Honolulu (2 page)

He began to read aloud: “‘All was bathed in the serene light of the moon. The sea was whiter than the night before, and a gale chilled my bones … ‘ ”

I listened, rapt and silent, as he conjured from the cold black type the image of a woman of many years past, shivering in the chill predawn light as she waited for the sun to rise. There was nothing as thrilling or dramatic about the narrative as in the folktales my mother and grandmother sometimes told me-but the woman’s vivid description of the lake, the sky, and the rising sun were nonetheless enthralling. The light from below the horizon appeared as “rolls of red silk spread on the sea,” and then slowly there arose “a strange object the size of my palm, glowing like a charcoal on the last night of the month.”

The words, her words, entranced me. For the first time I understood that these lines and slashes contained entire worlds within them. The rising sun was like a charcoal on the last night of the month. How could that be? I asked myself. How could something be two different things at once? How could these little chicken scratches contain so much?

Suddenly my brother stopped in mid-sentence, coming up short where the page itself came to an end. “That’s all there is, alas. Now, before Father sees you and scolds us both …”

I thanked him, took the page, and crept back to my room.

There I used a piece of charcoal to copy some of the markings onto a scrap of butcher’s paper. But without my brother’s mediation, they were once again an unfathomable collection of lines and squiggles. I knew they held meaning, I remembered the words Joyful Day had spoken, but like a bad magician I could not summon them on my own.

Now each morning I found myself studying my father as he read his morning paper, wondering what those columns of black type might be saying to him. I felt a pang of envy for the first time as my brothers set off for school, and in the evenings I sneaked in and stole glances as they read by candlelight from their school primers. But of course I knew better than to expect I could ever do the same. Girls, at least girls in rural villages like Pojogae, did not go to school; I might envy a bird the power of flight, but I knew perfectly well that I could not be a bird.

And yet-I kept that page. I kept it against the faint, perhaps impossible hope that someday I might learn how to coax the meaning from those enigmatic marks. Until then, it remained silent in my presence-a silence I would be forced to abide for another eight years.

By the time I turned fifteen, in the Year of the Rat-by the Western calendar, 1912-Confucian tradition forbade me from leaving the house without an escort. I was no longer free to play in the street with Sunny, or to go into the foothills to pick wildflowers, and I chafed at having to spend my every waking hour in the inner Room or Inner Court. On the rare occasions when I was permitted to leave, I was required to wear a long green veil that covered all of my increasingly womanly body but for a slit through which my eyes could peek. From this I drew the conclusion that the physical changes I was experiencing were unsightly to society, thus making me even more insecure about my appearance.

There were only two respites from the tedium of the inner Room. The first came each afternoon before we began cooking supper, when Mother and I would retire to her room and sew together. This was my favorite hour of the day-what Mother and I called our “thimble time.” I had learned how to thread a needle before I was barely out of diapers, or so it seemed. I was proud that after years of practice I was able to sew as many as ten stitches in a single inch-but Mother could stitch twelve! A gifted seamstress, she made all of the household’s clothes: the men’s waist-length white jackets and baggy white trousers, as well as the short yellow jackets and pleated red skirts I wore as an unmarried girl. But her talents shone most brightly in the wrapping cloths she loved to make.

In the West, people carry bags or briefcases; in Korea, they carry important papers, gifts, indeed objects of all sorts, wrapped in cloths woven of brilliant colors and rich textures. The most elaborate, called supo, had once been used in the Royal Palace-back in the days before the Japanese came and deposed our king-and were embroidered with a single design, geometric or pictorial. Favorite images were trees, fruit, flowers, butterflies, or birds. Mother made several such designs for local gentry and each was exquisite: I remember one that vividly depicted a funnel of windblown snowflakes against a sky-blue field, and another portraying a flock of cranes dipping their beaks in a river, as gold-flecked fish swam just below the waterline.

