Honolulu (46 page)

I hired a taxi to take me to Pojogae, and the seven miles that had once required several hours to cover on foot were now traversed in only thirty minutes, even though the road was still a rough one; the trip was slow and bumpy, with several near blow-outs of our tires. Finally we reached the outskirts of town, where a group of women carrying their laundry in wicker baskets stared at us curiously, while other pedestrians fell away from us like flocks of startled poultry. Clearly, the sight of an automobile was still a novel one here. In fact, I marveled at how little Pojogae had changed. There was a new school made of concrete, and some of the old mud and stone houses had been replaced with wooden structures-but the village was still small, the dusty streets not yet paved over, and the white summits of the mountains around us might easily have been made of rice. If time was a river, Pojogae seemed to be a sandbar around which the currents of years swirled past, but never fully engulfed.

When I finally saw the fading sunlight sparkling off the blue tile roof of my ancestral home, my eyes filled with tears. This, too, had changed little. And playing in the street were two young girls with long braided hair, who could easily have been Sunny and myself. Perhaps they were. Perhaps I had floated downriver into my own past.

The girls gaped at the approaching automobile. One ran inside the house; the other boldly came up to the cab as it chewed its way up the gravel drive. The child’s face was an oval of surprise, wide brown eyes taking in the car. She watched, fascinated, as I paid the driver and got out. Before I could greet her, she quickly bowed, assuming me to be of higher rank, then said breathlessly, “I am Bright Morning of the Pak clan of Pojogae, and I am honored to be meeting you.”

I smiled at her careful formality and bowed in return. “I am Gem of the Pak clan of Pojogae, and I am honored to meet you as well.”

She was startled. “We belong to the same clan?”

I nodded. “Today I live a long way from here, in a place called Hawai’i. But once upon a time, I grew up in this house.”

The door to the house opened and a cloudburst of children-at least tenfold-rained down upon me, their parents not far behind. Three of these parents I recognized at once, even refracted through the lens of years that separated us: my brothers Goodness of the East, Glad Son, and Joyful Day. The latter was now forty-seven, while Goodness of the East was the youngest at thirty-three. They all looked hale and hearty, and the women I took to be their wives dutifully followed three steps behind. The children exhibited no such decorum, however, clustering excitedly around me. Joyful Day came up to me and said, “So, the frog comes back to the old well, does she?” He laughed and took my hands in his. “I have missed you, little sister,” he said, more tenderly than I had expected.

“And I have missed my eldest brother,” I said. Meanwhile, my nieces and nephews peppered me with questions:

“Are you really from How-why-hee?”

“Where is How-why-hee?”

“Is it true the roads there are made of gold?”

“Children,” Joyful Day chided, “you will have time to talk with your aunt later. Let your halmoni pass through.”

I looked up. Threading her way through the cloud of children-her hair white as cotton, her skin cobwebbed-was their grandmother, my mother. She seemed somehow to have shrunk; I remembered her being taller. But she looked up at me with the same joy in her face as I was feeling. “Daughter,” she said softly, with tears in her eyes.

I embraced her and we wept for all the years apart. After a minute, she pulled back and gazed fondly into my face. “You are so beautiful!” she said.

“Oh, Mother, how I’ve missed you-and our thimble time together.”

“We shall share some again, you can be sure of it,” she said. “Come inside, and honor this old house with your presence.”

The whole clan gathered in the men’s rooms and my sisters-in-law put together a meal to celebrate my return. This house that had once been home to only three females-my mother, grandmother, and me-was now graced by considerably more. In addition to my brothers’ wives, five of their eleven children were girls. All the cousins shared the generational name of Kyong-from a Chinese character meaning bright, brightness, or shining-so the girls were variously named Bright Morning, Bright Lotus, Shining Daughter, Obedient Brightness, and Shining Virtue. These were far more flattering names than I had been blessed with, and I gave my brothers credit for their forward thinking. The oldest girl, Bright Lotus, fifteen and very talkative, gave me another pleasurable surprise when she spoke of some lesson she had learned that day in school.

“You go to school?”

“Yes, we all do.”

“Even girls?”

“Oh, yes. Our principal, Mr. Okura, says it’s especially important for girls to go to school.”

