One of the sisters-in-law takes the baby, and you help Suyon walk back to her room. But before she goes in, you take the bucket of warm water that someone has brought and gently bathe her belly and shaking legs. Suddenly with a strength that surprises you, she grabs your arm and whispers, “Take her.”
Yes, you want to say. But you hesitate.
The little girl with the braids comes out of Suyon’s room and says she has laid down fresh bedding. You help Suyon lie down. You say to yourself if she asks you one more time you’ll say yes, family and Buddha be damned. The baby is brought back in, clean and wrapped in a fresh blanket and put right onto Suyon’s breast. You’re amazed she knows how to suckle right away. But you see that as soon as her rosebud mouth latches onto Suyon’s nipple, you’ve lost her. You watch as the baby grabs hold of Suyon’s pinkie and stares intently up at her, claiming Suyon as hers.
After two months Suyon and the baby disappear. Nobody goes looking for them. The family strikes her from their family record. Within a year, her husband remarries and it’s as if she never existed.
Just when you think life will always be the same, just you and your husband growing older and smaller, always the same distance apart like two plants growing next to each other but never touching, just when you have given up, war breaks out. The North Koreans, dressed in Chinese uniforms and carrying Russian guns, come marching in and wet-plaster giant pictures of Kim Il-sung’s face on every available surface.
Within days they begin seizing everything: land, crops, tools, animals, dwellings. One night you and your husband look at each other and say, “Let’s part.”
It’s the middle of summer, the newspaper-lined door opened to the tepid night air, so you have to whisper softly to each other, heads held so close your foreheads are nearly touching.
“I’m afraid of being conscripted,” your husband says. “I won’t do well as a soldier.”
“Go,” you say to him. “But where? I heard they’re picking men off in the streets of Seoul.”
“I’ll go east, get myself on a ship to Japan. They need laborers there. The Americans won’t know the difference between a Japanese and a Korean.”
You can’t help it. You begin to cry. “Maybe I should go with you.”
He pulls away, looks at you sternly in the dark. “It won’t work,” he says. “You know why.”
You do, but you’ve never let yourself believe it until now. “You don’t want me,” you say.
“I can’t help the way I am,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He hesitates. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been a good husband to you, a real husband. I can’t. And I don’t want to try anymore.”
“You don’t want me,” you say again and again.
He cries instead of denying it. He holds you tightly and tells you he is sorry over and over again until you believe him.
When you tell the family, Father-in-law takes to his bed and refuses to see you or your husband. Sister-in-law gives you her best Western-style dress and says you’ll never know when you have to look pretty. Mother-in-law walks down the road to the gate with you. Your husband left a few days earlier and it has bent her back further to the ground. She takes your hand, looks up at you, and says nothing. She keeps patting your hand, the tears falling down noiselessly and without interruption on both your faces. Finally, you step back and, with your hands folded before you, give her a deep bow. Then you turn and walk toward the future.
It takes you a day and a half to walk to the train station in Songdo. The Communists aren’t for you. You don’t want to share everything. You don’t like the fact that men and women look the same in drab, gray, shapeless uniforms.
Before you parted, your husband gave you half of whatmoney he had, and it is enough to get you on a train to Seoul. But when you get there, you see it’s a wasteland, shops shuttered, bullet holes dotting buildings, chunks of concrete on the sidewalk, a suspicious air about the place. You shudder and pass through it quickly.
Eventually you find yourself alone in Pusan, swollen with American soldiers and frightened country people like you. The first few nights you try to sleep at a shelter set up by foreign organizations, but when you do, you wake up to find out that you’ve been thieved. First your meager bundle of food, then a comb and mirror, an extra pair of socks, and finally, brazenly, even the shoes from your feet. You learn from others that you can earn a few pennies every day sitting along the gated fence in front of the soldiers’ barracks reselling fruits and vegetables that you buy early morning from farmers outside the city gates. One night when the shelters are full, you find an unlocked storeroom that belongs to a small restaurant in the old part of town. At night you hear mice scurrying about, but you don’t care because at least you’re indoors and the mice can’t steal anything you care about. You still have the ring your husband gave you at your wedding and the gold bracelet your mother gave you when you left home. You don’t allow yourself to think about her or your father or your siblings. You tell yourself you’re an orphan and have always been one. It helps that everyone around you is doing the same. Nobody asks where you came from, who your family is.
When the simple couple who run it find you sleeping next to their bags of grain, they put you to work in the front.
It turns out your old shrewish neighbor was wrong; you are lucky. You meet an American soldier in the restaurant, an older desk man who gets you
