Fox Girl (7 page)

When I nodded, angry at her for laughing at me again, Pushy Lady said, “Oh don't be so serious. It's no big deal, really. I been there before. Lots of us have and most of us come home quickly. In fact, Mi Ok has to go there to get herself fixed up.”

I thought about it, then asked, “The Monkey House is like a hospital?”

“You could say that,” Pushy Lady chuckled. “For certain kinds of sicknesses.”

“How can we get there?” Sookie asked.

“Easy,” Pushy Lady joked. “They'll take you up to the front gate in a truck if you fail the exam. And really, who can pass it all the time—not every Joe-san is going to agree to wear protection.”

“How can we get there if we don't ride the government truck?” I said, irritated with Pushy Lady not only for laughing at me, not only for not telling us what we needed to know, but also for not offering us any of her food. That was rude, and I was hungry.

Pushy Lady took another bite of the
kimbap
before she answered. “The train to Seoul passes near the Monkey House. Get off at Pusanjin-gu and walk toward mountains. You still have to do a bit of walking to get there.” She picked at a bit of seaweed lodged in her teeth. “Really, I think you girls should just go home and wait. Your
omoni
will be home soon as she can.”

“Thank you, Auntie,” Sookie said, but I turned away without saying anything to Pushy Lady.

“Let's go, Sookie,” I sniffed as I took her hand. “Come to my house for lunch. Maybe we can make our own
kimbap.
”

Once again Pushy Lady found me hilarious. I could hear her big-mouth, ear-cracking cackles as we stomped away, but at that point I cared more about my stomach than my pride. When I think about how hungry I thought I was that day, after having missed just one meal, I feel ashamed. Because I never once worried about the hunger Sookie must have felt when—day after day, week after week—her mother failed to return.

While her mother was in the Monkey House, I still saw Sookie every day, but somehow I learned
not
to see her as well. It was difficult, at first, to pretend that things were normal for her. Then, perhaps because pretending so relentlessly begins to blur the distinction between invention and reality, it became easy to believe things were normal. Practice formed a new pattern, a new way of seeing.

In avoiding her mother's absence, I became adept at ignoring the obvious regarding Sookie. I stopped noticing how pale and gaunt she became, how circles blackened her eyes, how her hair—wild and uncombed—inched past the approved school length. I forgot what she was supposed to look like.

It became normal for me to bring her her breakfast before school. A ball of rice wrapped in seaweed. Shreds of dried squid. Half a pig's foot. A handful of nuts or grapes. A few pieces of
yot
. Little things that I could hide in my book bag. “Here,” I would tell her each morning as I handed her my leftover dinner, “now give me my homework.” And Sookie would dutifully pass me the art or history assignments she had completed for me in trade.

My father, who prepared breakfast before opening the store, began serving me the largest portions of rice to eat with the previous night's leftovers. Sometimes he'd boil two eggs, telling me to eat one at the table and the other on the way to school. “She's growing,” he'd say in response to my mother's glare. He knew, I now think, that I smuggled food to Sookie.

Looking back, I have to believe my mother also knew, but said nothing. The day Sookie and I returned from Clinic No. 5, I had asked my parents if she could stay with us until her mother returned from the Monkey House.

My mother slapped my face. “Don't ever let me hear you speak of that place again.”

“Stop,
anae.
” My father grabbed my mother's hand. When she tried to slap him with her free hand, he pinned her arms against her sides. I had never seen my parents embrace before. Without glancing at me my father said, “Leave, Hyun Jin. Your mother and I need to speak privately.”

I ran outside, scurrying around the back of the house, where I squatted underneath the window of the rear sleeping room. Though they tried not to raise their voices, I caught fragments of what they said:

My father's rumbling voice: “I promised . . .” countered by the sharp whip of my mother's: “She is no better than she has to be.”

Their alternating voices, the low and the high, crisscrossed:

“I knew her as a girl—” my father began.

“That's the problem,” interrupted my mother.

“She wasn't always—” my father started again.

“Yes, she was,” my mother insisted. “It's in the blood. Everyone's life is mapped from the moment of birth.”

My father's voice dropped, but I thought he said something about parents and choices, to which my mother—inexplicably to me at the time—said: “That's why you have to be strong with Hyun Jin.”

Hearing my name, I jumped away from the window. I thought that somehow my mother knew I was eavesdropping, that her anger had eyes that could see my heart. I almost begged for forgiveness, but when I realized that she was still speaking with my father, I ran away instead. I was too relieved to wonder why my mother mentioned me in the first place.

What I didn't have to wonder about, what was clear from what I had heard, was that Sookie would not be allowed to stay with my family. My father had no power against my mother. And though she did not expressly forbid me from playing with her, I knew my mother never approved of my friendship with Sookie. Whenever I mentioned Sookie—what she said in school, how she had laughed when we played seesaw or
salgunori,
what American treat she had given me—my mother, her face pinched, would spit out, “It's in the blood.” Then she would turn on me.

Eventually, I learned not to speak about Sookie because when I did, nothing I did pleased my mother. The fruit I sliced for the
yot
was too thick, she would complain, pushing my hand away as she grabbed for the knife to rechop what I had already done. In tempo with the downward strokes, she muttered, “Like this, like this, like this! How easy!” louder and louder, the knife slashing—quick and violent—killing the fruit, splattering its meat across the floor.

Or the
mandoo
I folded looked like a closed fist instead of a half-moon with edges pinched into delicate dimples. Or the way I swept was unlucky, scaring up clouds of dust demons. Once when I had tried appeasing her by fixing my hair like hers and saying, “I hope I look like you when I grow up,
Omoni,
” she slapped me on my stained cheek as if to emphasize my imperfection. Because of my deformity, that slap said, I could never hope to be anything but ugly.

