Sonju, page 20
The following Sunday, she arrived at the train station too early and had to wait an hour before she boarded the train. When the train neared Maari, she looked out the fast-moving window, craning her neck forward, first catching sight of Second House at the top of the steep rise. Emotion rushed forward. Then she caught sight of the chestnut tree, and she saw two young boys hanging on its branches. Jinju was nowhere to be seen.
Every Monday Miss Im asked, “Did you see Jinju?”
“I see a few village people sometimes,” was Sonju’s usual answer.
Sonju skipped her train ride on the first Sunday of October to help with Lady Cho’s annual art exhibit. Before the guests started coming, Miss Im told her that Lady Cho was known to have a keen eye for promising artists and had promoted several artists already who became renowned, and that reputation helped her succeed in attracting collectors and investors to her art exhibits.
Many of the invited guests were new faces to Sonju but most of them seemed to know each other. One young artist blushed when she told him she liked his work. By the end of the exhibit, nine pieces by seven artists were sold. The shy artist’s work was one of them. The possibility of one day seeing his paintings in the National Museum was terribly exciting to her, and she could understand why Lady Cho wanted to promote them. Sonju said to herself that perhaps she could do something similar one day.
Confessions
At her empty house, Sonju flipped the calendar to the next page and stood looking at the number eleven, the month Kungu died. She slowly rolled her thumb in her palm. She didn’t know when she stopped carrying her thinking-stone. It must have been sometime after he died.
On the morning of the first anniversary of his death, she opened the bureau drawer, touched the two thinking-stones with her fingertips. After closing the drawer, she walked over to the living room and stood in front of the glass door. A few mottled ginkgo leaves flew down into the courtyard near the water pump and swept back and forth then became wedged in the drain. She went out, picked them up, rinsed the dirt off the leaves, then placed them under a little stone in the garden.
As soon as she arrived at The Hall, she went to the back room and found Lady Cho and said, “A year ago today, Kungu died. I just wanted to be with someone for a few minutes.” She told Lady Cho about three childhood friends who swore lifelong friendship on the thinking-stones and how she lost Misu’s friendship. “I envy you,” Sonju said. “You are well connected and have friends and places to go to.”
A subdued smile passed over Lady Cho’s face. “I haven’t told anyone here because …” Lady Cho pointed and said, “Let’s sit over there.”
They sat side by side facing the Japanese garden where a small flock of sparrows were busy hopping and pecking between and on top of the rocks. Trees and shrubs in the garden stayed green all year around as if time never passed.
Lady Cho said, “The idea of marriage never appealed to me. I said so to my parents, but they would not hear of it. On my wedding night, I refused to consummate and kept on refusing day after day. On the twentieth day, he hanged himself.”
Sonju gasped inaudibly.
Her countenance solemn and dark, Lady Cho continued, “His parents discovered his diary. They sent me back to my parents before the funeral. My parents begged his family for forgiveness, but it never came. Nothing is bigger than a person’s life, and I caused a man to hang himself, for which I am forever guilty.” After a few seconds, she continued, “My mother said, ‘You have to pray to every god there is for forgiveness.’ For my repentance and absolution, she took me to a Buddhist temple, a Protestant church, and a Catholic church. My family donated large sums of money to each.” She was quiet for a moment. “I told my parents I wanted to live alone, and they bought a house for me to live in as a widow. My maid came with me.”
Lady Cho brushed at an invisible speck of dust on her shirt. “Suddenly on my own for the first time, I didn’t know what to do, but I wanted to end my parents’ financial support. I am not a good artist, but I love art. I frequented art galleries and befriended artists. With their help, I started inviting their wealthy patrons to private exhibits at my home. I did very well and needed a larger place, so I bought this property. At the urging of my artist friends, I added the back room to start this club.”
Even though she had told her maid no one else would know, Sonju told Lady Cho about Kungu’s suicide. They stayed still for a long while facing the unchanging garden, and quietly mourned together the deaths of two young men. Having shared the part of their lives they preferred hidden, Sonju felt that a special bond formed between them that morning.
Before parting, Lady Cho said, “You and I and the women here, we are all equal in shame and suffering. We need to be kind to each other.”
It was true what Lady Cho said about the women of The Hall. Sonju had known about the cook’s situation at home—her long-unemployed, women-chasing husband and her adolescent son who blamed her for his father’s frequent absence. Each of the women was wounded or damaged in some way—Miss Im’s childhood poverty and shame at her father’s alcoholism, and her having been discarded by her husband for infertility. Yunghee witnessed her father’s cruelty and hadn’t known safety while growing up. And Gija, a young woman of talent and intellect—she was passed around from one relative to another like an unwanted baggage. Gija herself wouldn’t tell, but someone had betrayed her, and she had been deeply hurt by it.
Sonju had not been as generous to the women as she could have been with her time. Gija, Yunghee, and Miss Im lived at The Hall and didn’t have friends or relatives to visit with. All they had was each other and the sameness of their daily routine.
