Honolulu

FOR
PAULETTE
my beautiful wahine from the tropical island of ‘Milwauke’e “
Me ke aloha nui

When I was a young child growing up in Korea, it was said that the image of the fading moon at daybreak, reflected in a pond or stream or even a well, resembled the speckled shell of a dragon’s egg. A dragon embodied the yang, the masculine principle of life, and it was thought that if a couple expecting a child prayed to the dragon’s egg, their offspring would be male. Of course, every family in those days desired a son over a daughter. Only men could carry on the family line; women were merely vessels by which to provide society with an uninterrupted supply of men. So every day for months before I was born, my parents would rise before dawn, carrying offerings of fresh-steamed rice cakes to the stone well behind our home, as the sky brightened and snuffed out the stars. And they would pray to the pale freckled face of the moon floating on the water’s surface, pray that the child growing inside my mother’s womb would be a boy.

In this they were to be disappointed. On the third day of the First Moon in the Year of the Rooster, their first and only daughter was born to them. In those waning days of the Yi Dynasty, newborn girls were not deemed important enough to be graced with formal names, but were instead given nicknames. Often these represented some personal characteristic: Cheerful, Pretty, Little One, Big One. Sometimes they presumed to be commandments: Chastity, or Virtue. A few-Golden Calf, Little Flower-verged on the poetic. But too many names reflected the parents’ feelings about the birth of a daughter. I knew a girl named Anger, and another called Pity. More than a few were known as Sorrow or Sadness. And everyone had heard the story of the father who named his firstborn daughter “One is Okay,” his next, “Perhaps After the Second,” the third, “Three Laughs,” and the last, “Four Shames.”

As for me, my parents named me “Regrettable”-eventually shortened to simply Regret.

Koreans seldom address one another by their given names; we believe a person’s name is a thing of intimacy and power, not to be used casually by anyone but a family member or close friend. When I was very young, Regret was merely a name to me, signifying nothing more than that. But as I grew older and learned it held another meaning, it became a stone weight in my heart. A call to supper became a reminder of my unfortunate presence at the dinner table. A stern rebuke by my father-“Regret, what are we to do with you?”-seemed to hint that my place in the family was impermanent. Too young to understand the real reasons, I wondered what was wrong with me to make me so unwanted. Was I too short? I wasn’t as tall as my friend Sunny, but not nearly so short as her sister Lotus. Was I too plain? I spent hours squinting into the mirror, judging my every feature, and found them wanting. My eyes were set too close together, my nose was too small, or maybe it was too big; my lips were thin, my ears flat. It was clear to see, I was plain and unlovely-no wonder my parents regretted my birth.

In truth, my father was merely old-fashioned and conservative, a strict adherent to Confucian ideals, one of which was the inherent precedence of man over woman: “The wife must regard her husband as heavenly; what he does is a heavenly act and she can only follow him.” I was a girl, I would eventually marry and become part of someone else’s family; as such my existence was simply not of the same consequence as that of my three brothers, who would carry on the family line and provide for our parents when they became old.

But I knew none of this when I was young, and instead decided it was due to the shape of my nose or the color of my eyes; and for years to come I would fret over and find fault with the girl who looked back at me from the mirror.

I have traveled far from the land of my birth, and even farther from who I was then. More than forty years and four thousand miles separate us: the girl of sixteen who took that first unwitting step forward, and the woman in her sixtieth year who now, in sight of the vast Pacific, presumes to memorialize this journey in mere words. It is a journey measured not in time or distance, but in the breadth of one’s soul and the struggle of becoming.

Jesterners count their age by the number of years completed on their birthdays, but in Korea one’s personal age is determined differently. A newborn child is said to be already in its first year of life, and thus is deemed to be one year old at birth. I was born in the Year of the Roosterroughly corresponding to the Western year 1897-and upon the next lunar New Year in 1898, I turned two; in 1899, I was three; and so forth. This sounds confusing, I know, so hereafter, when speaking of ages, I shall do so according to Western reckoning.

My early life was typically Korean, at least for Koreans of a certain rank. Our family wasyangban-we belonged to the country gentry and lived in a fine house with a tiled roof in a little village called Pojogae, not far from the city of Taegu, in Kyongsang Province. Pojogae means “dimple,” and the villagemostly houses of mud and stone, their roofs thatched with rice grass-rested in a dimple of land surrounded by rolling hills. In winter these hills were draped in snow, but when I was very small my eldest brother, Joyful Day, revealed to me that their white shawls were actually made of rice, the most delicious in all the land: “They’re called the Rice Mountains,” he explained solemnly, “and people come from all over the kingdom to gather grains to plant their own rice paddies. Why, wars have even been fought over that rice.”

I used to beg him to take me there, but he would just smile and shake his head. “The best-tasting rice in the world shouldn’t be eaten so early in a person’s life,” he would say, “but saved for later.”

“What kind of rice grows in winter?” I asked once, upon reaching the worldly age of five.

His reply: “Winter rice, of course!”

This sounded eminently logical, and I continued to believe in the legend of the Rice Mountains for longer than I care to admit.

Mine were good brothers-two older, one younger-and for the first six years of my life we played together, up and down the twisting banks of Dragontail Stream, along the entire length and breadth of our little valley. Father would not have approved had he known, as girls were not supposed to have fun with their brothers. But this all came to an end in my seventh year, when Confucian tradition decreed that boys and girls were to be strictly separated, like wheat from chaff. As in most Korean homes, my father and brothers lived in the outermost of two L-shaped wings, each with its own rooms and courtyard, which nestled close together but stood worlds apart. Since only men were permitted to have dealings with the outside world, they occupied the Outer Room. And as the women’s realm was that of sewing and cooking and raising children, we inhabited the inner Room.

