I embraced her and we wept for all the years apart. After a minute, she pulled back and gazed fondly into my face. "You are so beautiful!" she said.
"Oh, Mother, how I've missed you-and our thimble time together."
"We shall share some again, you can be sure of it," she said. "Come inside, and honor this old house with your presence."
The whole clan gathered in the men's rooms and my sisters-in-law put together a meal to celebrate my return. This house that had once been home to only three females-my mother, grandmother, and me-was now graced by considerably more. In addition to my brothers' wives, five of their eleven children were girls. All the cousins shared the generational name of Kyong-from a Chinese character meaning bright, brightness, or shining-so the girls were variously named Bright Morning, Bright Lotus, Shining Daughter, Obedient Brightness, and Shining Virtue. These were far more flattering names than I had been blessed with, and I gave my brothers credit for their forward thinking. The oldest girl, Bright Lotus, fifteen and very talkative, gave me another pleasurable surprise when she spoke of some lesson she had learned that day in school.
"You go to school?"
"Yes, we all do."
"Even girls?"
"Oh, yes. Our principal, Mr. Okura, says it's especially important for girls to go to school."
This made me very happy. "Does he?"
"Yes, he says we are learning the most important things a girl can know: how to be of good moral character and foster our womanly virtues."
My heart sank like a stone, but she went on excitedly, "And we are learning not just what it means to be a good wife and wise mother, but how to be a ..." She lapsed into perfect, fluent Japanese: "... nihon no teikoku no chuu na jitsu shiman. "
Joyful Day, overhearing this, began to make his way toward us.
"Forgive your poor aunt her ignorance," I asked with trepidation, "but what does that mean?"
"It means, `a loyal citizen of the Japanese Empire,' " she said proudly.
Before I could find a response, my elder brother came up and told his daughter, "Your aunt has had a long journey, I think she could use some air. Could you not, little sister?"
"Yes," I said. "I could, at that."
It was cold but not yet freezing outside; I bundled up in my winter coat and my brother and I were soon walking along the banks of Dragontail Stream, a stiff wind rippling its surface like a face wrinkled in surprise. "I should have prepared you for that, little sister," he told me. "I'm sorry."
"Does she truly believe all that?" I asked in dismay.
"For now she does. Whether she will continue to, I cannot say. And if I try to dissuade her from her views, she might bring it up at school, and then we will receive a visit from the High Police. Better to simply hope she grows out of it."
"I had thought, when she spoke of girls' education . . . "
He nodded. "Yes, I know. But the Japanese do not encourage girls to continue their studies after secondary school-the only colleges for women are private schools like Ewha."
"Is it still so bad, under the Japanese? I thought things were getting better."
"For a while they were," he said. "Then, in the Year of the Snake, a group of Japanese high school students insulted some Korean girls as they waited for a train in Kwangju. This led to violence, and eventually riots all across the country, and the government cracked down again.
"They make our children learn Japanese and would have us honor their Emperor as they do, as a god. Meanwhile, seventy percent of the rice we grow goes to Japan, and we still eat millet and beans."
I told him what I had seen in Pusan and asked him what it meant.
"The police have forbidden us to wear our traditional white garments," he explained, "but this is difficult if not impossible to enforce. So in the larger cities they set up those tubs full of foul, dirty water in order to embarrass and intimidate those who would continue to wear white."
I was speechless.
"So you see, Korea is still not free. And now China is lost as well."
"What do you mean, `lost'?"
With the Japanese controlling all newspapers and radio, my brother explained, the only reliable news came from illegal short-wave radios and clandestine word-of-mouth. And the latest news smuggled from town to town was that Japanese troops had captured the city of Nanking-killing some forty thousand Chinese, soldiers and civilians alike.
"We'd best return to the party now," he suggested. "Before my Japanese daughter reports our suspicious behavior to the High Police."
