Re Jane (26 page)

I hesitated. This was obviously some private letter or other. Emo had gone to so much trouble to hide it—was it my right to snoop? I remembered the short-lived period in the fifth grade when I had kept a diary.
“I hate Sang and Hannah! They're so mean! This house feels like a gulag!”
(We'd just finished up a unit on the Cold War in social studies.)
“I'm going to run away and go find my real dad and live with him!”
Hannah had found the diary, which I'd hidden in a shoe box tucked under the far side of the bed, against the wall. Which meant she'd gotten on her hands and knees and reached for the box with a broomstick.
So ungrateful!
she'd boomed, shaking my diary in the air.
How dare you call us by our first names?
Don't you know how to show respect?
I didn't know whether she couldn't understand the English past the first sentence or if in her anger she'd latched onto my first set of offenses. She'd handed the book to my uncle, who studied the words on the page. Then, tossing it casually onto the table, Sang turned to his wife and said,
She wants to run away? Then let her go. But she's a fool if she thinks for a second that her American father wants to take her back.

I held the envelope in my hands, debating what to do. But it felt thicker and stiffer than a letter, like photographs. What was Emo hiding?

Curiosity won out. I pried open the flap of the envelope.

Inside was a heavy, yellowed paper that had been folded over and over, as if someone had been trying to obscure its contents. Three brittle photos tumbled into my lap. One of a young couple. Another of two girls. But it was the third photo that hit me.

The man in that photo had a shock of rich brown hair—a color I would describe as all-American, a chestnut brown like the rich crests of the dads from TV sitcoms I watched while growing up. So, too, were his high cheekbones, cracking into a smile; the full bridge of his nose; and his strong jawline. His eyes I could not see at all—they were cast down at the bundle he cradled in his arms. I turned the picture over:
Currer Bell and his daughter, Jane
.

That bundle was me.

The photo slipped from my hands. I knelt in place, motionless. What to do? Tuck the photos away, pretend I never saw them? Confront Emo? Call Sang? Demand an explanation? But I could only fixate on the strewn makeup bottles, their irritating disorder. The photo, fluttering in the air like a fraught, suspended chord, dropped suddenly into my lap.

I felt a shadow in the doorway. Emo.

“Tsk, tsk, look at the mess you made!”
She knelt to a squat and began corralling the bottles with a hasty sweep of her arms. She gathered them to her breast and dumped them wholesale into the drawer.

“Why are you just sitting there? Hurry-hurry!”
She looked over at me, and she must have seen my blank, faraway expression. Then her eyes fell on the photo in my lap.

Disgust shot over Emo's face, her inky eyebrows pinching into peaks.

“I know who that is,”
I said in a steely tone.

“Oh, that.”
Emo was reaching for the photo. Her face righted; she forced air into her voice.
“That's just nobody.”

I was getting tired of her act.
“Don't call my father ‘just nobody'!”

My sharpness startled her; her hand froze in the air. I wasn't good at expressing—or modulating—my anger. My
han.
It was always the first emotion that leaped from my gut and licked the back of my throat, although life—Sang—had taught me to swallow it back down.

But suppressing your emotions, forcing your face to go blank like a dry-erase board, that was
tap-tap-hae.
Why couldn't I be like Nina? I envied her ability to open up, her emotions pouring out in unbridled, if unseemly, waves.

It was tiring, being kept in the dark.

Emo knew that I knew that the jig was up.
“Yes, you're right. That's your father.”
She sighed. The singsong quality had drained from her voice.

“How could you keep him secret from me?”

“Honestly, I didn't really like him. Your father had no
nunchi.
”

“Why, because he didn't fill your water glass first?”
It was an insolent thing to say, but I couldn't stop the words from coming out of my mouth.

“That was the least of it,”
Emo tut-tutted. She took my father's photo and stuck it back with the others, rearranging them into a tidy stack.
“I only met him once. But we could all tell his character right away—he had no family education whatsoever. And then he took Big Sister away.”

