"Last year-and this could not have been easy for her-your aunt came to me and told me of your desire to read. She said, `You owe me this much, at least,' and I could not argue the point. So I agreed to become your teacher."
She looked at me nervously and I now understood the anxiety I had seen in her eyes. "Does my Gem think less of me for this?" she asked.
"No. Of course not." I was shocked, I admitted, but ... "You were kind to my aunt," I said, "and to me. I can only think well of you for that."
She seemed relieved and happy to hear this.
We both knew that my lessons had come to an end. "I have no diploma to bestow on you," she said, "but perhaps this will serve just as well." She smiled and presented me with a well-worn, but complete copy of Lady Uiyudang's Diary of a Sightseeing Tour of Kwanbuk.
Blinking back tears, I thanked her for the book and for all she had given me; we bowed to one another; and I left, feeling dizzy with revelation. I now knew at what cost to her dignity my aunt had purchased my reading lessons, and I appreciated her generosity all the more.
Few mourners attended obedience's funeral, shunning her even in death, and I prayed that heaven might receive her more warmly than this life had.
ow, as Mother was denied the company of her sister, I was denied that of both my aunt and my teacher. I was surprised at the depth of the void it left behind in my life. Before I had learned to read, I felt small and incapable. But now I would lie awake nights pondering the meaning of a line in LadyUiyudang's narrative, amazed that I could even pose such questions to myself.
I read the entirety of the book in close to a month, then read it again.
I tried to content myself with my household tasks and the time I enjoyed with Blossom, but ... it was no longer enough. Evening Rose had awakened in me a thirst for knowledge, a thirst I was hard-pressed to quench in provincial Pojogae. Father's library consisted entirely of books written in Chinese, which was beyond me, and I was desperate for something new to read. So in the mornings, after Father had finished and discarded his morning paper, I would rescue it from the trash and secretly, eagerly, pore over it. I couldn't decipher the front page, which was largely printed in Chinese characters, but page three was written entirely in hangul and I consumed it greedily. Published in Seoul, the paper was always a week late by the time it reached us, but I still thrilled to read its mix of politics, world news, society gossip, even the advertisements.
In these pages I also encountered occasional mentions of institutions like Ewha Girls' School and the Hansong School for Education. The first schools for Korean girls were founded by American missionaries, but Hansong was a public school and was discussed in the paper in a very matter-of-fact manner. I began to see that things were changing in our country, and that it was not impossible for a girl to receive an education in Korea today. I told myself that my father must have seen these same stories and realized much the same thing. He was an intelligent man, a cultured man, who revered learning as all Koreans did. Perhaps if I impressed upon him my sincere desire for education-if I demonstrated my ability-he might consider allowing me to attend school.
It took me weeks to work up sufficient courage, but one evening after supper I approached him after I had removed his dining table. He was starting to get to his feet when I addressed him-in the appropriate "high" speech form one used to address a male elder-"Honorable Father, may I ask something of you?"
He looked at me in mild surprise. He was used to retiring to his study directly after dinner, but he sat back down. "Very well, then. What is it?"
"Father, I . . ." I took a breath and then let the words escape in a rush: "I would like to attend school."
He looked at me in bafflement.
"Is this a joke?" He laughed. The notion was obviously hilarious.
"No. I wish to learn."
"But you are learning," he said. "You're learning how to become a good wife and daughter-in-law. These are the most important things a girl can know."
"But Honorable Father, girls are going to school in Korea. You've seen the articles in the Dong-A Daily, I'm sure. You must realize-"
"How do you know," he interrupted, "what is in the Dong-A Daily?"
"Because I can read." There: I'd said it. It remained only to demonstrate it. I picked up that morning's paper. I turned to the third page and began reciting first the headlines, then the lead story, the words tumbling from my mouth.
Father was looking at me like a man whose dog had suddenly started speaking Mandarin.
I was about to finish reading the news story when Father erupted to his feet and snatched the paper from my hands.