This made me very happy. “Does he?”

“Yes, he says we are learning the most important things a girl can know: how to be of good moral character and foster our womanly virtues.”

My heart sank like a stone, but she went on excitedly, “And we are learning not just what it means to be a good wife and wise mother, but how to be a …” She lapsed into perfect, fluent Japanese: “… nihon no teikoku no chuu na jitsu shiman. ”

Joyful Day, overhearing this, began to make his way toward us.

“Forgive your poor aunt her ignorance,” I asked with trepidation, “but what does that mean?”

“It means, `a loyal citizen of the Japanese Empire,’ ” she said proudly.

Before I could find a response, my elder brother came up and told his daughter, “Your aunt has had a long journey, I think she could use some air. Could you not, little sister?”

“Yes,” I said. “I could, at that.”

It was cold but not yet freezing outside; I bundled up in my winter coat and my brother and I were soon walking along the banks of Dragontail Stream, a stiff wind rippling its surface like a face wrinkled in surprise. “I should have prepared you for that, little sister,” he told me. “I’m sorry.”

“Does she truly believe all that?” I asked in dismay.

“For now she does. Whether she will continue to, I cannot say. And if I try to dissuade her from her views, she might bring it up at school, and then we will receive a visit from the High Police. Better to simply hope she grows out of it.”

“I had thought, when she spoke of girls’ education … ”

He nodded. “Yes, I know. But the Japanese do not encourage girls to continue their studies after secondary school-the only colleges for women are private schools like Ewha.”

“Is it still so bad, under the Japanese? I thought things were getting better.”

“For a while they were,” he said. “Then, in the Year of the Snake, a group of Japanese high school students insulted some Korean girls as they waited for a train in Kwangju. This led to violence, and eventually riots all across the country, and the government cracked down again.

“They make our children learn Japanese and would have us honor their Emperor as they do, as a god. Meanwhile, seventy percent of the rice we grow goes to Japan, and we still eat millet and beans.”

I told him what I had seen in Pusan and asked him what it meant.

“The police have forbidden us to wear our traditional white garments,” he explained, “but this is difficult if not impossible to enforce. So in the larger cities they set up those tubs full of foul, dirty water in order to embarrass and intimidate those who would continue to wear white.”

I was speechless.

“So you see, Korea is still not free. And now China is lost as well.”

“What do you mean, `lost’?”

With the Japanese controlling all newspapers and radio, my brother explained, the only reliable news came from illegal short-wave radios and clandestine word-of-mouth. And the latest news smuggled from town to town was that Japanese troops had captured the city of Nanking-killing some forty thousand Chinese, soldiers and civilians alike.

“We’d best return to the party now,” he suggested. “Before my Japanese daughter reports our suspicious behavior to the High Police.”

He meant this as a joke, though neither of us laughed.

But the war still raged far from Pojogae, which for the moment rested peaceably in its little dimple of land. And these inner Rooms, which had once seemed so oppressive and stifling, now seemed to cradle me gently within their walls. I slept that night on a mat in a room shared by two of my nieces, warmed by heat rising up from vents beneath the floorboards. After so long in tropical Hawai’i, it was good to feel a chill, and to be warmed by a Korean floor.

The next morning I gently sought to extract from my younger brother, Goodness of the East, any information he might have about Blossom. But even though it had been more than thirteen years since her flight from these rooms, my brother’s bitterness was still fresh. “I do not know what happened to her and I do not care,” he declared. “She is a vain woman, and dishonorable. Wherever she is, I hope she is rotting away like a bad tooth!”

Clearly he was of no mind to help me, and I changed the subject.

That afternoon Mother and I retreated, as in days long past, into the room where we had spent so many happy hours together, sewing. I’d brought a few of the shirts I made for Mr. Chun, and when Mother saw them she gasped: “Oh, so lovely!” She held one up, examining the design, the cut, the seams, even the coconut buttons. “You are a very fine seamstress,” she said proudly.

“Oh, no,” I told her, “I shall never be as good as my teacher.”

She smiled and examined the other two shirts I had brought. Craftsmanship aside, she was fascinated by their startling images, so alien to her: hula girls, men riding surfboards, palm trees, pineapples, volcano craters, even the ocean waves. “Is this really what the sea looks like?” she asked.

