Jemi’s friends were wild and Western-loving. And I was their pet. “Your Korean is terrible, but we like you anyway.” “Those double eyelids are real!” “Oh, to be nineteen again!” I was not dumb to the fact that it was the American in me my new friend loved. Two years in Arizona doing her MBA had afforded Jemi a taste of freedom, of self-expansion in an expansive country, and she was torn between her life here and what America offered. With her mammoth mane and theatrical makeup, Jemi was conspicuous in Korea, too, and she probably missed living invisibly in America. Whatever had brought her back, it kept her here still. In that sense, we were inverse doppelgängers: I did not feel I belonged in Texas or Princeton and was now taking my Eastern medicine, just as years before, Jemi had taken her dose of Western fun.
“You need to come home right after work,” my grandmother said to me one weekend. She was visiting from my second aunt’s house, where she lived and took care of my two younger cousins. She was a good grandmother and not prone to lecturing, but nor did she love me much, as we were mostly strangers. She loved most the grandchildren she raised, then her sons and other grandchildren, and her daughters last. I was one of the grandchildren she did not know, and because my father was her youngest son, I lived toward the bottom of the family order. “Coming home late is not proper for a young woman,” she concluded, and passed me a roasted chestnut.
After that I did try to come home earlier, but inevitably, I was drawn back into Jemi’s world, where I drank and danced and forgot my troubles and aspirations for the year. The men with their bespoke suits and dumb eyes getting dumber licked the Johnnie Walker off their lips and grinned at me, drunk-eyed jack-o’-lanterns. Before my eyes, the hollowed-out spaces of the heads seemed to fill with American fantasies.
3.
WHEN THE STYLIST WAS DONE, she spun the chair around toward the mirror.
I had never had an expensive haircut or a salon perm in my life. When I was in the fifth grade, Umma had given me a home perm with the pink rollers she used on herself and Ogilvie from the drugstore. “Voilà!” she’d said. Upon seeing the junior version of her clown head, I teared up.
But now, in the softly lit mirror of a glossy Korean-French salon in Myeongdong moved a young Korean woman—not a Korean American one—her hair coiffed in the fashionable Seoul bob. The style had been achieved by the Brazilian “roll straight perm,” which tamed flyaways and puffed the crown. The cut, perm, highlights, and tip together came to twenty percent of my monthly earnings. I didn’t care. I swished my hair back and forth. Did I think I was beautiful? Perhaps. More than that, it looked as if I belonged.
4.
I WAS HALF-CONSCIOUS IN THE back of the taxi with Han Bin oppa. I was sprawled over his lap, and he had ratcheted my shirt up under my arms. His fat sausage fingers wriggled under my bra, fiddling with my nipples. The driver sped toward a motel where guests paid by the hour. I was supposed to sober up in a room before returning home. Sobering up, though, consisted of this man undressing me. Of him laying me on the bed. From inside the darkness, I couldn’t see or say much. Most of the time I was unconscious. Once, I opened my eyes and saw his silhouetted figure at the foot of the bed, hunched over and licking thirstily between my legs. He surfaced, and I didn’t recognize him for a moment, since his glasses were off. He poked his fingers in me. I moved my hips—“no”—but he pulled my legs and slid me toward him, like I was a meal he was positioning himself to devour. Grunting and moaning, he dove back down, and I closed my eyes as the room went into free fall. I felt him against me and shook my head no.
“Hyeseung, you are so sexy, I have to. I want you so much,” he begged, and pushed hard. I tried to tell him I was a virgin, but couldn’t find the words. Finally, he plopped his sweaty body on mine, pinning me flat on the bed, and while he stroked himself violently, I passed out again.
The cab dropped me off in front of my aunt and uncle’s. I was clothed somehow and made it up the stairs to the apartment. In the months I had been living with them, Keun Umma had never given me a key, and the front door was left unlocked.
In the morning, I was dirty and shaken. A film of whiskey lay on my breath, and in my hair clung the scent of cigarettes. I waited for my uncle to leave for work before creeping out of my room. Keun Umma was wiping down the living room floor and wouldn’t look at me.