Emo began the tale of how my mother had met my father. But as she spoke, a sharp bitterness suffused her story. It felt unfiltered and raw, so unlike her usual homespun tales. For once her words felt unrehearsed.

My mother had met my father—Currer Bell—while she was on a school-volunteer work trip down in the countryside of Jeolla province. That was where my father had been stationed. When she returned to Seoul, they continued a lively correspondence—so lively that she invited him home to Busan for the Chuseok holidays.

Every year Emo could hardly contain her excitement for the harvest holiday, because my mother would play with her and her friends and help her study for exams. That year, however, her excitement was tempered by the arrival of this “foreigner friend.”

“Who
was
this man? Big Sister said he had no family. He'd come here on some government ‘voluntary peace mission' trip. Father was so busy trying to earn a living he failed to make the proper inquiries. Big Brother was already married to that crazy wife of his. Big Brother Number Two was long gone in America.”

And so my grandfather, thinking the man was just a poor foreigner with nowhere to go for the holidays, gave him a warm welcome, complete with a banquet table so laden with food that its legs threatened to collapse. This I found hard to picture. But apparently my grandfather had a soft spot for the Americans—when he fled the North Korean army for Busan, they'd helped him along the way. They were generous with their food and supplies. Perhaps my grandfather thought he could return the favor in some small fashion.

“That man was insufferable,”
Emo said.
“He and Father began to talk politics. I couldn't follow everything they were saying—I was just a child, and also his Korean was
terrible
—but I remembered thinking how he should have just sat there quiet like a proper guest. Instead he had the gall to tell Father how he would reform our country. Him! A foreigner! Who did he think he was? Swooping in and expecting everyone to treat him like he was so special.

“I kept looking over at Big Sister, to see if she would stop it. Maybe nudge her ‘foreigner friend' to shut up. But the whole time she kept staring up at him all moony-eyed. Like she was
grateful.
Big Sister should have taken Father's side. It was the worst kind of betrayal.

“Finally Father shouted at that man, ‘It's just your kind of thinking that split our land in two!'

“Crash! went the banquet table. Kimchi juice splashed all over the man's pants. He ran outside—or maybe Big Sister told him to go, I can't remember. When he was gone, I thought the worst was over. At last! I was starting to tell Big Sister about the new game that Oakja”—
Oakja had been Emo's best friend from childhood—“
taught me. But Big Sister said, ‘
Younghee-ah.
Later, okay? I promise.”
Younghee was Emo's Korean name.
“She turned to Father. ‘He's asked me to marry him. And I've said yes.' ‘Have you gone mad?!' Father shouted back. ‘I'd rather you marry the worst beggar in Korea than
that
man.' Big Sister said nothing. Father went on. ‘I bet even the worst beggar in
America
is better than
that
man. That man is the
babo
of all
babos.
'

“He kept trying to stop her. Told her this was her last chance. That if she stayed, he'd forgive her disobedience. And you know what she said to him?”

Eat well and live well,
I thought. The same words Sang had once uttered to me.

But I was wrong.
“She said, ‘I love you, Father. But I love him even more.' Then Big Sister got up from the table and left.

“I ran after her. Told her she better stay, because we had to play that game like she promised. She lifted me up. ‘Younghee-ah, do you want to come live with us?'

“I shook my head. ‘Father thinks your friend's a
babo.
'

“‘But your big sister loves him. Does that mean I'm a
babo,
too?'

“Jane-ah. I'll never forget this. Big Sister gave me a big hug. But I was still pouting so I didn't hug her back.

“‘As soon as we sort things out, I'll come back for you,' she told me. ‘And then you can teach me that game.' But she never did.”

Emo's last words hit me in the gut.
Promise me we'll listen to the new Evv-R-Blü album when I get back?
I had never kept that promise to Devon.

