Gyong-ho arrived at the orphanage in the middle of the night in a big black automobile. It was an unusually opulent arrival for an orphan, especially considering her soiled state. The first thing Il-sun noticed about her was her smell, which filled the entranceway of the orphanage and assaulted Il-sun at the top of the stairs from where she was spying. She smelled filthy, but not in the way of a person who has worked hard between regular baths. She smelled as if she had crawled out of a sewer in which she had wallowed for months or years. Grime streaked her face and stained her hands. The orphanage mistress scolded Il-sun for being out of bed, and then whisked the girl off to the bath. Il-sun had never seen a face before that was completely blank, that showed absolutely nothing; but that was the only way to describe Gyong-ho’s face on the night of her arrival. She was empty, devoid of feeling—devoid of self—and that scared Il-sun.
For the first few weeks Il-sun ignored Gyong-ho because she looked and behaved oddly, stuck as she was in a state of near catatonia. But after a while something about her began to eat away at Il-sun’s patience. She hated her for her weakness. She hated her for being collapsed. She feared Gyong-ho for showing her how low the human spirit can be degraded and still not die. Gyong-ho was pathetic, broken, useless, and yet still alive. It meant that Il-sun herself could be broken further—things could get worse. Gyong-ho’s wretchedness stimulated such anger that Il-sun felt compelled to strike out at her. She tripped her, and shoved her when the mistress was not looking, and threw pebbles at the back of her head. She called her names and tried to rally the other girls into the cause of ostracizing her. Gyong-ho became the focus of a deep, stirring rage about the weakness of humankind and the apparent lack of any accountable or benevolent overseer.
One day, a few months after Gyong-ho’s arrival, the girls were given a rare treat of pork with their vegetables and rice. The portion was small, as usual, but the sliver of meat put a smile on Il-sun’s normally scowling face. Some of the other girls had never even tasted meat before. Il-sun ate hungrily until her bowl was empty, and then scraped it with her finger to make sure none of the valuable juices would go to waste. When she was finished, she looked up to see Gyong-ho staring blankly at her bowl of untouched food. It was an affront. Life was precious and hard, and the meat was such a rare opportunity to gather strength that Gyong-ho’s inability to respond to it provoked Il-sun’s fury. She walked over to her, stripped the bowl of food from her hands, and said, “If you’re not going to eat it, stupid cow, I will.” She then shoveled the food into her mouth, greedily scraping it out of the bowl with her fingers, making exaggerated sounds of pleasure. When the food was finished and the bowl licked clean, she forced it back into Gyong-ho’s hands and stood over her, waiting for a response. What she most craved was for Gyong-ho to protest, to yell at her or fight back. She wanted her to stand up and hit her, or scream obscenities—that would have meant she was alive. But none of that came. Instead, Gyong-ho kept her head down, a silent stream of tears running down each cheek and falling into her empty bowl.
“I hate you!” shouted Il-sun. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” With each time she yelled it, something capped and frozen moved and dissolved inside of her. With each time she screamed, she realized more deeply that it was not Gyong-ho she hated; it was herself. She had failed her mother, had failed her brother, had even failed the father she had never known. “I hate you!” she said to herself, more softly. “I hate you!” She fell to her knees, saying, “I hate you.” A torrent of grief rushed up from a dormant pool and erupted from her eyes. The relief she had felt after her mother’s death had been a thin crust over a well of sadness that she had not allowed herself to feel. But she was feeling it now in full. She missed her mother more than words could say. It ached from every organ and every limb, and it all came out through her eyes and the shaking of her shoulders as she sobbed.
She felt a hand on her head. In her collapse she had laid her cheek, without realizing it, on Gyong-ho’s lap. Gyong-ho had placed her small, hollow hand caringly on Il-sun’s head; and when Il-sun looked up, for the first time Gyong-ho’s face was not a void. It never really had been, not completely. It was then that Il-sun could see the flicker of Gyong-ho underneath the empty-looking husk. The pilot light had not gone out. She was a girl with a beating heart who had fully capitulated to some unseen suffering, but whose essence still throbbed beneath the surface. She saw how alone Gyong-ho was, how she had laid herself down to a demon whose torture of her never ceased; and yet she kept soldiering on, albeit damaged, every day. What must she have gone through to be reduced as she was? She was still fighting back, in the small way that she could, just by being alive. She was a person to be admired for her strength, not despised for her weakness.
