Comfort Woman (31 page)

The second type of clippings: the burial nails her mother pared from her fingers too soon.

When she arrived in Sulsulham to marry a man she had never seen, someone that had not even been picked out by a matchmaker, who at least would have ensured that their Four Pillars—the year, month, day, and hour of their birth charts—were well aligned, my mother felt her life was over. She was so alone that she knew she could cry forever and never again would there be anyone to comfort her.

My mother did not make her yonae love match, nor did she receive a chungmae, an arranged match, complete with the ceremonial exchange of gifts and celebration. When she arrived in the dust and dead of night, my mother was rushed to her future husband's home. She did not have time to wash or eat or change into her own mother's red-and-blue wedding dress, a dress that should have come as a gift from the groom. She had time only to listen to her future parents' lecture: Marriage is not about love but about duty. About having sons. About keeping the family name. My mother bowed twice to her new in-laws and was married by morning.

My mother never heard her name again.

When I was a child, my father would call her anae, wife, and the village ahjimas would mostly call her by my father's name, Kim Uk. Or sometimes ttal omoni, the mother of daughters. Only when the time came to bury her did my sisters and I even wonder what name my mother was born with. In the end, we merely carved Omoni, mother, into the sixth plank of her coffin, the one that faced the sky.

My mother died just before winter, during the kimchee-making time. Our family had harvested the cabbage and turnips from our field and were preparing to wash and salt them. My sisters and I had finished our day chores, and our mother had just rolled out the ceramic jars, each as high as her hip, that we would place the salted vegetables in overnight, when she began to complain about how tired she was. Still, she wrung the dripping, salted cabbage until her wrinkled hands stung from the brine. When all the jars were packed tight, my mother rinsed her hands in a bucket of clear river water and went to lie down.

My sisters took that as the sign to prepare the back room for the night and went to spread out our sleeping mats. Instead of joining them, I went to our mother. Mother, would you like some water, some soup, a massage? I asked her, hoping to trade my service for a story. Want me to pull your white hairs?

My mother touched her hands to my lips, then sighed, a long, tired exhalation, as if to shush me, but I knew from the way her eyes closed, lashes sealed against her blue-tinged skin. I put a blanket over her, as if she were only asleep. In Korea, whenever someone died, the oldest son took the dead person's coat up to the roof and invited the spirit to return to the house to feast and prepare for the long journey to heaven. Instead of getting her coat, I, her youngest daughter, went to her special box and pulled out her red-and-blue wedding dress.

I climbed onto the roof, sliding across thatching made slick with ice, and stayed there most of the night, holding her dress open to the wind until my body ached from the weight of the silk and from the cold bite of the stars. I waited on the roof, holding my omoni's dress in the bitter night air, calling for her spirit to come back, calling, Come back, Mother, come back, until finally, after a sudden blast of wind almost knocked me from my perch, I folded the arms of her dress into myself and knew I held nothing.

On the twenty-second anniversary of my mother's death, I try to think of what I will tell my daughter about her grandmother, and I remember the box. In her special box, my mother kept treasures for times other than the present, among them: fingernails and newspaper articles; a red-and-blue wedding dress; gold thread that she was forever saving to sew her first son‘s, then later her first grandson's, birthday coat; the fine hemp cloth with which she wanted, but would never have the time, to stitch her own shroud.

As I prepare the chesa—laying out the table with my mother's favorite foods, with wine, with a set of chopsticks and spoons for the members of my family, dead and alive, who will never eat from them—my daughter screams her displeasure from the crib she will not sleep in.

My husband has tried to put her in it for the night, but each time she whimpers, I jump to her side. I do not want her to feel the bite of loneliness, to feel she has been abandoned. When I leave her in her basket to take a shower or do the laundry, I hear her frantic screams in the running of the water; yet when I run to check on her, I find her quietly contemplating her hands or toes.

And each night, after my husband has fallen asleep in exasperation, I bring my baby to my bed, where we sleep, cocooned. The milk from my breasts fills her as she sucks from them even in her dreams; and the warmth of her solid body, the gentle waves of her breathing, soothe my own hunger.

Now, as her cries subside into soft hiccuping chirps, I wrap my daughter into a towel, tie her onto my back, and prepare to introduce her to her grandmother. I pour the scorched rice tea and, bowing twice, present it to Induk's spirit in gratitude, to my oldest sister's spirit—wherever she is—in forgiveness, and finally to my mother's spirit in love.

While I sip, I try to think of the words to a prayer I can offer for my mother. I cannot. Instead I will tell my daughter a story about her grandmother. I sift through memory, and this is what I say: She was a princess. She was a student. She was a revolutionary. She was a wife who knew her duty. And a mother who loved her daughters, but not enough to stay or to take them with her.

I will tell my daughter these things, and about the box that kept my mother's past and future, and though she will never know her grandmother's name, she will know who her grandmother is.

Later, perhaps, when she is older, she will sift through her own memories, and through the box that I will leave for her, and come to know her own mother—and then herself as well.

In the box I hold for my daughter, I keep the treasures of my present life: my daughter's one-hundred-day dress, which we will also use for her first birthday; a lock of her reddish-brown hair; the dried stump of her umbilical cord. And a thin black cassette tape that will, eventually, preserve a few of the pieces, the secrets, of our lives. I start with our names, my true name and hers: Soon Hyo and Bek-hap. I speak for the time when I leave my daughter, so that when I die, she will hear my name and know that when she cries, she will never be alone.

According to my mother, the rituals that accompanied the major transitions in a woman's life—birth, puberty, childbirth, and death—involved the flow of blood and the freeing of the spirit. Slipping out of the body along pathways forged by blood, the spirit traveled and roamed free, giving the body permission to transform itself. Necessary but dangerous, these were times when the spirit could spin away forever, lost and aimless, severed from the body.

“This is the blood of a lost spirit,” my mother told me when I first noticed the bloodied pad she unfolded from her panties each month. “Every once in a while a woman opens her mouth and a wandering spirit tries to take her body. I'm just spitting it out.”

“What? How?” I mumbled, afraid to open my mouth.

“When women are forced to bleed, we have to take care to bind our spirits to us, or they will get confused and wander away. Ejected from our bodies, the spirit flows out on the river of blood, losing its name and its place. Sometimes that
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spirit will try to invade another woman's body—maybe one that reminds them of the body they left behind. Sometimes they will catch a seed in a woman's body and be born again, but most times they will die. See? Like this one.” My mother ripped the sticky pad from her panties, rolled it into a wad of toilet paper, and dropped it in the trash.

“Will that ever happen to me?” I asked, unsure if I was referring to losing my spirit or bleeding out a stray.