Drifting House Read online

  “Yaesu,” someone said, calling out the name of Jesus.

  “Oh, Juyeo,” someone said even louder.

  “­Yaesu-nim,” someone said, louder still.

  “But even Jesus prayed into the night. Like Jesus who knew what it meant to suffer, our hearts must muse and our spirits must inquire, until the miracle happens.”

  He looked confusedly at the audience, as if he had forgotten that he was not at church, and that they were not his congregation. Then he recovered and said, “Now, it is another miracle to see so many decades of lives, so many generations here facing me, a miracle made true by God.”

  He spoke of the time our family had spent overseas, my mother’s death, and especially the ministry that he said had saved him and made him better than he was. Finally he gestured to us.

  “My busy daughters are married and working in America, but there they are, my son and his new mother.”

  When we stood and bowed, he beamed. New Mother’s face lit up like a votive candle. From looking at them, you wouldn’t think that each believed their life ruined by the other.

  He began to pray, his voice thundering in the quiet hall. It was a voice that as a kid I used to mistake for God’s. The entire ­chandeliered hall rang as his voice led us to the promised land, and for the length of that prayer, even skeptics must have believed. But when I opened my eyes, the certainty in his voice didn’t match his face. His eyes were shut, his face tight and seeking, as if he had lost his way. I didn’t want to see my father like this. I didn’t look again.

  When the prayer ended, he made his way down the hall, greeting women in ruffled blouses and men in ­gray-checked suits with his hands clasped around theirs; he anointed with his touch the heads of children scrambling between their mothers’ skirts and the tablecloth; he kissed the wasted cheeks of women who had been wheeled out from nursing homes; he embraced the people whom he had reunited with in the past six months in Seoul: CEOs, factory workers, gang members, professional pansori singers in horsehair hats, a dizzy number of church people. He forgot no one. But when he sat between New Mother and me, our dwindled family, he seemed to shrink.

  ­Middle-aged women in pastel suits pushed around the buffet tables heavy with sweet fried pork; salted mackerel; chunks of beef soaked in soy sauce and honey, and garnished with gingko nuts; crispy tofu; cold jellyfish salad; abalone porridge; raw fish and squirming baby squid; a dozen fermented vegetables and wild roots. Older women with hands like cigarette paper stroked my cheek.

  “He’s a goldfish copy of his mother,” they said.

  Each time, I made my greeting and darted away.

  A ­silver-haired man in a plaid suit and oxfords said, “I think of your mother all the time.”

  But I wasn’t ready to talk to strangers about my mother. I wasn’t about to tell them how her hair had grown in coarse and gray, how I had circled the block several times after school before facing her relentless pain, the moans that ground into my every thought until I never wanted to think again, or how she had begged me to put her to sleep as the morphine reached toxic levels without easing the pain, and that wasn’t the worst of it. It must have been the same for my father, though he thanked the man for his kind words. New Mother, who overheard, started tapping that foot of hers.

  The men concentrated on eating. These men who had grown up in wartime didn’t let conversation interrupt. As the saying goes, they wouldn’t have noticed even if someone at the table had died. They swallowed in hurried, dogged silence; they knew the value of food. In the rest of the hall, men drank and complained about jobs; women bragged about their children while wrapping extra food in the hotel’s napkins, some even brought Tupperware and plastic bags; others sang and danced to a rented karaoke machine, changing the cassette tape each time the music ran out; kids my age roamed around the hall as bored as I was; others passed out business cards. At our table, the conversation inevitably turned to God.

  A man with a bushy monobrow said that the church needed to prepare for the future of North Korea. “Just think about all those unsaved souls in Pyongyang alone. It makes me want to get on my knees and pray.”

  “Basic needs first,” my father’s voice barreled down the table. “Those people suffer; they’re still living the war. Give them democracy, and meat, first.”

  “Prayer is our food,” said the man with a nose like a fishhook. “Next you’ll be saying that Jesus and Buddha are brothers.”

  “Ah,” New Mother said. “There’s a thrilling book on just that subject.”

