Honolulu (47 page)

The voice I could not mistake. It was Fragrant Iris.

I started to bow, but she came up and gave me a warm hug instead. “In this house we do not stand on ceremony! How are you, and where have you been these many years?”

When I told her I had been living in Hawai’i she expressed astonishment and delight. “I hear it is beautiful there.”

“It is.,,

“Are you married?”

“Yes. Three children.”

“I remember when you were little more than a child yourself.” Her smile turned sad. “And I think I know what brings you here today.”

I nodded. “Did you ever … hear from her again?”

The sorrow in her eyes presaged her words.

“Yes. We did.” She motioned me to join her on a rush mat, and once we were seated she continued, “The police finally released her from prison, sometime in … the Year of the Dragon, I believe.”

“The year after I left. But that’s wonderful to know, she was freed!”

“She would not come back to work here,” Iris said. “She didn’t wish for us to suffer by association. Her patron paid to maintain a small apartment for her. The police watched her constantly, she said. But that did not prevent her from doing what she thought was right. It did not keep her from joining the demonstration in the streets on March First. She marched and cried Mansei!’ alongside thousands of others.” Her voice grew soft. “And then the police attacked them as if they were an army-an army without weapons.”

“I know,” I said. “Even in Hawai’i we have heard of their brutality.”

“By the end of it, thousands of lives ended at the point of Japanese sabers. I am sorry to tell you that Evening Rose was one of them. But know this: Your teacher died a patriot.”

I had half expected to hear that she was dead, but the manner of her death caught me unawares. I felt numb, having found and lost my teacher all over again in the space of a few minutes. I thanked iris, declined her offer to stay for tea, and stumbled out of the little pleasure house.

I thought I had cried all my tears for Evening Rose long ago, but as I leaned up against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, I found that I still had some to give up.

I hailed a taxi and left Taegu.

That night a windstorm blew the few remaining leaves off the trees and rattled the paper windows of our ancestral home. The air grew more wintry and Elder Brother stoked the coals that warmed the floor of the house. I felt, if anything, even more despairing than I had in Hawai’i after Joe’s death.

The next morning our household was visited, as it often was when I was a child, by our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Mun-Sunny’s mother. Tiny and frail, but with alert brown eyes, she was ushered into the inner Room, where my mother and I received her warmly. Oddly, though, Mrs. Mun turned to Mother and said, “I have come to tell your daughter something of a personal nature.”

I could not imagine what this might be, but Mother respected it without saying a word, brought us a pot of hot rice water, then left us to sit and talk. I, of course, inquired after Sunny, and a veil fell over Mrs. Mun’s eyes as she replied sadly, “My daughter passed from this life six years ago next month.”

Even though it had been years since I had seen Sunny, it was still a shock to hear. “How? What happened to her?”

“She died birthing her third son, who is now five, so it cannot be said that her death was in vain,” she told me.

“
I-I
am deeply grieved to hear it,” I said softly. “I wrote her from Hawai’i, but never received a reply.”

“No-she was too ashamed of how she had left you, and her intended husband. She could not bring herself to write you, but I know she wanted to.”

Unashamed, I shed tears for my old friend. “I wish she had.”

“We were shocked to see her return, and even more so to hear that she broke her engagement,” Mrs. Mun said. “I was happy to have her back, but it did make her life, and ours, more difficult. Such matters may be taken in stride in Hawai’i, but here in Korea if a girl is engaged to be married, she is married. Everyone in Pojogae knew my daughter had been engaged to marry a man in America; no man here or in neighboring villages would consider marrying her. This presented quite a problem, as you can imagine.

“It took several years, but we were finally able to find a husband for her in Kyonggi-do-far enough away that no one knew of her engagement. She married a shopkeeper in Suwon, and I never looked upon her face-to-face again.”

“Oh, I am so sorry,” I apologized, swept away with guilt. “Had Sunny not come to Hawai’i with me-”

“No no,” Mrs. Mun said, “you misunderstand. Every day I am grateful for what you did for her!”

Baffled, I asked, “What did I do?”