But mother also made another kind of wrapping cloth, one that was usually the province of commoners: the chogakpo, or patchwork cloths. These were cobbled together from leftover scraps of varying shapes-wedges, squares, rectangles, triangles-and fabrics such as linen, cotton, ramie, silk, whatever was at hand. The different materials, weaves, and patterns were stitched together into a mosaic of crossed lines and no apparent design. There was an abstract beauty to them, to be sure, but one day I asked Mother why she bothered to make these patchworks when she was capable of much more elegant and harmonic creations.

She thought for a moment, then said, “When we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design. But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths-bits and pieces, odds and ends-people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps. There is harmony in this, too, and beauty. I suppose that is why I like the chogakpo.”

I was old enough to know that she meant this as a positive statement, and I nodded to let her know that I understood the wisdom of what she had said. But I was also young enough to find the idea that my life was to be made up of odds and ends I didn’t want-frayed, ragged remnants like these, together forming a rather motley whole-a little terrifying.

My only other release from the monotony of the inner Room came on those days when Mother and I would don our veils and carry our laundry in big wicker baskets to the stream, where we would join other village women washing clothes. We were always careful to walk only on the left side of the road; men walked on the right, and whenever we encountered one we averted our gazes, never making the slightest eye contact as we maintained a virtuous silence. But today the only men we saw were a squad of Japanese military police in their glossy brown uniforms, like a swarm of bronze-backed dung beetles, marching somewhere with great urgency. We kept our eyes downcast, less out of decorum than fear.

It had been only three years since our nation, our Land of Morning Calm, had been annexed-swallowed whole by the voracious Japanese Empire, which had long coveted it. Fear had since become as much a part of our daily diet as rice or water. We had accustomed ourselves to the sight of Japanese police-often accompanied by Korean “assistants” dressed in blackdescending upon us like vipers to root out insurgents or search for caches of hidden arms. They might come at any hour, breaking down house gates, pulling men and even women from their homes in the hush of the night-a hush broken by the sound of imperious shouting in Japanese and terrified wails in Korean.

But this morning the police merely hurried by, taking no notice of us, and Mother and I let out a shared breath as they passed.

At the stream we rinsed our clothes in cool running water, then pounded and ironed them with laundry bats (an implement resembling a cross between a rolling pin and an American baseball bat). There was something soothing about the rhythmic chop chop thop of a dozen-odd laundry bats wielded against stone, like the comforting beat of one’s own heart. As we washed, Mother could gossip with neighbors and I would pass the time with Sunny.

“Have you heard?” my friend asked, as she wrung water from a pair of white cotton trousers. “Three girls attending Ewha School in Seoul will be graduating college-the first in the whole country!” She added hopefully, “Perhaps Imight attend it someday.”

I sighed. A week did not pass without some flight of fancy on Sunny’s part. Without looking up I said, “There’s a palace there, too, quite nice by all accounts. Perhaps I might live in it someday.”

She looked stung. “It’s possible. I could go.”

“Seoul is as far from Pojogae as the earth is from the sun,” I said. “How would you even get there?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t there a train that goes there?”

I found this conversation more irritating than most of Sunny’s fancies, and I let my frustrations out on the skirt I was pounding with my laundry bat.

“When you are attending school in Seoul,” I said brusquely, “let me know when the palace becomes vacant.” Sunny frowned and said no more on the subject-that day or ever again.

But far more disquieting was the sight that greeted us upon returning to town. The squad of Japanese police we had encountered earlier in the day had arrested a man, beaten him bloody, and was now preparing to demonstrate to our village the brutal folly of harboring rebels. They stripped the man’s shirt from his back and tied his manacled hands to a chain hanging from the rear of a horse-drawn wagon. Only then did I recognize their prisoner.

“Mother,” I whispered, “isn’t that Mr. Hong?”

He was our greengrocer, and the father of a friend of mine.

“Hush!” Mother hissed, and I quickly fell silent.

The wagon driver snapped the horse’s reins and it took off at a trot. We watched in horror and disgust but did not dare turn away, lest this be noted by the police. Mr. Hong, manacled and shirtless, was dragged on his back through the streets, the gravel raking and grinding his flesh like pepper in a mill. His left eye was swollen shut, his face purpled with bruises, but he remained defiantly silent, refusing to give up even a single cry of pain.