In that moment an understanding was born between them that was the foundation of a friendship—two halves finding unexpected completion. Gyong-ho’s broken state gave Il-sun a constructive focus. She nursed Gyong-ho’s enfeebled spirit with the irrepressible quest for girlish fun and mischief. Slowly, Gyong-ho’s catatonia melted away as Il-sun, day after day, brushed her hair and chatted idly with her. Having someone to care for kept Il-sun from seeking the kind of trouble that would have led her to her brother’s fate, and being cared for gave Gyong-ho a sense of safety that allowed her to come, at least a little bit, out of her shell.
“My name is Gi-Gi-Gi-Gi-Gyong-ho,” she said to Il-sun, stuttering her name as they formally met each other. She often had difficulty saying her own name.
“Why don’t you just tell people your name is Gi? It would be simpler,” Il-sun joked. From that point on she called her Gi.
Once cleaned up, Gi was not exactly pretty, but she had a quirky personality that Il-sun enjoyed. She looked at the world in a completely different way from anyone Il-sun had ever met, reducing it in her mind to its fundamental pieces and the forces that acted on them. Where Il-sun was almost entirely focused on the people in her life and how they related with each other, Gyong-ho seemed to care only about the physical construction of the world around her. She cared little for social grace, or perhaps she had simply never been trained; and so, in the rare moments when she would speak to anyone other than Il-sun, she often came across as brusque and insensitive. She did have a subtle sense of humor that would emerge at unexpected moments, making Il-sun laugh. Il-sun was a bridge to the outside world for Gi, showing her that many of the dangers she feared were imagined: Gyong-ho startled easily at loud noises and sudden movements, as if at any moment she was expecting a great calamity to come upon her. She was shy and reticent where Il-sun was forward and often spoke out of turn.
Gi never spoke about her past, and anytime Il-sun pressed her for information she became evasive and sometimes hostile. It was as if she was fighting a lengthy and gruesome battle not to remember it; and when she came too close within her own mind, she would race away on another topic until she seemed to have forgotten what it was she was avoiding. If she got too close to her memory, her eyes would roll back in her head and her face would become a blank stone for minutes, sometimes for hours. Then, quite suddenly, she would return, maybe cheerful, maybe sullen, but as if nothing at all had happened.
One of the odd things that made Gyong-ho so puzzling and special was her obsession with numbers. It was eerie how she could do large and complicated computations instantly in her head. It was as if she could simply see the numbers floating in front of her eyes, as if they drifted weightlessly, borne on the dust churned upward by the turning of her mind. Il-sun was lost when it came to numbers, so it seemed particularly miraculous to her whenever Gi showed off her talent. It was the only time she didn’t look quite so afraid. It seemed to Il-sun that Gi clung to numbers in the same way Il-sun clung to her anger—it was the only thing of which she could be absolutely certain. At times, when they were bored, Il-sun would try as hard as she could to make a calculation too complex or the numbers too large, lofting a string of numbers at Gi, all the while checking answers on a calculator she had stolen from their school. Gyong-ho never made a mistake. This was nothing more than amusement for both girls. It never occurred to them, being orphans and therefore having bad
songbun,
that Gi’s talent could be used for anything practical. They would never qualify for anything more than manual factory labor.
Il-sun could not muster much enthusiasm for her factory job. Had her mother lived and her life stayed on course, Il-sun would have been given a first-rate education and lived in their fine family apartment until she left to make a life, and a family, with her undoubtedly well-connected husband. She had never gotten over the sense that she was meant for a better life, married to a man who would shield her from the common drudgery that afflicted most of
Chosun.
