The years of the occupation and then the war—all the terrible things the Japanese did to us ... and what had Abuji done? Nothing. He'd kept his head down, buried himself in his books, let the Japanese do whatever they wanted. Sure, there were times when that was the smartest thing to do, maybe the only thing to do. But there were ways to fight back, and Abuji hadn't even tried.
Not like Uncle. Uncle had done something—something big. That newspaper. I've imagined it hundreds of times. Him printing the paper in some dark basement somewhere. Fixing the press when it broke, getting the paper out when no one else could have done it.
That's what I wanted to do. Something big. I had it all planned. It would have worked, too. Except for the weather. Damn clouds. Going back to the base in disgrace. A disgrace to the Japanese for failing in the attack. A disgrace to myself, for failing in my own plan.
Am I a complete failure? At least I didn't help them capture Uncle. That was something. But probably not, when I really think about it. Uncle is too smart. He'd never have let them catch him.
So in the end, I haven't done anything. Nothing at all.
Just like Abuji.
How can I live with a father I don't respect? And if I'm just like him, how can I live with myself?
Everyone is in bed when I get home. I tiptoe into the house. The door to my room squeaks when I slide it open. I hold my breath. No sound—no one getting up. Good. I still don't want to talk to anyone.
I don't bother to turn the light off—I know I won't be able to sleep. I lie down on my mat and stare up at the ceiling. For minutes? Hours? I don't know.
A rustle at the door: Sun-hee. She comes in without asking and stands with her arms crossed, glaring at me.
"Do you think this is what Uncle would want?" she says. Whispering fiercely, so our parents won't hear. "For you to show such disrespect to Abuji?"
I sit up abruptly. "Why does he deserve my respect?" I'm careful to whisper, too. But I can't keep the anger out of my voice. "Why should I respect a coward?"
There. I've said it out loud. My breath is coming hard now. "Do you know, sometimes I think he was worse than the chin-il-pa! At least they did something—at least they took a stand! He was like a—a worm burrowing into the ground ... hoping all the bad things would go away! How can I respect such a man? It's hard to believe he and Uncle are from the same family!"
Sun-hee stares at me for a moment. Then she hands me a newspaper and points to something in the middle of the page. "That article there," she says. "The one about education."
I glance down at the headline. "What about it?" I'm angry at her now, too.
"He wrote that," she says. "Abuji."
For a moment I don't think I've heard her right. I look up at her, then down at the paper again. This time I really look at it.
"How do you know?" I ask.
"I just know," she says. "He said the exact same thing to me, in almost the same words. You don't have to believe me," she adds stubbornly, "but I know I'm right. I'm sure he didn't put his name on the articles because he wanted to protect us."
A long moment of silence. "He wrote this?" I whisper.
"Yes," she answers. "I've been through all the papers. Abuji started writing after Uncle left."
The whole world turns upside down. Like going into a spin in a plane—everything inside out, backward, reversed, but you still have to make your brain work.
Abuji wrote articles. For Uncle's paper.
He must have used his position at the school to obtain information, and made regular contact with the resistance so his articles could be printed by Uncle.
Suddenly, I remember the nighttime raid. It must indeed have been his work they were looking for. He'd been in danger that night. Every night.
But he'd never shown a single sign of it. He'd gone to work, come home, studied in his room—or so I thought. But he must have been writing those articles.
And I never knew.
"Why didn't he tell me?" I'm asking myself, as much as her.
She kneels on the floor beside me. "The same reason that Uncle didn't tell him. It was safer that way."
"But why not now? I mean, when I got home, when the war was over—why didn't he say anything then?"
She shakes her head and speaks gently. "That isn't his way, Opah. He did what he did but felt no need to talk about it."
I look at the paper again. My eyes start to feel hot, and the print slowly goes all blurry.
32. Sun-hee
Tae-yul was up very early. I heard him rustling about and slipped out of bed to join him."Good," he said with a smile. "I didn't want to wake you, but I was hoping you'd get up."
He beckoned me to follow him and led the way outside to the workshop area. "We have a job to do," he said. I knew what he was thinking.
Together we dragged the rose of Sharon tree from under the eaves. It was still scrawny, but it had grown and was once again as tall as I was.
"By the front door," I said. "In a place of honor."
As we worked to transplant the tree, Tae-yul asked, "Are there any flags? I think we should fly a flag on our gate. Uncle would like that—a flag to greet him."
Uncle ... I'd made up my mind, at last. He would hate it if I felt bad every time I thought of him. Omoni was right. I would never forget what had happened, but I had to forgive myself if I wanted to think of him with gladness.