“You will never look like me,” she spat as I cringed under her open hand. “Blood will always tell.”

 

In a way, though, Sookie did move in with us. Something like her shadow breathed through the empty spaces of our home. Her presence was felt in the absence of small foodstuffs, in the secrets and suspicions left unsaid, in the guilt that caused my father to boil eggs two at a time.

At night the shadow of Sookie entered my dreams. Sometimes I dreamed Sookie was far ahead of me on a deserted wooded path. Dark-leaved trees bent toward me with gnarled, flexing fingers. Embedded in their trunks, faces grimaced, carving the air with wooden howls. “Sookie!” I would shriek. “Wait!”

She'd stop, her back to me, until I was just a few feet behind her. Then I'd hear her panting, and it was the panting of a fox. Her shoulders heaved, bucking with the force of her gasps and I knew that if I touched her, she'd turn, and her face would be the face of a green-eyed fox girl with bloody, pointed teeth ready to take a bite. In my dream I stood frozen, poised just behind her, unable to touch her, unable to run away, riveted by the sound of her breathing.

Sometimes her breathing became the gasps I heard the day Sookie had hyperventilated at Dr. Pak's Love Clinic No. 5. With each inhalation, the space around us grew smaller. Like the fox who drains the blood of her victims, Sookie sucked and sucked, stealing the air from my body. Her wheezing grew louder, the forest darker, the air thicker yet more fragile in my own lungs. I fought the fox girl for each breath, struggling in my sleep until I woke to the sound of my own harsh choking.

One morning, alarmed by my struggles to breathe, my mother decided to take me to her
hanyak-chesa,
reasoning that the herbalist would be able to pinpoint the reason for my weakening system. Gripping my elbow, she propelled me through America Town, down the winding alleys in the direction of the bay. Just visible in the hills behind us, nesting like open-beaked birds, loomed the shadowy outlines of the pointy-roofed, double-story houses where the
miguk
officers kept their families.

We marched past several GIs with their club girlfriends, their big meaty arms flung over the women's shoulders, hairy hands cupped around breasts. “Don't watch,” my mother hissed, slapping my jaw.

Obedient, I turned my head away and looked in the other direction. Other GI girls, their loose hair mussed, leaned out of their apartment windows and yelled to the men leaving their rooms. “Hey, Saxy! You be back to see me?” They pursed their reddened lips, blowing kisses into the wind.

My mother walked without taking her eyes off the ground. “I would kill myself before I let the big nose
miguks
touch me.” She shuddered, sidestepping potholes and groping couples as she would piles of dog dung. “Dirty animals.”

I wasn't sure if she was talking about the GIs or the women.

 

Lobetto and Chung Woo, who often crossed Chinatown to play at the train tracks along the pier, would tell stories about our Chinese neighbors, who seemed just as foreign to me as the
miguk
and
gomshi
soldiers. “You can't trust them,” Lobetto once hissed. “The
Chinke
are really bandits who smuggle opium in the linings of their raggedy clothes and pointed hats.”

“Ye, ye,”
Chung Woo added, “and they eat the raw livers of their enemies.”

Lobetto, who always seemed to have something in his mouth, spit his gum at my feet. “You can't make eye contact with them,” he growled, “ 'cause you never can tell what they're thinking. They might think you're the enemy and slice you up.”

When my mother led me past the first bakery with almond cookies, fried dough stuffed with black bean, sticky
gau gee
cake sprinkled with sesame, I knew we had entered Chinatown. I looked for the bandits and opium addicts. To my disappointment, the only remotely mysterious person I spotted was an old woman who wore silver and jade in Buddha-long earlobes. Baskets hooked over her arms, she tottered in and out of the shops that sold firecrackers and beads, dried roots and sugared fruits. Everyone else I saw along the streets and through the shop windows looked ordinary. Korean.

Though my mother visited Chinatown often for ginseng, snake wine, and iris root to bolster what she called the softening of my father's vigor, I could remember, dimly, visiting only once before.

I remember reaching up to hold on to my father's hand, skipping to match his pace, as we wandered past shop windows stocked with the fantastic: jars as tall as I was, filled with what looked like clusters of little white people, limbs entwined, suspended in amber; blood red pigs' heads perched on pointed sticks, their mouths gaping open in silent laughter at some secret porcine joke; snakes hanging by their silvery tails, their fangs open and ready to swallow my eyeballs.

My father and I had entered the store that seemed the most magical of all; its window was a vision from an enchanted forest. Strings of dried-mushroom stars danced across the top of the frame, and from behind a tangle of disembodied antlers that looked like a network of tree branches, a buck stared at me, transfixed. I stared back, and in his liquid eyes, I could also see myself. I knew then, in a moment more of looking, I would become the deer and the deer me.

My father, having finished his business with the herbalist, pulled me away before the transformation could take place. We walked into one of the alleys and up a set of wood stairs that groaned at the weight of our steps. At the top, we pushed open a door decorated with a small painting of one of the little people I saw dancing in a jar of amber water. Tendrils of cigarette smoke spiced with the pungent smells of hot cinnamon and ginger wrapped around us, pulled at our legs like lost and tricky spirits as we waded toward an empty booth.

My father ordered
chat juk
for me and a serving of fruits steeped in wine for himself. After tasting, then spitting out a potent slice of tangerine from my father's bowl, I settled down to sip my sweet rice and pine nut porridge. Before I was through with my treat, a woman emerged from the mist, pulling a girl taller but skinnier than me behind her. The lady stopped by our table, but instead of sliding into the booth with us, she knelt before my father. My father nodded briskly at her bowed head, then pushed an envelope toward her. “This is all I can get right now,” he said.