“You’ve never seen it?”

“The farthest I have ever traveled was to Taegu, to see my sister.” She looked at me with the hunger of one whose life has been tethered in one place like a balloon, as mine had once been. “Tell me about your life, your familyyour home. Your brother has read me your letters, but I wish to hear it from you.

So we sat and I told her things I had never written of in my letters: the high hot sun on the plantation, the hard brutal hand of Mr. Noh, my desperate escape to Honolulu, and my eventual divorce, which shocked her, but not as much as I feared. I told her of my picture bride sisters, the divine gift of Jaesun and my children, the beachboys’ songs-but also of Joey’s sad end and the cruel injustice that followed it.

I also spoke of the loss of my teacher and my little sister, my ignorance of their fates, and the nagging guilt that I might have altered these fates had I stayed. I even wondered aloud whether I should ever have left this house.

Mother just laughed good-naturedly.

“Nonsense,” she told me. “It is a fine chogakpo you have made. Far richer and more colorful than you would ever had stitched together here in Pojogae. And it is far from completed.”

“I do not wish to add any more patches like the passing of Joe Kahahawai.”

Mother considered that a moment, then got up, went to her wardrobe chest, and opened the bottom drawer. She rooted about inside, finally pulling out a carefully folded wrapping cloth. Sitting again, she unfolded it: it was a beautiful patchwork cloth with a green border enclosing a checkerboard of dozens of little rectangles and squares-red, yellow, gold, green, brown, blue, and black.

“You see these?” She pointed out a half dozen of the black rectangles, scattered randomly across the checkerboard. “I added these on the day my mother died, many years ago, because that was my mood that day. There is no pattern to where I placed them, as there is no sense to be made of death. One’s eye may not go to them first, but next to them the blues look bluer, the reds richer, the golds more brilliant. Without them the cloth is pretty, but without character or contrast.”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I see.”

She placed a tender hand on mine. “Look around us, child. Listen to the sounds of war coming from the east. You could have made a chogak po here in Pojogae-but you might have had more patches like these than you could count.”

The next day I told Mother that I needed to go into Taegu “on business,” looking for some Japanese fabric for Mr. Chun, and I made arrangements with a local farmer who owned a battered old truck to take me there. But the bumps and ruts I had felt riding in a new-model taxi cab now seemed more like mountains and gulches in a vintage Ford truck with questionable suspension. After half an hour of jolts and lurches, we finally reached Taegu, where I asked the farmer to drop me at the marketplace. Once he was gone I began a short walk to what I hoped would be a familiar sight.

I still remembered the way, and after five minutes I was rewarded by the sight of the little white house with the blue tile roof-looking much the same as it always had, but for the fact that the paulownia tree sheltering it had grown even more expansive over the years. The stone lantern still guarded the approach, and as I walked up the porch steps I told myself that there was little chance anyone I knew would be living there. But I knocked on the door anyway.

It was opened by a young woman in a gaily colored red-and-gold satin dress not dissimilar to the sort I had worked on at Iwilei. She seemed puzzled to find a woman standing on the doorstep: “Yes? Do you have some business here?”

I felt an odd surge of gladness that the house might have changed hands, but not its purpose.

“I am looking for an old friend who used to live here,” I said. “She called herself Evening Rose.”

“That name isn’t familiar to me. How long ago was she here?”

“Longer than you have been alive, I suspect. Some twenty-five years ago.”

“Oh!” she said with a laugh. “That is long. Perhaps our housemother might know. Please, come in.”

She ushered me inside and had me wait in the vestibule while she went in search of the housemother. I looked around: Although the furnishings were new to me, the house was much the same, decorated with folding screens, rush mats, and lacquered tables. Most of the current generation of kisaeng were apparently in their rooms sleeping, but a few wandered up and down the staircase to the second floor, eyeing me curiously as they passed. Finally, the young woman who had answered the door came down the steps alongside a woman in her fifties, graying hair framing a still-lovely face. I confess, I did not recognize her at first, but she knew me at once. `Aigo, “she said on seeing me. “The student!”