The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (50 page)

“I brought lots of garlic, all peeled and cleaned, so when you get that chicken butchered, fill up its stomach with garlic and simmer, then rinse a bowl of rice, add it inside and simmer some more.”

“All right.”

“It’s homegrown domestic-breed chicken, different from the kind you buy at the market. I fed him real well. Do as I say now, all right?”

“All right.”

Left with no other choice, Mom relents and prepares Oldest Brother’s birthday dinner with the other ingredients that she’s brought. She hulls peas to steam with rice. She cubes radish and braises the mackerel. She steams red beans to make sticky cake with the rice flour that she has ground. She makes kimchi and prepares wraps with the young radish and cabbage she brought from home. She dices the zucchini she’s picked from our vegetable patch to cook bean paste soup, and serves in a basket a heap of green peppers, baby cucumbers, perilla leaves, radish greens, and yellow cabbage leaves to make wraps with rice. Also green peas steamed inside their pods. When the rice cake is done, she sets the steamer on the table and a large bowl of water next to it. She plants candles in the rice cake and lights them. This is what she does back home, cooks rice cake, makes an offering of pure, clear water, and lights candles, even when the family member celebrating his or her birthday is far away.

Cousin has a present for Oldest Brother, a white button-down shirt. “You’re getting out of the military. Then you can wear this.”

The dinner table that Mom has prepared carries the smells of home. The smells from the rabbit hutch, the pigsty, the wooden floor of the veranda in midday, streaked with chicken poop, from
the roses by the brook. The chili paste dip mixed with chopped garlic and green peppers contains Mom’s vegetable patch. And Mom’s own corner of the garden behind the sauce jar terrace. The faint shadows of our family mixed inside the smells of home. Little Brother’s snot-stained sleeve, Father grilling marinated meat on the sizzling gridiron, my older brothers making extensions for my tiny pencil ends with pen stems. The flutter of Younger Sister’s bob cut as she calls to me,
Eonni
. I remember, at the house, there’s a shed for hanging farming tools. There hang sickles, shovels, hoes, pitchforks, giving off the smells of soil. The pitchfork. There’s a sudden sensation of pain and I stop in the middle of taking a spoonful of the bean paste soup, and touch the sole of my foot.

I remember, at the house, there’s a well. And there is a sixteen-year-old girl, who pulled down the pitchfork from the shed that had pierced her foot and headed to the well, dragging her foot wrapped in cow dung, to throw the pitchfork down deep inside.

In the afternoon Cousin is the first to leave, taking some rice cake for her sister. Around dinnertime Mom packs up her wrapping cloths and emptied bags and sets out to head back home. Oldest Brother goes to see her off at Yeongdeungpo Station. As she walks out of the alley to catch her subway to the station, she urges that I take the chicken to the vendor at the market and ask him to butcher it and eat it with Oldest Brother.

“You hear?”

“Yes.”

With Mom gone, the kitchen of the lone room, which had given off the smell of home, feels desolate. My eyes well up as I sit alone on the threshold. I take some rice cake to Hui-jae’s room but the door is locked. I clean the kitchen cupboard, and rinse with clear water the bowls and spoons and cutting board and knives and pots. When I am done putting everything away, the only
thing left is the nickel silver steamer that we used to make the rice cake, blank and quiet. The shiny steamer looks out of place in this kitchen. I rinse the steamer, dry it with a kitchen cloth, and put it away on the shelf.

I head up to the roof with a small bowl of water. The rooster is lying down, utterly exhausted. I place the bowl by his beak. It must have been thirsty and I feel sorry for the bird as it rushes to drink from the bowl, floundering. I come back down to get a fistful of rice and scatter the grains in front of him.

I leave the rooster on the roof instead of taking him to the chicken vendor. Hui-jae watches as I turn over the large rubber basin that had been left upside down on the roof, to see if he can stay released.

“How can you raise a chicken inside a rubber basin? Are you going to keep a lid on it?”

“What should I do?”

“We have a huge wooden plank at the shop that we don’t need. Should I ask him to bring it and put it up over there?” She points to a corner by the railing.

“Wooden plank?”

“He’ll get rained on if you leave him out here like this.”

I go up there the next day to find a wooden plank set up over the railing and the rooster moved under it. The straw rope tied around its feet has also been replaced with a long string woven with yellow and pink thread, extending over the plank through a hole. Thanks to the string, the chicken can now walk around freely under the plank.

At work and at school, from time to time I think of the rooster under the plank on the roof. It makes me happy to bring him water and food. When I step up on the last set of stairs to the roof, he starts to squawk, as if in recognition.

Ever since I’ve been keeping the rooster on the rooftop terrace, I often run into Hui-jae’s man up there. It looks like the chicken recognizes his footsteps as well. The man even plays his harmonica
to the rooster. Sometimes Hui-jae is next to him when he plays, her face on his lap.

