Honolulu (5 page)

“Again. And note the position of your tongue as you make the sound.”

“Nnnhh,” I repeated.

“What position was your tongue in? Was it straight?”

“No, it was bent upwards. Touching the roof of my mouth.”

“Like this, you mean?” And she wrote down L once again.

“Yes!” I said excitedly, the connection now obvious to me.

“Good. You see, hangul is what’s called a phonetic language-the characters were designed to mirror the shape of the mouth, tongue, teeth, lips, and throat when speaking them. So when you see this letter, you will think of that bent tongue and know that its name is … ?”

“Nieun, “I said confidently.

“Exactly right!”

She went on to draw for me the twenty-four basic characters of the Korean alphabet. I was delighted to find how quickly I was able to associate the letter giyeok with the “g” / “k” sound made at the back of my throat, or bieup with the “b”/”p” sound made with my lips pursed together. In less than an hour these mysterious symbols, whose meaning had once been so utterly opaque to me, were beginning to take on a form I could recognize.

When I marveled at how this could be, my teacher explained, “Hangul is an invented language, created to be easily grasped. Chinese characters are ideograms-they represent concepts, not sounds-and there are thousands of them. These letters are fewer, simpler, and more logical in design.”

By the time the hour had closed on my first lesson I found that I had learned to recognize a good two-thirds of the Korean alphabet.

Evening Rose said approvingly, “We’ve made good progress today, but we’ve only just started. Your aunt should be downstairs waiting. Come back tomorrow at this same time-no sooner, no later-and we shall continue.”

She went to her vanity table and I hurried out of the room and down the stairs to where Aunt Obedience was waiting in the foyer. Moments after we left the pretty little house she asked, “Well? Can you read?”

“Not yet,” I told her, “but-”

I saw a notice posted in the window of a grocer’s shop, and though I could not read the words, I was thrilled to realize that I recognized over half the individual letters. I went up to the store window and pointed to a character I had once thought resembled an upside-down wishbone. “This is the letter siot, ” I declared proudly. I pointed to another character, a nearly perfect circle with a small bump atop it: “This is called Leung. And this one is bieup …”

Auntie, suitably impressed, smiled with genuine pride.

“Perhaps when your lessons are over,” she said, “you can teach me to read!”

For the next twenty-four hours I could barely contain my anticipation. I longed to share my excitement with my mother, with whom I had shared so much, but Auntie insisted on keeping my lessons secret. The following day I again left her house, this time on my own, under the pretense of visiting with Mrs. Li’s nonexistent daughter. I was so thrilled that I forgot the route we had taken the day before and had to ask directions from a woman heading to market. But when I described the little white house under the paulownia tree, she gave me a reproachful frown: “What’s a girl like you doing going to a pleasure house? You hardly look like you belong there,” she said with disdain. I was a bit taken aback, but told her I was meeting a friend there. With a little grunt of disapproval she pointed and told me the house was two blocks north.

I arrived five minutes late and my teacher was not happy about it. “If you cannot be on time,” she told me sharply, “you might as well not come at all. I have a schedule to keep.”

“I am sorry, teacher. I lost my way. Please forgive me.”

My sincere contrition seemed to mollify her. “Very well,” she said, motioning me to sit again at the table, “we’ll continue where we left off yesterday.”

That day we studied the remainder of the Korean alphabet until I was able to recognize all ten vowels and fourteen consonants. Then my teacher handed me a pen and had me copy the letters onto the paper until I could make a passing imitation of her elegantly flowing calligraphy.

“You have a graceful enough hand,” she allowed, “but let’s try again.”

“Yes, teacher.”

I copied the letters over and over until my fingers cramped, but I had never been happier in my life.

The next day I made certain not to be late; in fact I was ten minutes early. But this time when I walked into my teacher’s room I suddenly found myself face-to-face with a middle-aged man pulling on a pair of baggy white trousers.

“Oh!” I gasped. “I’m so sorry!” Blushing and stammering, I backed out of the room and hid, unsuccessfully, behind a brass Maitreya statue in the hallway. After the man left, throwing me a chagrined smile as he passed, Evening Rose told me to come in, and we proceeded without a word spoken about the incident.