"No, we don't have a flag," I said. "But I'll sew one for you to put up."
He nodded, then stopped digging and looked at me, his face serious. "I saw Uncle's shop in town. It's boarded up."
"Yes. It's been vacant all this time, but Abuji refused to sell it. He wanted to keep it for—for when Uncle comes back...." For the thousandth time I wondered when that would be.
The war had changed so many things. Uncle gone, Tomo gone. Jung-shin gone, too. Her family had left town immediately after the Japanese surrender, because anyone who had helped the Japanese was in as much danger as the Japanese themselves—more, maybe. I didn't know where they'd gone; I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to her. I hoped with all my heart that she would write to me one day and let me know she was safe somewhere.
We were quiet for a little while. Then Tae-yul said, "I was thinking of training to become a printer myself. I could run Uncle's shop for him—until he gets back."
"That's a very good idea, Opah. The press is still there, you know. They used it a lot, but then it broke and no one could fix it."
Tae-yul grinned. I knew what he was thinking: Only Uncle could fix that old press. "I helped him lots of times," he said. "Maybe I can figure it out."
I nodded and he went on, "The shop needs a new sign. You could paint one. 'Printing—Kim Young-chun,' that's what I think it should say." He moved one hand across an imaginary sign, indicating two lines of large lettering.
Kim Young-chun. Uncle's real name.
"Abuji might be disappointed that I don't want to become a scholar," Tae-yul continued. "I'll convince him by telling him that my being a printer will honor the work he and Uncle did during the war." He paused. "But there has always been a scholar in the family. If I am to be a printer, it'll be up to you to become the family scholar."
I frowned. Me, a scholar? Girls hardly ever became scholars. And there was so much work to be done everywhere, in our home, the neighborhood, the whole country. It was hard to imagine a time when books and studying would be important again.
Still, Tae-yul had come back from the dead. That made it seem as if anything was possible. I felt myself start to smile.
Tae-yul smiled back at me and picked up the shovel again. I took the trowel, and we continued our work side by side.
Soon we were finished putting the little tree in its place by the front door. Tae-yul fetched a bucket of water for it.
"Let's not tell Omoni about this," I said. "Let's just make it a surprise."
He agreed. After we put the bucket and tools away, I turned to him and said, "If you're going to be a printer,
we have a lot of work to do."
"'We'?" he asked. "Have you changed your mind already—do you want to be a printer, too, instead of a scholar?"
"No," I said, laughing. "Come inside, I'll show you."
I collected my diary and a pencil, went to Tae-yul's room, and sat on the floor beside him. "I've been working with Abuji for a few weeks now," I said. "I'll show you what I've learned so you can catch up, and then we can study together."
I wrote something and showed it to him. "You'll be a terrible printer if you don't know how to read and write," I said in a stern voice. But I couldn't keep the smile from my eyes.
He started to answer indignantly. "What do you mean—" Then he saw my face, stopped speaking, and glanced down at the page.
"Ga, na, da," I said softly.
"Ga, na, da," he repeated, his voice barely above a whisper.
The first three letters of the Korean alphabet.
We looked at them for a long moment. Then I handed Tae-yul the pencil and watched as he copied the letters in a neat row under mine.
* * *
Author's Note
"In the South [of Korea], one particular decade—that between 1935 and 1945—is an empty cupboard: millions of people used and abused by the Japanese cannot get records on what they know to have happened to them, and thousands of Koreans who worked with the Japanese have simply erased that history as if it had never happened."
—Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun
I came across these lines while researching my previous books on Korea, all of which were set several hundred years in the past. For a long time the image of that empty cupboard kept appearing in my mind's eye. As I sought information for what would eventually become this book, I found that there were still bits and pieces, shreds and scraps, of stories in the cupboard. And some of them belonged to my own parents.
My parents told me many stories about their own childhoods in Korea—stories I had never heard before. My father told of receiving that gift of a rubber ball, of being forced to gather pine roots, and of having his first taste of chewing gum! My mother's best friend when she was little was a Japanese boy whose father was principal of the local elementary school; her father—my grandfather—was vice-principal. And her Japanese name was Kaneyama Keoko.
Although this book is a work of fiction, the historical events detailed in the story actually took place. Leaflets signed by U.S. general Douglas MacArthur were delivered by airdrop; the Japanese commandeered radios and metal; rose of Sharon trees were uprooted and burned by official order. And at least ten young Korean men died in service as kamikaze pilots toward the end of the war.
