This Burns My Heart (4 page)

Soo-Ja’s mother watched as the men bowed on the floor, lowering their knees, followed by their hands, and then their heads—all in one continuous, seamless motion. They folded themselves small like human paper dolls, going from adult, to child, to newborn, and then
upright again. Soo-Ja’s mother narrowed her eyes and spoke softly to her daughter.

“Don’t think you can fool me. I know how much you want to go. You’ve always been rebellious like that. Once you put an idea in your head, you go after it like an arrow to its target.”

“If Father really loved me, he’d let me go.”

“You clearly know nothing about love. And I didn’t realize your life here was so terrible. Most girls your age are breaking their backs farming rice paddies. You sit at home and read poetry.”

Soo-Ja looked at her mother. She wanted to tell her,
Mother, you speak as if you’ve never known what it’s like to want something.
Instead, Soo-Ja bit her lips lest she speak out of place. She watched as the men—all the sons—bowed and chanted to the ancestors, while the women stood back. They were all crammed in one room, and Soo-Ja had to fight the desire to run away.

“I thought parents wanted what was best for their children.”

“That is a myth. We want what is best for
us.
”

“I know. You want me to get married. But I’d rather go to diplomat school.”

“Those two things are not mutually exclusive,” said Soo-Ja’s mother. She turned to her daughter and looked at her not as her child, but as a fellow woman. “If you find someone weak—a man different from your father—somebody who will let you make decisions; of course, you’ll have to let him think he’s the one in charge. You’re eager to go to Seoul. I’m eager for you to get married. Perhaps there can be a compromise.”

“I thought you were against me going to Seoul.”

“I’m against you going there as a single woman. There is a difference.”

Soo-Ja took in her mother’s words and realized she was not so alone, after all.

Someone weak. Who will let me make decisions.

The answer came to her instantly: she’d have to trick her future husband.

“H
ana, dul, set!
One, two, three! One, two, three!” The instructor barked out drills at the young men filling the outdoor gymnasium.

The students were in their late teens and early twenties, all of them roughly the same height and build, wearing identically serious expressions. They moved in perfect unison—jumping up and down, squatting, and lifting their arms in the air. Soo-Ja sat on the bleachers a few yards away from them, watching. She did not know if Min had noticed her, so intent he seemed on the exercises. She wondered if the laws of gravity applied to sight, so that a look of interest—however weighty—would not land any quicker than an uninterested one.

When they finally finished, Min ran toward the bleachers, where Soo-Ja sat, and plopped himself down. His breath was still heavy from the effort, sweat covering his face and body. “I don’t have much time. I have to go back there.”

“Well, you don’t have to sit here with me. Why do you even assume I came here to see
you
?” teased Soo-Ja.
Keep this up
, thought Soo-Ja,
and I won’t choose you. Some other boy will get me to Seoul.

“Did you come here to say good-bye?”

“Good-bye?” asked Soo-Ja, worried her plan would be over before it even began.

“I’m heading out to Seoul next week, with some of the other boys
from my class. Didn’t you hear? Everyone’s talking about it. The students there are planning massive demonstrations on the streets.”

“In Masan, I heard.”

“Everywhere. Masan, Daegu, Seoul. I hope there’ll be fights with the police. If the pigs come after me, I’ll be ready,” said Min, pulling out an imaginary gun and pointing it at an invisible assailant.

“I hope you’re wrong. I hope there’s no violence. President Rhee should step down on his own.”

“I don’t understand why everyone hates him so much, by the way,” said Min, pretending to put his invisible gun away in its holster.

“Maybe because he takes foreign aid money meant for the reconstruction and lavishes it upon his cronies. Or because he throws people in jail for no reason, especially if they oppose him,” said Soo-Ja.

“Does that really sound that bad? I’d probably do the same.”

“How long will you be in Seoul?” asked Soo-Ja, trying to hide the envy in her voice.

“For as long as the excitement lasts.”

“Isn’t it going to be dangerous? Is your magic gun going to protect you?”

“No. But your thoughts of me will,” said Min cheekily, glancing at her askew as if to see how she would react.

