Drifting House (24 page)

When her teacher goes to the desk for the rod reserved for boys, Mina flicks her tongue out at Hana; it is covered in purple ink.

Junho comes and goes to school at will. Sometimes he leaves in the middle of class for a glass of water or returns with a snack. Some say he works several ­part-time jobs to help his family, since the
government ignores the war veterans, for hadn’t they volunteered and accepted American dollar bills? My mother said the war never happened, Junho says, but it’s still happening to me, then hits the wall with his knuckle. Still, the teachers pretend not to see and do not wield their rulers or bats. How can they, when he has grown facial hair since the sixth grade? When he does not care what happens to him?

After school he snatches taffy out of children’s mittened hands. Late at night he hauls crate after crate of canned drinks, gulps
soju
from the bottle. He sits and stares at the moon. He watches the sun rise with his eyes closed until his father finds him and drags his son indoors.

Yet another night when Mina’s mother is still not home, the shadows look like ­twenty-foot mountain rabbits with bristly fur and incisors the size of doors. You’re not even tigers, Mina says, feeling five years old again. She could flash as many teeth as she can, and kick them in their swollen rabbit stomachs. Instead she thinks about Junho.

Finally Mrs. Lim returns from a dinner held by a foreign church congregation member and dispels the shadows. Her hair is spiraled up like a western staircase, her face is as smooth as a Korean radish. Her hourglass figure is shrouded in a black wool coat. She holds her hands up helplessly and says, The only one who wants to marry me is Jesus.

What’s so great about marriage? Mina says. Her hand aches as
she pushes away a jar of peanut butter and reaches for her mother, a beauty that Mina cannot believe does not mean more to the world. But her mother says, Don’t touch me!

Mina hides behind her palms as her mother tosses her purse across the room. Copper coins twirl across the floor, do their dance, then tinkle to a halting stop. Her mother says, I’m a mother with child. There will never be new beginnings for me. Do you understand that?

Her mother’s gasping fish face, its terrible need for oxygen, makes Mina feel cold. Her body shivers with hurt. Her mother wants pity, but for once Mina cannot speak. She hides behind the peanut butter and stares into its terrain: plateaus, cliffs and craters, an endless, treacherous desert. She swirls her finger in, sucks on its creaminess. The sweetness explodes in her mouth. The kitchen light above is how she imagines the eye of God. Stickiness stitches her mouth together and holds in the anger and the sadness, as she waits for her mother to love her again.

Somewhere, fathers are bankers and mothers shuttle their kids to the sea. But here, boys blow up a frog to see how many pieces are created. There is camaraderie in robbing small shops at knifepoint. An actress makes love to an amorous producer on the set, while a few respectful yards away, the staff waits; a few blocks away, a real estate agent advises sons and daughters on how to confiscate their parents’ property. North Korea hijacks a plane. Men beat up their wives, their wives beat their children, the children beat their friends, and they all help Mina fall asleep to
their nightly music. But even here, in the crowded subway, a boy sits on his friend’s lap, a Buddhist monk makes music tapping on a gourd, a coin is found on the street, the dried pollack cart man sells his day’s stock early, a couple touch each other all night long and forget to sleep, an elderly woman plants red peppers to make kimchi, and
Haam!
Haam!
the groom’s friends cry, as they wind through the chilly alleys carrying a ­pearl-inlaid chest with coarse silk, coats, and jewelry for the bride’s family. Children play jacks with stones warmed by the sun, and everywhere there is the pungency of
bbeondaegi
and
soondae,
there is decency, there is hap­piness.

Mina visits Itaewon, where the American military men drink with paid women. Behind a large black man in green fatigues, she imitates his walk, imagines what it must be like to be his daughter. Her feet are so heavy with sadness that when he turns around and sees her peeking from a furry hat, she cannot turn away. He smiles, even laughs, and speaks babble in a friendly voice before he returns to his friends. She wants to say, My father who’s not my father, they say he’s dead in Vietnam, but there’s no proof. But she no longer knows the right words.

All winter they have waited for spring, but now that it is here, the yellow cloud of Gobi Desert dust still mists windshields and makes everyone strangers to their own faces. Nineteen ­seventy-six is the season of freedom, as Mina’s mother leaves for days at a time to be
with a male friend. The season of beginnings and of ends, as dictator cum president Park ­Chung-hee mourns his wife killed one year ago by a bullet meant for him. It is a time of protest poetry, of Hana’s notes to Mina saturated in purple and yellow ink, of air fragrant with cherry blossoms, of miniskirts that have the police racing for rulers, and of fresh octopus still writhing on ice and
soju
by the river in the ­all-night hum of covered drinking tents. It is a time when North Korea’s tunnels dug into the South are discovered, and South Korean fishermen are kidnapped by agents from the North to study how the culture of their southern enemies was changing. And red is everywhere, in the raids the police make to uncover communists, in late girls squirming in the stink of their first bloodied cloth napkins, in Mina’s cheeks when the teacher reads out the students’ ranking, from the first, to Hana, who is second, down to Mina’s name, which follows the ­sixty-one other classmates in grade seven. Mina had stayed up the night before the first day of exams waiting for her mother’s return from a prayer retreat, so had fallen asleep during the test. Now she stoically takes a public beating in front of the class. No one’s remembered for getting good grades, she says cheerfully, leaning against Hana as she hobbles out of class. Besides, someone has to be last.

At last Junho gives in to the new boy’s wishes. In an alley yards away from the school they circle. Circling, the school’s best reluctant fighter and the one ignorant enough to challenge him. Junho’s feline eyes, his skinny grace, give new boys false confidence. Junho squints into the sun just above the blue roof tiles; he tenderly
plucks a sprig of purple daisies growing from a crack in a wall. Hold this, he says, and rests it on an underling’s attending palm.