In addition to his 1936 Olympic gold medal, Sohn Kee Chung held the world record for the marathon for twelve years, from 1935 to 1947. In most record books, you will still find his name listed as "Kitei Son," and his nationality as Japanese. Korea participated in the Olympics under its own flag for the first time in 1948 in London; it was Sohn Kee Chung who carried that flag in the opening ceremonies. And in 1988 he lit the torch to open the Summer Olympics in Seoul.
The character of Miss Lim, briefly mentioned as the person who sent the packet of newspapers to Sun-hee's family, is based on a historical figure, Young-sin Im (a.k.a. Louise Yim). Educated by Christian missionaries, she went on to run her own school and was an active leader in the underground resistance movement. Im was the first woman ever appointed to a high post in the Korean government. Her career ended under a cloud of scandal when she was accused of corruption, a charge she vehemently denies in her autobiography, My Forty-Year Fight for Korea. Despite this disappointing end to her political ambitions, there is no doubt that she advanced considerably the cause of equal rights for Korean women.
One question raised in the story remains unanswered at the end. What happened to the girls who were taken away from the schoolyard the day Jung-shin's sister was granted a reprieve? The answer constitutes one of the most horrifying aspects of the war. Between 100,000 and 200,000 women from Korea and other countries conquered by the Japanese were forced to serve as "comfort women," satisfying the sexual needs of Imperial soldiers. After the war the Japanese government denied the existence of such a practice, and the women themselves were so ashamed that none of them came forward to reveal this atrocity. The truth was not revealed until 1979, and it still took nearly twenty years before the women received an apology from the Japanese government.
Tae-yul's mission is fictional, but for the account of its failure and other details of his life in the Special Attack Unit, I am indebted to two memoirs: Kamikaze, by Yasuo Kuwahara and Gordon'T. Alfred, and Ryuji Nagatsuka's I Was a Kamikaze. Also very helpful in my research for other parts of this book was Richard Kim's Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood.
The book ends in 1945. In 1948, after three years of strife, Korea was divided along the 38th parallel, with a Communist government taking control in the north and a nominal democracy in the south. Many people like Uncle were thus separated from their families. In 1950 the Korean War broke out, and the nightmare of "Koreans killing Koreans" began on a large scale.
That war ended in 1953, but the country remains divided today. As of this writing, the first steps on a long and painful road to reconciliation have been taken. Athletes from both countries entered the stadium for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, under one flag. In the same year, a few hundred families were reunited through a cooperative effort between the North and South Korean governments. I like to think that among them was a family like Sun-hee's.
* * *
Bibliography
Bigelow, Poultney. Japan and Her Colonies. London: Edwin Arnold, 1923.
Bishop, Isabelle Bird. Korea and Her Neighbors. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1897.
*Choi, Sook Nyul. The Year of Impossible Good-byes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
Chung, Henry. The Case of Korea. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1921.
Cumings, Bruce. Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Drake, H. B. Korea of the Japanese. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1930.
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Frank, Richard B. Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Random House, 1999.
Howard, Keith, ed. True Stories of the Korean Comfort Women. New York: Cassell, 1995.
Hoyt, Edwin P. The Last Kamikaze. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993.
*Kang, K. Connie. Home Was the Land of the Morning Calm. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
*Kang, Younghill. The Grass Roof. Chicago: Follett, 1959.
*Kim, Richard E. Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Kim, San, and Nym Wales. Song of Ariran: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel. New York: John Day, 1941.
*Kuwahara, Yasuo, and Gordon'T. Allred. Kamikaze. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.
Ladd, George Trumbull. In Korea with Marquis Ito. New York: Scribner's, 1908.
Lee, Chang-rae. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead Books/PenguinPutnam, 1999.
Lowell, Percival. Choson: Land of the Morning Calm. Boston: Ticknor, 1885.
*Millot, Bernard. Divine Thunder: The Life and Death of the Kamikazes. New York: McCall, 1971.
*Nagatsuka, Ryuji. I Was a Kamikaze. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
*Naito, Hatsuho. Thunder Gods: The Kamikaze Pilots Tell Their Story. New York: Kodansha International, 1989.
Toland, John. The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936–1945. New York: Random House, 1970.
*Yim, Louise. My Forty-Year Fight for Korea. New York: A.A.Wyn, 1951.
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LINDA SUE PARK is the acclaimed author of A Single Shard, which was awarded the Newbery Medal; Seesaw Girl; and The Kite Fighters.
The daughter of Korean immigrants, Linda Sue was born and raised in Illinois and has been writing poems and stories all her life. Her first published wor
k was a poem in a children's magazine when she was nine. Today, she lives with her husband and their two children in western New York. You can visit her website at www.lindasuepark.com.
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* Of interest to readers age 12 and up
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Linda Sue Park, When My Name Was Keoko
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