***
Every day I spent hours watching the road. It was partly out of pure greed: the American soldiers often threw gum—and one time a wonderful sweet called "chocolate," which tasted so good it made me want more. Standing at the gate also seemed to make time pass—each day was much like the one before, and it helped to be able to lose track.
Otherwise, I ended up thinking of time in terms of Tae-yul: it was so many weeks since he'd left, so many weeks since his first letter, so many days since his second ... leading my thoughts where I didn't want them to go.
Always I was searching the road for Uncle. The war was over, the Japanese had been defeated, and there was no more need for an underground resistance. Probably he'd been somewhere far away when the war ended, which was why it was taking him so long to make his way back.
If only Uncle would come home, the house wouldn't feel so empty anymore.
It was the middle of September; a month had passed since the surrender. I heard someone call from the gate and went to meet the visitor.
I stopped partway down the path, for at the gate I could see an American soldier. I hesitated and half turned back toward the house. But Abuji wasn't home, and I couldn't very well ask Omoni to come out—she couldn't greet guests while in mourning.
The soldier called out something in English and smiled, a friendly smile. That was another thing about Americans—they all seemed to have such big white teeth. I forced myself to walk the last few steps to the gate. He handed me a parcel wrapped in brown paper. He said something else and gave me a half wave, half salute as he left. I breathed a sigh of relief that it had been such a quick visit—whatever would I have said to him?
I took the parcel into the house. It couldn't be more rations—it was flat, like a big thick envelope. On the front there was some Korean lettering. I squeezed the parcel, trying to feel what was inside. It felt like paper, many sheets of paper.
Omoni came out of the kitchen. She took the parcel and put it in the sitting room to await Abuji's return from the school.
I was in the kitchen when I heard Abuji's steps in the entry corridor. I hurried into the sitting room, fetched the parcel, and handed it to him.
He didn't open it right away. He went into the sitting room, set it down on the table, and put his things away. I stood by the door, trying not to fidget. A parcel with Korean lettering ... maybe it was from Uncle.
Abuji opened the wrapping. A piece of paper fluttered to the floor. I darted toward him to pick it up; he leaned over at the same time and we nearly cracked heads. As he straightened, holding the paper, he looked at me a little impatiently. But he didn't ask me to leave him alone, so I stayed.
The parcel held newspapers, several of them. And the piece of paper was a letter.
"Please ask your mother to join us," Abuji said.
I was back with Omoni in less time than it took for him to refold the letter.
"It's from a Miss Lim," he told us. "I met her once, before the war. She writes that she was head of a resistance group and worked with my brother." He paused for a moment.
I pressed my lips together so questions wouldn't burst out of me. Uncle! Did the letter say anything more about him?
And beneath that, another thought—a woman working for the resistance? I could hardly imagine such a thing. What did she do? Did she do dangerous things—spying, delivering messages? How exciting it must have been! And what did her family think of her?
But that wasn't as important as hearing about Uncle.
Abuji looked at the letter and continued, "She says that after my brother left here, he kept printing the newspaper. He hid in different places, but eventually things became too dangerous—the Japanese were still looking for him. The resistance underground smuggled him to Manchuria, where there was a headquarters for the movement.
"Miss Lim received word after the war ended that he would be leaving Manchuria to return to Korea. But that was the last news she had of him. She says that the Communists are making things very difficult in the north. They have seized control and are allowing no travel, except for official business."
He looked at Omoni and cleared his throat. "It is likely that my brother is there now—in the north but unable to come home. She says she will write to us again if she hears more news."
The empty feeling in the house suddenly filled up my whole body. I thought of what Omoni had said to me so long ago—that I would someday be able to forgive myself for my mistake. There were times when I thought I had, but now I felt the old guilt welling up again. Uncle wasn't coming home soon.... No one even knew where he was....
Abuji turned and put the letter away in a chest in the corner of the room. Then he looked at us again. "Her letter says one last thing—we may want to tell Mrs. Ahn that Uncle escaped safely all those years ago."
Mrs. Ahn?
Abuji nodded, as if I'd spoken out loud. "Do you recall the accounting just after my brother disappeared, when our home was searched? There is a secret cellar in Mrs. Ahn's garden. He hid there for two nights. She helped several other resistance workers in the same way."
Old lonely Mrs. Ahn—the Japanese never suspected her! If I hadn't felt so sad about Uncle, I might have laughed out loud.
That night I ate almost nothing of my dinner, just pushed the food around on my plate. Omoni must have noticed, but she didn't chide me. After I helped clean up, I went back into the sitting room. Abuji was looking at the newspapers. Without my asking, he handed me a few of them. As I took them, I felt a little thrill break through my despair when I thought about Uncle printing these very papers.
The articles were written in both Japanese and Korean. If they'd been in Korean only, many people wouldn't have been able to read them.
I skimmed the headlines, looking for something especially interesting. It would be good to read something, to take my mind off the emptiness inside me.... Here was one about the education system. That might be good; I was eager for school to begin again.
The article talked about the future for Korean students.
