This Burns My Heart (35 page)

“The government wants to develop your land,” said Gi-yong, rolling each word around his tongue like a lollipop.

“It does?”

“Yes. It wants to buy your land and start erecting buildings there.”

“How much are they offering?”

“Five thousand
won
per pyeong.”

“What? That’s ten times what I paid for the land!”

“Yes, but you paid for an empty lot in the middle of nowhere. They’re paying for what’s now officially the site of a planned commercial zone.
It’s still a bargain to them. We’re hoping big business will follow their lead and turn the area into a commercial center. I’ve said this all along, Seoul is too congested. The city can’t handle the traffic and the crowds.”

“I can’t believe it. This is wonderful.” Soo-Ja started shaking her head in disbelief.

“If you sell the land, you’ll make five million
won.
How much did you put in? Five hundred thousand
won
?”

“You knew this would happen, didn’t you? When you sold me the land, you knew its value would shoot up.”

“Yes, I had a tip from a friend in city planning. They were debating between a lot in Gyeonggi-do Province and ours. The lot in Gyeonggi-do turned out to be tied up in a family inheritance. Our lot would be easier for them to buy. They’re eager to start construction soon.”

“If you knew the lot would increase in value and so soon, why did you still sell it to me? Why didn’t you buy it yourself?”

Gi-yong did not answer at once. “You think businessmen are so cold and calculating, and yes, we are, but when it comes to the heart, we’re sentimental folks. I thought that if I helped you get what you wanted… you would like me.”

“Oh, Mr. Im, I like you tremendously right now,” said Soo-Ja, sidestepping his confession. “This comes at such an opportune time. It has been such a terrible week… Thank you for what you did.”

“Don’t be
too
thankful. There was, of course, a small chance they’d go with the other lot, in which case ours would probably sit idle and worthless for another thirty years.”

“Thirty years? You said ten, or twenty at most.”

“Never trust a businessman, Soo-Ja. Never.”

Soo-Ja laughed. A guest came into the hotel. Soo-Ja gave him a quick nod, but kept her attention, rapt, on the phone. “I have to go. But one last question: Any chance we can negotiate with the buyers?”

“It’s a tricky line there. The thing is, the government could, if they want, just seize the land. So what they’re doing is a gesture of goodwill, too. It is only an offer, but it’s assumed we’ll all accept it.”

“So everyone who bought lots is selling, too?”

“The ones I spoke to so far, yes.”

“Add my name to the list. And oh, one more thing…”

“What is it?”

“I love you, Mr. Gi-yong Im,”
she said, in English.

Gi-yong laughed. Soo-Ja knew he could hear the smile in her voice.

“We’re rich! We’re rich!” Hana began to dance around the room, pretending to hit a wall, then falling on the ground, then getting up again, then hitting the opposite wall. Min, eating his dinner, stewed in his silence, sitting in his usual corner in front of a nong armoire.

“Sit down, Hana, and eat your dinner. You’re going to get hurt,” said Soo-Ja, waving her chopsticks at her daughter.

“How much did he say again?” asked Min.

“Five million
won
,” said Soo-Ja. She was pretending to be nonchalant, but her heart was doing the same thing Hana was doing, just on the inside.

“Don’t tell your brother it’s that much. He may want a cut of the profits,” said Min. Soo-Ja bit her tongue, nodding. One day she’d have to tell him the truth about the source of the original loan. “But you always had a lot of luck. This kind of thing only happens to you.”

“I’m lucky? Is that why I’ve been working as a hotel clerk for the past six years? And before that, I was basically a maid to your parents,” she said.

Min smiled. “My parents think we’re barely scraping by. Imagine their surprise when they hear this.”

“They
like
to think we’re barely scraping by. They like the idea that they’re better off than we are.”

Hana, as if feeling neglected, stopped running around the room and landed on her father’s lap, where she barely fit. Right now she was the giddiest twelve-year-old Soo-Ja had ever met.

“What are we going to do with the money?” asked Hana.

“What do you think we should do?” Min asked her, his head buried in her silky black hair.

“I think we should go to America,” she said.

Soo-Ja immediately looked up from her rice bowl. But why was she so surprised, when it seemed like everyone she knew fantasized about immigrating to America? Why should her daughter be any different?

