Fox Girl (16 page)

“I have nothing to say to you,” I screamed back. “You're not my mother. You're nothing to me.”

“That's right. We are nothing to each other. Did you hear that, husband? She said we are nothing to her—after all we did for her. She's no better than the fox girl in those worthless stories you forever told her. Eating up her own family.”

“Let me speak to my father,” I yelled. “I know the truth now.”

“Truth?” she scoffed. “You don't know anything!”

“Appah!”
I cried.

“He can't hear you,” she said. From the other side of the door, I heard her fighting with my father: “No, I will not open the door. She's nothing but the whore she was born to be. Her blood makes her, marks her.”

“Father,” I called out. “Don't turn me away.”

The door opened. My father lurched into the doorway, his wife clinging to his arms to pull him back into the shop. “Why did you do it?” His red eyes darted from Lobetto, who hung back on the street, to my rumpled clothes and disheveled hair. “How could you disgrace us like this? We tried to raise you right.”

I reach for him. “I didn't—”

“We never wanted you,” his wife screamed over his shoulder.

My father pushed her away. “We tried for years to have a child together,” he started to explain, and I couldn't tell if he was speaking to me or to her.

“I wanted one of my own blood,” his wife pouted. “A baby who could love me. Not her; she's not natural. She never did have human feelings, a human heart.”

“Stop it!” My father shook his wife off his arm. “She is my blood. She is my daughter.”

“That's what you think,” she retorted. “But how do you know? You only have the word of a trashy GI girl. A whore that gave away her child for money.”

“Shut up!” I screamed. The top of my head throbbed.

The woman I had called mother tried to leap past my father to claw at my face. “You see how she is?” she screeched at my father. “You see how she talks to me?”

I stuck out my chin. “You can't hurt me,” I sneered. All my life I had tried to please that woman. All my life, I had hated myself, thinking I wasn't good enough to be her daughter. All my life, I thought she had a right to beat me, because I had failed her.

I wouldn't let her hurt me again.

“She's trash,” my father's wife spat at me.

“She is my daughter,” my father said. “My only child.”

The woman shrieked as if in pain. “You don't know that! She doesn't look anything like you—and that mark! No one in your family has a birth defect like that. Something's wrong with her. You were tricked into taking her.”

“Don't you have any feelings for her?” My father pleaded. “You raised her.”

“Feelings?” The only mother I had ever known finally looked me in the eye. “Yeah, I had feelings,” she said. “I had the feeling she was trouble. I had the feeling that she would hurt us and shame our family. I knew it the moment I saw her face. And I was right.” She sounded proud.

My father dropped his head.

“I'm glad you're not my mother,” I said. I wanted to sound mean, but my voice wavered and I tasted salt. When I brushed a hand across my cheek, I was shocked to feel my face wet with tears. “I'm glad I don't have your blood. You're an evil-mouthed, cud-chewing, infertile old cow.”

“Stop it,” my father said to the ground.

“You think you're better than me?” The woman laughed. “Nothing but filth runs in your veins. My family can trace its roots back to Prince Tan-gun.”

“And your family will die off with you, won't it?” I taunted.

She howled, raising her upper lip not unlike a feral fox herself. “Get out of here!” she cried, her voice shrill. “Get out, be a GI whore like your sister. Like your mother.”

“Wait!” My father grabbed my hand as I backed away. I couldn't feel him squeezing my fingers, they had gone so numb.

His wife scratched at our knuckles until he let go. When I turned to leave, he rushed into the backroom. I heard her goading my father: “I told you, didn't I tell you how many times over the years? She's evil. Evil. You cannot dress a fox as a daughter.”

I stumbled down the steps, turning blindly toward the corner where Lobetto waited.

“Jin Jin!”

When I heard him call me by my baby name, I turned to see my father rushing to me. I opened my arms, thinking that he was going to take me back. Instead, he thrust an armload of dirty laundry at me.

“Appah?
” I croaked, dropping the clothes and stepping forward. “Papa?”

He flinched when I embraced him. I smelled the father smell of him—soap and hair grease and sweat—for the brief moment before he pushed me away. Biting his bottom lip so hard it turned white, he pressed a wad of money into my hand.

“Appah,”
I whispered. “Please. I love you. Don't listen to her—”

My father closed his eyes, and in response I felt my own eyes burn. “I'm a good girl,
Appah.
Don't send me away, I'll be good—”

He backed away, shaking his head. “I did my best for you,” he whispered. “Don't . . . don't come here again.”

Doubling over, his quiet words kicking at my stomach, I dropped to my knees. “I didn't do anything,” I said. “I didn't.” I pressed my face into the clothes my father had brought out for me—T-shirts and school uniform and shoes—trying not to vomit. When I looked up, his wife was running toward me.

Swooping down, she grabbed at the clothes in my hands—clothes she would have no use for but didn't want me to have anyway. “That's mine,” she screeched. “Not yours. That's mine. Nothing is yours. Nothing. You don't deserve it. You're dead now.” She continued pulling at the things in my hands, even as I tried to leave. “Tell her,” she ordered my father, who gazed above our heads, above the grappling near his feet. “Tell her what she is.”

“You are what you are,” my father said.

“See!” his wife gloated. “Blood will tell!”

My father searched my face, his scrutiny intense, fierce. He didn't skim over half of my face but looked at it all, the light and the dark. “She's right, Hyun Jin,” he said. “Blood will tell.”

I let go, suddenly too tired to fight. I dropped my arms, and air rushed through my fingers. Everything, everything that had once belonged to my old life, my old self—the daughter of these parents—fell into the street. “Take it,” I said, rising to my feet though my body felt too heavy to move. “You are dead to me, too.” I looked directly into her eyes, into his, contemptuous, before I forced myself to walk away.