He meant this as a joke, though neither of us laughed.
ut the war still raged far from Pojogae, which for the moment rested peaceably in its little dimple of land. And these inner Rooms, which had once seemed so oppressive and stifling, now seemed to cradle me gently within their walls. I slept that night on a mat in a room shared by two of my nieces, warmed by heat rising up from vents beneath the floorboards. After so long in tropical Hawai'i, it was good to feel a chill, and to be warmed by a Korean floor.
The next morning I gently sought to extract from my younger brother, Goodness of the East, any information he might have about Blossom. But even though it had been more than thirteen years since her flight from these rooms, my brother's bitterness was still fresh. "I do not know what happened to her and I do not care," he declared. "She is a vain woman, and dishonorable. Wherever she is, I hope she is rotting away like a bad tooth!"
Clearly he was of no mind to help me, and I changed the subject.
That afternoon Mother and I retreated, as in days long past, into the room where we had spent so many happy hours together, sewing. I'd brought a few of the shirts I made for Mr. Chun, and when Mother saw them she gasped: "Oh, so lovely!" She held one up, examining the design, the cut, the seams, even the coconut buttons. "You are a very fine seamstress," she said proudly.
"Oh, no," I told her, "I shall never be as good as my teacher."
She smiled and examined the other two shirts I had brought. Craftsmanship aside, she was fascinated by their startling images, so alien to her: hula girls, men riding surfboards, palm trees, pineapples, volcano craters, even the ocean waves. "Is this really what the sea looks like?" she asked.
"You've never seen it?"
"The farthest I have ever traveled was to Taegu, to see my sister." She looked at me with the hunger of one whose life has been tethered in one place like a balloon, as mine had once been. "Tell me about your life, your familyyour home. Your brother has read me your letters, but I wish to hear it from you.
So we sat and I told her things I had never written of in my letters: the high hot sun on the plantation, the hard brutal hand of Mr. Noh, my desperate escape to Honolulu, and my eventual divorce, which shocked her, but not as much as I feared. I told her of my picture bride sisters, the divine gift of Jaesun and my children, the beachboys' songs-but also of Joey's sad end and the cruel injustice that followed it.
I also spoke of the loss of my teacher and my little sister, my ignorance of their fates, and the nagging guilt that I might have altered these fates had I stayed. I even wondered aloud whether I should ever have left this house.
Mother just laughed good-naturedly.
"Nonsense," she told me. "It is a fine chogakpo you have made. Far richer and more colorful than you would ever had stitched together here in Pojogae. And it is far from completed."
"I do not wish to add any more patches like the passing of Joe Kahahawai."
Mother considered that a moment, then got up, went to her wardrobe chest, and opened the bottom drawer. She rooted about inside, finally pulling out a carefully folded wrapping cloth. Sitting again, she unfolded it: it was a beautiful patchwork cloth with a green border enclosing a checkerboard of dozens of little rectangles and squares-red, yellow, gold, green, brown, blue, and black.
"You see these?" She pointed out a half dozen of the black rectangles, scattered randomly across the checkerboard. "I added these on the day my mother died, many years ago, because t
hat was my mood that day. There is no pattern to where I placed them, as there is no sense to be made of death. One's eye may not go to them first, but next to them the blues look bluer, the reds richer, the golds more brilliant. Without them the cloth is pretty, but without character or contrast."
"Yes," I said quietly. "I see."
She placed a tender hand on mine. "Look around us, child. Listen to the sounds of war coming from the east. You could have made a chogak po here in Pojogae-but you might have had more patches like these than you could count."
he next day I told Mother that I needed to go into Taegu "on business," looking for some Japanese fabric for Mr. Chun, and I made arrangements with a local farmer who owned a battered old truck to take me there. But the bumps and ruts I had felt riding in a new-model taxi cab now seemed more like mountains and gulches in a vintage Ford truck with questionable suspension. After half an hour of jolts and lurches, we finally reached Taegu, where I asked the farmer to drop me at the marketplace. Once he was gone I began a short walk to what I hoped would be a familiar sight.
