Seoul Survivors (4 page)

Sydney screwed the lid back on the cleanser. Beside the bottle, Jin Sok's pink hanky lay crumpled on the counter like a used party napkin. Like her whole fucking
life.
Tears welling in her eyes, she opened the Oxytoner and dampened another cotton ball. Why had she been dumb enough to think Johnny might really be into her? He had turned out like all the rest: a selfish, controlling jerk with a jealous streak as cold and deep as the Atlantic. So much for the Boyfriend Experience.

But as she dragged the wet cotton ball over her cheek, the clean seaside scent of the toner fought with her misery. No. She hadn't crossed an ocean to be forced to do anything she didn't want to anymore. She wasn't going to let Johnny scare her, not his control freakery or his porno MoPhotos: he was just another no-neck Yank with a borderline personality disorder, and one day she was going to tell him so. Savagely, she threw the wodge of dirty cotton balls into the bin, where they hit the plastic liner with a thump. Her chin throbbed with a buried zit she longed to squeeze—but she wouldn't, no; she'd moisturize properly and tomorrow she'd have a facial, the full works: clay mask, steam and extractions. She had to look after herself now she was a model—the top new Canada model in Seoul.

“You ready go, Sy-duh-nee?” Jin Sok yelled from the studio.

“Two minutes!” Furiously, she dotted concealer over the bags beneath her eyes and applied a quick brush of color to her cheeks.

“I want lock up!
Palli palli
, plea-suh. Leave clothes on rail.”

“Coming!” Sydney tugged off the boots and wriggled into her mini-skirt and strappy top. She'd have to do her make-up in the taxi.
Johnny would freak about her hair.
So let him
, she thought as she pushed her feet into her shoes. Shit: the OhmEgo shorts. She slipped them onto a hanger and slung them back on the rail; then she stuck her tongue out at her reflection, grabbed the pink hanky from the make-up counter and turned on her kitten heels to go.

“Lee Mee Hee—are you awake? Lee Mee Hee?” Soft and clear as a mountain stream, a familiar voice was murmuring her name.

Slowly, Mee Hee opened her eyes. Dr. Tae Sun was sitting by her bed. And Dr. Tae Sun was standing at the foot of her bed as well.

She must be dreaming, not yet awake. She blinked in the gauzy light and the cracks and stains in the ceiling swam into focus. So she was no longer in the box—she could stretch, sit upright. With an effort that reminded her body how much it hurt, she pulled herself up against her pillow.

She was in a bed high off the floor, and a blue nightdress was gently brushing against her bruised skin. There was a tender spot on her forearm where a tube was taped against her skin. She followed it with her gaze: it was attached to a plastic bag hanging on a frame as tall as a person beside her. Was she in a hospital? The room was small, with faded yellow walls. There was a chest of drawers beside her and next to that an empty bed with a green blanket, just like hers, standing neatly made beneath a single window hung with thin white curtains. From outside she could hear beeping, roaring and tinkling: the noises of vehicles of all sorts, cars and buses and bicycle bells. And there were indeed two doctors here, mirror images of each other, except looking more closely now she could see one was slightly stockier, a little fuller in the face. That one, the stranger, was resting a clipboard against the iron bedstead, observing her with concern.

“Don't be afraid,” said Dr. Che,
her
Dr. Che, grinning broadly as he smoothed the corner of her sheet. “This is my brother, Doctor Che Dong Sun—my
twin
. He's thirty-three years old, like me, and a graduate of Yonsei University, the top medical school in Seoul. But he wants you to feel at home with him. Please, you may call him Dr. Dong Sun.”

Dr. Dong Sun tried to look humble, but he seemed to grow half an inch as his brother spoke and his chest swelled slightly beneath his white coat. Mee Hee shrank back on her pillow. Was she supposed to introduce herself now? She opened her mouth, but nothing came out except a dry squeak.

“Shhh,” Dr. Tae Sun said quickly, “don't try to speak yet.”

“We were worried about you,” Dr. Dong Sun said, kindly. He ticked something on his chart and slipped his pen back into his breast pocket. “You were delirious when you arrived, so Dr. Tae Sun prescribed this IV drip to replenish your fluids and electrolytes. The nurses washed you and made you comfortable, and you've been sleeping peacefully all afternoon.”

