Honolulu (3 page)

Then one afternoon-during which, I couldn’t help but notice, Blossom braved the wintry cold to carry at least ten buckets of water back and forth from our well-I finished my own chores and entered the inner Court to take what little sun I could find. There I found Blossom, standing silently at the base of the high wall enclosing the courtyard, gazing up wistfully. Her cheeks were chafed red from the chill; her nose was runny. And there was such longing in her eyes as she looked up-at what, I wondered?-that I asked her if anything was wrong.

“Honorable sister-in-law,” she said, “could you help me up to the top of the wall? Just for a minute?”

I was puzzled, but couldn’t bring myself to say no. I overturned a large clay flowerpot, stepped onto it, then reached down and scooped Blossom up in my arms. I gave her the boost she needed to clamber atop the wall, where she settled herself on the ledge and peered intently into a distance I could not see. Curious, I pulled myself up and sat beside her, our legs dangling over the edge of the inner Wall. I followed her gaze across the blue tiled rooftops of the Outer Rooms, but all I saw was the road leading out of Pojogae and into the hills, where dark clouds pressed down on snowy summits.

“Do you see something out there?” I asked.

After a moment she just shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “I just wondered if maybe my papa was coming back for me.”

I had built a wall around her in my mind, but with these few plaintive words it was breached as easily as this wall of stone.

Her father, she told me, had been a well-to-do yangban farmer, until the Japanese took his farm and cast Blossom’s family from their ancestral home. Now penniless, her father went to work as a field laborer, but his pitiful wages were insufficient to feed eight children. Somehow my own father heard of his plight and offered to raise their youngest child as a bride for Goodness of the East. Normally, families of the upper classes would never have resorted to minmyonuri marriage, but circumstances were difficult for both clans. Blossom’s parents had one less mouth to feed and received four yen in paymentabout two American dollars. In return my family received the services of a bride-in-waiting to replace the servant girl we could no longer afford, a virtual slave to the household.

I felt shame for my clan, and guilt when I looked at Blossom.

She spoke of her own family-her parents, five sisters, two brotherswith tenderness, longing, and the fear that she might never see any of them again. I could hardly tell her otherwise; even daughters-in-law wed in the traditional manner seldom saw their birth families again, especially if their new homes were far distant. She began to weep, and without a conscious thought, I took her into my arms, the only comfort I could offer. I held her against me, let her head rest against my breast as she wept, and resolved to myself that from now on I would try to be more than just a sister-in-law to her: I would try to be a sister.

Mother worked Blossom harder than she had ever worked our servant girl, but I helped her with her chores whenever Mother wasn’t looking. When we had free time, we enjoyed board games like go and yut, or played seesaw in the Inner Court. (Legend holds that seesaws became popular with girls because on the upswing they were able to catch a glimpse of the world beyond their cloistered walls.) Since Blossom was so young, there were no rigid restrictions yet on her movements, and this worked to my advantage as well. I would tell Father that Blossom wished to play down by the stream or pick wildflowers on the slopes of the near hills. Father, of course, wouldn’t permit her to go alone and appointed me her escort. I always protested a little for the sake of plausibility, and soon the two of us were free of the stifling sameness of the inner Room for an hour or two.

On New Year’s Day, Blossom and I rose early to help Mother cook the food to be offered to our ancestors on this first day of the Year of the Ox. It was Mother’s responsibility to prepare for these ancestral feasts, up to ten a year, though as females we were not permitted to take part in them. We merely carried in the dining tables and set out the food in the appropriate attitudes-fish on the east side of the table, meat on the west. Joyful Day, as eldest son, poured wine into the ancestors’ wine bowls, laid chopsticks across the plates, and placed spoons for the soup; then, kneeling, he led the ceremony honoring the past four generations of our forebears, as Mother, Blossom, and I listened from the kitchen.

