Sad Peninsula (24 page)

“That's one thing I'll never get about Western culture,” Carl is saying over the din. “Is it true — you actually
see
the corpse at the funeral?”

“Not at the funeral,” I tell him. “At the wake. It's called ‘open casket.'”

“That's disgusting,” Jin says.

“No, it's not.”

“It
is
. What, people just line up to see the body?”

“Something like that.”

“Did you have an ‘open casket' when
your
mother died?”

“We did.”

She crinkles her brow. “For what purpose?”

“It's all about closure, I guess. It's one last chance to say goodbye before the person's sealed up for good.”

She gives a little shiver of revulsion. “Ugh. Such a morbid superstition.”

“What superstition?” I say. “Jin, you believe in
fan death.
”

It's true. We've been together two summers now, and each time she sleeps over she insists that I not set up the fan in my room next to the bed to keep the summer heat and mosquitoes off our bodies. Many Koreans believe that you should never sleep with a running fan next to your bed. The idea is that, as you exhale carbon dioxide, the fan will blow it back in your face and you'll suffocate in your sleep.

“Hey, fan death is real. It's
science
. I have a coworker who lost a grandparent to fan death.”

Carl is chuckling. “I must admit, after three years in the States, I realize we Koreans pretty much take the cake on superstition. Especially when it comes to death. You know, in olden times when a Korean passed away, the family would treat the body immediately afterwards. They'd trim its fingernails and place uncooked rice in its mouth to ward off evil spirits.”

I turn to Jin. “And what, that's not morbid?”

She sucks her teeth and wants to change the subject.

I ask Carl about Los Angeles, about chef school. He's loving it despite all the trials of being a rookie — the constant burn marks up his arms, the minimum wage and surly head chefs at the restaurants where he apprentices. It'll be all worth it when he moves home to Seoul, he says, and gets his pick of upscale restaurants to work at. In the meantime, he's soaking up as much of America as he can. His English wasn't great when he moved there — “Worse than Jin's,” he jokes, giving her shoulder a loving bump with his own — but now considers himself fluent. He lives in an apartment outside Hollywood with a couple of other immigrants — a guy from Pakistan and another from Belarus — but they hardly speak at all. Carl's main friends are white guys he's met at the school. I ask if he's ever encountered racism in the States. He says of course he has, but he takes it all with a sense of irony. He even owns a chef's apron that reads: K
ISS THE
G
OOK
.

“So when do you go back to L.A.?”

“Well, Chuseok is just around the corner, so I'm definitely sticking around for that.” The Korean Thanksgiving is the nation's biggest holiday. It's ancestral in nature and encompasses three full days. Carl goes on: “I'll have to see how well my father holds up before I decide to leave. But I can't afford to miss much more of school.”

I turn to Jin. “So about Chuseok,” I ask. “Did you want me to …”

“Michael, I've been meaning to talk to you about that,” she says. “Listen. Chuseok is very sacred, very big for Korean families. And for our family, more so this year than ever. I don't want to offend you. I mean, you can come if you really want to. But I was thinking, maybe this year … especially if we do go to Canada next year, and I miss Chuseok altogether … that maybe, you know …”

“I understand,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” But Carl gives her a look like
he
doesn't understand.

“I'll take lots of pictures. I promise!”

“Oh, speaking of which,” I say, and reach down to pull my digital camera out of my satchel. “Do you mind if I get a shot of you guys?”

“Not at all,” Carl says, and the two of them scoot in together.

I turn on the camera and aim. Jin and Carl appear in the centre of the viewfinder. I adjust the zoom and hold the camera a few inches from my nose. I'm just about to press the button when Jin does something I've never seen her do — not once, in all of the photos I've taken of her.

She flashes the “kimchi”
V
, her spread fingers popping up at her chin.

I look up from the camera, a bit shocked. She just looks back with a blank stare, her eyes a straight line below her French beret. I return to the viewfinder and snap the photo. She holds the
V
even after the flash has come and gone.