I still remembered the way, and after five minutes I was rewarded by the sight of the little white house with the blue tile roof-looking much the same as it always had, but for the fact that the paulownia tree sheltering it had grown even more expansive over the years. The stone lantern still guarded the approach, and as I walked up the porch steps I told myself that there was little chance anyone I knew would be living there. But I knocked on the door anyway.
It was opened by a young woman in a gaily colored red-and-gold satin dress not dissimilar to the sort I had worked on at Iwilei. She seemed puzzled to find a woman standing on the doorstep: "Yes? Do you have some business here?"
I felt an odd surge of gladness that the house might have changed hands, but not its purpose.
"I am looking for an old friend who used to live here," I said. "She called herself Evening Rose."
"That name isn't familiar to me. How long ago was she here?"
"Longer than you have been alive, I suspect. Some twenty-five years ago."
"Oh!" she said with a laugh. "That is long. Perhaps our housemother might know. Please, come in."
She ushered me inside and had me wait in the vestibule while she went in search of the housemother. I looked around: Although the furnishings were new to me, the house was much the same, decorated with folding screens, rush mats, and lacquered tables. Most of the current generation of kisaeng were apparently in their rooms sleeping, but a few wandered up and down the staircase to the second floor, eyeing me curiously as they passed. Finally, the young woman who had answered the door came down the steps alongside a woman in her fifties, graying hair framing a still-lovely face. I confess, I did not recognize her at first, but she knew me at once. `Aigo, "she said on seeing me. "The student!"
The voice I could not mistake. It was Fragrant Iris.
I started to bow, but she came up and gave me a warm hug instead. "In this house we do not stand on ceremony! How are you, and where have you been these many years?"
When I told her I had been living in Hawai'i she expressed astonishment and delight. "I hear it is beautiful there."
"It is.,,
"Are you married?"
"Yes. Three children."
"I remember when you were little more than a child yourself." Her smile turned sad. "And I think I know what brings you here today."
I nodded. "Did you ever ... hear from her again?"
The sorrow in her eyes presaged her words.
"Yes. We did." She motioned me to join her on a rush mat, and once we were seated she continued, "The police finally released her from prison, sometime in ... the Year of the Dragon, I believe."
"The year after I left. But that's wonderful to know, she was freed!"
"She would not come back to work here," Iris said. "She didn't wish for us to suffer by association. Her patron paid to maintain a small apartment for her. The police watched her constantly, she said. But that did not prevent her from doing what she thought was right. It did not keep her from joining the demonstration in the streets on March First. She marched and cried Mansei!' alongside thousands of others." Her voice grew soft. "And then the police attacked them as if they were an army-an army without weapons."
"I know," I said. "Even in Hawai'i we have heard of their brutality."
"By the end of it, thousands of lives ended at the point of Japanese sabers. I am sorry to tell you that Evening Rose was one of them. But know this: Your teacher died a patriot."
I had half expected to hear that she was dead, but the manner of her death caught me unawares. I felt numb, having found and lost my teacher all over again in the space of a few minutes. I thanked iris, declined her offer to stay for tea, and stumbled out of the little pleasure house.
I thought I had cried all my tears for Evening Rose long ago, but as I leaned up against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, I found that I still had some to give up.
I hailed a taxi and left Taegu.
That night a windstorm blew the few remaining leaves off the trees and rattled the paper windows of our ancestral home. The air grew more wintry and Elder Brother stoked the coals that warmed the floor of the house. I felt, if anything, even more despairing than I had in Hawai'i after Joe's death.
The next morning our household was visited, as it often was when I was a child, by our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Mun-Sunny's mother. Tiny and frail, but with alert brown eyes, she was ushered into the inner Room, where my mother and I received her warmly. Oddly, though, Mrs. Mun turned to Mother and said, "I have come to tell your daughter something of a personal nature."