Afterward we ate, each in our own turn. Mother’s New Year’s Soup was always delicious, though there was more rice and dough in it this year than chicken, and no pheasant at all. I drank a bowl of rice wine too quickly and got a little tipsy. Grandmother had several bowls and became quite the cheerful drunk: She was much nicer to be around when half-pickled than sober, calling my mother “dear, dear daughter-in-law” as if she had been possessed by spirits-as I suppose she had! Would that we could have gotten her to drink more during the other moons of the year.

As Blossom and I played inside, the boys took the kites they had been building all winter and cast them to the winds. The traditional Korean kite was an oblong or rectangle-a mulberry-paper skin stretched across a framework of bamboo sticks-with a circular hole in the middle, the diameter of which was exactly half the kite’s width, for greater stability and control. It was always colorfully painted: A kite with a red half-circle on its face was called a red half-moon kite; one with stripes of green, red, and blue was a tricolor skirt kite; and so on. Some kites were not rectangular but resembled an octopus with eight flapping arms. None had tails. The boys would use a horned wooden reel to let out the lengthening string, and the kites would ascend gloriously into the skies.

During these first two weeks of the First Moon the boys would also engage in kite fighting. They dipped their kite strings in a mixture of glue and glass powder, then dried them to a coarse edge, so when the kites were aloft the strings became razors. Each boy would try to steer his string so that the serrated glass edge would slice like a knife through another boy’s string, neatly severing it, and watch his opponent’s kite go spinning away on the wind.

Blossom and I observed this pageantry from atop the wall of the inner Court. From a distance the white, green, red, yellow, and black kites diving and slashing at one another looked like a flock of brightly feathered parrots quarreling amongst themselves, with an occasional bird taking off in a snit for parts unknown.

Then on the fifteenth day of the moon, all the kite flyers wrote the words “Away Evils, Come Blessings” on their kites and took to the skies one last time. It was said that thirteen hundred years before, during a trying time in our nation’s history, a famous general had tried to calm civil unrest by sending a kite bearing a burning cotton ball into the night skies. The people saw it as a falling star returning to heaven-a sign that the nation’s current misfortunes would be ending. Ever since, on the fifteenth day of the New Year, boys all across the land would unreel their kites, long threads having been attached beforehand to the kite strings. Once the kites were airborne the boys would strike a match and light a fuse to the threads; as the kites flew higher, the sparks would race up the threads and finally reach the strings, which would then burst into flame, setting loose the kites.

From our house Blossom and I could see dozens of flames igniting in midair, and watched the brilliantly colored kites fly free, borne away on updrafts, drifting toward the distant hills.

“How far will they go?” Blossom asked excitedly.

“Very far,” I predicted. “At least as far as Taegu.”

“Will they reach the ocean?”

“Some of them, I’m sure.”

“Will they go all the way to America, do you think?”

“I have no doubt of it,” I said with a smile.

From our high perch atop the wall we watched the kites bobbing and spinning on the wind, like caged birds set wildly free. Would either of us have ever dreamed that soon I would be following in those kites’ imaginary wake?

If Blossom was one piece of my chogak po, another patch would be added later in that Year of the Ox when Mother’s elder sister, Obedience, fell ill. Widowed and living alone in Taegu, she was guilty of the worst crime a Korean woman could commit: a failure to produce heirs. “Not even a daughter,” my father would say with pity and contempt. Producing sons was the highest duty of every woman, and those who failed to live up to that duty were often ridiculed and shunned. But Mother would not forsake Aunt Obedience and petitioned Father to allow her to go to Taegu to care for her. Father grumbled a bit about it-it was customary to bring lavish gifts to one’s in-laws, which we could ill afford-but he did not gainsay Mother the trip. Besides, it was a good excuse to sell some of our eggs at the market in Taegu. I quickly volunteered to help Mother carry the eggs and was delighted when Father agreed that I could accompany her. A trip outside the inner Room was thrilling enough, but a trip to the city-I was beside myself with glee, though of course it was indecorous to show it.