You did the whole “kimchi”
V
, Jin
, I think.
You always felt that was a bit daft. So what's next? Are you going to start wearing
hanbok
now?

E
un
-young and her grandniece did not speak much on the trip back from the funeral. It was like the two of them, arm and arm, had slipped through time itself, fallen out of sequence with the ruckus of life around them — the crowded subway ride back, the walk up the main drag of Eun-young's midtown neighbourhood, the turning down to her narrow side street. This little boulevard, with its orange bins of rotting kimchi and bleak 7-Eleven, held an aura of decay, of solitude, of people who minded their own business. Eun-young's building was at the very end, small and squat with a dragon-scale roof and short wrought-iron gate. She lived in the basement suite by herself.

The two paused on the sidewalk out front and Eun-young hung her cane over her wrist. “Thank you for escorting me home, Jin-su,” she said. “You didn't have to do that.”

“I wanted to do that,” Jin-su replied. The fleshy mounds around her eyes were still swollen and red. “Here,” she said, “let me come in. I'll make you some tea and help you get changed.”

Eun-young shook her head. “No. I'll be fine. You should be with your family.”

“
You
are my family,” her grandniece snapped. The anger, the vehemence, with which she spoke, was bottomless. “Eemo-halmoney, you are
our
family.”

Eun-young turned her liquid eyes up to her.
Your
mother
never really thought so, did she. We've been through this so many times before, Jin-su. Her death this week alters nothing for me, even if it alters everything for you.

She ran her tongue over the scar above her lip, and looked to change the subject. “And what about your
waegookin
friend?” she asked. “Is he family now, too?”

Jin-su blinked at her, then looked away.

“He was staring at us at the graveside,” Eun-young went on. “He's always staring at me, Jin-su. It's like he's got a throat full of questions he'd like to ask.”

Her grandniece said nothing.

“Tell me, Jin-su — is he a decent man?”

“Very much so.”

“Are you going to marry him?”

“
Eemo-halmoney
.”

“Come now, you can tell me. One woman to another.”

Jin-su lowered her gaze. “He wants me to follow him back to Canada next year.”

“
Canada
?” Eun-young could not imagine such a place. “Are you going to do it?”

Jin-su tilted her head back and looked at the sky, her face scorched by sudden tears.

“I have so many things to think about,” she replied. “I believe I could live for a thousand years and still not have enough time to think about everything I need to think about.”

“I know exactly how that feels.”

Her grandniece looked at her once more. “Eemo-halmoney, please let me come in.”

“No. It's okay. Your father needs you, and so does your brother, and your grandparents. You should be with them. It's been a very hard day.”

Jin-su at last conceded with a nod. “I love you very much,” she said. “Call me if you need anything. Or if you just want some company.”

Eun-young patted her hands, but then turned away toward the gate. She didn't look back as she climbed her way up to the building.

I
nside and down the stairs — one-two, one-two-and-three — and Eun-young was at her door. Turned the key in the deadbolt and hobbled in. When she popped on the light, her dank basement apartment fluttered to life in fluorescent grimness. Eun-young began pottering about, changing her clothes and going into the bathroom to take her medication, two pink pills from a bottle in her medicine cabinet. She downed them with a glass of water at the rusted sink. They would settle the ache that ricocheted through her hips.