One day I find next to the makeshift chicken coop a planter made out of styrofoam. Inside, little trees are squeezed in together, abloom with scarlet flowers. Then one day I find next to the planter a large apple crate filled with soil. When I ask what it is, Hui-jae says that the man has lettuce seeds planted in there. A few days later there really are green lettuce leaves lifting themselves out of the soil, toward the chicken. It seems that the two have decided to build a home on the roof. Sometimes they lay out a bamboo mat and take a nap, next to the chicken coop, the flower bed, the vegetable patch.

Once I walk up to the roof with chicken feed and find the man already there. He is mumbling something to the rooster while feeding it. I know how awkward it can be when someone catches me talking to myself. Sometimes I say out loud what I mean to say to Chang, who is far away, but sense that someone had heard me and quickly extend my syllables to turn them into a song. Ah-ah-ah—where can he be? I see him conversing with the rooster, his back to me, and turn around and head back down.

The rooster is theirs now, that’s what’s happened. Without knowing it, Mom has given them a huge present.

I receive a letter from Chang, who is now a university student, and it contains the term “library card.” He checked out
An Introduction to Aesthetics
with his library card. He was writing the letter with the book under his letter pad. The term “library card” has left me feeling awkward and I stand for a long time leaning again the gate of the house with the thirty-seven rooms. “Freshman, College of Art Education.” I gaze for a long time at Chang’s new address on the envelope.

We all leave the places of our birth in order to grow up. It seems that Chang has also left the village where we grew up in order to attend university. When I get to thinking that Chang is no longer there, suddenly the lights in the village go out all at once.

A woman I met today told me that the place of her birth was Ningan County in Heilongjiang Province, China. Her name is Kim Yeong-ok. Her book was published in Korea under the title,
Madwoman
. Her author bio read as follows:

Born in 1971 in Ningan County in Heilongjiang Province, China, Kim Yeong-ok won first prize in the National Ethnic Korean Children’s Writing Contest at the age of eleven in fourth grade in elementary school, acquiring a reputation as a literary prodigy, a genius writer. When she was fifteen, in third year of middle school, she was selected as one of China’s Twelve Young Geniuses by the influential
Hainan Daily
, and at seventeen, included in the fifty-six Young Stars of China selected by the government, to the amazement of the nation’s 1.2 billion citizens. She was the only ethnic Korean in the list, a source of great pride to Koreans. Upon graduating from middle school, she went straight on to the College of Korean Language and Korean Studies at Yanbian University, and after earning her bachelor’s degree, worked as staff reporter covering arts and literature at the Yanbian Daily. In April 1994, she began her master’s studies in the graduate school at the Academy of Korean Studies in Korea. Her nickname is Dallyeo—a woman always on the run.

I was signing books at Kyobo Bookstore after giving a talk a few days ago when I saw her, this woman who was nicknamed “Dallyeo,” standing in front of me with a journalist that I remember meeting. She had a bob cut and wore a sky-blue cardigan over a tight skirt. She said to me as she handed me her copy of my book, “I’d like to get together some time.”

We met four days later. We went to have jumbo dumplings at Sogong-dong. After having tea at the coffee shop in the Seoul Press Center, the journalist left. I suggested that we head to Kyobo to get a copy of her book. She was shy, and I said, “You’ve read my work but I don’t know you at all and that makes me uncomfortable.” We got the book and walked to Insa-dong. We sat down in a corner of a tearoom named Volga and I asked her to autograph her book.

She said she’d been in Korea for a year and a half now. I asked if there’s anything awkward or inconvenient about living here and she said she didn’t feel that way at all. That she never felt like she was in another country. That perhaps it’s because there was nothing unfamiliar, whether it was food or customs. That she had the choice of studying either in Japan or Korea and she was really glad that she ended up coming to Korea. Our conversation naturally turned to the collapse of Sampoong Department Store. She was shocked, she said. Of course, I thought, but she explained that it was not the collapse that shocked her but the fact that the entire scene of the catastrophe was shown to the public and the fact that people showed their anger.

I went blank for a minute.

“If something like that had happened in China, they wouldn’t have broadcast it.”

“. . .”

“Watching the Korean people expressing their anger, I felt there was hope. The Chinese do not care even if they see something happening right next to them. Even if in broad daylight, a pregnant woman is being harassed in the middle of the street,
people simply stand around and watch. It could go on for three hours and no one would stop the men. Unthinkable, in this country.”

“. . .”

“Once a woman fell in the river, in Heilongjiang Province where I’m from. There wasn’t a single person who jumped in the water to try to save her before her family arrived. Everyone stood there, their arms crossed, watching the woman flounder as she drowned. When the family arrived and offered money, they started negotiating how much they were going to pay, and the woman died while this went on.”

“. . .”

“That’s how things are in China nowadays. Nobody cares if someone dies in front of them. But everyone’s more and more interested in money. The collapse should never have happened, but watching the people showing interest and expressing anger I feel a kind of hope in the people here.”