“Hey, what happened to you? You didn’t go to work this morning?” Kang Dae asked, emerging from his bedroom. His dog, in his arms, barked at me.
I ignored them and went to the bathroom to wash.
I had met Han Bin oppa and the other men through Jemi. At first I welcomed their attention, never having attracted a Korean male before. But these were not college boys, they were men, and while Han Bin oppa reported to Jemi that the taxicab ride to my apartment was expensive, he of course left out the detour to the motel. Ashamed, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth, and gradually, she cooled toward me, her invitations falling off.
Soon, the cold season loosened and melted into spring, the brittle joints and hard angles of the capital softening with the first cherry blossoms. I explored the streets of pink-blossoming Seoul. At the street carts, men threw back their ties and devoured fish cakes on skewers or hard-boiled eggs marinated in soy sauce. The aproned ajummas in the coffeehouses noticed their customers lingered, and the mood of the country, sour for months after the austerity measures, changed with the wind.
Before I knew it, it was almost May. Summer was approaching, and then after summer, what? Dean Kay’s office had sent an email. While I mulled the prospect of reentering college life, I spent more time at home with Keun Umma. When I was still going out with Jemi in the winter, one night I had forgotten about jesa, the ceremony commemorating an ancestor’s death. It was a busy time for Keun Umma, who spent the entire day cooking for the jesa table, laid out for my uncle and Kang Dae, as the oldest son, to swoop in front of and bow. She expected her niece to help with the preparations, but instead, I was out getting wasted.
But in a family as vast as Appa’s, there was no shortage of jesa days, and now I was home flipping bindaetteok on the griddle, fashioning meat patties the size of my palm and dipping them in flour and beaten egg wash, scooping cups of new-crop rice, playing the daughter my aunt never had.
The next weekend, the many Songs converged in a village for a cousin’s wedding. At dinner in the banquet hall, I drank soju with my older cousins as the younger ones snatched at the kalbi cooking over the charcoal fire. I surveyed the scene as if it were a miracle. After all, I had very few memories in which the concept of family had widened past the point of the nucleus.
5.
UMMA GOT IT INTO HER head that since my time in Korea was drawing to a close, I ought to make a visit to her brother and his wife in the country.
When I stepped off the bus at Onyang, I caught sight of Oesungmo. She had spotted me, too, and ran over.
“Your cousin Tae Hyun is coming tomorrow,” my aunt said, embracing me. She spoke with the regional accent of this countryside, and my memory had rinsed her of this. Even though my Korean had improved exponentially, my comprehension wasn’t good across all dialects and accents, and I leaned in, as white people did with my parents.
She held my hand as we walked to the house. Though not of my blood, she was warm to me. The smell of sewage running underneath the sidewalk wafted up, as did the ambrosial scent of roses spilling heavy over the gates of the high-walled houses. Seeing the wide-open peach roses, like sunny faces, Umma’s favorite, I thought of her, the country rose who must have once had the accent of her brother before shedding the village ways for the city’s, and for her dreams.
I stepped over the threshold of the gate as Oesungmo pulled closed the heavy door. It was lush and cool inside the compound, verdant and clean. She had a raised garden in a bricked rectangle for the perilla and trellises for the climbing squash. Chili smells intermingled with that of the roses—spicy and sweet at once. Everywhere were plants I didn’t know the names of, in English or Korean.
Oesamchon was a darker Korean like my mother, who, on our last visit, had let herself become a girl again, sitting next to her older brother with her shoes off and kicking her legs up under her skirt. Bare-faced, she had looked young and carefree in a way I’d never seen her in America. I asked him and Oesungmo to receive my bow. Afterward, she ushered us to a lacquered table laden with banchan made from the garden. While the three of us ate, I listened more than spoke. That night, I slept warmly on the heated ondol floor in the front room and woke up to mackerels crackling on the fire in the kitchen.
My cousin arrived in time for breakfast. Tae Hyun was their oldest child, an officer in the Korean army. Having worked alongside American soldiers for years, he spoke English well and was an alert, good-natured man fifteen years my senior.