"How dare you!" he cried, so loudly it made me flinch.
Koreans place a high value on never revealing their emotional state through their facial expressions. Korean men believe that to display emotion is to be seen as frivolous or feminine. So the anger I now saw openly displayed on Father's face was both extraordinary and terrifying.
"How dare you disobey your father's wishes!" he shouted. "What you have done is shameful!"
"No, it's not!" I shot back, bravely but foolishly. "If my brothers can go to school, why can't-"
I never finished. In a fury, Father gave me the back of his hand across my face. I staggered backwards. He lunged forward and struck me again, this time in my left eye, dropping me to the floor.
"A woman without ability is virtuous!" Father shouted down at me. "You are not virtuous! You dishonor your clan!"
My mother rushed in from the kitchen and saw me cowering on the floor. The color drained from her face.
Father yelled, "There is an old proverb: `Women who read become foxes.' And by your deceit you are the proof of it!"
He stepped forward as if to strike me again, but Mother-in the only time I had ever seen her react with such emotion-stepped between us.
"This is not right!" she told Father, voice trembling between anger and fear. "Look at how you've bruised her eye! Is this what a father should do to his daughter? No matter what the girl has done, surely this is punishment enough!"
For a moment I thought he might strike Mother as well, but instead he merely vented his frustrations on the paper he still clenched in his other hand. He balled it up and threw it at me, and I received it gratefully in lieu of another blow. His face regained some of its normal color and composure, and finally, satisfied that he had put me in my place, he stormed out of the room.
Mother knelt by my side. "Daughter, are you all right?" Gently she touched the swelling on my right cheek. "Come, we'll tend to that bruise."
he next morning Father's eyes were cold and cloudy as milk glass as I served him breakfast. I tried not to flinch as I set down his rice gruel and kimchi, as one might leave scraps of food before a crouching tiger. He ate hurriedly and left to deal with some matter of business in town. I told Mother that my eye hurt and I wished to lie down. "Yes, of course, no chores today," she said. But instead I sneaked out of the house and began a long, chilly walk to Taegu.
I had no set plan in mind. Vaguely I thought to somehow get from Taegu to Seoul, where I might be able to apply to a school like Hansong, though I knew this would be difficult without my father's permission. I hoped that Evening Rose might be able to help me ... perhaps loan me enough money to get to Seoul. She would understand, surely, why I left home. Three hours later I was on the steps of the white and blue house beneath the spreading leaves of the paulownia tree.
The door was answered by the blunt-faced older woman I had encountered once before-the housemother, I had learned-and when I asked to see Evening Rose, she looked positively stricken. "Evening Rose is not here," she said stiffly.
"May I wait for her?"
"Evening Rose," she said, "does not live here anymore."
"What do you mean?"
"Stupid girl," the woman snapped, "I mean what I say!" Fearfully she looked up and down the street, then leaned in to me and hissed, "The constables took her! Two weeks ago. They came in the night and they to
ok her! Do you understand now?"
"The police?" I gasped. "But why?"
"Why is the moon white! Stupid girl! She's gone, forget about her!" And like someone chasing a fly from her house, she shut the door in my face.
Three
simply could not accept what I had just heard. Standing there on the porch like a cow stunned for slaughter, I convinced myself that I must have somehow offended my teacher; that for some reason she did not wish to see me, and had sent this old woman to greet me with a lie. As terrible as that would have been, it was infinitely preferable to the alternative. I had to know the truth-had to know that my friend was all right. I ran to the back of the house. I found a window with no moving shadows behind it, tore a hole in the rice paper covering it, and clambered through. I knew the house well enough by now and stole up the stairs without the housemother noticing me. I bid what I hoped was a casual greeting to the girls I passed, then slowed as I came to my teacher's room. I overcame a momentary rush of apprehension and entered.
A woman sat with her back to me at the little vanity table and in a surge of joy I called out to her. But when she turned in her seat I saw that it was not my teacher, but the young woman known as Fragrant Iris.