She went back out to sit in the wicker chair she kept near the door. She remembered her father having this exact kind of chair in this exact place in her childhood home. She had come to understand why he had kept such a thing there: it provided a bird's-eye view of his domain, such as it was. Hers was even less — just two rooms in the basement of a decrepit building. Eun-young settled into the chair and cast her eyes up at the
real
reason she had not allowed Jin-su to accompany her inside. There, at the place where the upper wall of her bedroom met the apartment's low ceiling, grew a long dark-green cartography of mould. It spread like faded tattoos all the way from her front door to the top of the wall at her bathroom. The unsightly mildew had cropped up clandestinely over the last several weeks, starting as small dark patches in the corners but then extending outward along the length of the apartment, getting out of hand before Eun-young realized how bad it was. What would Jin-su say if she saw it there now?
Eun-young, your walls are
rotting
. You need to move out. Why won't you move?
She knew exactly where Jin-su thought she should move to — the spare bedroom in the Park apartment that Bum Suk had left behind when he went to America. But Eun-young would never entertain such an idea — even now, with Tae dead and buried. She looked up at the mould again. It was bad but, perhaps, manageable. A bucket of bleach would do it. She'd need to find a brush with a long handle with which to scrub the walls; she would not risk standing on a chair. Or maybe the landlord, if she mustered the courage to speak to him, would come and do it for her. He was a feckless twit, but if she asked him he would probably —

She stopped herself. Ran a finger along the sinewy treads of her wicker chair.
Why are you pondering such mundane things? You don't care about the mould on your walls. You have just watched your family bury your sister's daughter. Poor Ji-young, who has never known a fraction of the anguish you have, wailed out the kok with complete abandonment. It alarmed you, the groan that rose from her throat, the tears that bled across her wrinkled face. Admit it, Eun-young
, she thought.
After all you have witnessed, all you have suffered, you still couldn't grasp the pristine failure one feels over burying a child.
That
was Ji-young's
han
— the sadness that will constrict her heart for the rest of her days. And what did you do? You, so knowledgeable in the ways of pain and grief? You stood at the service alone, away from her, from the family. Staying at the very edge of their lives, as you have done for decades.

She looked up again at the mildewy rot on her wall.
No, Jin-su
, she thought.
I will
never
leave this apartment.

E
xcept the mould really did have to go. So the next day Eun-young went out and bought bleach and a scrub brush with a long handle. At home in her bathroom, she filled a plastic bucket with hot water and mixed in the powdery blue crystals, then lugged the concoction out to the main room and got to work. As she reached up and stroked the brush along the length of her upper wall, Eun-young found her thoughts falling absently, inexplicably, onto Jin-su's
waegookin
friend. Or perhaps it wasn't so inexplicable: hadn't this mildew, she thought, begun to crop up around the night of the birthday party when Jin-su first introduced him — the night he took that photograph of her, and she had surreptitiously removed it from his camera when he left it behind?
He knows
, Eun-young thought.
Jin-su has told him. Such is her love for him, I suppose — and her love for me.
Eun-young wondered if the
waegookin
knew the privilege that he'd been given.
Even my own husband didn't know what you know,
waegookin
. Imagine that. A man who loved me, who loved me more than anything, wasn't privy to what Jin-su has shared with you.

As she re-doused the brush and edged it along the wall again, Eun-young wondered what
Tae
had made of the
waegookin
. Actually, she didn't have to wonder — of course her niece would have disapproved of him, and expressed that to Jin-su in various subtle and unsubtle ways. But had Tae known that her daughter let the
waegookin
in on their little family secret? Tae was all about keeping Eun-young's past in the closet, and the fact that Jin-su would share it with someone else — a
non Korean
, no less — would have infuriated her. Eun-young had become adept over the years at ignoring Tae's endless displeasures, her need for secrets. Tae saw Eun-young's history as a threat to the family's reputation, and argued that it should never be discussed with people outside of their kin.

Which was fine by Eun-young. Her shame had not diminished over the years, and her need for solitude, to live on the very periphery of her family's lives, grew only stronger. But then, in 1991, the first of the comfort women, Kim Hak Soon, came forward to tell her story. The family was instantly in disarray. They insisted that it was Eun-young's choice whether she wanted to join the growing armada of old women who were coming forward. But it was
clear
where Tae stood on the matter. Oddly enough, Jin-su — then in her mid teens — was just learning about the family secret, and she immediately embraced it as a way of rebelling against her mother.
No
, Eun-young thought as she scrubbed the wall harder,
it was more than that
. Jin-su embraced her
eemo halmoney
as a way of rebelling against the whole family, maybe even the whole country itself. As awareness of comfort women grew, Jin-su became
enraged
to think that Korean society — not to mention her own family — had helped to suppress such traumas for decades. She expressed her rebellion by trying to become Eun-young's best friend — visiting her often, showing her more kindness than anyone in the family, even drawing that creepy charcoal sketch of her. Jin-su also expressed that rebellion by doing some patently un-Korean things, things Eun-young really couldn't imagine, in the foreign quarter of Itaewon when she got a little older. The
waegookin
boyfriend was the culmination of that.