“Now it's time for you to eat.” Dr. Tae Sun nodded at his twin, a barely repressed note of joy in his voice. Oh, he must love his brother very much—and all the good family feeling was contagious. The last time she had smiled so widely was when her baby was born.

The thought brought a lump of coal to her throat. Her smile wilted and she dropped her gaze to her hands. They were rough and scratched: a peasant woman's hands. What was she doing here in this iron bed, attached to a plastic tube, surrounded by the complicated music of a Chinese city?

There was a rap on the door and a woman in a blue uniform—a nurse? a guard?—entered the room, carrying a tray with four short legs. The doctors parted to make room and she carefully placed the tray over Mee Hee's lap, not spilling a drop of the soup in the bowl balanced at its center.

Small chunks of
tubu
and slippery green pieces of
miyeok
were floating in the soup. A delicate scent like the sea on a warm summer breeze wafted up with the steam from the bowl. Tears flooded Mee Hee's eyes: the room, the food, the doctors and the plump nurse all swam together in a blur before her. “Eat, please, you must eat, Lee Mee Hee,” Dr. Dong Sun gently urged. “The
miyeok
is full of minerals, and the
tubu
will give you protein. It's very good for you.”

She couldn't—she
mustn't
eat it. Anything but
miyeok
soup—

“Lee Mee Hee, you need to eat. This is good food, simple for your stomach to digest. Please try it.” Softly echoing his brother, Dr. Tae Sun handed her the spoon.

She wanted to say no, to tell them why, but the words were trapped inside her, while the fragrance of the
miyeok
curled around her like a cat demanding to be stroked. Helplessly, in silence, she ate, her tears dissolving in the soup. The doctors and the nurse beamed and chuckled as if she were a child. Finally the bowl was empty and the warmth in her stomach was spreading through her aching limbs. The nurse picked up a folded piece of white linen from the tray and held it out to her.

“It's a napkin.” Dr. Tae Sun smiled and pointed at his chin, just at the place where on her own face she could feel a spot of soup.

A linen napkin. It was far too beautiful to make dirty, but everyone was looking at her, waiting. Gingerly, Mee Hee dabbed at her mouth as the nurse removed the tray and bustled from the room.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“It is our honor to feed you.” Dr. Dong Sun bowed low.

“I didn't know you had a twin brother,” she said to Dr. Tae Sun, her voice gaining in strength. “And a doctor, too. Your parents must be very proud.”

The two brothers exchanged glances. Dr. Tae Sun cleared his throat, and Mee Hee crumpled the napkin in her hand. She must have said entirely the wrong thing—what made her think she knew how to speak to doctors?

But when Dr. Tae Sun spoke, his voice was quiet and kind. “If our parents were still alive, they would be very proud and happy to know we are together at last.”

Boldly, she dared to meet his gleaming eyes, but it was his brother who continued the story.

“We were separated as infants, you see, when our uncle escaped from the North.” Dr. Dong Sun leaned against the bed frame with the air of a man accustomed to attention. “He walked across the frozen Yalu River, with me bundled underneath his coat. Our father had died, and our mother—”

“—who was very ill—” Che Tae Sun piped up.

His brother nodded briskly. “—begged him to take us both—”

“—but he couldn't carry two babies—”

“—as well as everything he needed to survive.”

“Uncle walked all the way to Seoul with Dong Sun and when he got there, he brought him up as if he were his own son.” Dr. Tae Sun swept on. “All his life my twin was determined to find me and now, by a miracle, we have been brought together again.”

“But . . . how—?” Mee Hee gaped at the doctors, so caught up in the story she almost forgot to cover her mouth with her hand. Of course she knew of countless people who yearned to be reunited with their families in the South, but she had never before heard of it really happening.

Dr. Dong Sun brandished his clipboard in a gesture of triumph. “Our mother recovered, and she lived long enough to see my brother became a doctor—and such a good doctor that one day he was permitted to attend a conference in China. Because of this, his photo was put up on a website, where Dr. Kim, my employer, saw it. When she told me, I was so happy I thought my heart would burst, and
Dr. Kim was nearly as excited as I was. She has many friends in the medical world, and so she arranged for my brother to be invited to another conference, one that she could also attend.”