"Ah," she said softly, recognizing me. "Her student. I wondered if you would come back."
It was a subtly different room I had entered. It held similar furnituresleeping mat, folding screen, vanity table-but the lacquered wall shelves were shorn of books. Now they held only a few knickknacks: an assortment of folding fans, one or two ceramic figures, a white porcelain vase. "What's happened?" I asked. "Where is Evening Rose?"
Fragrant Iris approached me, staring at my bruises. "Child, what happened to you? Are you all right?"
"That doesn't matter. Where is my teacher?"
"I'm sorry to tell you, the police took her," she said sadly.
The words struck me harder than any of my father's blows. "But why?"
"They claimed she was giving money to the independence Army. Who knows if it was true? They came in the middle of the night and they arrested her. It was true enough for them."
Despite my best efforts to rein in my emotion, tears welled in my eyes. "We-we have to help her, somehow."
Iris noted ruefully, "Once, the idea of constables invading the privacy of a woman's room-even a kisaeng's-would have been unthinkable. We have no influence with the Japanese military police as we did with the royal court. But one of Evening Rose's patrons is a government official. We have hopes that he may be able to use his influence to free her ... or at least keep her alive."
These grim last words proved too much for me and I wept. Iris kindly took me in her arms and held me as I sobbed. But my shame at expressing my emotions so freely won out over my grief and I forced myself to stopthough not before attracting the notice of the housemother, who now glared at me from the doorway: "What! You again?"
"Go away, grandmother," Iris said coldly. "This is none of your concern." The old woman muttered darkly under her breath but did move on.
I again took in all the empty shelves. "What happened to her books?"
Iris sighed. "I'm afraid those didn't help her case. When the police saw them-the histories, in particular-they stripped the shelves bare, piled the books in the street, and burned them all."
I could almost smell the smoke, and it made me sick.
"We were fortunate," she said, "they didn't shut the whole house down."
"I want to do something. What can I do?" I asked helplessly.
Fragrant Iris just shook her head.
"There is nothing to be done," she said gently. "Go home. Go back to your village. Pray if you are of a mind to. We have no further recourse."
he walk back to Pojogae took a hundred years. I had ample time to reproach myself for not remaining in Taegu and doing something to help my friend, though I was hard-pressed to think of what a seventeenyear-old country girl could have done to help. But at least my troubles with Father now seemed inconsequential. My absence had not gone undetected by Mother, who had feared, correctly, that I had run away; when she saw me safely home again she was so relieved that she did not think to punish me. More important, she did not tell Father. She had even lied for me: when I missed supper she told him I wasn't feeling well, and he accepted this at face value. When I saw him the next morning I caught him glancing at my swollen, discolored eye and I finally saw a twitch of guilt disturb his stony face. We never spoke again of my ability to read, though he now made a point of carefully disposing of his daily paper after he had finished it. He was thankfully unaware of the copy of LadyUiyudang's book I kept hidden beneath the bottom drawer of the wardrobe chest I shared with Blossom.
I took what comfort I could in the rote exercise of my daily chores-in the chorus of laundry bats at the stream, in sewing with my mother-and in Blossom's sweet presence. After a few weeks of good behavior I asked for and received permission to take her on a "flower picnic" in the hills, where we snacked on jellied soybean slices as we tried to name all the various flowers that were blooming that summer. Blossom correctly identified the Yellow Day Lily, also known as Forget-Your-Troubles; the Mountain Iris, or Servant-ofthe-Rainbow; and a purple-flowered peppermint whose leaves we both tasted approvingly.
But among those she did not know was a long-stemmed flower with a white-and-violet bloom that looked something like an open mouth-on the "tongue" of which were two small white bumps resembling grains of rice. She asked, "What is this? It's so pretty," and I started to tell her, then caught myself.