Soo-Ja smiled at his flirtatious tone. “Just be safe.”

“I can’t. I’m going to march in the very first row.”

The wind grew stronger, blowing Soo-Ja’s hair in the air. She held it down with her hand, rearranging her headband. “Don’t be a fool. What if something happens to you?”

“Well, it’s not like my life is even worth that much,” he said ruefully. Min lowered his head heavily and stared at the bleacher below him, tracking its cold silver contours with his fingers. “Although, if you gave me a date, that’d give me a reason to stay here…”

Soo-Ja gave him a sideways glance. “I’ll think of you while you’re gone.”

“Well, that’s a beginning.” He got up excitedly and pretended to hug her. “And maybe if I do something impressive, you’ll marry me.”

“It would have to be
very
impressive,” she said, joking along, amused that he really had no clue that she’d been putting on an act.

You’re clearly in love with me. Would it be fair to you, though, if I married you? And used you to get me out of my father’s house, and on my way to Seoul? You, who seem to have no career prospects, would you let me earn money for us as a diplomat? You, who seem to flounder and meander, would you have any choice but to let me make decisions?

Min noticed the instructor making his way back to the court outside, gathering the men one last time before dismissing them. “I have to run back. What did you come here to talk about?”

“Nothing. I just came to see you,” said Soo-Ja, hoping to sound convincing.

As she walked away from the gym, leaving behind the voices of the men chanting, Soo-Ja wondered which one was Min’s. And the thought struck her then—she didn’t really know anything about the man she was planning to spend the rest of her life with.

My dear Soo-Ja,

My first week as a revolutionary fighter—how do you like the sound of that?—is over, and while the other students are upstairs on the rooftop, exchanging oaths of loyalty, I write here in the basement, with a bottle of makgeolli by my side.

What a long week it has been! We have gone on several protests already, and each of them is a miracle of logistical planning and precision. Have you ever yelled the same words loudly with a group of a thousand people? Try it sometime; it sends quite a burst of oxygen to the brain. I have never felt so connected to people I feel such disdain for. When we demonstrate, the police stand at a barricade, blocking our way, and there’s always a tense moment when neither party knows whose turn it is to push forward. The trick is to have both strong lungs and legs; I’ve been hit more times now than I can count, but luckily always manage to get away.

It’s hard not to come back for the next protest, however. The feeling is quite addictive. Afterward we go to secret meeting places. Yesterday we
met at a political science professor’s house for drinks. This is, of course, the part that keeps me here. The others begin a long litany of criticisms of the regime. I pay lip service to all that, waiting for the bottle of soju to make its way back to me. I have to say I’m a bit of an outcast here. The others do not entirely trust me.

At times, I feel silly holding up some of the placards. They have such poetry as “Down with Fraudulent Elections!” and “Can Freedom Gained Through Blood Be Taken Away by Bayonets?” The other students have rejected some of my ideas for chants, as well as my suggestion that we simply wait for the President to die of old age. He is, after all, 85 years old. I cannot imagine he’ll live that long. If we’ve waited millenniums for democracy—as ours is such an old nation—I figure we can wait another year or two.

Sometimes I wish to tell my friends here about you, but I fear they would not believe me. I think of your beautiful, silky long hair. Your porcelain complexion. Your high cheekbones. Your big, pendant-shaped eyes. Your long-bridged nose. Your gorgeous smile, warm and wicked all at once. Your face, shaped like those mysterious stone statues on the ground in Cheju Island. We do not know how they came to be there, or who carved them, but we can wonder, and I wonder, at you.

Perhaps if you sent me a picture I could prove to everyone here that you are real—and prove to myself, too, that you weren’t just something I invented in my head. May your days be good, and they must be, if they’re filled with half the hope and joy you give me.

Min Lee

Soo-Ja sighed and closed her eyes. She was happy, but envious. She wanted to be the one far away, writing letters about her own adventures to some virginal bride who would ooh and aah at her courage. She wanted to be the one telling Min how much she was fighting to keep up her strength. If getting this letter was so sweet, imagine being able to be the one to write it.

