Sonju, page 24
The maid followed Sonju to the living room. “After the master died, I worried about you. You had no one to be kind to you then. I haven’t met the women you worked with but if I had, I would have thanked them for being family to you.”
Sonju tried a smile, but only managed to hold back a tear. “But you are still with me,” she said and thought, how could she be so lucky as to have this deeply caring, loyal woman? The maid lowered her eyes and rubbed her hands, then said, “I have prepared dinner for you. It’s in the kitchen. I will see you Monday.” Within minutes of her maid leaving, Sonju heard someone knocking at the gate. It couldn’t be the maid returning, she thought. She wouldn’t knock. She had a key.
It was Lady Cho. Entering the courtyard, she said, “I met your maid. She asked me if I was Lady Cho. She said you had told her how I looked, then thanked me for being family to you.”
Sonju nodded and said, “Without her, I wouldn’t have gotten through after Kungu’s death.”
“Then I should thank her.”
“You look tired,” Sonju said. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll make some tea.”
Sonju returned with a tray and poured the tea. “How did it go at the real estate office?”
“I expected some last-minute haggling, but the buyer paid the full asking price for The Hall.”
“That’s good.” Sonju took a sip.
They talked about Gija and Yunghee: now that they were no longer working, what would they do with their time and energy and how would they get along in Gija’s small house, how fortunate it was for them to have constant companionship even with occasional conflicts they would surely have. Between sips, they both gazed down for long stretches of time. The idea that they wouldn’t see each other daily sank in.
The same must have happened to Lady Cho too. Before leaving, she said, “You and I, we will see each other often.” Sonju nodded several times like a child.
On Monday, after finishing her work, the maid said, “This is very difficult for me to bring up.” She crossed her hands and looked away, then looking back at Sonju, said, “I planned to work for you as long as my health was good, but my son wants me to quit before he gets married in July. He says it doesn’t look right for me to work at my age when he can provide for me. We’ll move to Chungju for his job and have the wedding there.”
Another loss, Sonju thought, and reached out and covered the maid’s hand with hers. “I’m happy for you and your son. I understand that you will need time to prepare for the move and for the wedding. But would I be too demanding if I asked you to give me two weeks?”
“Not at all. Why two weeks?”
“I have been thinking about removing the tall fence and replacing it with a much lower one. I’ll do away with the gate, so visitors can come directly to the house. I’ll have the workers lay flat stones for the walkway and landscape the rest. I have seen a picture of a garden in an American magazine.” Sonju gestured with her arms, laying out the garden, pointing here and there, listing names of shrubs and plants. “I would like you to be with me until the workers finish.”
“Of course. But will you feel safe without a gate?”
“In addition to the front door lock, I will add a locking door at the entrance to the living room. I will be fine.”
For the next two weeks, workers labored from morning till evening. They planted climbing roses along the low fence, and in the garden, evergreen shrubs, flowering plants, and ground-hugging junipers.
On the maid’s last day, Sonju gave her an envelope of money to help pay for her son’s wedding. She asked, “Do you want anything of your master’s?”
The maid thanked Sonju and put the envelope in her purse. “I would like his teacup. May I? I’ll drink tea from his cup and think about him.”
“Then you’re the person to have it.”
Sonju took her maid’s hands, feeling the rough, bulging joints of her fingers, thinking back to the days following Kungu’s death. The maid turned her hands and squeezed Sonju’s. “You take good care of yourself.”
“Ah, the cup.” Sonju retrieved the cup and the matching saucer from the kitchen and went to her bedroom to wrap the gift.
Handing the gift to the maid, she said, “Thank you for keeping the promise about your master. You’ve been … I’m about to cry, so I’m going to turn around and go to my room.” Her sobs broke loose before she reached her room. She heard the maid’s sniffles fading. Then came the click of the front door.
After she dried her eyes, she thought of the first time she met the unsmiling maid and how warm their hearts had grown for each other over the years. For that she was grateful.
Misu came to see her the following Saturday. It had been so long since Sonju saw her friend that she had given up on their friendship. She wondered why this visit now.
Misu said with a nonchalant air as if they had seen each other only a week before, “No gate. Do you feel safe?”
“I feel quite safe. I don’t have to go to the gate to open it every time someone comes.”
“That’s a maid’s job.”
“I don’t have one. Don’t need one.” Sonju expected an argument, but Misu must have finally accepted that Sonju would do what she pleased. Misu instead talked about her children, her husband, then casually inserted, “Our classmates asked about you.”
She didn’t ask Misu how she responded. Misu had never asked about her work at The Hall, but it didn’t matter. Sonju said, “The business closed as planned. I’m not a working woman any longer.”
Misu had an immediate response, “Oh, good.” Then she corrected, “I mean … you’re financially well placed?”
“Yes, I’ll be all right.”
“I want you to know, you are my best friend.”
It was interesting that Misu felt it necessary to reassure her, Sonju mused. She still didn’t know why Misu came to see her after all this time, but she let that thought go because it didn’t matter any longer.