I had never seen a man’s private parts before and was barely acquainted with what my own could do, but I was becoming as fascinated with what went on in this “pleasure house” as I was by my teacher’s lessons. After a few more glimpses of men slipping in and out of women’s rooms, I began to realize that being an “entertainer” apparently meant more than merely serving tea or playing the lute. I admit, I was a bit chagrined by this: The importance of chastity was drummed into every Korean girl from an early age, and such flagrant lack of virtue was at first shocking and dismaying to me. I was confused: Evening Rose was so elegant and refined-how could she be capable of such disgraceful behavior? What would my mother say if she knew this woman was teaching me? Did Aunt Obedience know what went on in this place?

That set me to wondering something else, and one morning when I was alone with Obedience I asked her, “Auntie? How did you and Evening Rose happen to become acquainted?”

An innocent enough question, but it brought out the fire in Obedience’s eyes. She said tartly, “It is enough for you to know that we are acquainted,” and I wisely never broached the subject with her again.

Which is not to say I didn’t broach it to Evening Rose, but when I asked her the same question she merely replied, “I am not free to discuss that with you,” and I decided that further pursuit of this question was futile.

My teacher went on to demonstrate to me how letters were stacked and combined in syllable blocks, and the syllables then joined to create words. When I correctly deciphered the first word she presented to me, I was so happy and proud that I actually burst into tears, which seemed to both startle and move her.

She then gave me a grade-school primer, not unlike the ones I had seen my brothers reading from, and tasked me with reading the simple wordscat, dog, house, sky, mother, father-therein. Over the next several sessions, as my reading skills gradually increased, so did my writing ability. Soon I was stacking vowel upon consonant, consonant upon vowel … and as the syllables combined into words flowing out of my pen, I exulted in a joy and a confidence I had never felt before.

“Well,” Evening Rose said, pleased, “you seem to have a gift for language.”

“The gift is yours, teacher.”

“My teaching skills are minimal. I have a talented student.”

I beamed with pleasure at this rare compliment. My initial shock and dismay at my teacher’s profession had receded to a faint reproof in my mind. It seemed, after all, a small thing compared to what I was receiving from her.

That wonderful, thrilling week in Taegu passed all too quickly. At the end of it I had grasped the rudiments of something I had only dreamed of. the power to take meaning from words. It was a gift I knew I could never truly repay, but I wished to give my teacher something, so I filched one of the bottles of rice wine we had brought for Aunt Obedience and presented it to Evening Rose on our last day of lessons. She accepted it graciously and bowed. “Know that you are welcome to return again anytime,” she said, then turned away.

I started to leave the room, when behind me I heard my teacher say, “Your parents were wrong, you know.”

I looked back at her. “What?”

“When they named you. They were wrong.” She gave me a soft smile. “To these eyes, you are a rare and beautiful gem.”

I smiled and left, my heart soaring like a kite.

Later, when I went into Aunt Obedience’s room to deliver her some ginseng tea Mother had made, I demonstrated to her how I could now write simple words. “You are a smart girl,” she said, looking pleased and proud. “You will make something of your life.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Auntie, for all you’ve done for me,” and I kissed her on the cheek. Flustered, she changed the subject.

Back in Pojogae, I found a moment alone and surreptitiously took out the browned old page I had kept all these years. Evening Rose had identified it, sight unseen, as from a travel book by a woman writing as Lady Uiyudang; and now I let my eyes drift across the columns of printed symbols. To my delight the word moon jumped off the page at me. Then sea, and night, and sun, the words blazing like stars in a paper sky. I did not, of course, recognize all the words-but I identified enough to transform the page from a mysterious and unfathomable riddle into something nearly comprehensible, and thrillingly attainable.

Blossom wanted to know everything about our trip, but I worried that a child as young as she might let slip something to my parents, so I withheld the full truth from her. I fell back into my old routine-cooking, sewing, housekeeping, washing. But having walked the streets of Taegu unescorted-and glimpsed an even broader world beyond that, through words-I found myself chafing even more within the limited confines of the Inner Room.