Then the wagon turned a corner, and none of us ever saw him again.

In fact, the conflict with Japan had begun years before. In 1895, our Queen Min, who was fiercely opposed to Japanese interference in Korea, was stabbed to death by agents of Japan. Ten years later, Korea was declared a Japanese “protectorate,” and five years after that we were annexed. Not everyone in our country would give it up without a fight, and I’m proud to say that our provincial militia in Kyongsang-do fought most bravely and bitterly against the Japanese army. But in the end, a dragonfly is no challenge to a dragon, and our province fell like all the others-though there would be scattered guerrilla warfare against our colonial occupiers for years to come.

The Imperial Government insisted that Korean children learn the Japanese language in school. They also banned the teaching of Korean history and language, and burned hundreds of thousands of books that dared to suggest Korea had ever been an independent nation. They were determined to turn the next generation of Koreans into Japanese.

You might think that little Pojogae, far from the corridors of politics, would have been relatively untouched by all this. Yet rural villages like ours were much more central to the conflict than you might imagine. Japan needed food for its people and intended Korea to be its breadbasket. Farmers-and the landed gentry like my father, who leased them their land-were forced to abandon almost all other crops but rice, then saw their harvests confiscated for the exclusive use of the Japanese. We who grew the rice were not allowed to consume it, and had to subsist instead on the small plots of barley, millet, and beans we planted.

My eldest brother’s fanciful whimsy of the Rice Mountains had come, in a way, into grim existence.

Meat became a scarcer sight on our table, and we could no longer afford the services of a servant girl from the village who had helped us keep house. Mother-who managed the household finances-was now scrimping and saving scraps of cloth for more than just aesthetic reasons, or turning our clothes inside out and restitching them to get some further wear out of them.

And yet, I must be grateful to the Japanese for one thing, if only one thing: were it not for them, Blossom would never have entered my life.

She simply appeared in our home one morning, a five-year-old moppet with a long braid of black hair down her back and a sweet oval of a face that was everything mine was not: delicate, fine-featured, lovely. She was in the kitchen helping Mother peel a clove of garlic when I entered, still blinking sleep from my eyes. I stopped short upon seeing her, wondering perhaps if she were a new servant girl. Mother didn’t even look up from preparing breakfast: “Daughter, this is your new sister-in-law, Blossom, of the Shin clan of Songso.”

I stared uncomprehendingly at the little girl, who offered me a small smile. But this was apparently not sufficient response for Mother, who poked her in the arm and said, in a tone I had never heard in her voice before, “Where are your manners, girl? What do you say?”

“Good morning, honorable shinui,” Blossom greeted me. The word meant “husband’s sister,” but how could this slip of a child have a husband?

Mother said, “She is betrothed to marry Goodness of the East”
my younger brother
“when he comes of age. In the meantime, she’ll live with us and learn how to attend her wifely duties.” To Blossom she added reproachfully, “Your husband will waste away and die waiting for you to finish that garlic.”

“I’m sorry, honorable mother-in-law,” the girl apologized, and quickly finished peeling the clove.

I was still confused, though not, of course, at the idea of the betrothal. In those days all marriages were arranged by one’s parents, either directly or indirectly through the services of a marriage broker. As a young girl the notion of marrying for romantic love never entered my mind. Nor was it unheard of for families to take in a minmyonuri-a daughter-in-law in training, as it were-though I had always heard it spoken of disparagingly. No, what baffled me was that my parents had arranged a marriage for Goodness of the East, who was but eight years old, while my two elder brothers and I were still unbetrothed!

I was peeved enough that for the next few days I made no attempt to befriend my new sister-in-law, too busy fretting that I saw no sign of my parents finding a husband for me. Blossom and I worked side by side at household tasks, but exchanged few words. We slept in the same room, but at night the only sound was the sigh of warm air flowing through the heating flues beneath the floor.