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The wind, for instance. I don’t remember it having so many shades of sound.
“Sometimes I just can’t stop thinking about how ugly she is. I mean, why doesn’t she just get surgery? Why? I really don’t understand ugly people. Especially if they have money. Are they stupid?” She studies herself in the mirror, tilting her head to the side until I right it again. “Are they perverted?”
IN THE HOSPITAL, all I can do is hold Sujin’s hand while she weeps silently, just her eyelashes and nose and lips visible in her bandaged head.
Sometimes they would leave their front door wide open to air out their apartment and I would see them lounging around in their pajamas, Pale Face playing with Square Face’s hair as they dozed watching dramas. “Like sisters,” I caught myself thinking in a melancholy way.
“Isn’t that why you suffered so much pain with your surgery?” she says, stabbing her finger into my cheek. “What is the point of having a beautiful face if you don’t know how to use it?”
EVEN AS A GIRL, I knew the only chance I had was to change my face. When I looked into the mirror, I knew everything in it had to change, even before a fortune-teller told me so.
I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.
I married him because I was tired and it was already too late for me, even though I was still so young.
But the best is when I hear them knocking on each other’s doors to borrow makeup or order fried chicken together at strange hours of the day.
I sit on the stoop and watch passersby. During the day ours is an ugly street, washed out and dusty with trash piled up and cars honking and trying to park in odd corners, but at night, the bars light up brilliantly with neon signs and flashing televisions. In the summer, they set up blue plastic tables and stools outside and I can hear parts of people’s conversations as they drink.
But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.
If things went really well, I would also take her to the stationery store next to the market, where the neighborhood children gathered to play on the benches out front. I imagined them whispering to each other about how pretty and interesting she was, Wonna’s cousin, the girl from America. These were the daydreams I had in those days.
“When the boy is born, the daughter is cold rice anyway,” she said. “Time to throw away.”
There is something about happy people—their eyes are clear and their shoulders hang lower on their bodies.
“This isn’t America,” my grandmother said in a steely voice. “There are no madmen with guns. The children will be fine.”
When we finally reached the church garden, I could have cried with relief. My small plot was in the far corner, right on the stream bank, and I had spent the entire summer making it into an orderly vision of beauty, with geometrically strung cucumbers and green peppers and squash.
“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”
I looked behind me as the door closed and Ruby was laying her head against Hanbin’s chest as he put his arms around her. They looked so peaceful and complete and so utterly content that I stood transfixed until the door slowly shut. I never saw them touch again.
But for now, I can’t help it, I cannot stop going down this path, even though I know the wreckage that it will leave of my heart. All of this—Hanbin, my job, my frenzied productivity—is very temporary, I know. All I can offer her is proof she haunts me still, every day.
I love hearing his voice on my phone. And I love that it doesn’t matter that I can’t say anything back.
Because I know there isn’t anything that can change her except time and inevitable misfortune. Those girls I used to roam with, they all live with despair now, I can tell you that.
He doesn’t know, though, that I’ve started racking up debts again because of my recent touch-up surgeries. They’re just small ones here and there but they add up. I’ve decided not to tell him. He thinks I am going to school to become a teacher. He is so proud of how he has changed my life, and often, his eyes water when he looks at me. He loves the story that he saved me.
It still amazes me—the naïveté of the women of this country. Especially the wives. What, exactly, do they think their men do between the hours of 8 p.m. and midnight every weeknight? Who do they think keeps these thousands of room salons flush with money? And even the ones that do know—they pretend to be blind to the fact that their husbands pick out a different girl to fuck every week. They pretend so deeply that they actually forget.
“I don’t know, sometimes I think I know men, and then I think I can’t understand them at all,” I say.
AT KARAOKE, Hanbin’s friends join us and things get fun real fast. They are both yoohaksaeng—rich kids who studied in America for high school and college. I like yoohaksaeng because they tend to be more experimental with sexual positions because they’ve watched a lot of American porn.
“You know, this is the first time I’ve slept with someone who isn’t a customer,” she says hesitantly, after she takes a gulp. “But it’s kind of all a dream, like I am watching it happen on TV or something. I mean, I know it’s happening but I can’t really wake up.”
Who knows? Maybe someone will marry me if I move there. A foreign man who will think I was born beautiful, because he cannot tell the difference.
So I am sitting in a bakery café on Garosugil, gloriously alone, biting into a buttery almond croissant and flicking crumbs off a scarf I just bought at the boutique on the corner. I don’t know what possessed me to buy this scarf—we are so strapped for money as it is—but it’s been a while since I bought anything and it looked so chic on the mannequin in the window.