In the end, Eun-young had decided that nothing would change. She was still just so horribly ashamed, and no matter how much the world learned about comfort women — the books, the news reports, the radio documentaries — she would not come forward. This meant, for example, that she didn't head over to the Japanese Embassy for the weekly protests — where comfort women, the ones who
had
spoken out, descended onto the sidewalk out front with their placards and their banners, chanting and singing and demanding recognition from the Japanese government. It happened every Wednesday afternoon, without fail. Eun-young had never participated, had never taken up one of their placards and pumped it up and down and shouted at the Embassy windows to say, unequivocally:
I was one of these women, too.
Not once, in the twelve years since the gatherings had started.

It also meant that she had never travelled down to Kwangju to visit the “House of Sharing” — the place where many of the comfort women now lived together. It was a kind of commune, a living museum to what they all went through. Eun-young refused to go there, to set foot in a place that had built replicas of the stalls where they had been raped.
What, am I to stand in one of them and marvel at it like a tourist?
Am I to listen to these women share with strangers, on a daily basis, ordeals that I couldn't ever speak of to my own husband?

She scrubbed at the wall furiously, and let her mind fall once more on Jin-su's boyfriend.
Don't stare at me with your curiosity,
waegookin, she thought.
I am not like those other women. I am a coward one thousand times over. I cannot move beyond the disgrace that weighs me down like sandbags, that threatens to drag me into the centre of the earth. Look at me — I couldn't grieve with my own sister this week when she buried her child. I could not mourn the loss of her first-born because I am too selfish, mourning the loss of my never-born, the children I couldn't have had because the Japanese ransacked my womb.

Eun-young reached the end of the wall, scrubbing hard into the corner by the bathroom, and then lowered the brush. She looked back across the length of her apartment. The mould had faded but was not yet gone.

O
n the Sunday after Tae's funeral, Eun-young went to church for the first time in weeks. Manoeuvering up the concrete steps under the steeple and pulling open the lobby door, she felt a mild guilt for being absent. It wasn't something the rest of the congregation foisted consciously: their nods at the sight of her weren't laced with malice, just a pleasant
Oh, you came back. It's nice to see you again.
But there was also a prying curiosity behind their gazes:
Was there a reason you stayed away?
One of the ushers, a girl of about seventeen, offered to take Eun-young's arm and help her to a pew. But Eun-young raise a palm and shook it at her:
No, leave me be.
This was her reputation among the other churchgoers, to be tetchy and unwilling to accept help. Eun-young found a place near the back, eased her bones into the pew's wooden grip, and lowered her head to pray.

She had been coming to this church, off and on, for sixteen years. The sermons struck a chord with her, she had to admit. Sins washing away in the blood of Christ; giving your burdens over to God to carry; knowing that you could be loved no matter what you did. Inside the church, she felt a serenity within herself that she hadn't believed possible.

And yet. Certain sermons infuriated her. The idea, for example, that Christ suffered more on the cross than any human could imagine.
Really? Does Christ know what it's like to be raped thirty-five times a day for two years? To have one's legs burned by hot pokers, to be urinated on, to be penetrated by two men at once?
She would leave the church steaming under these blasphemous thoughts and not come back for weeks. But then she
would
return, in need of the calm that she'd found under this roof. And each time she did, she'd lower her head to pray just as soon as she found a pew to sit in. Which was what she was doing now: beseeching God to forgive her absences and fill her mind with all the reasons why this was where she belonged.