The Queen of Tears (4 page)

“So are you going to start something else?”

Keep talkin’ Mom. I rudely raised my hand. “Two
tako,” I said, probably too loudly.

Crystal sighed. “Yeah, I’m trying. I think I’ll go back
to school. You know, I got my G.E.D., so I was thinking
about trying business college again. Maybe get a degree
in legal aid or something. But in order for me to do that,
someone has to get a job.”

Go back to school? She’s crazy. No wonder why she’s
with the jobless loser. She’s nuts. I was about to say something
cool; I was about to tell Crystal in a really suave
way that if she wanted to go to school, she could do my
homework, but Grandma nudged me and pointed to all of
the sushis I ordered, but didn’t eat. It was like she was Mr.
Fantastic. She’s like three-two, and that’s when she just
gets out of bed, and here she was, reaching me across
Mom. Right when I was about to tell her to eat it, Mom
gets up, Dad takes her seat, and Crystal turns around to
talk to the loser. Dad was going to try to talk to Grandma.
I hated when he did that. It was always so obvious that
she didn’t understand him. “So Mom, tell me if you’re
looking to stay here permanently. It’s a buyer’s market
right now because of the bad economy. I could get a great
deal on a nice one-bedroom condo, for about a thousand
a month, five percent down.”

Dad’s a real estate agent, whatever that is. It has
something to do with houses and kissing people’s asses.
He also day trades on the Internet. He’s up at four every
morning. Anyway, sure enough, Grandma didn’t understand
him too well. She just nodded, smiled, and said,
“Thank you.” Lucky for her, she was interrupted when
the old uncle turned pale, jumped out of his seat, and
started walking really fast to the bathroom. What a loser.
Even Dad laughed. “That son of yours has to learn to
hold his food and liquor.”

Grandma still smiled, but it was one of those smiles
that look like walls. After a pause, Mom came back and
told Grandma and Dad that she saw the loser rush past
her, and that maybe it was time to go. She said it first to
Grandma in Korean, or at least I’m pretty sure that’s what
she said, because that’s what she told Dad right after. I
turned to Crystal. She was gulping beer from a big bottle
of Asahi. I was in awe.

So two bad things came several minutes later, the
loser and the check. It was funny though, one didn’t even
touch or look at the other. Instead Mom, without even hesitating,
grabbed the check. I caught a glimpse of it. Three
hundred and fourteen. Old people are crazy. Well, Mom
took out a credit card, but before she could put it on the
little black plastic tray, Grandma, with her Mr. Fantastic
arm, grabbed the check. Then Dad, with his super-ripped,
Incredible Hulk arm grabbed it. Crystal was reapplying
her metallic lavender lipstick, and the loser was laying his
head, face down, on his crossed arms. Well anyway, Dad
looked at the check and handed it back to Mom. Mom
gave the credit card, tray, and check to the waitress and
said something in Korean to Grandma. She then told Dad,
“I asked Mom to come and look at our place. She hasn’t
seen this one yet.”

Dad nodded. And for the first time, Grandma, who
was reapplying her dark pink lipstick, looked tired. I
never saw her look tired before. I understand though, I get
that tired too sometimes. Mom gets worried when I stay in
my room all day long on weekends sometimes. Luckily,
Dad is paddling a lot on weekends, or he’d drag me out
of my room. He hates when I get tired.

Well, the check came, the loser and Crystal left, with
no kiss this time, it was like they were in a hurry, and I
watched Crystal bounce away while Mom gave the waitress
three twenties. Dad frowned and said, “That’s like
nineteen percent.”

Mom ignored him, which she always did when he
mentioned money. As we got up to walk out, Dad told
Grandma, “You should talk to your daughter. She’s too
careless with money.”

“You listen, Kenny,” Grandma said. “You listen husband.”

“When you pay, you can tip whatever you want, husband.”

They were going to start again. It’s like when you get
old, it’s all about making and spending money and complaining
about it twenty-four seven. Money’s cool and all,
but jeez. I mean, when Dad gave me an Ameritrade
account on the Internet last year, with three thousand dollars
of buying power, I was stoked. I mean, I made a
killing on Cisco and Harcourt, but to tell you the truth, I’d
rather be playing Everquest or Final Fantasy VIII. But I
guess Ameritrade is like Dad’s computer game.