But maybe I should just be grateful for what I have
, Soo-Ja told herself. There was much to enjoy about living in Daegu. Yes, half the time
it was either raining or snowing, but during the glorious fall and spring, she’d lose herself in the hilltops behind her house. There, she’d race past the gingko, pine, maple, bamboo, and persimmon trees, and count constellations of lilacs, tiger lilies, moonflowers, cherry blossoms, and red peonies. She breathed in wisteria and walked on chestnut leaves. She traced trellised grapevines and caressed silkworms in the mulberry groves. Soo-Ja drew imaginary rings around the ubiquitous mountains in the distance, and pretended to be in the Scotland she’d read so much about. And when the monsoon rains came, for days at a time, creating miniature pools on the ground, Soo-Ja and her brothers splashed around, kicking water into one another’s faces.

If Soo-Ja ever left Daegu, she knew she would miss its lavender skies and peach-colored sunsets; the fresh red bean cakes from the bakery, still warm from the wood-burning oven; the Saturday afternoons spent soaking with her mother at the bathhouse, the heat as comforting as the sound of gossip all around her; and above all, the innocence of her childhood, still free of secrets, lovers, and ambitions.

It is no good to want to stay.
Getting these kinds of letters only made Soo-Ja want to leave more. She prayed for Min to come back safe and come back soon, so he could help her with her plans. And in the meantime, she had to make sure to keep her father from finding out about him.

Soo-Ja put the letter away. There were few places to hide it, since her room was entirely bare except for the large
nong
armoire where she kept her coverlets and comforters and clothes. She decided to go to the kitchen, where her mother stored empty earthenware kimchee jars. But when she got there and opened some of them, she found that they were already filled—with money. This was an old habit of theirs. Her father gave her mother a large allowance every week for household expenses, and her mother, not knowing what to do with the extra money, often placed it in jars, where the hwan bills took on the smell of spices.

Soo-Ja went back to her room, frustrated, and took her clothes off to go to bed. She considered simply leaving the letter inside her jewel box—a small treasure chest inlaid with shiny mother-of-pearl—but it
seemed too obvious a hiding place. Then, as she folded her woolen shirt, she decided to place her letter inside it, wrapped between the folds of fabric of its sleeves. She’d have to find some other place before Tuesday, when the servants did the washing. But for now it seemed to make perfect sense to leave it there, ensconced between the clothes she had been inside all day and had just cast off.

Soo-Ja’s father sounded angry when he called her into his room. He sat cross-legged on the floor facing her. He did not speak right away, and she found herself staring at the screens behind him—four large ink paintings, one for each of the four mythical animals: blue dragon, white tiger, red phoenix, and black tortoise. She imagined her father as the dragon, and herself as the tiger. She wondered which would win in the end.

“This time you’ve gone too far,” he said.

“What did I do now?” asked Soo-Ja, her eyes rolling to the back of her head.

Soo-Ja’s father reached for a stack of letters and tossed them on the writing table in front of him. Soo-Ja opened her mouth, surprised.
How had he found them?

“Is this the same young man who showed up at our door that night?”

“What night?” asked Soo-Ja innocently. She avoided his gaze, looking instead at the white tiger in the painting on the screen, its mouth open in a roar, one paw in front of the other. It looked as if about to charge, and only self-control held it back.

“You must have him come and introduce himself, so I can officially tell him how inappropriate he is for you.”

“He’s not in Daegu. He’s in Seoul. You shouldn’t have read my—”

“I didn’t. And what’s he doing in Seoul? He hasn’t finished college yet? Is he younger than you are? You cannot consider someone who isn’t at least a year older than you.”

“He’s in Seoul for something else. And
appa
, don’t make a scandal out of this. He’s barely an acquaintance.”

Her father flashed her a grim look. “Is he a member of a student
group? One of those lazy bums, living in boardinghouses, who can’t get a job, and so wastes his time getting into fights with the police? Some fool dying for democracy?”

“He’s not dying for democracy,” she said, looking away. “Maybe getting bruised, but not dying for it. He’s there more for the social aspect.”