I don’t want anything to do with boys—I just want a tiny little girl, to dress up in soft, chic beige and pink and gray dresses and bounce in my lap. I wouldn’t get one of those top-heavy strollers but a sturdy one with a big basket on the bottom for when I’d go grocery shopping with her to make her baby food. All-organic porridge with a little bit of meat and mushrooms and beans and carrots. No salt or sugar until she’s at least two. Definitely no cookies or juice or television.
Then perhaps I would have been as free as they are. I would love to be on my own, living with a roommate, ordering noodles at 2 a.m., waking up deliciously alone, with no one to ask what my plan is for the day.
She wanted to become a doctor, she said. But I think that’s because it was the only job we knew of at the time that made any money.
I was still not used to the interiors of this world—that of the wealthy Koreans in America. The strange, lavish use of colors in this apartment bewildered and overwhelmed me. Even the scent was heavy and unusual—like burnt roots mixed with flowers and spices. I had never smelled anything like it before, but it was expensive, I could divine that immediately.
“You’re so normal too,” he added. I frowned uncertainly. “What does that mean?” I asked. He sounded as if he wanted to be congratulated for this observation. “I don’t know, I feel like I would be all kinds of messed up if I’d had to go through what you went through—no offense,” he said quickly.
I was still learning the appropriate levels of reaction in this world. Things I should not express shock or delight at. Things I should be overjoyed about. I was not supposed to be amazed by the unusual beauty of the apartment, but thick-crust pizza called for riots.
IT WAS SO SMALL that it felt like everyone in town knew us: the Loring Center kids. Orphaned, disabled, or delinquent. Our abandonment scared people, as if it might be contagious.
I laughed a little for no reason at all and was leaning against him. This was exhilarating, this soft sofa, the books that surrounded us, his warmth through his sweater. My cheeks were warm from the alcohol, and the hip-hop music that had been too loud when I was downstairs seemed low and soothing now. I had no idea where to leap from here, but I was wildly content.
“All the girls in the blogs had their swelling go down so much faster. It’s been more than two months! This really isn’t normal, is it? I should call Dr. Shim, right? Don’t you think so, Ara? And I keep hearing a clicking sound in my jaw when I walk. That cannot be normal or they would have told me at the hospital, right?”
I know it will fade by next week, but for now it makes me happy, as if I have set off a signal to the world.
When I was young, it had seemed to me that the rest of the world was compressed into this bus station, the people with the quicker steps and large travel bags heading for darkly glamorous lives.
“It’s kind of eerie how it’s stayed exactly the same,” Sujin says, gesturing around her. “I feel like I’m in middle school again. Your mother made these, right? You used to bring them to school.” Sujin pushes the plate toward me but I shake my head. Even as a child, I could see only how much work and cleanup they involved, and I did not like to eat them.
“No matter how dark things get for me, the memory that I saved a life—that my life has mattered—has been something I can cling to,” he says with a catch in his voice. “It is, perhaps, the only lifeline that I possess. And I am so grateful that I can tell you this. What your life means to your parents—you will realize it one day, when you have your own children.”
each of us grasping at our own shifting versions of the past.
Kyuri also suffers from persecution mania. This is entirely my own and secret opinion. She sees herself as the victim—of men, of the room salon industry, of Korean society, of the government.
am spoon-feeding the muse that lives in a well deep inside of my brain—hearing Kyuri’s stories, watching her drink to oblivion every weekend, obsessing over her face and her body and her clothes and her bags. I take photos of her and her things whenever I can. I will need them to remember her by.
and when we were entwined it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
“Do you know how much of a dilemma I face every day? Whenever I see you, I am trying to ascertain what I think needs more protecting—your future, your idealism, your misplaced faith.”
You will have things I did not when I was growing up—like cherished photographs and birthday cakes and days spent at the beach.
“You have to grow up with parents whose lives become better as time goes by, so you learn that you must invest effort for life to improve. But if you grow up around people whose situations become worse as time goes on, then you think that you have to just live for today. And when I ask young people, What about the future? What will you do when the future comes and you have spent everything already? they say they will just die. And that is why Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world.”
I know I will not get this job—nothing in this life is this easy. But as long as I am trying, doesn’t that mean something?
The raindrops keep falling, more thickly now. So we all stand up to make our way upstairs together, as the sky starts crackling, taking aim at each of us and the drunk men stumbling by.