Comfort Woman (20 page)

Because of that tae-mong, the first birth dream, I knew my baby was a boy. I was so sure of this, I told my husband. See, fire and dragon and sun, I said, all yang. And salt, really good luck because it's so valuable. I am having a boy.

He told me he had not heard such superstitious nonsense since leaving Korea. Didn't he teach me to leave all that behind, to give it up for the Lord? Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

But still, underneath the words of disapproval, I read the pleasure and the pride in his eyes.

Consequently we were both surprised when we saw the baby's genitals. I remember how hazy everything looked to me, how the faces of the doctor and the nurses blurred until they turned into those of Induk, my mother, my sisters. When they held my baby up to me, I remember first thinking: Oh no, something is wrong with his jajie—where is it? And then I realized I had a daughter and knew a fierce joy, more awesome because of its unexpectedness.

This baby was for me, mine, not my husband's son but my daughter.

I still feel that joy as if it were brand-new, so hot that it hurts, burning blue-white and brilliant, sharp as a dragon's teeth.

Like my mother, my daughter was born in the month of the dog. Fierce, loyal, bold, and fearless. If we were in Korea, and if I had married a Korean, I am sure my husband's father would have insisted on a name to counteract these traits, to inject meekness into the dominant natures of those animal signs.

I asked my husband to pick an American name that is very strong, one that will protect her throughout her life.

It does not matter that I cannot pronounce Roh-beccu.

I will call her Bek-hap, the lily, purest white. Blooming in the boundary between Korea and America, between life and death, this child, with the tendril of her body, keeps me from crossing over and roots me to this earth.

Watching my daughter sleep, arms and legs flung wide, her body like a star, I find myself fighting both overwhelming joy and overwhelming grief. I lightly touch each fold in her fat baby arms, stroke her wrists and fingers. I lift her hands to my face, inhaling her sweet, sweaty baby smell, and I know in that moment how much my own mother must have loved me—more than anything in this world or in heaven, including God.

I wonder if my own mother ever dreamed dreams so filled with yang that they could only mean sons, and I wonder whether she was happy or disappointed when yet another daughter emerged from between her legs. Did she feel betrayed by her night visions, by the signs, by Samshin Halmoni, the grandmother spirit who takes care of babies and mothers? I know my mother and father would have made the appropriate offerings in hopes of a male infant.

Maybe by the fourth daughter, she could not feel the love that I now feel, all maternal instincts diluted with the disappointing birth of each successive child, all girls. Maybe by the time I was born, my parents had no need to pretend unhappiness to placate jealous spirits. There would have been no need to think of protective, misleading nicknames like Dog's Dung or Straw Bag or Rockhead, because the truth, announced by the kumjul of pine branches and charcoal hung across our gate, would have been demeaning enough: one more girl for the mountain Kims.

I was born on the fourteenth day of the first month, the day before the first full moon of the year, and so it was doubly unfortunate that I was born a girl. Women in Korea take special care not to go visiting the day before the first full moon of the year, since bad luck will enter with them and stay for the year; because of me, a wrong-sexed baby arriving on an inauspicious day, bad luck moved in and became part of the family.

Because of me, my oldest sister always reminded me, our family could not participate in what was to be the last full-moon celebration in our village; before the year was out, the Japanese soldiers arrived to enforce the Emperor's edict banning Korean holidays.

We all had to sit around and look at you, all crinkly red and ugly, she used to say, while outside we could hear nuts and fire-crackers exploding in the bonfire, scaring away demons, wild animals, and mosquitoes into the next year.

Oldest sister was especially bitter, because that was the first year she had helped to weave the rope to be used in the male-female tug-of-war contest. She had even planned to position herself near the front—if not at the very front—of the rope so all the boys could see her; in this way she'd planned to lure a future husband and pull him to her side. She mentioned this every year until the year our parents died and she betrayed me, paying me back.

Because I was the youngest and she was the oldest, my sister loved to torment me. The other two, second and third sisters, teased me too, but their taunts held no malice. They were just like little birds chirping out whatever words oldest sister fed them. They had each other and were happy, not having to worry about the responsibilities of oldest sister while at the same time having someone to order to refill the rice or water bowls.

Oldest sister, though, snapped at me out of anger. She was old enough to realize I should have been a boy. She was old enough to have traveled with my mother to Samshin Halmoni's shrine and old enough to pray. She was old enough to understand what my parents wished for and what the villagers would have celebrated.

If you were a boy, she used to tell me, we would have had a hundred-day party for you. We would have dressed you in a crown and a rainbow-sleeved hanbok as if it were New Year's or Harvest Day. We would have made a feast, with special red-and-black bean cake sprinkled with honey to show how much we loved you, if you were a boy.

I want my own child to know that I gave her a hundred-day celebration, that I love her and thank the spirits for her health, even though she is not a boy and not in Korea. Or perhaps I celebrate because she is a girl, an American girl.

I sew her hanbok and crown out of the best satin on sale at Sears. I make special red bean cake topped with white sugar and place it at the four compass points in the house, to bar disaster and welcome happiness. And I prepare enough rice cake for one hundred people to ensure her a long life, even though I do not know one hundred people to invite to the party.