From that week onward, Sonju remained at The Hall on some Saturdays and spent time with the women, sitting on a warmed floor chatting, knitting, listening to songs on the radio and singing along and forgetting the cold outside. In the spring, they went to Changduck Palace for the Cherry Blossom Festival at night and were intoxicated by the fragrance of the spring blossoms under the magic of lantern lights. In the summer, they glued photographs of American actresses in a scrapbook, listened to the radio dramas and ate melons. In the fall, they walked on the carpet of fallen leaves among the trees and looked up to find leaves of brilliant yellow, orange, and red still hanging. And in the winter, they went to Kyungbok Palace and threw snowballs at each other on the palace grounds, laughing and ignoring the glances of the proper people.
In spite of those Saturday activities, the women at The Hall knew that Sonju’s Sunday train rides were disappointing, and that it was difficult for her not to see her daughter for such a long time. Fourteen years. She might have told them once that it felt like a sentence to her. And fear started whispering that she might gradually forget her daughter’s face, or that Jinju had changed so much that she might not recognize her daughter even if she saw her. She had to see her daughter.
In early April, she passed small and large train stations along the way and greening fields in between, and when the familiar juniper fence on high plateau came into view, she leaned toward the window. Under the old chestnut tree were two young, animated boys talking to a girl sitting in a tree. Jinju! Jinju! She almost jumped up from her seat. She half-laughed and half-cried. Her child, much grown in two years, was sitting on the branch dangling her legs. Jinju was turning out to be a sturdy little girl. After the train passed, for the rest of the ride, she walked the aisle up and down smiling, unable to calm down and sit.
Sonju didn’t see her daughter again. In the fall, she strolled in the Secret Palace with the women of The Hall; after a deep snow, they were back at Kyungbok Palace for a snowball fight; on New Year’s Day, they welcomed 1955 and ate rice cake soup for good luck and on the Lunar New Year’s Day they ate rice cake soup again just to make sure the luck stuck.
Then spring came with clear, cloudless, blue skies that opened up suddenly and delivered days so perfect that it made Sonju’s heart lift like a bird taking flight. When crisp cool breezes passed, she could smell the starched-shirt freshness.
On one such brilliant day, she took a bus to downtown as soon as the clients left after Saturday lunch. People were everywhere. Buses honked. Taxis tooted. Her steps sprang. There, near the Ducksu Palace gates stood Kungu wearing a white cotton oxford shirt with a navy jacket draped on his left arm. He was waiting for her. She rushed toward him and reached out to lay her hand on his arm. The man turned. She stepped back aghast. “I thought … My apologies.” She turned and ran, panicked, huffing in fast bursts. Her dry tongue and throat cracked. Pain stabbed her lungs and threatened to shut them down. She didn’t remember paying the taxi driver, but upon reaching home, she dropped to the living room floor and buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
What had happened to her to lose her mind like that? She recalled the time when she found Second Sister slumped on a street in the dark night driven mad by relentless gun shots and explosions. Alarmed, she bolted up. She summoned the time she and Jinju played “I can see” game on her last day in Maari. Jinju’s smile, smell, voice, gestures. She wished she could have kept her daughter’s chatter and laughter in a jar tightly covered so that she could hear it every time she missed her. She missed the village. She missed the smell of burning straw and the taste of the country food. She missed the people, even the cows. Most of all, she missed her daughter. After this trail of imagery and sentiments, she had forgotten about the incident at Ducksu Palace. Now it didn’t seem so tragic when occasionally the memory of it returned.
She was tending her garden when the mailman delivered a letter. She wiped her hands on a towel to open it. Her sister wrote that their father, not expecting to recover, had insisted that his son marry while he was still living. He didn’t want his son to be at a disadvantage of being a fatherless man with a widowed mother. The wedding was arranged in a hurry to a woman from a house of equal class. It didn’t bother Sonju that she was excluded from the wedding. She wouldn’t have expected an invitation and would not have gone even if she were invited.
In July, three months after her brother’s wedding, Sonju’s father passed away, which marked the second time she lost her father. After the funeral, her sister came to visit without her mother. Fidgeting and shifting, with pauses in between, she said, “Our brother doesn’t want any contact from you because Mother grieves so much.”
Her eyes steady, her back straight, Sonju said, “There’s no need for him to worry. Tell him I’ll abide by his decision. He is now the head of the household.”
Her sister studied Sonju and finding no agitation, seemed relieved
“What did he die of?” Sonju asked.
“As he was dying, the doctor told Mother he had a stomach cancer.”
Sonju was relieved. It didn’t matter if her family had blamed her for her father’s illness before the doctor’s words. It mattered to her that she hadn’t caused her father’s death.
In April of the following year, Lady Cho gathered the women in the living room and said, “People are moving to Seoul in large numbers for job opportunities and better education. I am advised to invest in real estate. You may want to consider buying a house or a piece of land yourselves. I will buy some land south of the Han River just in case the North invades us again. The land is much cheaper there as it’s mostly farmland.”
After Lady Cho had gone home, Miss Im pulled Sonju to the back room. “I bet it was Assemblyman Kim who advised Lady Cho on real estate investment. He is a close friend of hers.”