Now, the most contact I had with my brothers was at mealtimes, when Mother and I would carry in the dining tables, set them on the floor, and serve bowls of steaming rice and mandu dumplings to the men of the house, who always ate first. We hovered nearby, out of sight but never out of earshot, in case they needed more kimchi-a spicy side dish made from fermented cabbage, garlic, and red peppers-or a cup of ginseng tea. Only after they had eaten their fill were we women permitted to return to the kitchen and there consume what food remained. In the course of serving them, I might get a wink or a smile now and then from Joyful Day or my second brother, Glad Son … but the days of games and companionship between us were over, and I missed them sorely. I missed my brothers’ teasing. For the first time I began to feel acutely the lack of a sister.

There were only three females in our household: my mother, my grandmother, and me. Grandmother, never seen without her long bamboo pipe, was Father’s mother, and a more rancorous old crone never lived. She treated my mother as a beast of burden, addressing her by a Korean term roughly translatable as “that thing” or “what-you-may-call-her,” as in:

“You there, what-you-may-call-her, fetch me some more tobacco!”

“Yes, halmoni, ” Mother said, obeying without complaint.

In this Grandmother was merely following long-standing precedent. New brides moving into their husbands’ ancestral home were expected to kowtow to the every whim of their mothers-in-law, who did not hesitate to take full advantage of the situation. They, after all, had once been daughters-in-law kowtowing to their mothers-in-law, and now felt entitled to receive in kind.

“What’s that look you’re giving me, girl?” Grandmother snapped, having glimpsed a shadow of disapproval on my face.

“Nothing, halmoni,” I told her.

“You think you know everything, don’t you? But you don’t. Someday,” she said smugly, “you will be me, and then you’ll understand.”

I gave her a cold look, thinking, I will never be you, Grandmother, and retreated into the kitchen to help mother wash the breakfast dishes.

It was a breezy autumn morning, and through our rice-paper windows I could hear the chatter of fallen leaves scuttling across the ground outside. I was anxious to finish my chores and go out to play. My brothers were leaving for school, and though I had some mild curiosity about what they did there-my parents, like most Confucians, revered learning and stressed its importance to their sons-those chattering leaves spoke more eloquently to me than the vague benefits of an “education,” which in any event was only for boys.

When the last dish was dry I hurried outside and joined Sunny, who lived next door; her family, too, was yangban, though they owned less farmland than mine and lived in a smaller house. We began a game of shuttlecock in the road, but as often as we succeeded in batting the feathered ball between us, the wind would step in like a third player, scoop the ball up in a gusty hand, and send it spiraling away from us. We found this less frustrating than amusing, and there was much laughing and giggling as we chased the ball down. I raised my paddle and found myself fielding a whirlwind of leaves that swept in between us, swatting not the ball but a windblown scrap of paper that flew up and into my path.

I tore it off my paddle and was about to toss it aside, when I noticed that this wasn’t just a scrap of old newspaper, but what looked like a page out of a book. I say looked because at this time I had absolutely no acquaintance with the printed word. I could read neither Chinese characters nor hangul, the native Korean alphabet; words were an enigma to me, each letter a puzzle I could not hope to solve. All I could tell from the browned, brittle page was that it was obviously from a very old book-perhaps one that had fallen apart and been discarded by its owner, only to have its pages plucked from the garbage heap by a stray puff of wind.

I examined it more closely, noting the elegant black strokes stacked up in neat columns, and though I couldn’t fathom their meaning, I was impressed by the graceful and delicate calligraphy.

“Isn’t this pretty?” I said, showing the page to Sunny.

Some of the marks were little more than vertical or horizontal lines with crimped ends. Some resembled upside-down wishbones, while others were a combination of circles, squares, slashes, squiggles, and dots. All seemed beautiful and mysterious to me.

“It’s hangul, ” Sunny said, “I think.” More than that she couldn’t say because she was not able to read, either. Another bellow of wind sent the shuttle ball airborne again and Sunny raced after it.

On a whim, I slipped the scrap of paper into the waistband of my skirttraditional Korean clothes, or hanbok, have no pockets-and resumed our game.

Later, alone in my room, the page presented its mysteries to me anew. I had never had any real curiosity before about these things called words, but the frustration I now felt at my inability to decipher these marks drove me to an uncharacteristically bold move: After supper I sneaked out of the inner Room and into the men’s quarters, where I hesitantly approached Joyful Day as he studied, alone, from a schoolbook.

“Elder brother?” I said in a low tone.

He glanced up, surprised. “Little sister, you shouldn’t be in here.” But the admonishment was softened by a smile.

“I know,” I said, “but may I ask a great favor of you?”

I showed him what I had found and asked if he knew the meaning of the writing on the page.

His eyes tracked across the markings, right to left, then he turned the page over and examined the other side as well. “It seems to be some kind of … travel narrative,” he said.

“What is that?”

“An account of someone’s journey to a faraway place. It appears to have been written by a yangban woman, judging by some talk of her maidservants, while visiting a place called Kwanbuk.”

I was thunderstruck by this. “Women can write words? Onto paper?”

He smiled at that. “Some do. Some even publish what they write, though for heaven’s sake don’t tell Father I said so.”

“But what does it say?”

“Nothing very exciting, I’m afraid. It simply relates how the woman went to view a sunrise.”

“Would you read it to me?”

Bemused by my interest, he asked, “If I do, will you then go back to the Inner Room?”

“Yes, yes,” I agreed.