  As if these men stuck in another era were interested in a woman’s opinion, she began talking. Even I, who didn’t think of myself as a real Korean, knew my place. She jabbed her fork at the center­piece of roses while she made her point. “As early as ­1979—”

  “Why don’t each of you stand up and say something nice about me?” my father said. His voice was needy. I slipped lower into my seat, ready for the evening to be over.

  “Pastor Ryu saved my life, in the army,” said the eyebrow. “You could’ve left me on the field.” His lips trembled. “But you took me out of there on your back.”

  New Mother’s head jerked up obstinately. “I was ­saying—”

  “This man loaned me money when my own family turned me out,” said another. “No questions, nothing. Like a brother. Better than a brother.” He embraced my father. “You are my brother.”

  The stories kept coming, some that I knew, many that I’d never heard because my father rarely talked about his past. He kept his eyes turned above the crowd to the frosted cupcake of a ceiling. His face was greedy, insecure, solitary. New Mother was biting down on her fingernails; I could see her thinking that if she were my mother, Father would have let her finish her sentence. The sad fact is my mother would have gone into a cave of quiet, with opinions and feelings I only wondered about once she was gone. Long before any of us were born, it seemed, she had given up hope of changing a thousand years of tradition, or my father.

  “Look at my boy eat.”

  My father patted me. The entire table looked over as I popped a piece of fried pork in my mouth.

  “He’s all appetite. He stays skinny like that because all he does is run. You did twenty kilometers this afternoon, didn’t you, Jingyu? In the rain, too.”

  I shrugged.

  My father sighed. “He reminds me of me.”

  His friends disagreed.

  “No, he’s more like his mother’s body, long and lean.”

  “Well, he’s got your bones, but he’s too pretty to look like you.”

  “You’re one of those quiet but notice everything types, aren’t you?” said a man with a dribble of soy sauce down his chin. “Your mother was like that, a rare woman. That’s a wise way to be. People shouldn’t waste words.”

  New Mother’s heel tapped harder under the table. It got so the silverware rattled. The conversation continued to swirl around and past her. She picked at a mound of glass noodles, her face absurd, mournful. When the men happy with soju began toasting one another, she pushed back her chair so quickly, it caught the tablecloth and sent her silverware crashing to the floor. She weaved out of the hall, her face volcanic with misery. Abeoji laughed.

  “Just like a woman,” he said.

  She was probably looking for a piano somewhere in the hotel. You couldn’t really blame ­her—the room was filled with the past, and Mother’s ghost seemed everywhere. It was too much, even for me.

  “I can’t compete with a dead person.” New Mother slapped at her palm. Within minutes of coming home she had begun listing her grievances.

  “Be quiet, woman.”

  My father shoved the piano bench at her. When it hit the side of her knee, she fell.

  He said, “You’ve humiliated me enough.”

  “Let’s get some rest,” I said.

  She rose shaking, her bad leg floundering behind her. She took the picture of my mother off the wall and held it like a shield.

  “That’s not for you
to touch,” I said. I grabbed for it, but she hugged it to her chest.

  My father punched the piano keys, all dissonant notes.

  “Getting you to listen is like reading the Bible to a cow,” he said.

  “A new start’s overdue for everyone.”

  “It’s been a year, only one year, since your best friend died.”

  “I’m a woman. A woman.”

  “You told her you wanted marriage as life insurance, nothing more from me. Put the picture where it belongs, you ­middle-aged virgin.”

  She began to cry. I stood between my father and her, wanting to walk out, wanting to be anywhere but here, but her fear kept me suspended. I knew that fear well.

  “I’ll break the picture.” She held it high in the air. My mother, still young, still healthy, gazed hopefully out of the frame. “I swear I’ll break it.”

  “She pitied you.” His voice thrummed with pleasure.

  New Mother hurled the picture across the room.

  The frame crashed to the floor, and glass struck out everywhere. With the last shards still tinkling, I scrambled to my knees and started picking up torn pieces of the picture. I didn’t care if I was a boy; there was a piece of my mother’s arm in my right hand, a shred of her nose in my left, and I was crying for my mother.

  My father seized New Mother by her hair and hauled her to the floor.