"It is useless to regret all the hours our young people have spent being educated in Japanese.... Instead, we must look to find areas of strength through which their pride and learning can be further nurtured. Kanji, for example, is based on Chinese characters that have long been a source of esteemed scholarship for our people.... When Korea is free at last, students should turn the dedication and knowledge acquired through learning kanji to the study of their own language and to the classical literature of our country, much of which is written in Chinese...."
I'd heard these ideas before. Stunned, I looked again at the top of the article. There was no author's name given. I lowered the paper a little and looked over the top at Abuji. Our eyes met for only the briefest moment; his face was expressionless and he didn't say a word.
He didn't need to. I could figure this out with no help at all.
A few afternoons later Omoni and I were in the garden weeding. My hands made the right motions of digging and pulling, but my thoughts were elsewhere.
Since we'd received Tae-yul's last letter, the death letter—that was how I thought of it—I hadn't written a single word in my diary. It was as if my mind was working fine; I could enjoy our meals these days and look forward to school starting again, things like that. But my heart was still empty, and I never felt like writing anything. I wondered if I ever would again.
We heard the honking of a jeep's horn from the road. The Americans seemed to like honking their horns. They used them not just in warning, to clear the road, but as a greeting, too. When two jeeps were going opposite directions on the road, their drivers honked as they passed each other. It seemed quite friendly but was also very noisy.
This time, though, the honking seemed to be coming from right outside our front gate. It kept on, loud and insistent. Omoni was still wearing her mourning dress. She looked at me and nodded toward the road.
The honking stopped, and the jeep roared off as I was fiddling wit
h the rusty latch on the side gate. Then I heard Omoni cry out—a strange choked cry. Startled, I looked back at her—it was the first sound louder than a whisper I'd heard her make in weeks.
I saw her standing there in the vegetable patch. She threw her arms out wide in front of her, waved them wildly, and made that sound again, half screaming, half choking.
What was wrong? My heart leapt in alarm and I rushed toward her. But before I could reach her she began to move, to run toward the house.
It was as if time had suddenly stopped—as if the air had turned to water and all movement was thick and slow. Omoni, running. Me, looking first at her, and then at the house.
At Tae-yul, coming out the back door.
31. Tae-yul
It's the middle of the night, but no one in our house is asleep. Omoni feeds me a meal. Then I bathe and rest. Now I come out of my room, ready to talk.
The family is in the sitting room waiting for me. But not impatient—they'd have waited all night. Omoni brings cups of tea. She changed out of her white dress the minute she stopped hugging me, when I first arrived. Now she's wearing her old brown dress and the dragon pin, too. She looks beautiful.
Sun-hee is so excited! She sits next to me, then moves to sit across from me, then back again. And Abuji hugged me, too, when he first saw me. He hasn't done that since I was a small child.
I look at all of them. Smiling—I can't stop smiling. "Well!" I say. "Here I am, back from the dead.
"I want to tell you everything that has happened to me, but I hardly know where to begin. I guess I'll start with what happened after I wrote my last letter. That's a kamikaze tradition, you know. You write a letter and address it yourself—'To the family of the late' whatever-your-name-is. It was a funny feeling writing that. It was as if I was already dead!"
Everyone laughs. I can't remember the last time we all laughed together.
I go on. "I don't want to bore you with all the technical details, but you should know that a Special Attack plane carries very little fuel. This is because the bombs are so heavy that if the fuel tank were full we wouldn't be able to take off. They calculate the exact amount of fuel to make it to the target site—not one drop more.
"We got our orders a few days before and were waiting for the weather to clear. Finally, in the dead of night, we got the command to depart. It was still pretty cloudy that morning, but they told us the sky would clear up soon.
"They were wrong, those weather people. It never did clear up. The sky was absolutely solid with clouds, and the farther we flew the worse it got! I was in a squad with four other planes. The leader signaled to us to return to the base. There was no way we'd ever find the target in that weather."
I shake my head, remembering. "We felt so ashamed. Here we'd gotten ourselves prepared to die—the whole base had turned out to send us off. We'd written our letters and everything. The letters had already been collected and sent—someone takes care of that as soon as the planes leave. So there we were, supposedly having accomplished this great mission, and instead we had to go skulking back to the base without even having reached the target site."
I look at Abuji. "I had a plan all along, you know. Those attacks were so difficult to accomplish. In fact, I don't know how they did it—the ones who succeeded in their missions. Most of the planes ended up getting shot down or else crashing into the ocean—missing their targets completely.
"That's what I planned to do. I'd fly out with my squad and it would look like I was attempting an attack. But I knew if I were to dive my plane just a few degrees off target, I'd miss and it would still look like I'd tried to hit it." I grin. "It would have been a double feat—I'd have done no damage to the Americans and I'd have taken out a Japanese plane."
Beside me, Sun-hee gasps. She's looking at Abuji. He nods at her, but neither of them says anything.
So I go on. "The clouds ruined everything. If I'd started a dive then, without any ship around for a target, they'd have known what I was up to."
