Honolulu, Page 2

  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.

  n 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 brai
d 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.

  Then one afternoon-during which, I couldn't help but notice, Blossom braved the wintry cold to carry at least ten buckets of water back and forth from our well-I finished my own chores and entered the inner Court to take what little sun I could find. There I found Blossom, standing silently at the base of the high wall enclosing the courtyard, gazing up wistfully. Her cheeks were chafed red from the chill; her nose was runny. And there was such longing in her eyes as she looked up-at what, I wondered?-that I asked her if anything was wrong.

  "Honorable sister-in-law," she said, "could you help me up to the top of the wall? Just for a minute?"

  I was puzzled, but couldn't bring myself to say no. I overturned a large clay flowerpot, stepped onto it, then reached down and scooped Blossom up in my arms. I gave her the boost she needed to clamber atop the wall, where she settled herself on the ledge and peered intently into a distance I could not see. Curious, I pulled myself up and sat beside her, our legs dangling over the edge of the inner Wall. I followed her gaze across the blue tiled rooftops of the Outer Rooms, but all I saw was the road leading out of Pojogae and into the hills, where dark clouds pressed down on snowy summits.

  "Do you see something out there?" I asked.

  After a moment she just shook her head. "No," she said quietly. "I just wondered if maybe my papa was coming back for me."

  I had built a wall around her in my mind, but with these few plaintive words it was breached as easily as this wall of stone.

  Her father, she told me, had been a well-to-do yangban farmer, until the Japanese took his farm and cast Blossom's family from their ancestral home. Now penniless, her father went to work as a field laborer, but his pitiful wages were insufficient to feed eight children. Somehow my own father heard of his plight and offered to raise their youngest child as a bride for Goodness of the East. Normally, families of the upper classes would never have resorted to minmyonuri marriage, but circumstances were difficult for both clans. Blossom's parents had one less mouth to feed and received four yen in paymentabout two American dollars. In return my family received the services of a bride-in-waiting to replace the servant girl we could no longer afford, a virtual slave to the household.

  I felt shame for my clan, and guilt when I looked at Blossom.

  She spoke of her own family-her parents, five sisters, two brotherswith tenderness, longing, and the fear that she might never see any of them again. I could hardly tell her otherwise; even daughters-in-law wed in the traditional manner seldom saw their birth families again, especially if their new homes were far distant. She began to weep, and without a conscious thought, I took her into my arms, the only comfort I could offer. I held her against me, let her head rest against my breast as she wept, and resolved to myself that from now on I would try to be more than just a sister-in-law to her: I would try to be a sister.

  other worked Blossom harder than she had ever worked our servant girl, but I helped her with her chores whenever Mother wasn't looking. When we had free time, we enjoyed board games like go and yut, or played seesaw in the Inner Court. (Legend holds that seesaws became popular with girls because on the upswing they were able to catch a glimpse of the world beyond their cloistered walls.) Since Blossom was so young, there were no rigid restrictions yet on her movements, and this worked to my advantage as well. I would tell Father that Blossom wished to play down by the stream or pick wildflowers on the slopes of the near hills. Father, of course, wouldn't permit her to go alone and appointed me her escort. I always protested a little for the sake of plausibility, and soon the two of us were free of the stifling sameness of the inner Room for an hour or two.

  On New Year's Day, Blossom and I rose early to help Mother cook the food to be offered to our ancestors on this first day of the Year of the Ox. It was Mother's responsibility to prepare for these ancestral feasts, up to ten a year, though as females we were not permitted to take part in them. We merely carried in the dining tables and set out the food in the appropriate attitudes-fish on the east side of the table, meat on the west. Joyful Day, as eldest son, poured wine into the ancestors' wine bowls, laid chopsticks across the plates, and placed spoons for the soup; then, kneeling, he led the ceremony honoring the past four generations of our forebears, as Mother, Blossom, and I listened from the kitchen.

  Afterward we ate, each in our own turn. Mother's New Year's Soup was always delicious, though there was more rice and dough in it this year than chicken, and no pheasant at all. I drank a bowl of rice wine too quickly and got a little tipsy. Grandmother had several bowls and became quite the cheerful drunk: She was much nicer to be around when half-pickled than sober, calling my mother "dear, dear daughter-in-law" as if she had been possessed by spirits-as I suppose she had! Would that we could have gotten her to drink more during the other moons of the year.

  As Blossom and I played inside, the boys took the kites they had been building all winter and cast them to the winds. The traditional Korean kite was an oblong or rectangle-a mulberry-paper skin stretched across a framework of bamboo sticks-with a circular hole in the middle, the diameter of which was exactly half the kite's width, for greater stability and control. It was always colorfully painted: A kite with a red half-circle on its face was called a red half-moon kite; one with stripes of green, red, and blue was a tricolor skirt kite; and so on. Some kites were not rectangular but resembled an octopus with eight flapping arms. None had tails. The boys would use a horned wooden reel to let out the lengthening string, and the kites would ascend gloriously into the skies.

  During these first two weeks of the First Moon the boys would also engage in kite fighting. They dipped their kite strings in a mixture of glue and glass powder, then dried them to a coarse edge, so when the kites were aloft the strings became razors. Each boy would try to steer his string so that the serrated glass edge would slice like a knife through another boy's string, neatly severi
ng it, and watch his opponent's kite go spinning away on the wind.

  Blossom and I observed this pageantry from atop the wall of the inner Court. From a distance the white, green, red, yellow, and black kites diving and slashing at one another looked like a flock of brightly feathered parrots quarreling amongst themselves, with an occasional bird taking off in a snit for parts unknown.

  Then on the fifteenth day of the moon, all the kite flyers wrote the words "Away Evils, Come Blessings" on their kites and took to the skies one last time. It was said that thirteen hundred years before, during a trying time in our nation's history, a famous general had tried to calm civil unrest by sending a kite bearing a burning cotton ball into the night skies. The people saw it as a falling star returning to heaven-a sign that the nation's current misfortunes would be ending. Ever since, on the fifteenth day of the New Year, boys all across the land would unreel their kites, long threads having been attached beforehand to the kite strings. Once the kites were airborne the boys would strike a match and light a fuse to the threads; as the kites flew higher, the sparks would race up the threads and finally reach the strings, which would then burst into flame, setting loose the kites.

  From our house Blossom and I could see dozens of flames igniting in midair, and watched the brilliantly colored kites fly free, borne away on updrafts, drifting toward the distant hills.

  "How far will they go?" Blossom asked excitedly.

  "Very far," I predicted. "At least as far as Taegu."

  "Will they reach the ocean?"

  "Some of them, I'm sure."

  "Will they go all the way to America, do you think?"

  "I have no doubt of it," I said with a smile.

  From our high perch atop the wall we watched the kites bobbing and spinning on the wind, like caged birds set wildly free. Would either of us have ever dreamed that soon I would be following in those kites' imaginary wake?

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