The Calligrapher's Daughter (6 page)

“Like peeling apples into flowers,” I said. “I have lots to practice.”

“That way of thinking will help you become a good wife and mother someday.”

I warmed with this praise.

“A turtle can’t move if he doesn’t stick his neck out,” quoted Mother. We walked through the west end of the market, past a shimmering curve of violet-hued silk in a dry-goods stall hung between bolts of golden brocades. A breeze from the public garden ballooned our skirts and swirled
dirt around our ankles. I pressed my hands on the indigo silk of my skirt. “Be patient,” said Mother, continuing her lesson, “not prideful, and think of others first. Najin-ah, remember that your weaknesses are willfulness and self-centeredness.”

I couldn’t avoid the petulant swell to my lips.

“It’s simply a fact. Understanding your weaknesses will improve your character. It’s nothing to be ashamed of—merely something that needs improvement. You must always put others before yourself. Remember: think ahead about others first.” She led me to a bench beside an enormous bush of second-blooming yellow roses. “Let’s rest a moment.”

Anxious that we’d stopped walking, I kicked my free-hanging legs rhythmically until she touched my knees. The rising sun deepened the morning’s long shadows and dew evaporated from the roses, emitting sweet perfume. My mother breathed in, her eyes closed, a faint smile spreading peace through her features. “Najin-ah, you’re going to be a
nuna.”

A boy would call his elder sister Nuna. I smiled wide at this unexpected news, exposing many teeth, then quickly covered my mouth and said through my fingers, “You’re having a baby? A boy!”

“Yes, in the second month next year. Our prayers for a son have been answered. Born in the year of the sheep in the earth phase—a good match for you. Soon you’ll see my stomach growing and you’ll be able to feel him kick, like you kicked before you were born.”

A perfectly curled rose petal, vivid yellow in the sun, floated onto the wooden bench within inches of my wrist. Although bursting with delight and questions—what would Father name him, and how did Mother know it was a boy?—I heeded my manners and kept quiet.

“I’m healthy and strong—a good omen. I thank God for this baby, and that on this day, your birthday, you begin your education.” We all celebrated our birthdays on
Sollal
, the first of each year, so her acknowledgment of today, the actual day, felt like a special blessing. She bowed her head, and the bun at the back of her neck reflected blue highlights in the sun. “We receive the bounty of your blessings, merciful Father, and are grateful. Amen.”

I touched the rose petal lightly and it rocked like a miniature cradle. My feet began kicking again, flashes of white toes back and forth.

She stood. “Let’s go, it’s almost time.”

To show something of my happiness, I held her hand tightly all the way through the neighborhoods and up the hill.

We approached the school, a long building of orange-brown brick with evenly spaced metal-framed glass windows. “I won’t go farther,” said Mother. “See if you can walk at least part of the way home with someone. Be well-mannered and respect your teacher.”

I turned, panic rising, my braids lashing my shoulders.

She stooped to look calmly into my eyes. “Perhaps I’ll send someone to get you later.” Her fingers lingered on my shoulder. “The neighbor’s boy, Hansu. He won’t mind.”

I gripped my lunch tied in the square of cloth I’d sewn and decorated with my own ivy pattern. “Thank you, Umma-nim, but I will walk home myself.” I turned to enter the school’s varnished double doors and felt the departure of warmth when my mother’s hand dropped from my shoulder.

I WOKE TO AN UNFAMILIAR RASP—THE FRONT DOOR SLIDING OPEN and shut. Since my room was next to the vestibule, I sleepily wondered why I’d never really heard the door before. How easily something so common could go unnoticed! In other seasons, humming insects, nocturnal creatures crying, breezes swishing through trees, or leaves scratching the courtyard masked the sound of the door. But heavy new snow had wrapped the night in deep stillness. I heard my father giving instructions to someone outside and opened my eyes.

Easing out of bed, I saw that no lamp burned in my mother’s room down the hall, meaning it was unusually late. Moonrise marked the beginning of a woman’s private time, and long after I went to bed, she
stayed up to sew, read, or write letters. I cracked my shutter open. Two silhouettes, outlined crisply against the snow like shadow puppets, headed toward the gate. I dimly heard a rattle of iron and wood when the bar was lifted and the latch released, then the sounds in reverse when Byungjo closed the gate. He went into the cold gatehouse where he’d await Father’s return. My face chilled, I crept into my quilts, sleepless with curiosity. What seemed like hours later, I woke to sounds of my father’s snow-crunching footsteps, then his shoes shuffling off in the entryway as he quietly, and surprisingly, hummed the Doxology.