I take a sip of tea. "It wasn't that I lost my nerve—" I stop again, my face growing warm. "Well, maybe a little." I can still feel it. Sitting in that plane, shaking with fear. Trying to pretend it was only the engine shaking me.
I speak quickly to get past that part. "The main thing was, if they knew for sure I was a traitor, they might make things really hard for the family. So I flew back with my squad. All that planning for nothing. And when we got back to the base we were thrown into jail for failing to accomplish our mission!" I shake my head again, still hardly believing it. Like the weather was our fault.
"Anyway, we were kept there for several weeks. No trial, nothing. It was like everyone had forgotten about us."
I pause for a moment. Then I stand, drop to my knees, and make a formal bow. "I apologize to my family," I say, my face still at the floor. "I realized you'd have gotten that last letter—that you all thought I was dead. It drove me crazy that I had no way of letting you know I was still alive. I apologize for the pain I caused you."
A moment's silence. Then, "There is no need for—for apology," Abuji says, his voice cracking in midsentence. I sit up again and see his face. His eyes are wet.
I clear my throat. "One day we were released, with no explanation. Eventually, we learned about the bombs, and that the Emperor was preparing to surrender. Then we were all demobilized and sent home."
Omoni lets out a long sigh. Like she's been holding her breath for years. Everyone is quiet for a few moments. No questions, not even from Sun-hee.
But it turns out she's only waiting, making sure that our parents aren't going to talk. Then, "Opah, what was it like to fly?"
I can't keep myself from grinning. "Sun-hee, you can hardly imagine it. The first time I went as a student; someone else flew the plane. I was supposed to pay attention to what he was doing, but it wasn't easy—all I wanted to do was look out the window. The houses were so tiny! And you could see the shadows made by the clouds on the ground—imagine, being higher than a cloud!
"The next few times I flew I was so busy paying attention to the controls that I couldn't look out the window at all. There are so many things to think about—your altitude and speed, the effect of the wind, your direction, keeping the plane steady. But after a few flights I could handle the plane pretty well. So I could look out over the countryside from time to time.
"It's an odd feeling—the plane is so small inside, you're all cramped up, as if you're in a box made of metal. And the engine is very noisy. But in spite of that, you feel so free—like there's nothing but air and space around you. It's truly a miracle-—you feel almost like a god."
Suddenly, I feel really tired. Abuji seems to sense it. He clears his throat. "Enough talk for tonight, my son. We should all sleep now."
He smiles broadly at all of us, longest at me. "We have plenty of time to talk in the days to come."
That hellhole of a prison ... I haven't told them anything about that, and I won't either. There's not much to tell. It was filthy, with bad food, sometimes no food. But other than shoving a dirty dish of scraps at us once a day, the guards left us alone. Sometimes I wondered if anyone but the guards knew we were there.
I can remember lying in that cell, not sleeping much—you had to keep kicking the rats off your legs. I thought about home a lot and played games, like trying to remember every single thing in every room. Or meals—remembering all my favorite foods. Home seemed so far away. Almost like it wasn't real, like a dream.
But here I am now. Home.
Omoni's cooking. Pace again, the American stuff. It's different—it doesn't stick together the way Korean rice does, which makes it harder to eat with chopsticks. But still, it's rice.
Sun-hee's questions. Every time I see her she's asking me something—about flying or training or Japan. And I don't even mind.
But after the first few days I start to feel restless, almost like I don't belong here. How can that be? This is my home.
The trouble is, I don't know
what I'm going to do. I'm busy enough for now. Abuji asked me to help at his school. Cleaning up the classrooms, repairs, stuff like that. He hopes to open it again very soon. I'm glad to help, glad to have something to do.
When the school is ready, then what? Go back to school myself? I don't feel like a student anymore. I can't see myself back in a classroom.
A job, then. But what kind of job? I'm a pilot now, and proud of it. But what good is that in a town where there aren't any planes? Not a single plane has ever landed on that airstrip.
The war was a terrible thing. But during the war I had something to do, something really important. And flying was the most exciting thing I've ever done.
Now the war is over. Everything's supposed to be better, but it isn't. Not for me.
I've been home a couple of weeks. One evening everyone is in the sitting room: Omoni and Sun-hee sewing, Abuji reading, me whittling. We get together like this almost every evening now. Funny how the war made ordinary things seem special again.
But something's wrong tonight—with me. That restless feeling. I just can't settle down. I'm whittling, but not making anything, just shaving off bits and pieces of wood.
Abuji is looking through one of Uncle's newspapers. He draws in his breath a little. "Look at this," he says. "An article openly critical of the Japanese economic policy, written at the height of the war. It actually accuses officials in the government by name." He shakes his head, admiring. "It took great courage to write and publish such an article."
Before I know it I'm on my feet. My knife and the piece of wood clatter to the floor. I'm shouting, without even thinking. "What right do you have to speak of courage?"
His face—not angry but stunned. "Tae-yul—" he begins.
I don't want to hear what he has to say. I turn my back on him and run. Out the door.
All evening I walk through town. Up and down street after street, thinking over and over: My father is a coward.