“You taught her hangul so she could pass some sort of test. She wrote me every week until the end of her life. My middle son would read her letters to me, and write down my reply.” She patted me on the hand. “It was a source of great comfort to me then, and even more so now. Today my son will reread her letters to me, and”
she smiled
“I hear her voice again.”

“I … I am glad.”

“But that is only part of what brings me here. You see, after her return, my daughter became quite close to your little sister-in-law.”

I was surprised but pleased. “Did she?”

“Oh yes. She and Sunny would do laundry together at the stream, and occasionally sew together. They both missed you, and I think they each saw a bit of you in the other. Until your sister-in-law ran away for once and all.”

She leaned in to me and lowered her voice. “This is why I asked to speak with you privately. I know that Sunny taught your sister-in-law some hangul because I walked in on them once when they were supposed to be sewing. I never said anything. I don’t know how much she learned-probably at least enough to read road signs.” She smiled the faintest of smiles. “A day or two after Blossom ran away, I noticed that the money purse in which I kept our household funds was short about fourteen yen. I never asked Sunny if she’d taken it, or if she did, what she’d done with it. Any fool could plainly see how much your sister-in-law missed her clan, and wished to be gone from this house.”

I was touched and grateful. “That was very kind of Sunny … and of you.

“It was the least we could do. You gave her the money, after all, that enabled her to come back to us.”

“She said she would repay me, somehow,” I remembered with a smile.

Mrs. Mun chuckled at that. “Which is what brings me here today. I have something for you, something important.” She reached into a small purse she had brought with her. “Among my daughter’s effects was-this.”

She took out a small envelope, but did not hand it to me immediately.

“Her husband says it came a few days before she went into labor. If there was a letter in it, it has been lost. But he recalled that he later saw it on a table, with some folded currency inside it, and when he picked it up to examine it, he counted the sum of fourteen yen.”

My heart began to race as I took the envelope Mrs. Mun now offered me. It was empty, and the return address read simply:

Nang Farm Yudong Village, Kangwon-do

I stared incredulously at the address. “You believe this was-from Blossom?”

“I cannot tell you for certain that it is,” Mrs. Mun said. “But I thought you should see it. Sunny would have wanted you to see it, I am sure.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much,” I said.

She smiled, stood, and gave me a shaky bow. I returned the bow, then saw her out of the house.

I sat back down and stared at the envelope in my hands, studying the address again. Was it possible? Could this be where Blossom was living-on a farm up north-doubtless married by now? Living the bleak life of a peasant farmer’s wife, working from sunup to sundown, forced to give up the best of their crops to the Japanese Empire? The possibilities were depressing to contemplate.

Kangwon Province was many hundreds of miles away; it would take days to get there by train, I knew. And I had no real assurance that Blossom was even at this “Nang farm.” I could write her there, but I was unlikely to get a reply before I left for Hawai’i. If ever there was a chance to see her again, I would have to travel to this “Yudong Village.” If there was the slightest possibility that Blossom needed to be rescued from her situation, I had no choice: I would have to go to Kangwon-do. I could not leave her behind again.

It had been twenty-three years since I had felt the bite of a Korean winter, and the farther north I traveled, the deeper into that winter I journeyed. The train compartment was well heated, but when I touched the window I could feel the chill on the other side, like the frigid breath of an ice spirit, pressing up against the glass with cold, implacable patience. In winter the arctic Siberian air rolls in across the Manchurian Plain and into Korea from the north, freezing rivers in their beds, gusting snow and wind from one side of the peninsula to the other. And yet the stark, bare trees we passed, their branches glittering with frost, looked oddly like the branching white coral I had seen in the warm waters of Hawaiian reefs.

All the while I sat in my seat and wondered whether this was a fool’s errand-whether I would even find Blossom in Yudong Village, and if I did, in what circumstances.