The first time I met him, he, his wife, and their son took Arthur and me to Lotte World, Seoul’s largest amusement park. Arthur and I had gone out of our minds with the food and toys our adult cousin lavished on us. Strapped in next to me on the roller coaster and log-flume ride was Tae Hyun’s son, in whose serious face were carved my own cheekbones. So, this was what it was to be related, to be clearly for once a Lim and not a Song, and see the stamp of myself in a stranger’s physiognomy. As for my cousin’s wife, in a show for her American relatives, she’d appeared in a purple fur coat, purple leather pants, and corkscrew curls. A few years after the amusement park, Mrs. Lim abandoned her serious boy and husband, and was never heard from again.
After breakfast, Tae Hyun and I headed to the mountain where our grandparents were buried, and Oesungmo packed us everything we’d need to perform jesa. The mountain was deeper into the countryside, and during the drive, my cousin made conversation, unerringly slow and didactic, the way he probably addressed all Korean-speaking foreigners in his language. Eventually, he asked whether I remembered writing him letters when I was younger.
I laughed. “Yes, I was a big one for letters.”
“I kept them all. The ones from my aunt, your kind mother, too. She sometimes sent school pictures of you and Arthur, which I also kept. The army can be very lonely, you know.”
The mountains of Korea can be very beautiful, you know, I sang to myself in soft imitation as I peered out the window. The early-morning fog was clearing. Through a blanket of water droplets, the edges of the world appeared soft and blurry as if stippled with a brush. Pulling the car into grass, Tae Hyun pointed. “All the way up there.”
The path up the mountain was not well-worn and every once in a while, Tae Hyun threw off a large branch or parted grasses, holding aside a curtain into the thicket. Terraced platforms where rice grew cut into the wet, black soil of the mountain. As we gained in elevation, we left a fragrant, muddled trail of green underfoot.
Finally, we caught sight of the mounds that were the tombs, two grassy breasts in the clearing. The sun moved behind thin clouds and suddenly, everything went steely like flint in the grayness. Tae Hyun unpacked the Chamisul, dried fish, rice, orange, apple, and a tremendous pear, bigger than a bocce ball and pregnant with juice. I arranged everything on plates, cutting just enough off the bottoms of the fruit so they would sit flat and not roll away. The lines and colors felt true and distinct thanks to the neutral background of the sky—the orange, so very orange; the apple, so very red. On the ground, he spread a tarp and a blanket to go over it. And then the blue blanket, so very blue.
We bowed twice, touching our foreheads to the ground. I performed a jaunty jul like a boy, having perfected my bowing style among the Song cousins, who were all male. Afterward, Tae Hyun and I sat with our backs to the tombs and looked out onto the vista for miles. This was the view our grandparents gazed upon in silent benediction from inside the quietude of their deaths. The grave on the left entombed my grandfather, who drowned years before we were born; the one on the right, my grandmother, who had loved me well. Tae Hyun and I pulled apart the dried codfish, cut up the beautiful red apple, and peeled the flawless orange. The sun descended faster than we could eat, but we took our time.
“I hope now you have lived in your country, you will feel you can return often,” Tae Hyun said, breaking the comfortable silence that had only been punctuated by the rapping of a woodpecker nearby. He tugged a weed from the base of our grandmother’s tomb. I didn’t feel any pressure from him to respond either way, did not feel he wanted anything from me, but in that moment, I realized I might never see him again.
“My boy loved meeting his American cousins many years ago when you and Jae Sung visited,” he said, calling Arthur by his Korean name.
“That was a memorable trip to Lotte. I hope Byun Ok is doing well.”
“He is well and loves school. And he is excited someday to meet his third American cousin, Sarah! You will like to hear my boy is very quick-minded. We always say he is like your mother, still the most famous student ever to hail from these parts… I suppose my aunt has told you Byun Ok does not have his mother anymore?”
I nodded. The image of Tae Hyun’s ex-wife flashed in my mind: the mane, a little like Jemi’s, the flamboyant clothes.