  Still, she didn’t beg to be forgiven. Instead she said, “No one knows who you are, but God knows!”

  I was still angry and didn’t step between them when he dragged her out the door.

  My mother’s image was too broken up. There was nothing left of her now. She was gone. What was left in the house was the meager life that the years had given her, the smell of a man who had terrified her into becoming invisible. There were my sisters who had married men they knew they could dominate if needed, and me, unable to speak to people because anything that felt true about me was a secret.

  Then I left the house.

  I ran until I caught sight of them, and followed them from a ways back, calling to my father. But near the Han River walkway, I lost the two in the fog. I checked the parking lot, my hands feeling out before me. The rain swallowed the silence. The pleasure boat was docked, the paddleboats empty. One minute the rain thinned, then a sheet of rain fell so thick it erased my hands.

  It must have been ten yards ahead on the riverside walk. I was straining to see when I spotted my father thrusting New Mother into the river water. Closer, enormous ­bubbles—her ragged ­breathing—rose up from the water. When he yanked her back up, New Mother’s breasts sagged out of her unknotted choguri, the skirt of her hanbok stuck to her heavy thighs. Her moan was like the sound of whales spuming. When he clawed off her hands, her body keeled over as he released her into the water.

  I shouted, “I’ll get the police! I will!”

  He thrust her in and out. There was no struggle now, no breath of resistance, nothing in that body except for her small exhausted sounds.

  I scrambled down the embankment to the river’s edge. I was nearly on top of them, but he didn’t stop. Only then I locked him by his arms and hauled him off her.

  He looked at me, his eyes black with anger. He said, “Go home, jashik. There’s no happiness here.”

  New Mother’s flattened curls shrouded her face. She crouched on the cement, her breathing uneven.

  I said, “Stop it, please. God is everywhere….”

  He looked crazed, sad. He gripped himself, trying to contain himself. But then he was on me. His breath was hard on my cheek as he locked me from behind by my arms.

  “Decades my junior and you think you have rights? You think we’re American?”

  His teeth scraped against my ear.

  “You’re no baekin from America with white skin. You look like me.”

  I laughed, convinced there was nothing of my father in me.

  “On your knees,” he said. “And I want real sorrow in that apology. Say it.”

  New Mother said, “He’s your boy.” She flinched with fear at her own words.

  “You.” He pointed through the fog to the ghostly cars. “Go away, woman. Leave my family alone.”

  His eyes bore into her.

  I told her, “Go! This isn’t about you.”

  Finally she began walking backward, away from us, her eyes on him the entire time. “I’m getting help, don’t worry!” She kept screaming this until she was no longer there.

  He squatted, his shoulders like a ssireum wrestler’s, his legs spidery. “I’ll break your legs if you don’t get down on them yourself.”

  “Is this the only way, Abeoji, hurting people?”

  “Who are you, telling your father what he is and what he isn’t? You ­mot-nan gaesaekki!”

  His voice rammed into me, he swore he would teach me.

  His fist struck me in the stomach; his leg reared back. I heard a ­snap—like ice cracking in ­spring—as I fell. When the foot kicked out again, I balled up, my arms around my skull, and waited for the blows from my father, the man I should love. I tried to imagine myself somewhere else, someone else, but I only saw myself on the cold pavement. I was young, a stranger in my own country, again my father’s easy victim.

  His foot sailed out again; I did the unforgivable. That foot, my father’s own foot, I caught with one hand. Then I hit him.

  He lay on the pavement. His lips were parted as if he were thirsty. The rain beat down on his face, his nose bled, and his forehead swelled a dull purple. He closed his mouth, opened it. He was trying to say something.

  “Jingyu, I don’t know ­why—this ­anger—” He looked up. “Jingyu, don’t cry. Please.”

  He kissed my head, my chest. His hands were wet, rubbery, as he caressed my hand. I saw he didn’t want me to leave him, like all the others had.

  “You know what I think about every day?” I said. “I ask myself why God took the wrong parent.”