“Who put that idea in your head?” Soo-Ja asked gravely, figuring it was Min.

“Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman,” Hana replied.

“Your America exists only in movies,” said Soo-Ja.

Hana quickly got up and reached into the nong for a cylindrical can of Pringles chips, left behind by some American guests. She’d been saving it. She opened the lid, and pulled out a chip shaped like a wave, admiring it.

“
This
is America,” she said, before biting into it. “I
eat
America.”

“Ah, and of course, she can’t travel alone, so you’d have to go with her,” Soo-Ja said, turning to Min, letting him know she was onto him.

“I don’t want to visit America, I want to
live
in America!” Hana almost yelled.

“Go. Go live with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Hana, the life you want is a dream, a movie-star life. If we moved to America, we’d start at the bottom. I’d probably still be a hotel clerk, just in a place where nobody can understand what I’m saying. Nicer background, same life.”

“But we have money!” Hana protested.

“Hana, I already told you before. We’re not keeping all the money. We have to pay back your grandfather in Daegu.” Soo-Ja smiled at herself, proud of being able to pay her father back for the money he had loaned to Min’s father so many years ago.

“I thought you said the money was for me! You told me, the reason you invested was so you could invest in my future!” Soo-Ja heard an unexpected desperation in her daughter’s voice.

“Yes. It is, of course it is. If we had sold the land twenty years from now, especially, all of it would be yours. But my father is still alive, and I want to pay him back.”

“It’s not fair! It’s my money.” Hana got up and ran out of the room, leaving the paper door open on her way out. Soo-Ja wondered if she
spoiled her by letting her do whatever she wanted. How would she ever learn to appreciate their love?

Soo-Ja patiently rose and closed the door. She didn’t want guests to look in and see into their room.

“My parents still offer to pay back what they borrowed from your father,” said Min evenly, without looking up from his bowl of
doenjang
soup.

“What kind of insulting offer are they making this time? The exact same amount he borrowed, not adjusted for inflation, only enough to pay for a TV? Your father borrowed enough to pay for three houses!”

“You can’t get back what you lost.”

“What do you mean?”

“The years you spent with them. The money can’t make up for that.”

“I was their slave.”

“I know, I know. But they’re my parents you’re talking about!”

“You want to go to America, too, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said quietly, the pinched sound hinting at some larger sorrow.

“And if it were up to you, we’d fly there tomorrow, right?”

“But you won’t let us,” said Min, letting more of his anguish emerge. “You’re trying to keep us away from them.”

“I’m not,” she said. “And I don’t have my parents with me, either.”

“They’re four hours away by train.”

“My father’s too sick to travel. I hardly ever get to see him.”

“But you see him. I haven’t seen my parents in almost ten years.”

Min was as restless as a cast-off lover. He would often talk about his plans to join his parents—plans that Father-in-law neither supported nor discouraged. In the past, whenever Soo-Ja listed the reasons why they couldn’t go—Min’s parents had betrayed them, she did not wish to live with them, she couldn’t leave her own parents—Min only repeated,
But they are my father and my mother.
She knew at those moments that he did not, could not think ill of them, regardless of what they’d done to him. He rationalized the past, did elaborate somersaults in his head, concocted versions of the story in which his parents finally emerged as victims, and Soo-Ja—Soo-Ja, whom he had to live with, the one who was left—turned out to be the villain.

•   •   •

But the idea somehow took hold. It came back in the morning, in the bitter coffee and the spicy udon noodles. It lashed at her ears, tugged at her ankles.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I can go live with Grandpa and Grandma on my own,” said Hana.

“Don’t say that,” said Soo-Ja.

“Why?”

“Because I need you to need me.”

“It’s America!” Hana yelled, like a mantra. Soo-Ja understood her daughter’s frustration. She probably couldn’t fathom why her mother was keeping her away from sun-drenched afternoons and wide-laned streets and air so clean you could drink big happy gulps of it. In America, no one would honk in traffic, or cut in line, or speak ill of you. In America, every day was a vacation, including the workday.

When it wasn’t Hana, it was Min. Did they conspire to take turns cornering her? Soo-Ja wondered.