Website
.
Conference
. Mee Hee scrambled for a thread of meaning. “Did you go too?” she asked Dr. Dong Sun.

“Of course I wanted to. Desperately. But that would have alerted my brother's colleagues; they would think that he would surely want to leave them. So I had to be patient. But Dr. Kim was on our side and I knew that if I waited, I would soon have my brother with me forever.”

The doctors' faces were glowing, and for a moment Mee Hee was a little girl again, being told a story by her grandfather. But at the same time it was difficult to believe that anything—the room, the two identical doctors, the miracle of their reunion—was real. If she fell asleep and woke up again, she might be back in the box, or shivering in her hut in her village. She tugged the sheet up to her chest.

“Dr. Kim is the woman who has brought us all together.” Dr. Tae Sun leaned forward, his round face suddenly looking anxious. “I mentioned the scientist to you in your village. Do you remember what I said? What I asked you to do for Dr. Kim?”

Mee Hee nodded. “Yes, I remember,” she whispered, and her heart trembled briefly, as it had in the rice paddy behind her hut when she was showing Dr. Tae Sun the graves: the fresh mound covering her mother-in-law's shrunken body, and the turtle stone above the tiny sack that held her son. There, out of sight of the village, he had explained about the food-aid truck, and offered her the chance to come away, to help him and his employer, Dr. Kim. She hadn't exactly understood what he'd wanted, or even really believed him, and yet her heart had stirred for the first time since her baby had died.

“I know why I am here,” she said in a louder voice.

“Good, good.” Dr. Tae Sun patted her hand, and when she remained motionless, he awkwardly withdrew and fiddled with his watch.

“Dr. Kim was very brave at the conference,” Dr. Dong Sun continued vigorously.

Dr. Tae Sun nodded in agreement. “She passed me a note saying she worked with my brother, and she told me to be patient, that she would communicate with me somehow. Later, while we were standing in an elevator, she slipped her name-card and a satellite handi-phone into my pocket.”

“A what phone?” Mee Hee whispered.

“A handi-phone—the best in the world.” With a flourish, he drew a small silver object out of his coat pocket. He did something to it
and it opened up, displaying buttons on one side and a colorful screen on the other. “Made in Japan, powered by solar energy. With it you can call anyone you like, from anywhere in the world.”

“Ah.” She didn't dare touch it. He deftly snapped it shut again and replaced it in his pocket.

“My brother has also been extremely courageous,” Dr. Dong Sun announced, standing up as straight as the Wise Young Leader awarding a medal. “He smuggled the handi-phone back into North Korea and for the past two years he has been calling Dr. Kim and me from Pyongyang. Just owning the phone is illegal, so he took a great risk, and endangered his own life many times to bring you and all your sisters into China. We can never repay him.”

Dr. Dong Sun regarded Mee Hee expectantly, as if waiting for her to break into applause, but she was barely listening anymore. She closed her eyes as she leaned back against her pillow. Did she really know nothing at all? First, in the rice paddy, the doctor had told her that the
ramyon
he had brought to the village in the truck was not a gift from the Wise Young Leader but food-aid from the South and other Western nations. Now he had shown her what he said was a telephone, but looked like a metal clamshell, and he had happily told her it was made in the land of the kidnappers, the rapists of Korean women, the
colonizers
. A damp chill stole over her body. Who had put her in this nightdress? Why hadn't they given her a
yo
to sleep on instead of this dizzying metal bed? And how did she even know where she was?

Fearfully, she peeked up at the doctors, half-expecting them to be grinning with the sharpened teeth of the Japanese soldiers in her schoolbooks, but instead they were nervously exchanging glances, with identical—almost comical—expressions of dismay. She loosened her grip on the sheet.

“Am I in Beijing?” she whispered weakly.

Dr. Dong Sun made another note on his chart. “She's tired,” he said sternly to his brother. “We mustn't strain her with our stories.”

“Yes, you are safe in Beijing,” Dr. Tae Sun declared. “You are in a small hotel, which we've rented entirely for you and your sisters and your caretakers. You are sharing the room with another woman from your province. You must sleep now, we'll return later.”

Exhausted, Mee Hee slid back beneath the sheets. She was asleep before the doctors had closed the door.