“Will you buy a house?” Sonju asked.
“No, I want to stay here. I don’t want to live alone, and this place is free. Would you buy one?”
Sonju had been thinking about a house for her and Jinju to live in. So, after three years of working at The Hall, she bought a house in her own name in the West Gate District—near work. She loved the simple lines and sunny interior of the house, and imagined her daughter happily moving about from one room to another.
1956 May 25
My Daughter Jinju,
I bought a house near my work. It is a Japanese-built home, not like your grandfather’s. It is much, much smaller than your grandfather’s house, but it has an indoor bathroom, which I like very much. I wish you were here with me. You would have had such fun dancing, singing, or playing princess on the raised wooden platform in one of the rooms that a Japanese family used as a place for private worship.
An artist friend of mine painted a portrait of you from the photograph when you were two years old. He said it is exactly the same size as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. You would like it. It’s hanging in my bedroom. I look at you and say good night before I go to sleep.
English Lesson, 1957
Through the window of the train, Sonju saw a spread of golden stalks, frozen fields, and then rice seedlings planted in rows. She saw Jinju on a chestnut tree in 1954 when she was five and hadn’t seen her for three years since. She once saw her former mother-in-law waddling down the slope, swinging the same hefty hips. She wanted to run to her and hold those thin veiny hands and talk to her again and tell her she was sorry.
On a June day, Miss Im was flipping through a copy of Life magazine and asked Sonju, “Have you noticed our clients use more English words and phrases now? I need to study English, so I don’t come across as ignorant. I have forgotten much of what I learned at school other than the alphabet.”
They bought a conversational English book and tried to translate Life magazine articles using dictionaries. Unlike learning the Japanese language, English didn’t come easily to them.
“Why do English letters have so many different sounds when the alphabet has only twenty-six letters?” Miss Im complained. “We should thank King Sejong the Great for having our alphabet developed. It’s so easy to learn to read and write. And consistent.”
When they were learning nouns, Miss Im questioned why it was necessary to add an s to make a plural. “Two apples. It already said two. Why bother with an s after apple?”
About irregular verbs, she said, “English is so irrational. Wouldn’t it be better for all the English-speaking people to agree to add ed, like goed or eated for a past tense instead of went and ate?”
“That’s a good idea,” Sonju said. “To whom do we make such recommendations?”
Miss Im threw a mean side glance at her.
Hearing Miss Im tell the clients about studying English with Lady Yu, Professor Shin said, “I can ask my American colleague and friend to teach you American English if you want.”
The following Saturday, the American presented himself and returned an awkward, unaccustomed bow to Sonju and Miss Im.
Before entering the living room, Miss Im pointed at his shoes, and he took them off. He was taller than any of their clients and had a foreign smell that was hard to describe. He looked exotic with light brown hair, blue eyes, and long lashes that curled up. His eyes were so transparent that Sonju could almost see the inner workings behind that blue. This was the first time she had seen a Westerner that close.
The American said his name was Roger Williamson, and upon seeing the apprehensive look on Miss Im and Sonju’s faces, repeated slowly this time. He then wrote it on a piece of paper.
Miss Im and Sonju read his name together, “Rho…jehru Wee…ree ahmu sohnu.”
He corrected their pronunciation a few times until Miss Im, laying her right hand on her chest, said, “My name is Im Nari.”
She had practiced it before Mr. Williamson arrived. Then she added, “Nari, American way.”
Mr. Williamson nodded and smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Nari.”
Sonju showed him the Life magazine articles and the English/Korean dictionary. She pointed to the words and went over the lines with her finger, nodding and looking into his eyes to see if he understood what she was trying to convey.
After the American left, Miss Im said, “Each of his shoes would hold at least one doi of rice,” which caused the women to laugh.
He came every Saturday afternoon, even during the monsoon.
During the occupation, the Japanese had taught British English with a Japanese accent, and undoing the hardened memories of a tongue was a great challenge for Sonju and Miss Im. While learning to pronounce words in American English, they laughed at every mistake they made, which made for a lot of laughs. Mista Weereeahmusohnu seemed used to Koreans’ easy laughs and laughed along with them.
After four months of weekly study and practice, Sonju and Miss Im understood English well enough to ask Mr. Williamson why he came to Korea. They asked him to write the spelling of the words they didn’t know so they could look them up. Eventually, they understood the gist of what he told them: He was in the United States Army stationed in Japan after the Japanese emperor unconditionally surrendered. There he befriended a Meiji University professor, a Korean expatriate who had studied in Japan for many years. Through that professor, he learned that almost all Korean diaspora in Japan were denied Japanese citizenship as well as social and health benefits. As a result, many worked in menial jobs. This knowledge led to his interest in Korean people. He took his current job after receiving a doctoral degree in political science focusing on the Japanese occupation of Korea.
“Now we call you doctor,” Sonju said.
Miss Im said, “Please tell us about your family. Are you oldest son?”
“I am the only son. I have an older sister and a younger sister.”
“America is big, yes?” Miss Im asked. “Where in America, do you come?”