“I don’t know how you can stand that festering sore of a city,” Father told Mother. He disliked Taegu and avoided going there, I suspected, because as a member of the country gentry he had no social standing in the city and was not accorded the kind of deference and respect he received in Pojogae. I think that may have been why he took such pains to be a strict Confucianso none could dispute his aristocratic lineage, even if we weren’t rich like other yangban.

Mother and I would be gone an entire week, during which one of the village women, with help from Blossom, would cook and clean for Father. We planned to leave before dawn in order to arrive at the marketplace by early morning. The day before we left I went to the henhouse and set about filling up egg cribs. These were long open cradles made of woven straw, each holding about ten eggs-they looked rather like elongated bird’s nests, with little loops of straw to secure each egg in place. After I had filled seven cribs Father adjudged that the amount was sufficient and secured them onto a jige-two pieces of pine bound together with straw at an angle that makes them look like the English letter A. It also held our clothes, as well as presents of rice wine and sweet cakes for Aunt Obedience. The next day, in the early morning darkness, Mother and I donned our veils, I hoisted the jige onto my back, and we began the eight-mile walk to the city. (Other yangban women were often transported from place to place in palanquins-an enclosed sedan chair borne on the shoulders of servants-but alas, the days of palanquins were long over for us.)

The day dawned clear and cool and the walk was pleasant, if long. At one time, I knew, even this much travel would have been impossible for us except at night. It used to be that a town bell would toll in the evening and all the village men had to remove themselves from the streets so that women could leave their homes-to do shopping or errands, or just to take a breath of air, often in the company of servants bearing lanterns to light their way. Only under cover of night could women traffic in the outside world, without risk of being glimpsed by men.

We stopped occasionally to rest or to drink water from a stream, and after three and a half hours we finally reached Taegu. Merchants were just opening their doors to customers but the streets were already busy with pedestri ans, palanquins, horse-drawn carts, even the occasional automobile, still an exotic sight. I also noticed that few women here in the city were veiledperhaps the veils, like the nights of women shopping by lantern light, were going out of fashion.

The closer we came to the town marketplace, the more the streets took on a festive air, bustling with color and commerce. We passed a grain market where customers haggled over the price of wheat and barley; nearby, vendors sold handmade pottery and fine leather sandals. I savored the smells of cooking food from booths selling pungent kimchi or sweet rice cakes made with fresh pumpkin. When we arrived at the poultry market I took the jige off my back and Mother presented our eggs for inspection to a vendor. She did so while still managing to avoid looking directly at the man to whom she was trying to sell her wares. They bargained over the price in one of the more ridiculous speech forms required by Confucianism, in which a woman interacting with a male stranger addressed an imaginary third party to the conversation: “Please inform the honorable gentleman that these eggs were laid by fine young hens raised in the village of Pojogae, which is renowned for its poultry.” “Please tell the honorable lady we might look more favorably upon these eggs at a lower price,” and so on. Eventually this tortured negotiation came to a satisfactory conclusion, and we left the market slightly wealthier than we had entered it.

Aunt Obedience lived in a narrow sliver of a house next door to a butcher’s shop. The butcher is one of the lowliest and most reviled professions in Korea, and when Auntie’s windows were open one could hear the incessant clucking of doomed fowl and the constant chop of the butcher’s blade cleaving through meat and bone. I tried not to think about what animal parts were being amputated each time I heard the thump of a blade striking the butcher’s block.

Obedience was a kind-hearted if somewhat self-pitying woman with a consumptive cough and a grudge against the world. This was not unusual among Korean women who, after all, had much to feel aggrieved about. “My life has been nothing but suffering,” she would say, warming to her subject. “Better I should never have been born!”

Mother would then object, “Sister, you know this is not so.”

“Well, at least, I should not have been born a woman. Had I been a man, I might have made something of my life.”

“But had you been born a man,” Mother said, “I would never have been blessed with such a loving sister.” The words punctured Auntie’s self-pity and brought tears to her eyes. “Do you remember that old song we used to sing at picnics?” Mother asked with a smile.

“Of course! `The evening sky holds many stars-”’

“‘By the sea there are many sands … ‘ ”