Drifting House (19 page)

Her mother muses, her mother mulls. Her mother gives her a handful of chocolate tears wrapped in silver foil. Should it be the one about the evil brother who steals the good brother’s fortune? Or the one about men who turn into oxen? She looks flustered, her forehead creases with frustration as it sometimes does, when making decisions. When it is so simple! Finally, she asks, in her pleading voice, What does my princess want to hear tonight?

You spoil her, says the man, breathing out menthol and cigarettes. She doesn’t act seven.

I
am
seven! Mina says, and comes out from under the table, so he can see her full height. I’ll be eight soon.

She’s lost a father, Mina’s mother says, which sounds like
fahder
when she says it. She becomes sullen, no longer interested in him.

Mina seizes the opportunity. Tell me a goblin story, she says. She stares at the stranger’s eerie green marbles. He folds his pink hands neatly on the table and stares back. How can her mother trust a man who irons his collar crisp but overlooks what must be dirt and moss under his fingernails?

All children like animals, the man says. When he smiles, he bares glistening yellow teeth.

Hana has decided that everyone will like the new student Mina. When she announces that they are now best friends two days into the spring term of 1971, no one in the third grade, not even Mina, dares challenge her. Hana is too big for age eight, too certain, to contradict.

At lunch she sits down by Mina, her body as bountiful as her personality. Her eyes open to the size of spoons when she sees the wheat sausages and rice Mina will eat for lunch. Angered by all inequality, with a flip of her sturdy wrist, she releases the metal clasp to her oversize lunch box: rice, kimchi, preserved radish, fried anchovies, fried squid, eggs, and beef marinated in soy sauce. Her large hands gesture out to her lunch box like a traveling
pansori
singer’s fan. She says, I give you half this universe.

At home it is impossible to see Hana in her mother’s fat folds of flesh that smother with each hug. There are only the skirts of her mother’s stiff silk
hanbok
scraping against her cheeks. She says, My little genius! You’re as good as any of our boys.

Mrs. Song’s professions of love echo as loud as threats. They are so pronounced that her voice shakes their yard cloistered by four buildings, clatters the crocks of preserved foods, and breaks through their ­fortress­like gates down to the Yeongdeungpo neighborhood’s serpentine alleys. She is so loud that the barber stops shaving his customer, a tabby cat springs toward the sound, and Mina looks behind her as the uniformed pusher pushes her mother and her onto the crowded tram, pushes them all the way in.

Soon after Mina and her mother, Mrs. Lim, or Sergeant Brown’s woman, as the foreign community has dubbed her, arrive at Namdaemun Market, her mother pretends to inspect crates of mackerel heads. She does not want to be seen hungering for imported
banana clusters by their old neighbors. The tropical fruit cluster is nearly worth what Mrs. Lim made in a day working at a laundry service near the U.S. army base. I won’t listen to their insults again, she says, and tugs Mina hard into an alley, where spools of thread and buttons to dress entire nations are sold. Her panic reminds Mina of what she already knows: if it weren’t for her birth, her mother would not have to run away from anyone.

So what does Mina do? She runs.

In the Itaewon neighborhood, this is what they had said:
GI’s lover
.
A blackie’s bitch
. The chortles bandied about by the neighborhood’s ­old-time Korean residents just loud enough to trail after the family.

They had smirked hello after Mina’s father, Sergeant Brown, persistently greeted them after church with his brisk pace and friendly black face, his determined smile, like his stepdaughter’s, intact unless he was asked about his family in the United States. Then he would stop smiling and say, “That’s none of your business.” When there were no witnesses, the Korean congregation snatched away their children by their armpits and would not let Mina play with them. They gossiped about the noises from the house, not knowing that when Sergeant Brown was drunk, he tickled Mina or her mother; they did not know that he wore bifocals that divided his eyes in half, read three newspapers each morning, taught Mina how to read, and had been trying to secure a ­long-distance divorce from his first wife (a vengeful woman!), and always deferred to Mina’s mother with, Yes, my dear, as if it
pleased him to lose to her. They said it was God’s will when Sergeant Brown left to fight in Vietnam; their faces twisted into grimaces as they searched for someone else to judge. How confused the neighbors were after Sergeant Brown died in action and the Lims moved away from the house near Yongsan’s U.S. military base, a trail of turquoise butterflies fluttering after them.

Mrs. Lim is calling for Mina somewhere in the labyrinth of ­Namdaemun Market’s crates of spoiling vegetables and fresh pig’s heads, but Mina forgets this as she wanders through stalls of fermented mackerel, dogs hanging by their hides, jars of alcohol with snakes coiled inside, army uniforms and canned baked beans smuggled off the army base, and 101 varieties of pickled vegetables.

Lost, she swerves into an ancient man in a horsehair hat and bumps into his cart of squirming squid, hops over a rat sniffing into the mouth of a blowfish, skittles past naked mannequins and stuffed tigers. When she feels fear, she pinches her thigh to distract herself.

Boys don’t cry, she says out loud. Spring’s first dandelion seeds flit across her nose and make her sneeze.

You lost, little girl? says a shopkeeper with the white whiskers of a mouse. His face softens as he gazes at her.

No! she says. I’m never lost! She impales him with her glare for noticing.

When he hunches to her height, she runs, with her companions from her favorite folktales: the ­garlic-eating bear, a
pipe-smoking tiger, a fox ­shape-shifting into a beautiful woman. Mina is a warrior with a quivering bow, an iceberg, a tortoise barricaded in his gunmetal shell; she is invincible. She is almost as brave as her father. But an hour later, she is alone, zigzagging from alley to store to escape her shadow.

What a beautiful child! the dried pollack vendor exclaims after she nearly steps on the sleeping girl’s ­egg-shaped face. Mina, the size of a sack of rice, is prostrate beside boxes of body-scrubbing cloths. Her cheeks bloom with a garden of color, her two pigtails of hair curl into question marks. Disappointed by the two sons the vendor has raised into ingrates, she dreams of taking the girl home and dressing her up in yellow ruffles and bows. Maybe even parading her loveliness on one of those newfangled black-and-white machines called televisions. In her trance, the vendor leans to snatch the girl up in her arms, but is too late.

The girl’s curtain of eyelashes flies open, revealing the ambers of her bright, friendly eyes. She says, Have you seen my
omma
? and yawns with such a stretch of her arms that her top jacket button pops and rolls across the alley’s pavement.

After Mina has been warmed by the smoky coal grate and tucked into bed, Mrs. Lim trundles through yet another market and buys thread and buttons in bulk. Soon, she thinks, as she passes women carrying wooden A–frames loaded with fabric, women whose cracked, lined faces have been ravaged by their hard lives, soon I will be one of them.