Once alerted, I heard my father over the next several weeks go out in darkness with increasing frequency. It was especially peculiar because in winter, except for church, he rarely left the estate. And since my mother hadn’t attended church lately—too noticeably pregnant to be seen in public—he hardly went out at all. I longed for answers, but I’d learned well how to suppress my inquisitiveness, particularly on matters related to him. With my father, I was like that raspy sliding door—always around but noticed only when something was awry, such as when I dropped a cup, spoke before thinking or skipped on the flagstones.

LATER THAT WINTER in February, the moon a strand of blue in a cold starlit sky, I sprawled on the bedroom floor with my favorite activity: filling thick pads of cheap paper with vocabulary in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and an occasional English word in crooked letters. The courtyard rang with dripping thaw, loudly punctuated by sheets of ice crashing from rooftops onto the flagstones—a noisy harbinger of an early spring. My mother stopped at my door and I immediately sat in a more ladylike position, but she only said to come quietly to help with something.

In her sitting room, ghostly twin trails rose from two lamps and disappeared in the smoke-stained ceiling beams. Fabric and blankets tumbled from a linen chest, its woven grass lining lifted sideways to expose a false bottom. In this hiding place, bright scraps of cloth in familiar shapes lay in neat piles. I picked up red and blue half circles with yin and yang curves and fitted them together.
“Taegeukgi
, the flag.”

“So you haven’t forgotten. And you know it’s forbidden. A secret, agreed? You hem. We have fifteen more to finish in less than a week.”

“So many!” I whispered. “What for?” Sitting on the floor, I inspected her invisible stitches on the corner trigrams—heaven, earth, fire and water—and bent to her instructions to join the completed flag rectangles back-to-back.

“You’re old enough to know about certain things,” she said. “You’re not to speak of it at school or even at home, to anyone. It’s impossible to tell who’s friendly to whom.” She clipped a thread between her teeth and deftly tucked the edge of a cut form onto the background.

I thought of the Japanese merchants I saw at the market on my way to school, and the shouting men performing calisthenics every morning in the police station yard, but I’d rarely said more than a few words to a Japanese person and couldn’t imagine anyone I knew being friends with the people my father called “heathens.”

“What about my teacher?” I asked.

“Not even her, though I’m certain she’s a patriot. We prevent trouble by keeping this secret in this room.” She sighed. “Why must you always ask questions? Obedience.”

“Yes, Umma-nim.” I disliked the fussy exactness of sewing, but the warm floor and my mother’s humming made the task almost pleasant. I assumed she withheld an explanation about the flags because of my questioning and tried to be patient, but my curiosity about their number and secrecy only grew. I worked to match the precision and speed of my mother’s handiwork with little success. “So slow! How can we make that many? Abbuh-nim’s right. I’m too clumsy”—one of my father’s standard criticisms.

“Your work is beautiful when you attend to it. Don’t worry, I’ve already made forty. It’s been months.”

“I’ve never seen you—”

“When you’re asleep.”

“Oh.” A surging inquisitiveness, which I often felt at school, made me both circumspect and eager. What
did
she do in those hours that burned her oil lamp dry? What else didn’t I know about the world of my mother? I knew I’d get in trouble, but out it came like water from a broken gourd. “Where does Abbuh-nim go at night?”

“It’s not for you to question your elders!”

Questions burst through the limp walls of my propriety. “Why is everyone whispering so much? Why do we need so many flags? I hear him go out, but where?”

“Hush! Even the stones in the road can hear you. A child of mine would never talk back to her mother!”

I poked at my flag through frustrated tears. In the long quiet that followed, I managed to placate the spirits of curiosity by concentrating on evenly spaced, barely visible stitches.

Mother said, “Here’s another one. You’re working quickly.” Our eyes met briefly, mine grateful and apologetic, hers forgiving and kind. “He goes to church at night.”

