’s mothers. Their banners are held by men bowed so low they resemble dwarves.

  None of them have hair, Mina says. It must be a political requirement.

  It’s wrong, Hana says. The lies they keep telling us.

  Her fists are on her waist; she is furious the way she rarely is, her eyes darkened to ash with what they have seen over the years: stooped child seamstresses and demonstrators trussed together with rope as police baton them in the gut, a student dragged across the pavement by his bleeding feet. Before Hana erupts for her newest cause, her latest underdog, Mina pulls her by the hand and runs, not knowing that all around them there is change and loss. This is a time of garment factories and of fear, a foreign time of blue eyes and flaxen hair. Villages are razed for progress and farmers become overnight real estate millionaires. It is a time of youth, and therefore a time for death, a time of silence as Hana yearns to speak. And because America is the most powerful country in the world, it is an American time while Mina’s mother struggles to start over again, and Mina seeks magnificence.

  Finally she is fourteen, but all Mina worries about are the patchy stains across the wallpaper and the peeling green kitchen cabinets that Junho must notice. The furniture makes lumpy shadows in the light that is the same at three in the morning or three in the afternoon. It is what you do when the muggy summers are long and you are true teenagers at last. Mina mounts Junho, his hand advances up Mina’s shirt, and Mina’s traverses up his. They have watched their first porn film (illegal, they are everywhere), and they have reassured each other that they are practicing. Mina claims the male part (she will not be like her mother!) and she clambers on top, her school skirt flipped up. Her tights are rolled down. A cool trickle of sweat runs down her thigh. Her hand descends down his shirt to his waist. Junho dips his fingers into a small bowl of roasted seaweed and eats a few crispy pieces. Those same salty fingers creep up her skirt and explore her dark places. But the door opens, and Mina falls, tumbles off Junho’s lap onto the floor. She tugs down her skirt.

  Omma, she says.

  Her mother’s eyes go wide. Her hand hangs midair to her hair. She says, It’s not my fault. She shakes her head several times, begins unloading bags of goods, as if readying for nuclear fallout. Her frantic hands toss a packet of black beans across the counter as the clock ticks the hour.

  Mina says, We were just playing! Junho says nothing. His leg shakes, her hands smooth down her school skirt. Their legs clamp together, waiting.

  Mina’s mind retreats from her mother. She longs to escape, but there is nowhere to go. How much has her mother seen? What have they been doing? Suddenly Mina abhors Junho’s strong thighs, his eyes the faded gray of clamshells.

  She smiles, slings an arm around her mother’s shoulder. Nothing has happened; her mother has seen nothing. Just having a bit of fun, playing around. Because that is all it is. But Junho stands there, his hands patting his pockets, looking for cigarettes that he should pretend he doesn’t smoke in front of older people. He watches them baldly, his eyes flicking over the bags of groceries, over each tender gesture. It is humiliating to be watched this way; she feels betrayed.

  Mina’s palms make petals around her mother’s face, she kisses her on the nose. At fourteen, she has the kind of beauty that makes the local pastor blush. Male teachers pretend not to notice her as they watch to see who is watching her; the female teachers dislike her confidence. When Junho finally escapes without proffering a single excuse, Mina’s hands flutter through the bags of food. She is charming enough, she is sure, to make her mother forget.

  Finally her mother smiles. Her tired face stretches with fear, and longing, though Mina is standing in front of her. You never could stay still for a minute, she says.

  All men are dangerous, Mrs. Lim warns Mina as she paints her lips strawberry red, sets her hair into a quivering black beehive, and dons a geometric print skirt that flirts at her knees. But when she makes her entrance in the chapel, the young man about to leave looks at Mina first.

  Her mother kneels and prays in the ghostly pews long emptied of people. Mina watches Jesus’ unmoving lips and waits for her mother’s routine to conclude. If I kiss Jesus, Mina wonders, maybe he would reject her tainted lips. Or maybe he would kiss her back as fondly as a father might. He was God’s son, so wasn’t he capable of anything?

  Fourteen is far too old to believe in magic, but tonight she will do anything to appease her mother. She shuffles to the altar, a penitent’s walk, and kisses his wooden face. He merely stares, impervious. She tries prayer because her mother says she must pray for forgiveness, but instead her hands keep moving to free the doves trapped in the stained glass. A splinter enters her palm when she runs her hands across the bench smelling of vinegary sawdust.

  A man taps her mother’s back: the pastor, a man with yellow fingernails and a tenuous mustache, a man who looks unable to help himself. His solemnity is touching, ridiculous.

  Pastor Seo, Mrs. Lim says to the pastor of the Korean service she does not attend, which is conducted before the English one.

  You’re here again, Mrs. Lim.

  He must have meant to comfort them with that practiced smile and certainty that his God has all the answers. But this is what Mina will remember: the waxy candlestick holders. The pastor’s smug pity, the way his pin-striped trouser cuffs collect dust. The woman on her knees scrubbing the cold floors. Used to the endless troupe of sinners, she does not look up once.

  Everything is the way it was before except that it is not. Over dinner Mina’s mother refuses to talk. Mina longs to hear her mother’s comforting songs: Man is the heavens, woman is the earth. Yin and yang. The effete yangban with white scholar’s hands who rescues the ­sijo-writinggisaeng from her courtesan’s chambers and then together, live blissfully ever after. America, where rice grows on trees. The predictable lull of her mother’s fantasies that neither believes anymore.

  Her mother stares into a glass
of water and tries to wipe away her reflection with her thumb. Her smile grows shapeless as she says, You’re too grown up now, at the age of all loneliness.

  Mina feels old and grave; she tries to erase the distress from her mother’s face with a kiss, and succeeds for a moment as her mother leans restfully against her.

  I have you, Mina says. I know everyone in our neighborhood! I’m never lonely.

  Suddenly her mother says, You’ve become beautiful.

  She removes her diamond earrings, her only precious gems, and forces them into her daughter’s palms until the brittle edges cut into her skin.

  Then Mina knows, something must be wrong. Her mother is gone.

  She is the only kind of mother that Mina knows. She is a mother who used to nibble on raw silkworms to keep her skin as pale as pearls, who now prays out loud at night that God make her His wife.

  She is a mother who leaves Mina a note the next day saying, You shouldn’t behave that way with men. It is twilight, autumn of 1976. Birds from China have migrated and settled on the naked trees surrounding their house. Her mother has not returned. Perhaps she has gone to a church retreat or stayed late at work, though she has not told Mina anything. In the refrigerator, there is a plastic tub of kimchi and fresh produce; a flank of pork has been left out. It will rot, Mina thinks, as she pieces together the evidence, imagining a pink flank and bony rump hooked up at the butcher’s, and squeezes herself until it hurts. She drops her schoolbag and withdraws like a hermit crab. If she flees to Hana’s home and forgets that her mother is right to punish her, she will be safe. But she has never run away.