This Burns My Heart (5 page)

“How do you know so much about him? I thought you said he was barely an acquaintance.”

It was no use trying to lie to her father. Soo-Ja threw her hands up in the air.

“I can’t imagine anything I say is going to satisfy you, so maybe I should just sit here like a mute.”

“At least you no longer fight with me about diplomat school. I have
that
to be thankful for. You seem to have taken that decision rather well.”

“I have, haven’t I?” said Soo-Ja, using the back of her hand to wipe off the serene, mysterious smile taking residence on her lips.

My dear Soo-Ja,

I hesitate before writing you this letter, as I do not wish to involve you in anything dangerous. But the protests are moving beyond Seoul and are making their way to our own hometown of Daegu. You may have heard about this—or maybe not, as the government has been trying to keep this away from the newspapers—but a neighbor of ours has gone missing. He’s a young boy—a twelve-year-old middle school student—from our very own town of Won-dae-don. His name is Chu-Sook Yang, and he attended a demonstration in Daegu; in Jungantong, we believe. Group records show he called himself a member of our organization. Apparently, he never made it home after the demonstration. All of us here suspect some kind of foul play.

The leader of the Daegu chapter of our group, a rather smart medical student named Yul-Bok Kim, has tried to contact the boy’s mother, but she refuses to provide any information, and won’t speak to any of us. (Have the President’s men gotten to her already, maybe?) Yul has asked me if I know her, and I laughed at him, since I don’t exactly spend my weekends with teenage boys from the slums. But then I thought, I may
not know the boy’s family, but maybe Soo-Ja does. I know your father’s factory employs a lot of people in town—even if the boy’s mother doesn’t know you, I’m guessing she’d be willing to talk to someone of your stature. Yul lives in the Mangwon district, not too far from you. I’m attaching his phone number and address—he’ll await contact from you—should you decide to get involved in this.

Min Lee

“Excuse me, excuse me,” said Soo-Ja, making her way to the back of the bus. She wore a pink embroidered coat with a high collar, a red silk chemise with a bow over her chest, and a long cream polyester skirt. She also had a yellow headband on top of her head, accentuating her bangs. She looked as if she were simply heading for an afternoon stroll.

According to the instructions she’d been given, she was to take the Dalseo-gu bus at the Won-dae-don stop and sit on one of the last seats in the last row, making sure to keep the one next to her empty. As the bus sputtered forward on the unpaved asphalt, driving over stones on the road, its constant bumps made Soo-Ja lose balance several times, grabbing the metal handrail repeatedly to keep steady. Outside, wreaths of smoke covered the ground behind them, tinting everything she saw out the windows in shades of brown.

When Soo-Ja finally reached the last row, she sank into one of the hard cloth-covered seats, drawing the attention of an old man in a broad-rimmed black horsehair hat, the kind that had gone out of fashion in the twenties. He turned to glance at her, and Soo-Ja glowered at him until he went back to talking to his friends. They were a group of about four white-haired men in their sixties, sitting on the two rows in front and across from Soo-Ja. They talked like teenagers, touching one another’s arms and teasing one another over the supposed aphrodisiac quality of ginseng tea. Their laughter was raucous, almost ricocheting against the sides of the bus.

As Soo-Ja watched them, she was reminded of a Swiss teacher she’d had in high school, who had told her how surprised he was to see the physical expressiveness of Korean people. Indeed they moved their
bodies extravagantly, used them like punctuation marks, with arms rising, and fingers freely pointing in the air for emphasis; they were like a country full of excitable preachers gesticulating to congregations of one or two listeners at a time. They weren’t quiet at all; in fact the opposite: temperamental, given to passions, sentimental to a fault. Their feelings and emotions flashed on their faces with the intensity of a close-up projected on a giant screen, and they weren’t afraid to weep or laugh in front of other people.

“Good. Their laughter will drown out our conversation,” she heard a young man say as he took the seat next to her. He had appeared out of nowhere, as efficient and unobtrusive as a comma. Soo-Ja swallowed nervously; she knew this was the leader of the student group.

