Comfort Woman (26 page)

My mother was told that the most famous fortune-teller in Seoul, paid to read her head at birth, said that she was the most roundheaded baby she had ever seen. In a roundheaded family that valued head shape along with money and auspicious birth charts, this was the highest praise.

The fortune-teller predicted that because of her roundness, because of the class she was born into, and because of the sign she was born under, my mother would be very spoiled and very happy. Everything would roll her way.

This was true for perhaps the first seven years of her life.

My favorite tales when I was growing up were my mother's own baby-time stories. When we played make-pretend, my sisters and I pretended to be our mother, whose early days were filled with parties in Seoul and candy and fancy Western dresses. I pictured most of the things she told us about by finding something in my own life to compare it to and thinking: Same thing, only one thousand times better. When she told us about a doll from France with blue eyes painted in a porcelain face, I took my own pine-and-rag doll, put a cup over her head, and imagined a toy a thousand times better.

The one thing my mother talked about that neither my sisters nor I could imagine or comprehend was ice cream. We just had no reference for it in our own lives, and when we'd push our mother for a definition, her descriptions left us even more dubious and mystified.

It's like sucking on an ice-cold, perfectly ripe peach, my mother once tried to explain.

Then why not just eat a peach? we asked.

Because it's not the same, my mother said. That's just what it feels like in your mouth. It feels like a ripe peach and like the snow, and like how a cloud full of rain must feel if you could bite into it.

I remember biting into my own honey-and-nut candy that my mother made for us during the harvest and watching her talk. She would shut her eyes, but I could see them move back and forth, back and forth, under their lids. She seemed very magical, like a princess from heaven, when she talked about ice cream.

When I came to America, I was surprised to see how common and how cheap ice cream was. Once I found out what it was, I bought one carton of each flavor I could find—cherry vanilla, strawberry, mint, pistachio, Neapolitan, chocolate chip, butter brickle. We'd have ice cream every night after dinner. At first my husband encouraged me, glad that I was becoming American. But then he found out that I was also eating ice cream for lunch and for breakfast. And that I cried after eating a bowl of a particularly good flavor, because it reminded me that when my mother was a roundheaded child princess, she took a bite out of heaven.

After he found out about these things, my husband put me on a diet. He taught me about “Mulligan Stew,” the four basic food groups, telling me, Your body is a temple.

I try to maintain my baby's round head. I make sure her hats and headbands aren't too tight. When I shampoo her hair, I am careful that I don't use too much pressure and leave unintentional dents. I make sure she sleeps on her stomach, so her skull won't flatten out in the back, and I maintain a constant vigilance, checking on her throughout the night so that I can catch her when she flips over. This is hard work, and I do it in secret because I do not want to hear my husband talk about God and genetics. I know better, because of my mother, than to think that head shape is fixed for life.

In the years before her head changed, my mother's father was a middle school official. He was the one who gave my mother her doll from France, her fancy dresses, her taste for ice cream. He was also the one who taught her her lessons, drilling her in math and history. Because of him, my mother wanted to be the best girl student in the primary school.

I studied, studied, studied, my mother would say, so I could be the best. But every time we took the tests, I always placed second. Number one was always my best friend, whom I hated at that time of year.

Every year, she said, I wished to be number one. One year, though, I figured out that my wishing it wasn't enough to make it happen, because my best friend was also wishing to be number one. Her wish was blocking my wish. So that year, when it came time to write our wishes on the paper we would burn and send to heaven, I told my best friend she should wish to be the prettiest girl, since she was already the smartest. When she said okay and I saw her write this down, I snuck away and wrote on my own paper: I wish to be number one in the school.

My mother would always become sad at this point in the story, and when my sisters and I asked if she got her wish, she'd always say, Yes, and I'm sorry.

The year my mother's wish came true was the year Japan invaded Korea. The year her father and his colleagues were taken away. The year that her best friend had to drop out of school because her family could not afford to pay the fee demanded by the Japanese Provisional Government, could not spare the money for a girl.

My mother's generation was the first in Korea to learn a new alphabet, and new words for everyday things. She had to learn to answer to a new name, to think of herself and her world in a new way. To hide her true self. I think these lessons, these deviations from the life she was supposed to lead, from the person she should have been, are what changed the shape of her head.

Those are the same lessons my mother taught me, the morals of her stories, and because I learned them early, I was able to survive what eventually killed my mother. Hiding my true self, the original nature of my head, enabled me to survive in the recreation camp and in a new country.

At the camps, both the women and the doctors always talked about the monsters born from the Japanese soldiers' mixing their blood with ours. When I became pregnant, I could not help worrying about what my baby would look like, wondering if she would be a monster or a human. Korean or Other. Me or not me.

Now, as I look at my Bek-hap, my White Lily, I do not know how I could have doubted her perfection. Her hair, reddish brown at birth, is now growing in black. Her eyes, though brown, are neither my husband's shape nor mine, are instead what the face readers would classify as dragon eye, the best in size and curve. And her head is round. I cup her tiny head in my palms and whisper, I am so proud of you. You are a rockhead like your mother and your mother's mother. Only a thousand times better.