That dream was dashed, but she was still determined to climb, any way she could, out of the mire of mediocrity that her life had become. She still believed that her way out was through a man. Perhaps she had already found him.
3
T
HE ORPHANAGE MISTRESS SAT
in front of a scratched, old mirror, raking through her hair with a comb that was missing most of its teeth. She spent many hours, whenever she had hours, combing, looking at herself and trying to will her perfectly straight hair curly. She would have been happy if it had turned even slightly wavy, but her hair never complied. She reached back and tied it into a tight bun on the back of her head. This was her one indulgence, gazing into the mirror and fantasizing about a different self.
She applied powder from the bottom of an empty tin using a brush that held more dust than color. Again, it was the fantasy that fueled the ritual. Her face was an acreage of plainness, of nothing special, of a measure of time. It was a dull clock ticking off years, showing a late hour of youth, on the cusp of middle age. Her face might as well have been a pane of glass—eyes rolled right on past it, slid straight off it without stopping or even slowing down, seeing right through her.
She bit at her lips for color, then smoothed over them with the bottom of a taper candle, just for the sensation. On a different face they might have been nice lips, she thought, just right for kissing. She batted her eyes at herself, then sighed. Her birth certificate claimed that she was one hundred percent
Chosun,
but her eyes betrayed a hint of Japanese. This did not have any consequence for her, such as limited mobility within the Party—people were used to looking the other way for such ancestral transgressions—but it was like a small badge of shame.
She slid one foot, then the other into old, white, knee-length stockings that had dark impressions of her footprints stained into the feet. A clean toe peeked out between threads, its unadorned nail filed to a precise length, reflecting the light from her bedroom window. The stockings were ragged along the top and deftly stitched in places. On first glance, just seeing the ankles, they could have been new.
Maybe someone will notice my ankles,
she thought. Her unshapely underwear was a drab, laundered gray, and she quickly covered over it with a neatly pressed skirt and starched blouse. She took great care in her appearance, but for whom? The orphans? They certainly did not care. Her superiors? They never concerned themselves with the orphanage. Looking into her partial reflection, it seemed that there was nothing there but a uniform of efficiency, her face a mere window on her shoulders.
But I have nice ankles,
she thought.
Maybe there will be a delivery today.
Her bedroom opened into the large, plain kitchen, and as she left her room she was pleased to see that the girls were already making breakfast. She spoke her approval, causing several of the girls to beam. She had learned that having the girls take responsibility for themselves not only eased her work load but helped them gain needed confidence. She performed her morning rounds delivering praise, or a mild rebuke when necessary. Few of her girls had behavior problems.
She passed Gyong-ho and Il-sun as they were heading out the door on their way to the factory. They would soon be leaving the orphanage to live on their own, when their paperwork cleared, maybe in a couple of months. She felt both proud and heartbroken when girls flew the nest, but these two in particular had a special place in her heart and she would be sad to see them go. Il-sun was a success story of sorts. She had been the bad apple to spoil the bunch when she first arrived, and the mistress had feared her crossing a dangerous line. It was so easy to do. But now she stayed, mostly, within a safe margin of behavior, largely because of her friendship with Gyong-ho. She was ripening into womanhood in the way some girls do, like a bomb exploding, and the mistress hoped she would get plucked into marriage soon, before the world of men could leave its stain on her. A young woman with Il-sun’s thirst for trouble was safer when married, in
Chosun.
The orphanage ran without hiccups, which was a testament to the mistress’s competence. When she had taken it over six years earlier, it was in complete disarray. The girls were filthy and the grounds unkempt. Violence was commonplace, and several of the older girls were openly prostituting themselves, perhaps even to the profit of her predecessor. The food shortage had been worse in those days: Many of the girls were sick, and all were malnourished. She could not have been successful if she had allowed herself to get attached. There was no time for coddling or mothering. She was the only caretaker for twenty-five girls, and she understood that routine and structure were more important than pampering, given the limited resources at her disposal. Besides, if these girls were going to survive, they needed to be tough.