After a long summer hibernation, Sonju and Lady Cho roamed the streets for two weeks as though to make up for the lost time. They shopped, visited art galleries in search of promising artists, went to movies, museums, and bookstores. They frequented the South Gate Market where the whole strata of humanity bustled in an exuberant mix of colors, noises, smells, and dialects.
Eyeing the merchandise stacked high in each stall, Sonju paused at the memory of the Japanese occupation, the war between the North and the South, the revolution, and the ongoing nervousness of the nation’s mood under the strong-armed military regime disguised as a civilian government. In spite of those difficult events, this resilient country had survived as it must.
It had been nineteen years since Japan’s surrender, ending the Second World War and the colonial occupation of Korea. From the streets, Sonju could see the wheels of progress turning with Korean manufactured taxis and chauffeur-driven cars here and there. Tall buildings were going up; more hotels were built. Manufactured goods, factory woven underwear, ready-to-wear clothes, textiles of every color and design were sold at shops and markets. An increasing number of men and women wore Western style clothing. People craved products from Japan and America if they could afford them. Everywhere, the fingers of America’s reach were visible not only militarily but also in everyday life in Korea. Even though the current regime was oppressive, it was beginning to deliver on its commitment to lift the nation out of poverty and transform it into a developed country.
1964 September 20
My daughter Jinju,
I miss you so much. I don’t know where you live now, but I wish you lived here in Seoul.
I walked the streets in Myungdong the other day and a familiar smell hit me. I knew right away what it was. A merchant was selling roasted grasshoppers and sparrows. It reminded me of the time your aunt cooked sparrows right there in the inner court, a snack your aunt and your boy cousin enjoyed. Lady Cho said people in Seoul eat grasshoppers as health food, for more energy. Sparrow meat is considered a delicacy here too. To me, it is a piece of Maari.
I often think about my time in Maari. My experiences there taught me many things about people and life in general, which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. I am comforted that you are with good people who show you they love you, but what do I do with the smell of roasted grasshoppers that still lingers in my mind?
I wish I were with you. I miss you and Maari, the place you were born.
Sonju was on the way to a coffeehouse in Myungdong to meet Lady Cho. The mottled leaves were dropping, each with a resigned sigh. Street vendors in their stalls were roasting peanuts, chestnuts, and dried squid. Passing by, Sonju took a whiff of the aroma and thought of Kungu and of their last night together after he had peeled roasted chestnuts for her. He had said I love you. Sadness no longer accompanied her thoughts of him, even on the twelfth anniversary day of his passing. She still talked to him sometimes, told him she was fine.
After coffee, Sonju and Lady Cho walked a short distance to the art gallery they frequented. They went toward the mid-section of the gallery where the owner usually sat in a chair.
Under the soft artificial light, Sonju saw a woman sitting across from the owner. When he saw her and Lady Cho, he rose from his chair. “Hello, it is good to see you again,” he said and moved a few steps to the side. “Please meet Artist Ilchon. Of course, you know her. She is so famous.” He bent slightly toward the artist. “Lady Cho owns a gallery outside the city.” Turning to Sonju, he said, “And Lady Yu is her friend.”
The artist nodded without rising to greet them.
“A pleasure to meet you in person,” Lady Cho said in her usual confident voice.
The owner went to the back and returned with two more chairs.
Sonju sat across from the artist, lost for words, unable to take her eyes off of the woman in her layered Western clothes, each layer a different color and different pattern, her long hair streaming down almost to her waist, thick makeup, a cigarette between her index and middle fingers.
Staring at Sonju, the artist brought the cigarette slowly to her mouth, then turning her head slightly to the side, blew out the smoke. Staring back at Sonju, she said, “You have an interesting face.”
Sonju had heard that before, but it was different hearing it from the artist. She touched her blushing cheek, then tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “I … thank you.”
As the artist took another draw from her cigarette, her cheeks sank. Slowly she rose, blew out the smoke, nodded once to Sonju and Lady Cho and walked toward the door, her ankle-length multi-colored, multi-layered attire flowing and trailing.
Sonju and Lady Cho exchanged looks and watched the owner follow the artist. They heard him say, “I would be honored if I could see your new works.”
The door closed and the gallery owner returned. He said, “The first time you meet her, you are taken aback. But she is an artist. She lives art.”
“She is a colorful person, and not timid,” Lady Cho said. “She is perhaps my age?”
“She is older than she looks,” he replied. “She is from a good family but left home to dedicate her life to art. She told me she sewed for women and often slept in a closet at some woman’s house. She painted whenever and wherever she could. One day an art professor saw one of her paintings and bought it. She became his lover. He died a few years back.”
Sonju had seen her paintings in a museum, bold colors and thick flowy lines, much like her attire. She had assumed the artist was a man, based on the name. If she had known about the woman twenty years earlier—a woman from a reputable family who defied convention to live her own life—she might have summoned all her courage and done the same to be with Kungu.