 

Sometimes I think I could have changed my story at this point in my life, just by choosing how to interpret what my father said. When he echoed his wife, repeating, “Blood will tell,” I thought at the time that he was acknowledging that I could be nothing more than a whore. But now, I can almost believe he was reminding me that I was his daughter, that I carried his heart, that I had choices. I could have chosen—can choose even now—to believe he loved me.

Other times, I think the maps of our lives are etched into vein and muscle and bone, and that mere words—however interpreted—don't have the power to change anything.

I went to Sookie. At first, I was hesitant, unsure of how to treat her. I imagined we'd fall into each other's arms. Weeping, she'd tell me how hard it had been not to claim me as her sister, how difficult to keep me—her own blood—far from her heart. I assumed things would be different between us. But Sookie acted as if nothing had changed—not us, not our relationship, not my life. It was as if she hadn't said what she said, as if I didn't know what I knew.

So I pretended as well, and soon I didn't have to pretend. We eased back into the tentative rhythm of friendship, enjoying the comforts of Chazu's apartment while he was away. After lighting candles in all the rooms, we'd turn off the lights in the bathroom and bathe in the private tub, the two of us face-to-face, knees pressed together. We made the water hot enough to scald our skin pink, soaked and rubbed dead skin off each other's back. Then with our hair wrapped in towels, our skin new and tingling, we'd eat ice cream and cookies on the bed and laugh about the days Sookie was so hungry she wondered what her shoes would taste like. But under the laughter, I would think: this is my sister. This is how it always should have been between us.

At night the two of us sat in the apartment, all dressed up with nowhere to go. Sookie said Chazu didn't let her out on her own in the evenings; she could only visit the clubs when he went with her. So we watched TV. We painted our nails. We dressed in the clothes that Chazu bought for Sookie and made ourselves up. We never once talked about Duk Hee, even though we wore the same brands and colors of makeup that Chazu had once bought for her.

When Chazu returned, he took us to the clubs. We avoided Club Foxa, where Bar Mama glared at Sookie and refused to serve us drinks. Though she fawned over Chazu, offering to pair him up with one of her girls, she ignored us and tried to pinch us behind his back. Sookie explained that Bar Mama was convinced Sookie had betrayed her, stealing one of her best customers. Sookie said this proudly, because it proved that Chazu never came in anymore.

Instead of the Foxa, Chazu arranged for us to meet his friends at Club Rose or Tulips. The first time I went on what they called a “doublu date,” I sat in the booth, pressed against the inside wall. Chazu and his friend—a sharp-nosed and poky-headed man who looked like a grinning chicken to me—talked quickly in English.

Sookie, with her quick-swiveling head and mouth hanging open in a perpetual smile, looked like a small bird herself, trying to catch the worm of their conversation. I didn't smile or laugh at their jokes because I didn't understand them. Sookie kicked me under the table. I frowned, and that made her kick me even more.

“We go ladies' room,” Sookie finally giggled. She crawled over Chazu slowly, fumbling over his lap until he helped her out by pushing on her bottom. His fingers cupped her cheeks, slipped into her crease. Embarrassed, I looked at the wall, and so I did not realize she was standing in front of the table until she said through a clenched smile: “Hyun Jin! Come.”

I shrugged my consent and waited for my GI to get up so I could scoot out of the booth. He didn't move. I pushed his shoulder and he grinned at me.

“Please,” I said to him.

“Good English,” the happy chicken man said. “Polite.”

I pushed Happy Chicken's arm again. “Ooh, now she's getting rough. I like that even better than ‘please.' ” He and Chazu laughed. So did Sookie, even though she narrowed her eyes at me. I smiled, too, even though I could not tell if the GI was complimenting or cursing me. I smiled and nodded, which made the men laugh louder. I could tell they thought I was stupid.

“Come on!” Sookie tapped her nails on the table. We had just painted them—Beach Peach—that afternoon. When I glanced at Happy Chicken, she pulled my arm so that I fell across his lap.

“Right on!” he crowed.

I climbed over him, but when his hands wandered over my breasts, I dug my heel into his shin.

“Shit!” he yelped and pushed me off of him.

Sookie dragged me into the bathroom and scolded me over the toilet. “Loosen up!” she said. “You are a
dragu.
”

“What does that mean?” I asked, rubbing my arm where her nails had scratched me.

“That's what the GIs call a girl who won't have a good time.” She pressed a pointy finger into my chest.
“Dragu.”

“Right, I'm not having fun with that Happy Chicken of a man.”

“Happy Chicken?” Sookie laughed even though she wanted to stay mad at me.

I pinched up my hair and threw out my chest. I strutted around the stall with my arms flapping loosely at my sides. “Hello, kak-kak-akoo, call me Bil-lu,” I said, trying to deepen my voice to sound like Chicken Man.

Sookie giggled, then suddenly pouted. “But it's not funny!” She looked in the mirror and smacked her lips. Her eyes flicked from her reflection to mine. “You have to learn to be like me.”

I gazed at our images, studying the shape of our eyes, the slope of our noses, the colors of our skins. Closing one eye, I placed a hand over the side of my face without the birthmark. “Do you see what I see?” I asked her, willing her to acknowledge our similarities.

Sookie knocked my hand from my face. “Pay attention,” she chided. “Make the men feel like big shots, but treat them like little babies—laugh, say, ‘You are so funny!' Put your hand on their arm, say, ‘You are so strong!' Dance with them, touch their face, say, ‘You are so sexy!' When they buy you drinks, drink! When you start feeling good, lean into them and say, ‘Let's honeymoon!' ”