They rode for a few minutes in silence, with Soo-Ja stealing occasional glimpses of him. Yul had on black rectangular glasses and a brown corduroy jacket. He was dressed casually, with no tie. His hair looked slightly unkempt, not in a disheveled way, but in the manner of someone who did not bother with mirrors or Vaseline. He wore it a bit long, like a European beatnik.

“I’m glad you came. I was afraid you might change your mind,” said Yul, looking straight ahead. “This is more than we have the right to ask of you.”

“You’re right,” said Soo-Ja, also staring straight ahead. She decided not to tell him how much she had enjoyed being asked to help. Everywhere she went, there was talk of the student movement. Now, she could carry with pride her own sudden, unexpected role in it. “Nevertheless, I’m just a woman riding the bus. You’re the one being chased by the police.”

“Good point,” he said. “But don’t worry about me. The police aren’t going to do anything to me. The last thing they need is to create a martyr; give a face to the movement.” He then lowered his head and spoke in the direction of her neck. “So, have you met Chu-Sook’s mother? Do you know her?”

“No, but Min was right. Her husband used to work for my father. She thinks I’m coming to talk to her about some back pay.”

“Very inventive of you to add that detail.”

“I brought some money, as well as a list of questions I want to ask her,” said Soo-Ja, looking into her purse.

“Don’t worry about the questions. I’ll handle that.”

“Damn it,” said Soo-Ja, going through her belongings.

“What’s wrong?” asked Yul, immediately looking around him.

“Once I memorized the questions, I reached in to throw away the crumpled piece of paper, but instead of the paper with the questions, I threw away the thousand-hwan bill,” said Soo-Ja, still digging through her purse.

Yul could not resist cracking a smile. He glanced at her directly for the first time in their conversation. “Maybe it’s still in there.”

“No, I tossed it out the window,” said Soo-Ja, returning his look. “Boy, that’s a lot of money to just throw away like that. I suppose I wouldn’t make a very good revolutionary, would I?”

“We’ll just make sure we never trust you with our secret plans,” said Yul, smiling.

He was handsome when he did that, thought Soo-Ja. She let her eyes rest over him for a moment, and she noticed his high cheekbones, alabaster skin, and eyes shaped like laurel leaves. She was surprised by how
solid
he seemed, and also by the fact that he smelled a little bit like cocoa. She felt the impulse to linger near his collar and breathe in his scent, though of course she held back.

Soo-Ja smiled to herself, the earlier tension now gone. The bus made a stop, and the group of old men rose to leave, as another group of people made their way in. Soo-Ja looked over at Yul again, noticing how the sun filtered in lightly through a half-opened window behind him, casting a warm glow on the back of his head.

“So, Min said you studied literature, but that you want to be a diplomat?” asked Yul, gazing out the window, paying attention to who got on and off the bus. Soo-Ja couldn’t tell if he felt a genuine interest, or if he was just trying to create an aura of casualness around them.

“The two are not so different,” said Soo-Ja, surprised that Min had shared that with Yul. She’d mentioned it to Min almost in passing, and
was glad to see that he remembered. “With literature, you learn how people behave, and you learn empathy, a good trait to have as a diplomat.”

“Did you always want to be a diplomat?” Yul asked, still looking around.

“No, not always. When I was little, I wanted to be a waitress.” Yul laughed at this, and Soo-Ja smiled at him before she continued. The bus began to move again. “I liked the uniforms, and the idea of feeding people all day. Then I wanted to be a journalist. I liked arranging words on a page. It changed, though, with the war.”

Soo-Ja looked out the window, and she remembered the view from the car on the day they fled the city—the seemingly endless lines of refugees, walking the narrow roads above the rice paddies, carrying their belongings on their backs; some split their loads by each holding one end of a stick, their bags in the middle. They walked in a long line, Indian file, like prisoners in a chain gang, eyes looking down into the ground. Occasionally, someone would look up at her as the car went by, and she would nod slightly, as if she knew the person. If it was a girl, she’d even smile, as if to say,
I’ll see you when we get there, I’ll meet you by the seaside. It’ll all be fine.