It was mid-December already. With her red wool scarf over her black coat collar and her gloved hands in her pockets, Sonju weaved among the crowded streets. Bing Crosby’s Christmas carols blared out of stores decorated with garish red paper streamers. Pedestrians packed the streets in Myungdong. Taxis and buses honked while snaking through the traffic. Sonju saw a young couple walking arm in arm. She entered Shinsege Department Store and squeezed through the crowd. Two women, perhaps a mother and daughter, were chatting, going through the records of carols by American singers. With envy, she watched them. In 1967, three Christmases from now, she would be able to do the same with Jinju. Happiness filled her heart.
By the time she walked every street in the city center, she felt like she had accomplished something without accomplishing anything. At her last stop, a flower shop, she bought an armful. Flowers in winter! She went straight home and arranged them in a large glass vase and thought about Jinju, her daughter who loved flowers.
The following day, after a telephone call from Lady Cho, Sonju met her at a small, quiet Japanese restaurant in her neighborhood.
“I am going straight to G-62 from here,” Lady Cho said, dipping a piece of tuna in sauce. “We need to see Assemblyman Kim more often. I think he misses The Hall.”
“Me, too,” Sonju said.
Lady Cho took the last piece of sashimi on her plate. After she swallowed, she said, “By the way, I received an odd call from the gallery owner. The artist we met painted your portrait and wants to use your full name as its title.”
“My portrait? From her memory? With my name on it without showing it to me?”
“Don’t worry. It won’t look anything like you. She paints Modern Abstract.” Lady Cho grabbed her purse. “So how do I answer him?”
“Let’s look at the portrait first.”
Three days later, Sonju saw the painting. It did look like her, even with thick lines and swaths of yellow and lavender paint across her face. She didn’t know what to make of her portrait. Not a sad or happy face, but a face that looked to be holding something back.
“Do I look like that? I mean … my expression.” Sonju stared at the portrait.
“Sometimes. You have that enigmatic look.”
When Sonju asked the gallery owner where the artist was, he said, “She doesn’t want to explain her work but insisted that a woman must announce her name proudly in public. There will be a three-page spread of her work in the Today’s Art, and this will be one of them.”
Sonju liked the artist’s attitude. “My name is Yu Sonju,” she announced.
On the first day of spring, Sonju was strolling the halls of the museum in Ducksu Palace when she came across two of her classmates. One of them said, “I saw your portrait in Today’s Art by Artist Ilchon. I showed it to my husband. ‘She is my classmate,’ I told him. I told everyone.” The other classmate nodded.
Sonju forced a courteous smile and thanked them, then left the museum before they could engage her in further conversation.
Sonju hadn’t been at G-62 half an hour when she saw Assemblyman Kim walking toward the cottage.
She opened the door. “Is Lady Cho meeting you here? She isn’t here yet, but please do come in.”
“She didn’t answer the telephone at her home, so I thought she might be here. Chairman Park’s wife passed away this morning.”
Sonju lowered herself in a chair. “Even though she had been sick for a long time, the news still shocks me. Please sit.”
He sat in a chair across from her.
Sonju asked, “How did Chairman Park sound?”
“Sad and lost.” After a brief look out the window, he said, “I don’t remember feeling lost when my wife died. I wonder if that is a character defect.”
She realized she parted her lips a little, surprised that he was sharing his private thoughts with her with such ease, almost like talking to himself.
“Do you mean to say you might be too rational, perhaps too unfeeling?” Sonju was thinking about herself when she said this.
He nodded a few times and fixed his gaze on the lawn out the window. “I accepted my marriage as what it was, an arranged marriage. I tried to make the best of it.” He swept his forehead with his hand as if he were brushing up loose hair. “I think my wife believed she had lived a good life. I was never unfaithful to her, that is not to say I wasn’t tempted.”
He was not known to talk much but sounded as though he wanted to, so she listened as he continued.
“My wife was a good woman. She trusted me completely. But she never knew me. I admit that the only reason she didn’t know me was because I didn’t let her. But then I wondered, would she have understood me better if I did?” He chortled and said, “She often told others she knew me like the lines on her palm. She knew my habits and preferences on some things, but if she had read my inner thoughts and desires, she would have found me a stranger. She never questioned anything about life, didn’t have a passion for anything, didn’t try to change anything. She just lived with a constant babble about meaningless things.”
Sonju had never heard him speak this way. Every client at The Hall knew that even though childless, Chairman Park and his wife had something special between them which not even her long illness could spoil. Listening to the assemblyman, however, she sensed that he grieved the absence of that special something in his marriage. How strange that his thoughts and ideas seemed to flow in the same direction as hers. But then, she could be assuming too much.
She asked, “Did you come to The Hall every day because you were not able to connect with your wife?”
He smiled, and this time, he did look at her. “The Hall filled my needs to some degree. I cherish Lady Cho’s friendship. We have known each other a long time.”
“She is so wise, isn’t she? Sometimes I think she knows me better than I know myself. She was more than an employer to me.”
“She thinks very highly of you and has never thought of you as an employee. She was excited when you agreed to work at The Hall. She said you are special, and I agree.”