It was a full day’s trip to Seoul, and when I got there my journey had barely begun. A bus took me as far as the town of Ch’unch’on, where I slept overnight in a small inn notable only for the high ratio of insects to paid guests; then the next morning I set off on the final leg of my trip. I hired a taxi to take me to Yudong, a sleepy little hamlet nestled at the base of Mount Palgyo, but when I inquired about the location of the “Nang farm,” I was told it lay outside the village proper, and I was pointed helpfully in the general direction. This, as it turned out, was straight up Mount Palgyo, and the farther we drove into the foothills, the steeper the road. We passed a few farms and I inquired at them all, but none of the residents were named Nang and we continued on, passing an occasional church and a small schoolhouse. But once the rough gravel road turned into an even rougher unmarked trail, my driver informed me he had gone as far as he intended to. I paid him his fare, took my overnight bag in hand, and started up the trail on foot.

It grew steeper by the minute, threading through an endless grove of bare oak and poplar trees that forested the hill. I passed a lovely stream, from whose clear waters I took a drink, then continued on and up. I had to stop several times to catch my breath, and as I took in the dense forest around me I wondered what kind of farm this could be that Blossom was living on, clinging like a billy goat to the side of mountain? The trail wound around the mountain like a watchspring, and just when I was becoming so cold and exhausted I didn’t know whether I could go on, I came around a bend-and finally saw a house.

It was a small house, to be sure, made of rough-hewed stone, with a brown thatched roof like a mop of shaggy hair. It was built into the hillside, its rock foundation higher in front than in back; it looked snug and cozy amid the fallen snow. A wind-bell hung from the eaves, chiming a greeting to me as I started toward it.

I had drawn only a few yards closer when a woman came out of the house carrying a bucket, headed toward a well in back. She was a bit shorter than I, with long dark hair, an oval face, and delicate features. My heart found a rhythm it had long forgotten.

I stopped and called out excitedly, “Little sister!”

The woman turned, startled to hear my voice-any voice, perhaps, in this wild place-and gazed down the trail at me. I was almost afraid to move for fear of scaring her off, as if she were a deer, or some rare bird that might take flight.

She took a few steps closer, and I saw the dawning recognition in her eyes. When she was but a few yards away, she stopped and said in a hushed voice, “Sister-in-law?”

“Yes,” I said softly.

We ran toward each other, meeting in an embrace long dreamed of. She squeezed me hard enough to take away what little breath I had left, but I held her just as tightly. `Aigo, aigo, ” she said, and then the only sound I heard was her laughter and mine.

She pulled back and looked at me. Her black eyes shone like opals.

“I cannot believe it! I am so happy to see you,” she said wonderingly. “I never dreamed I would again!”

“Nor I you.” My words were swallowed up in a sob, and tears ran down my face, nearly freezing as they did. “I have missed you, little sister, so much.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” she said. “But how is this possible? What brings you from Hawai’i to our mountain?”

“I came back to visit Mother-and to look for you.”

She looked amazed at this, and laughed.

“Well, you’ve found me! And look at you, you’re half frozen for the effort. Come, come in, and have some hot rice water.”

As we stumbled toward the little house together, I noticed that the hillslope behind it was covered with what looked like mats of straw-hundreds of them, blanketing acres and acres of uphill land. “Little sister,” I asked, puzzled, “do you have so many animals that you need so much hay?”

She laughed again. “It’s not for animals, it’s for the crops. To protect them from the cold.”

“What kind of crops grow on the side of a mountain?”

“Ginseng, of course. But I’ll show you all that later. Come inside!”

She welcomed me into her home, to my surprise quite a lovely one. Its stone floor was plastered with mud and covered by straw mats, but a brass brazier kept it toasty warm. In the largest of the rooms there was a large rice chest made of burnished pagoda wood, colorful floor cushions tucked unobtrusively into a corner, and a rolled sedge mat that Blossom now unfurled for me to sit on. I warmed myself by the brazier as Blossom went to the kitchen to fetch a pot of rice water and two bowls.

“The children are still at school,” Blossom said, “but here is a photograph we had taken last year.” She handed me a portrait of herself standing beside a tall, handsome man in a traditional Korean jacket, vest, and trousers, as well as four children-two boys and two girls. They were posing solemnly for the camera, but there was a smile-a joy-in Blossom’s eyes that I had not expected to find there.