“My parents and I had to evacuate, like everyone else, and go to Pusan, at the seaside. We stayed with an aunt of ours, by Haundae Beach, and all through the fall and winter, we watched as the refugees came. I remember it very vividly, the guards squeezing all these women and children into these crowded camps. Their clothes were made out of recycled army uniforms, and a lot of them slept and went to the bathroom on the streets. There were rats everywhere. I remember little boys with shaved heads and tin cans in their hands running after army jeeps, begging for food. My family was lucky. My father had retrofitted his shoe factory into an army uniform maker, and the President was very grateful to him. We stayed in my aunt’s big house, and never went hungry during the war. In fact, we ate pineapples.”

“You shouldn’t feel badly about that,” said Yul. “Your father probably saved the lives of a lot of soldiers.”

“Well, every day I heard stories of people being killed, and bodies mangled, and found on the roads. It was terrifying. I was fourteen at the time.”

“Did anyone in your family get hurt?”

“No. No one. It felt like a miracle. I remember when it all ended, the day we came back home. It felt like everything was gone—buildings bombed, roads filled with debris. Only our house, still standing. There were some people living in it, mostly men—war deserters, vagabonds, idlers. They napped on the floors. Some played
hato
cards. They had these bored looks on their faces, like they didn’t care that the South had won Daegu back.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, my father started telling people to get out. He used his factory-owner voice—very firm, but also kindly. Like he was saying,
Go now, before the real owner, who’s much meaner, catches you here.
Nobody protested, the men just got up and started leaving. My mother gave each of them some money, enough for a hot meal, I think, and I remember everyone took the money, but nobody thanked her, or even looked her in the eye. When they left, I wondered where they’d go.” Soo-Ja paused and looked at Yul again. “Are you really sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes. Go on,” he said, his gaze encouraging her. The bus began to move faster now, over paved asphalt, and Soo-Ja could see the Geumho River rise beyond the windows; the sun’s rays rested languidly over its waters—as still as a lover’s outstretched arms.

“That night, we slept in the bare rooms. Everything we had was gone—they’d taken all our furniture, every single jar in the kitchen, every dresser and bookcase, all the lamps and writing desks. And what they couldn’t carry out, like the doors, they’d pulled out parts of with screwdrivers. The only things left were the floors and the ceiling.

“So the next day, we went to the open-air market to buy new clothes and furniture. It didn’t take very long until we noticed something funny about all the items on sale. I recognized a comforter I used to sleep under, yellow on top, with patchwork-like squares of different colors. I saw the armoire that used to sit in my brother’s room. The silver dagger
that used to hang by the mirror in my mother’s room. They were selling our things! My books, from the fourth to eighth grade, the silverware we used at dinner.

“I looked at my father and he just smiled back at me and said, ‘Now we find out how much our things are truly worth.’ He gave my brothers and me money to go buy back our things. My mother wanted us to call the police and have all the merchants arrested, but my father shook his head and said, ‘These people need to earn a living, too.’ I’ll never forget that. I remember going from merchant to merchant, buying back my old clothes and ornaments, and each time I was amazed that I could do that, that I could welcome back my possessions. I felt so grateful to be alive, and to be safe, and to have all my things back.”

Soo-Ja smiled at the memory. She then wondered for a moment why she trusted this stranger so much. Maybe because he looked concrete, self-sufficient; he wanted nothing from her. Two, he simply let her speak, and never interrupted her.

“So that’s why you want to become a diplomat. You think diplomacy alone can prevent nations from going to war?” asked Yul.

The bus reached a rough patch, driving over potholes and rocks. As Soo-Ja lurched forward slightly, Yul caught her arm and steadied her. His grip felt electric, his fingers denting her flesh. He took her hand and guided it to the handrail in front of them. Soo-Ja swallowed, embarrassed, but as she sat back again, she let her body fit snugly next to his, shoulder to shoulder.

“You think I’m naive?” asked Soo-Ja, easing back into the conversation.

“Maybe.”

“Fine, so I’m naive. But I’d like to make a small difference. A small difference may not change anything, but it could also be just enough. I mean, you must have believed that as well, when you chose to become—well, what you are.”

Yul did not reply. Instead, he looked at her thoughtfully. Soo-Ja felt a bit foolish for opening up so much to him.
How had he pulled it out of her?
With him, she felt the ease of being around a friend who’d neither judge nor criticize.