But that was the thing, wasn't it? If my mother had made the “right” choice and stayed, she would have been heartbroken. Instead she left, and it was Emo who suffered afterward. Someone was always losing out.

Later, after Emo had regained her composure, she would tell me other things. The details she'd pieced together through the years. For one: My father had come as part of some “government volunteer mission” promoting “peace and culture.”
The Peace Corps?
I'd asked, to which Emo nodded and said it sounded familiar. (Beth had done the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, right after college. She was continually on my case to apply, even though it would have put me two years out of the job market, with no new skills to add to my résumé.) Emo told me how my parents and I eventually set up house in Itaewon, where they could move about a little more freely than in the other, less “foreigner-friendly” neighborhoods. How they had traveled down again to the Jeolla countryside—“
another volunteer trip—or so they claimed,”
Emo said, with some consternation, as if alluding to something I didn't understand—and it was there, in a cheap
minbak
inn, the kind heated with
yeontan,
coal briquettes, that carbon monoxide seeped into the room where my parents were sleeping. Both died in the middle of the night. I had been left in the care of friends in Seoul; had I accompanied them on the trip, I would have died, too.

For as long as I could remember, I had created a certain memory of my last night with my mother before she died. It was a constructed one, but still its images were etched into my brain. There was the cheap room with the hard earth floor, the thick blankets and mats redolent of spittle and warmth. Our last hours together. My mother swaddling me in those thick blankets to protect me from the gas that took her own life. I thought she'd given her life to spare mine, the way mothers in fairy tales died to save their children. But that's not how it had happened at all.

I knew that Emo blamed my father for my mother's death. She was performing backward induction, tracing the sequence of events that led to her death, and all those roads led to Currer Bell. If only he had never set his “insufferable” foot in this country. Who knew how far back Emo followed the thread of blame. For her the story, and that photo, changed nothing. Her Big Sister was dead, and That Man was the one responsible. But for me, for me!

“So . . . my father
wasn't
a GI?”

“Is that all you care about?”
Emo cried.

“Of course I care. This changes everything!”
Was Emo so clueless? Who my father was changed what kind of person my mother had been. It wasn't so much that I was the kid of a GI; it was that my mother hadn't just been his one-night stand, the way everyone back in Flushing thought of her. She hadn't been thrown away and left behind.
She's a fool if she thinks for a second that her American father wants to take her back.
But this picture, too, revised my whole history—Sang had been wrong. I
had
been wanted.
“Not fair, you keep something so big from me!”

Emo stared at her hands in her lap.
“I'm sorry, Jane,”
she said.
“Your grandfather would get so angry if anyone mentioned your mother that I guess I got used to never talking about her. But that was wrong of me. And I only found that picture after your grandfather passed away. It was tucked inside some old files. But it still doesn't change the fact that that man should've had the
nunchi
to leave our family alone.”
Emo's tone was suddenly petulant, like a child's.

But soon it grew hazy, nostalgic.
“And then—you came to me. After they died. You were my sister's best parts. Whenever I held you in my arms and looked down at your little face, I could see only Big Sister.”

Emo reached for one of the other photos from the envelope—the one of the two girls. She gazed down at it tenderly.

“This was taken right before your mother left to start school in Seoul.”
She held the picture of my mother up to my face.
“This is your good half. Don't ever forget it.”

That night, after my talk with Emo, I kept staring at the photos, trying to force a flood of infantile memories to rush over me. But they remained locked; the photos released not one shard of the past.

In the black-and-white, sepia-tinged picture of my mother and Emo, Emo wore a school uniform and looked no older than Devon. In her prepubescent years, Emo was painfully skinny and knock-kneed, and she gazed up at her older sister with adoration. Devon had looked up at me in the same, hopeful way, when she asked me to help her with the Hunter exam. I focused on my mother in the photo. She looked lanky and drawn—the skin was stretched taut over her pronounced cheekbones. She had the same haunted expression clouding her eyes that she'd had as a child.