I could not imagine what this might be, but Mother respected it without saying a word, brought us a pot of hot rice water, then left us to sit and talk. I, of course, inquired after Sunny, and a veil fell over Mrs. Mun's eyes as she replied sadly, "My daughter passed from this life six years ago next month."
Even though it had been years since I had seen Sunny, it was still a shock to hear. "How? What happened to her?"
"She died birthing her third son, who is now five, so it cannot be said that her death was in vain," she told me.
"I-I am deeply grieved to hear it," I said softly. "I wrote her from Hawai'i, but never received a reply."
"No-she was too ashamed of how she had left you, and her intended husband. She could not bring herself to write you, but I know she wanted to."
Unashamed, I shed tears for my old friend. "I wish she had."
"We were shocked to see her return, and even more so to hear that she broke her engagement," Mrs. Mun said. "I was happy to have her back, but it did make her life, and ours, more difficult. Such matters may be taken in stride in Hawai'i, but here in Korea if a girl is engaged to be married, she is married. Everyone in Pojogae knew my daughter had been engaged to marry a man in America; no man here or in neighboring villages would consider marrying her. This presented quite a problem, as you can imagine.
"It took several years, but we were finally able to find a husband for her in Kyonggi-do-far enough away that no one knew of her engagement. She married a shopkeeper in Suwon, and I never looked upon her face-to-face again."
"Oh, I am so sorry," I apologized, swept away with guilt. "Had Sunny not come to Hawai'i with me-"
"No no," Mrs. Mun said, "you misunderstand. Every day I am grateful for what you did for her!"
Baffled, I asked, "What did I do?"
"You taught her hangul so she could pass some sort of test. She wrote me every week until the end of her life. My middle son would read her letters to me, and write down my reply." She patted me on the hand. "It was a source of great comfort to me then, and even more so now. Today my son will reread her letters to me, and"-she smiled-"I hear her voice again."
"I ... I am glad."
"But that is only part of what brings me here. You see, after her return, my daughter became quite close to your little sister-in-law."
I was surprised but pleased. "Did she?"
&nbs
p; "Oh yes. She and Sunny would do laundry together at the stream, and occasionally sew together. They both missed you, and I think they each saw a bit of you in the other. Until your sister-in-law ran away for once and all."
She leaned in to me and lowered her voice. "This is why I asked to speak with you privately. I know that Sunny taught your sister-in-law some hangul because I walked in on them once when they were supposed to be sewing. I never said anything. I don't know how much she learned-probably at least enough to read road signs." She smiled the faintest of smiles. "A day or two after Blossom ran away, I noticed that the money purse in which I kept our household funds was short about fourteen yen. I never asked Sunny if she'd taken it, or if she did, what she'd done with it. Any fool could plainly see how much your sister-in-law missed her clan, and wished to be gone from this house."
I was touched and grateful. "That was very kind of Sunny ... and of you.
"It was the least we could do. You gave her the money, after all, that enabled her to come back to us."
"She said she would repay me, somehow," I remembered with a smile.
Mrs. Mun chuckled at that. "Which is what brings me here today. I have something for you, something important." She reached into a small purse she had brought with her. "Among my daughter's effects was-this."
She took out a small envelope, but did not hand it to me immediately.
"Her husband says it came a few days before she went into labor. If there was a letter in it, it has been lost. But he recalled that he later saw it on a table, with some folded currency inside it, and when he picked it up to examine it, he counted the sum of fourteen yen."
My heart began to race as I took the envelope Mrs. Mun now offered me. It was empty, and the return address read simply:
Nang Farm Yudong Village, Kangwon-do
I stared incredulously at the address. "You believe this was-from Blossom?"
"I cannot tell you for certain that it is," Mrs. Mun said. "But I thought you should see it. Sunny would have wanted you to see it, I am sure."