A dozen more questions struggled to break through the newly installed guard at my voicebox, and one slipped through. “Is the minister a patriot-friend?”

Mother abruptly shouted for Kira, then louder for Joong, and I jumped. When no one answered, she gestured me closer. Lifting her sewing close to her face, like a cowl, she spoke very softly. “If I explain, perhaps you’ll understand the danger and respect it properly. You’re smart enough, and your curiosity and recklessness could jeopardize us all. I tell you this because I have faith you’ll understand how everyone’s safety depends on your ability to keep it secret.”

Relieved I wouldn’t be punished and subdued by her solemnity, I faced her directly and sat tall. “Thank you, Umma-nim.”

“Did they tell you at school about His Imperial Majesty Gojong
Gwangmuje
?”

I rarely heard my mother use high court language, and it took a moment to understand whom she meant. Then I nodded, for Teacher Yee had told us last week that Emperor Gojong had died in the middle of January. Dethroned and prohibited from returning to the main palace, he still commanded respect because, though he ultimately failed, at least he had tried to fight Japan’s political assault, and his consort, the beautiful and outspoken Queen Min, had been murdered long ago. After her murder, he and his ministers had changed his status from king to emperor in a futile attempt to match the level of his sovereignty with that of Japan, but they lost the kingdom anyway. Japanese officials had entered the palace with troops, and Emperor Gojong was forced to abdicate to his second
son, Sunjong, the only surviving offspring of the martyred queen. From the blackboard, I’d copied the new word
abdicate
, along with others Teacher Yee explained but didn’t write on the board:
sovereignty, protectorate, coerce, annexation, propaganda.
Teacher Yee said that the Japanese had responded to public pressure by designating March 4 as the national day of mourning for Emperor Gojong.

Then she told us the noble and thrilling story she’d heard: that the emperor had committed suicide to protest the forced marriage of his son to Japanese royalty, Princess Masako of Nashimoto, which was Japan’s way of saying we were the same country, the same peoples, when obviously it was their attempt to dilute the sovereignty—that new word—of the Korean royal line. Much later, I heard the other more plausible story of Emperor Gojong’s death. Japan wanted him to sign a document asserting his satisfaction with Japan’s union with Korea, which Japanese envoys would present at the Paris Peace Conference. But Emperor Gojong decided to send his own secret emissary to Paris to protest Japan’s annexation, and when the emissary was discovered and killed, the emperor was also killed. Even if I had known this, for a young girl with a colorful imagination, Teacher Yee’s story of honorable, romantic sacrifice was far more captivating.

To keep this dramatic story swirling in my head and not out of my mouth, I tucked a hem edge with a needle, pressed it tightly between my fingers and said distractedly, “Sunsaeng-nim said there’d be a big parade in Keizo for his national day of mourning.”

“In Seoul,” said Mother, to remind me that Japanese language was not allowed at home.

I wanted to ask not only if the emperor had committed honor suicide, but also if his son, the new emperor, was really a simpleton. Girls at school said he was an idiot, but I knew that term was mean. Mother had a relative still at court, a cousin who had married the last prime minister loyal to Emperor Gojong. When this prime minister refused to affix his seal to the Protectorate Treaty of 1905—which proclaimed Japan to be the protector of Korea and thus opened wide the gates for official Japanese takeover—he was removed bodily from the palace. Not long afterward, he and their only son, a four-year-old child, were killed. His widow, whom I called
Imo
, Maternal Aunt, still attended royal functions and would
certainly know something about the young emperor. Because of Mother’s warnings about my responsibility as a child of yangban, I’d known not to talk about Imo to my schoolmates. And I followed the same inner counsel and said nothing now.

Mother spoke as softly as the susurrus of thread being pulled through fabric. “Yes, there’s a big funeral planned, and they’re freely giving travel papers to anyone going to Seoul. What I’m going to tell you must remain between your ears.” She looked at me meaningfully and I nodded. “Your father is helping to coordinate a nationwide protest. Instead of a parade of mourning, there’ll be an enormous demonstration for independence. Every patriot knows about it. A wondrous event! At the same hour in every city and village across the country, a declaration of independence will be read.” Her voice held an intensity, an excitement I had never heard before. “All the churches are involved. Ministers lead the movement in towns and villages throughout Korea. Think of what it means!”