of sexual rivalry, they rise en masse in time with Rob’s movements, each trying to claim one of the shivering sticks as they too stand, adjusting miniskirts and straightening tube tops. Jin gets up, as well, trying very hard not to look at me. She finally, finally takes off her coat and tosses it onto the bench.
Oh my God.
She notices that I’m staring but haven’t moved. “Are you coming?” she asks.
“I don’t dance.”
Her face flattens with disbelief. What, you think this is about dancing? The others can’t quite believe that I’m holding my ground, that I’m about to squander what I’ve earned. Jin waits, maybe thinking that if she stares at me long enough with that face, I’ll change my mind.
Rob Cruise stands watching at the top of the stairwell, growing impatient. “Jin, baby, let’s go!”
She’s waffling now — to leave and dance, or stay and talk? I refuse to give her an inch, and so she clucks her teeth at the air and races lithely to the stairs, her legs a rush of tendons and confidence. Rob has already begun descending, certain now that she’ll follow him. Meanwhile, Jon Hung’s girlfriend is pulling him to his feet. “Go on, baby, I’ll be right there,” he orders her. When she’s gone, he comes over to me.
“What are you, lost?”
“I don’t dance,” I repeat.
He drains his drink and sets it noisily on the table. “Milan Kundera,” he shakes his head in mock disgust. “You are in the wrong fucking place, my friend.” He then motions to Justin, who is also still sitting. “Are you coming down?”
“No, I’ll stay behind. Keep Captain Hopeless over here company.”
Jon shakes his head at me again and then is gone. I slide over to the rail to watch them all on the dance floor. I find Jin right away. She stands out in the crowd not because of her cashmere and jeans but because her body in dance is an alluring twist and spiral to the mindless thump of music. GIs comes on to her, but she makes shoving them away look like just another of her moves. She looks up at me over the rail and holds my stare for a moment. At the end of a song, she hurries off the floor, trots up the stairs, and returns to the table to search for something in her coat. When she doesn’t find it, she races back down again, without so much as a glance at me, to join Rob and Jon under the spinning lights. I look at Justin, who is also watching them, also drinking his drink, also keeping his sad mysteries below the surface. On the dance floor, Rob Cruise has abandoned Jin like a crossword puzzle he will never solve and has begun grinding into another girl. For an instant, we make eye contact. It’s as if he holds my conscience in the same grip that he holds the girl. A stare that wants to liberate me from my principles. On a night other than this, he promises to seize my reticence and toss it with delight into Seoul’s great fevered flow. He will teach me to take what I want here. And we will better friends for it, sharing the sort of bond that two men can have only after they’ve been intimate with the same woman.
Chapter 3
Through years that fell like rain to join the flow of the Han River, she would learn that the only thing that kept her alive was the value her mother had instilled in her, the value of knowledge. Her umma had taught her, as early as the girl was old enough to absorb it, that it was better to know things than to not know them. Even girls need to know things, her mother would say when tucking her in at night, whispering it so that the girl’s father wouldn’t hear. Learn everything you can, my little crane. Even the hard things. Never be afraid of wisdom. And whenever she uttered these words, her mother called the girl by her true name and never the one her Japanese teachers had given her.
In the years that fell like rain, the girl would learn just how much her mother had known about what was happening to their country, the fate that awaited the young girls in it, and learn that it was this knowledge that eventually pierced her mother’s heart and killed her. These thoughts always brought the girl back to the Han River, its churning acceptance of the rain that fell like years. She would ponder that Korean word that shared the river’s name, shared the name of their people, their language. Han. Which meant, among many other things, the long, constricting accumulation of a lifetime of sorrow.
Despite her father’s fussing, the girl was allowed to go to school. This was not what he wanted when he brought his family of six from their ancestral farm to the growing capital of Seoul. That was in 1934, a year after the girl’s baby sister had been born. In the city, her father expected the boys, the two oldest, to study briefly before becoming labourers, and the girls, the two youngest, to stay home and help their mother in the small house that the Imperial government had allowed them. His plans were precarious at best, and the girl watched as her mother toppled them with a kind of quiet sedition, a restrained glee.
“She is going to study,” her mother said one day in their dark kitchen, chopping vegetables for a stew.
“The hell she is,” her father retaliated from the washtub, where he stood scrubbing the day’s grease off his hands from his new job in a munitions factory. The girl watched them argue while spooning mashed rice into her baby’s sister’s mouth. “No daughter of mine will be caught in a school,” she heard her father say.
“There’s a small academy for girls near the police station. I found it on my way to market. I’ve already paid the tuition. I’ve already arranged it. She is going to study. Next year.”
“ Aigo! To what end?” her father snarled. “How will this help us? To have our daughter at a desk all day, learning to read and speak Japanese? How will this help you? You can barely keep up with your housework as it is. Aigo!”
“You don’t know what the future will hold, my friend,” the girl’s mother said, dropping radishes into a dented pot of boiling water. “You can’t say how it might help us to have at least one of our children properly educated.”
“Must everything change?” her father sighed as he dried his hands and then collapsed into his flimsy wicker chair near the door. To the little girl’s eyes, his now-clean hands looked weak and shrivelled as they fell limp in his lap, like two dead birds. He spoke almost to himself. “They have taken my fields, forced us to live in this city with less land than a dog. And now girls — girls — going to school. Must everything change?”
“Yes, it must,” her mother replied, putting the lid on the pot and wiping radish juice off the knife with a rag. “I cannot watch her twenty-four hours a day. And I will not bear the thought of her wandering these streets unsupervised. I will not bear it.” The girl watched as worry fell over her mother’s face then, a shifting in the han that flowed through her. “She is going to school. She’ll be safer there.”
And the little girl felt that tickle in her mind, the ache for wisdom. “Safer from what?” she asked from the table. But to her surprise, her mother would not answer.
So here was the little girl in school, grappling with that ache, these questions, this sense of entitlement instilled deep within her. She perhaps learned more slowly than the other girls that some questions were okay to ask, questions like when? and where? and how much? — but others, like why?, were not. “Why” seemed off limits; “why” was a waste of time and reached for answers that existed beyond the outskirts of the teachers’ patience. Questions like: Why can’t I eat rice while sitting at my desk? Why must I ask before I can go to the bathroom? But also: Why do we stand each day at the beginning of class to sing the Kimigayo, the Japanese national anthem? Why is there a picture of Emperor Hirohito on the wall above the blackboard? Why must we bow to it several times when we finish singing? And why have you given me a Japanese