It was called a Daughter-in-Law Flower, and I knew well the story from which it took its name: Once a long time ago there lived a woman and her daughter-in-law, so poor that the only food they could find were a few cups of unshelled rice. The mother-in-law instructed the girl to hull the rice, then left to search for more food. She returned to find the daughter-in-law chewing something, and when she demanded to know what she was eating, the girl admitted it was two small grains of rice which had fallen to the ground-and she stuck out her tongue to show her. Furious, the mother-in-law choked the girl to death. Later, a green shoot sprouted from the daughter-in-law's grave, becoming this flower which bloomed in her memory.
"I don't know this one," I lied, and quickly moved on to another.
I saw in the Daughter-in-Law Flower more than just Blossom's future, of course; I also saw my own. In its open mouth I divined endless days and nights trapped in the inner Room, a lifetime of servitude to a husband and mother-in-law. I told myself that this was no less than what I had been facing a year ago, and back then I had even fretted about whether I would find a husband or end up like poor Aunt Obedience, childless and reviled. I told myself to forget about school: I would never know more than I knew now, and that was the end of it.
There is a uniquely Korean emotion known as han-one of the fundamental aspects, it is said, of our psychology. It is a kind of fatalistic acceptance of defeat and suffering, a despairing resignation to one's lot in life. Korean women particularly understand han, but it is also rooted in the Korean people's history and our nation's endurance of many trials and misfortunes over the centuries. Yet we do endure, have endured, will endure-and from that we derive the fortitude to go on, to continue the struggle even if our efforts be doomed.
So even as I told myself, I will never know more than I know now, my sense of han gave me the strength to endure what lay ahead of me-and that strength gave me the courage to challenge it.
week later, after telling Mother I was going to spend the afternoon sewing with Sunny in her family's inner Room, my friend and I instead found ourselves sitting on a straw mat in the home of a ke-man, a matchmaker, named Mrs. Kim-a smiling, grandmotherly woman in her sixties, who came recommended by the American missionaries at the Methodist church. Her manner was at once maternal and businesslike: "You know how hard life can be in Korea," she told us, "so it should come as no surprise when I tell you that some fifteen hundred Korean gentlemen are today living in a place calle
d Hawai'i-a lush and fertile group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean-which is a part of America.
"Many of these men journeyed there as bachelors and have since become wealthy and prosperous, but they have a problem. There are not enough Korean women there for everyone to marry, and most will not consider marrying non-Koreans. So, what to do?" She gazed earnestly at us, as though this dilemma had kept her awake nights. "Well, it's my business to help these lonely men find wives. I consider it a patriotic duty, aiding Koreans who are far from home and in a bad way. I'm proud to say that I've signed up nearly two dozen young women from Kyongsang-do, and they are all now happily married women in Hawai'i."
"What sort of a place is this Hawai'i?" I asked.
"Oh, a beautiful land," Mrs. Kim said with enthusiasm. "A tropical paradise, where food grows so abundantly that if one is hungry, all one needs to do is reach up and pick something off a tree to eat! Money is scarcely needed to live, so it can be sent back to one's family in Korea. The Chun clan has recently been receiving lavish gifts of food and clothing sent by their eldest daughter, now married to a wealthy businessman in Honolulu."
"But how would we get there?" Sunny said. "It sounds very far."
"It is, but it's only nine days' travel by steamship. Your fare will be paid by your fiance. He will also send you two hundred yen-one hundred American dollars-which you may use for spending money or give to your family."
Two hundred yen! Sunny's eyes popped. What Mrs. Kim was proposing, of course, was not so very different from what went on in Korea every day. If one's parents could not find their son or daughter a suitable spouse, they might easily engage the services of a marriage broker; few Korean women married men they actually knew before the wedding. "So we would see these men for the first time when we arrive in Hawai'i?" I asked.
"Not at all," Mrs. Kim replied. "In fact, you may see them right now." She reached into an envelope and took out a handful of photographs of solemn-faced young Korean men. She laid them down on the table one by one, like cards in a Tarot deck presaging our futures.