  My father dragged himself up, his hair shiny against his forehead. I listened, unmoved by his weary breaths. “You know the old saying?” he said. “If your parents die, you bury them in the mountains. If your child dies, you bury him in your heart.” He reached for me the way he always did when he was calmer. “Adeul–ah, no one will ever love you the way I do.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  The rain came. My father sighed, the sound threadbare, labored.

  “Jingyu, I didn’t have a father,” he said. “I don’t know how to be a father.”

  I stood still. He paced, then turned back. His brogues made prints in the rain before they were washed away.

  “This rage….” His voice slowed. “I can’t slow ­myself—”

  “Enough, Abeoji.”

  I walked away. When I held my hands out in front of me, they were shaking. They were strangers to me, these large knuckles and thick fingers I would grow into. I turned.

  “Adeul–ah….”

  I said nothing.

  My father took off his shoes and laid them neatly on the cement as if he had just come home. He sat, legs folded over each other, then got up again, as if he wasn’t sure where he wanted to be. He walked over. His hands held my face, and he stared deep into my eyes. He kissed my cheeks.

  “Adeul–ah, pray for me.” His voice dropped. “No matter what, tell them I drowned.”

  And just as I moved toward him, my father turned his back on me and on God, and stepped casually off the riverside path and into the river.

  I have not looked at photos of my father for years. His bloated river face and ­emptied-out eyes have faded for me, though I still hear his cadences, those broken incantations that rang through my childhood. Soon after my father’s passing, I stopped attending church. No matter how often New Mother reminded me that I was a pastor’s son, I could never go back.

  During my college years I dutifully visited New Mother; sometimes I just made phone calls. Every year I poured the rice wine that my father liked so much over his grave and pulled the w
eeds around the tombstone; I ordered flowers for my mother’s grave, stranded in America. Just after I graduated, I fell in love with and married a woman who nurtured the faith that I no longer could. Through her, even after we returned to America, a part of me stayed connected to Korea and to the church. I believed myself to be happy, or at least reconciled, as we settled in New Jersey, acquired our first mortgage, and took ­weeklong holidays in the ­summers and winters.

  Time passed for me, time stayed still. Seoul is a city that, no matter its changes as it modernized, I will always remember as my father’s. On my last day there, I walked through Woo Meat Market, where merchants unload pigs’ heads leaking blood from the mouths and necks, and passed men staggering into the dark, men seeking brawls and seeking love. I saw the violence that my father had grown up with and passed down to us. I felt what my father must have always carried with him: the terrible war, its ­long-ago shadow that cast far beyond and drew you in like a thirsty curse. Only then I understood what the war had done to us.

  When the monsoon rains descended that July, I thought of how he had wanted to walk with God but had been incapable of it. I see now that his slightly bowlegged walk is my walk; that my black, watchful eyes are his. When I see a stranger hunched over, devouring a cut of filet mignon as if it were a bowl of ramen, I see my father and the hunger he had grown up with. There he is for me, an orphan, hungry all his life.

  THE GOOSE FATHER

  EVEN AFTER SOONAH and their two children had left Seoul for Boston, Gilho Pak denied that he was what the news­papers dubbed a “goose father,” one of those men who faithfully sent money to his family living overseas. The original goose fathers, the term signifying their journey from one country to another, were Korean men who had been drafted or volunteered as mercenary soldiers for the U.S. army in Vietnam, and sent their salaries back to their family. But back then, there had been few jobs and a national landscape of poverty. Gilho was not a goose; he was entirely stationary. He was a successful accountant who did not associate himself with the Vietnam mercenaries, much less the so–called goose fathers reduced to eating ramen for dinner; those men so dishonest they had other women in their wives’ absence, men who collapsed from strokes, unearthed in their homes weeks later by neighbors, men less than men in their solitude. Unlike those fathers, his family’s absence made Gilho even more upright and correct in his behavior. Sex? He had never understood the fuss. And what about Junho, his ­ten-year-old son, and his daughter, Jinhee, in American private schools, his wife’s ­language-school tuition that qualified her for a student visa, their living expenses? He’d had the foresight of a ­self-made man, and made sound investments before the country’s financial crisis in 1998.