“She’s not just being frivolous,” Min said to her over lunch, between bites of thinly sliced beef and spiced cubed radishes. “She’s worried about her future. She’s not doing very well at school.”

How awkward it was, to have to hear news of your daughter from your own husband! thought Soo-Ja. “She’ll do fine. She’ll spend the summer studying.”

“In America, you don’t have to be good at school. You just have to know how to smile brightly and shake hands firmly. Hana could learn how to do that.”

“Listen, if she wanted to go to America to go to school, I’d give it a second thought. But you know Hana. She wants to sit by a swimming pool in a nice hotel, and marry some Kennedy.”

“Fine. We just might go without you then,” said Min, with his mouth full, pushing his empty plate away from him, the leftover chili pepper staining it red.

“I’d kill you if you did that,” said Soo-Ja, heading back to the front desk.

Soo-Ja had no time to listen to either of them. She couldn’t wait to tell her father that she could finally pay him back. She would go visit him and give him a check for the money.

For the last eight years Soo-Ja had lived full of guilt, thinking of all the money he had lost because of her. In his sixties, her father was supposed to reap the rewards of an industrious life, and finally rest while Soo-Ja and her brothers took care of him. But Soo-Ja had not been able to help him in this stage of his life; and not only that, she had moved to another city.

Her brothers still lived in Daegu, but the eldest, Tae, had turned against their father (he felt that his father played favorites toward Soo-Ja), and it had been left to Kwang-Ho, the youngest of the three, kindly but a bit reluctantly, to take care of their parents (which was the job of the eldest, not the youngest).

After Soo-Ja moved to Seoul, she tried not to think too much about the family she was leaving behind. She felt terrible when they lost their ancestral home and had to move into a small apartment. Now, finally, Soo-Ja could make it up to her father.

“Eomma, can you please put Father on the phone?” asked Soo-Ja excitedly.

It was late in the evening, and Soo-Ja sat in the alcove that served as her office. The day’s check-ins and checkouts were done, and she knew she could talk to her father in peace.

“Soo-Ja, is this you? I don’t remember what my daughter’s voice sounds like,” said Soo-Ja’s mother.

“Eomma, please,” said Soo-Ja, trying not to let her mother kill her good mood. “Just give the phone to Father.”

“I’m just saying, it’s been so long since you called. And you didn’t come home for Seollal.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“If you won’t even come home for the holiday, when will you ever come home?”

“Eomma, please put him on the phone. I have good news for him,” said Soo-Ja.

Soo-Ja heard the faint sound of her father’s voice in the background. Her heart leapt with joy, until she realized he was singing. She heard the hesitation in her mother’s breathing, and then finally the sound of the phone being handed to her father.

“Soo-Ja? Is this you?” He sounded like a man who had swallowed a microphone. His words seemed to stretch for miles.

“Hello, appa.”

“Your mother doesn’t want to sing for me! Nobody wants to sing for me. But you will sing, right?”

“Appa, no, I—” Soo-Ja squinted her eyebrows, worried. The phone cord tangled in her hands, an unruly bracelet.

“Sing for me. Sing for me!”

“Appa, you’re going to wake up Kwang-Ho. He has to get up early for work,” said Soo-Ja. She heard some talking in the background, and she thought she could hear her brother’s voice. She had not spoken to him in months.

“Kwang-Ho is not my son!” her father proclaimed loudly. “I have disowned him!”

“Appa, you live in his house. He takes care of you.”

“He drags me out of the sul-jib, and embarrasses me in front of my friends. What kind of a son is that?”

Soo-Ja closed her eyes, mortified by her father’s drunkenness. For a moment, Soo-Ja heard the sound of the phone changing hands, and then she heard her mother’s voice.

“Soo-Ja, your father is tired. Why don’t you call again tomorrow?”

“What’s wrong with him? Why do you let him drink?” asked Soo-Ja, pulling the phone cord so tightly she almost broke it.

“Your father’s been having a hard time. He doesn’t like living off of Kwang-Ho. Your father never had to depend on others before. It used to be that other men came to him, asking for money. Now he has to ask
them
for handouts. He has nothing of his own. Remember, he was once the richest man in Won-dae-don.”