Doing laundry at the stream, I found that Sunny had a new enthusiasm, and as usual she shared it with me as we pounded our clothes with our bats: “Have you ever heard”
IMPERIAL
JAPANESE
GOVERNMENT
. We then applied for visas from the American Embassy in Seoul.

Within six weeks, the hundred yen for my steamship ticket arrived, along with two hundred more for incidental expenses. I gave half of this to my mother to use for the household, and promised to send more once I was settled in Hawai’i. I was also required by law to deposit a portion of this money in a bank as a kind of insurance that I would go through with the picture marriage (some women, flush with spending money, had reneged on their engagements but kept the cash).

Now that our plans were out in the open, Sunny and I boldly came and went as we pleased, increasing the frequency of our English lessons to an hour each day. By the end of these lessons we were conversing, simply but effectively, in English with our American teachers.

Mother made two new dresses for me, in colors more befitting a married woman. As the day of departure neared, I packed these and my other clothes in a bag along with a sewing kit and the book my teacher had given me. The morning I left I bid goodbye to my family-all but Father, who had left for town before dawn. My clan surprised me with lovely and touching farewell gifts. Blossom, bravely trying not to cry, gave me some pressed flowers she had picked in the hills. My mother bestowed upon me a silver hairpintraditionally worn only by married women-to place in my hair on my wedding day. And finally, Joyful Day and my other brothers presented me with a package of writing paper and a fountain pen-“so that you might write us and tell us of your life and education in America, and keep us all as close as your pen.” This meant more to me than I can say: it was both an acknowledgment of my literacy and an approval of my aspirations. I embraced each member of my family in turn and wept without shame.

Sunny’s parents took us on ponies to Taegu Station, where we boarded a train for the port city of Pusan. There, in the towering shadows of Mount Hwangnyeonsan and Mount Geumjeongsan, we transferred to a ferry bound for Yokohama, Japan. Though Sunny and I were sad to leave our families, being together made us feel less lonely; and the excitement of being aboard a ship for the first time, so far from everything we had ever known, was as bracing as the salty air. In Yokohama we were given physical examinations for smallpox and trachoma, and more embarrassingly were required to provide stool samples, which were to be tested for parasites. We knew it would take a day or two for the results, so we had made reservations at a local Korean-style inn, where we were made welcome and fed a fine dinner of kimchi, seafood soup, red bean paste, and, of course, rice.

At the inn we met other Korean women who were traveling to America as picture brides. One, aptly named Beauty, was an exquisitely lovely sixteenyear-old with a melodious Kyongsang accent. In fact, all of us turned out to be from the same province. Within thirty seconds of introducing herself Beauty had pulled out a picture of her fiance in Hawai’i. “Isn’t he handsome?” she asked, showing us a small portrait of a serious-looking young man with penetrating eyes. “Such a fair complexion, so scholarly!” She was clearly smitten with her intended, or perhaps just smitten with the idea of being smitten.

Another woman, a well-dressed city yangban with features sharp as a paper crane’s, glanced at the photograph and announced airily, “Fair … but common.

Beauty wilted like a flower in a dry wind.

Theyangban, whose name was jade Moon, quickly produced her own fiance’s photo. He cut a dashing figure in a Western business suit, holding a Panama hat in one hand as he posed jauntily with one foot on the running board of a Whippet automobile.

“This is an uncommon man,” she declared.

A tiny young woman named Wise Pearl, no more than five feet tall, spoke up, quoting an old proverb: “An empty cart rattles loudly,” she said, meaning, One who lacks substance boasts loudest. Sunny and I laughed, which seemed to annoy Jade Moon more than the jibe itself.

I asked Wise Pearl why she chose to become a picture bride. She admitted that her parents were poor, that there wasn’t always enough to eat, and the promise of abundant food as well as money to send home was what first attracted her. “But it also promises to be a great adventure,” she added enthusiastically.

With no prompting from me, jade Moon volunteered the information that while there had been much interest from many yangban families in having their sons marry her, she found them all too “common” and was much more taken with the idea of marrying a successful and socially prominent man in America.