I feel bad for Mom, though, when he gets on her about
money. Sometimes he gets mean. He’ll say stuff like,
“That’s what I get for marrying a Korean barmaid,” or
“Why did I marry a Waikiki novelty peddler?” I mean,
she’ll remind him that she was a bartender when they met,
or that she sells designer stuff in her shop, but it has no
effect on him. Once the big guy gets rolling, get out of the
way. It got especially bad when I made the mistake of
printing out an IQ test from the Internet, and we all took
it. Mom kicked our asses. I didn’t care too much, to be honest,
I tanked it a little, I mean, if I score well, the next thing
you know, the folks will expect you to bring home straight
A’s, but Dad didn’t take it too well. I think it especially
bothered him because the test was in English, or as Mom
sometimes calls it when she slips, “Engrish,” her second
language, and it made him feel even dumber. Poor guy.

So anyway, I blanked out their money conversation in
Dad’s S.U.V., or tried to, and thought about Crystal
bouncing. But from what I did hear, it was pretty tame,
Grandma being in the car and all. Grandma was checking
her make-up and keeping quiet. I wondered if Mom
and Dad would get a divorce. Whatever. As long as they
don’t blame me for staying together. That’s so lame.

THE DEATH OF KWANG JA

chapter two

-1-

I
N 1952 Cho Kwang Ja walked from a village in North Korea to Seoul. She walked over a hundred miles. That summer, in the sometimes one-hundred-plus-degree heat, her skin baked to a nice, golden brown. Her tiny and bare fourteen-year-old feet developed calluses so thick that they were tougher than the bottom of most people’s sandals. She stepped on sharp, jagged rocks and hardly noticed. She stepped on leftover pieces of shrapnel and didn’t even feel it. Once she stopped to sit down, and she looked at the bottoms of her feet. She smiled and pulled out the tiny shards of metal. She didn’t care. She just wanted to get out of dry, mountainous country. She wanted to see tall buildings, green mountains, and people with shoes. She wanted to get out of Communist Korea.

She wasn’t a political person. If it were the Communists who were running Seoul, she would have embraced Communism without a second thought. She wasn’t a religious person either. Despite her poor education which left her barely literate, she sensed early in her childhood that religion was used by bigger people to get what they wanted from smaller ones. Confucianism was an example. As was Christianity. Before the white missionaries in the north were finally burnt out by the Communists, she’d seen some of these foreign holy men get what they wanted from young girls using their religion. When Confucianism and Buddhism were outlawed by the Communists, she saw how their religions did not help the priests. Her atheism may have pushed her towards Communism if Communism did not prove as useless to her as God did.

So Cho Kwang Ja was neither political nor religious. But she was ambitious. Ambition drove her over hundreds of miles of dirt roads and rocky, bald, mountainous terrain. Ambition forced her to live on nothing but dirty water and the leaves of plants she could not even identify. And not only that, ambition made her smart. too. She hid whenever she came close to any human contact. Villagers, soldiers, both North and South Korean, were stealthily avoided. She did a lot of her traveling by night to better her chances of not being detected by anyone. Sometimes, during days, she would sleep in the burnt-out skeletons of American or Russian tanks or shot-down planes. But most of the time, she didn’t sleep. Ambition kept her awake, too.

Kwang Ja didn’t even know where Seoul was, except that it was south. A missionary had once told her that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, and ambition forced her to hold on to that piece of information like it was a piece of perfect jade. So every morning she looked up at the sun and smiled when she knew which direction south was. Then she’d tell herself she’d know Seoul when she saw it. It would be big with a lot of people. It would be a place where American GIs drove around in their beautiful green jeeps, a place with riches oozing out of great buildings. A place that big and magical, as long as she kept walking south, she could never miss. How naive she was.

It wasn’t until years later that she knew that she’d owed luck more than ambition for the successful trip. Crossing the thirty-eighth parallel without even knowing it, and accidentally locating and following the Han River, which turned more and more brown further into her journey, she walked right into Seoul. Besides, her ambition wasn’t really ambition. She had no real goals. She didn’t know what she wanted to be. She didn’t even really know what money or success were. Instead, what drove her through the long walk was part hunger and part fear. She was hungry for something different, and she was running from something too sadly familiar.

Cho Kwang Ja was a half-breed. Before her adopted mother had died of lung disease, she’d told Kwang Ja that her real mother was with her in the recreation camps of the Japanese army during the occupation. She told Kwang Ja that her father was a cruel Japanese soldier. When Kwang Ja had asked for a specific name and description, her adopted mother only scowled. “Foolish child. They all wore the same cruel mask to us.” Then she’d coughed herself unconscious.

Kwang Ja’s mother had been a comfort woman, a Korean peasant forced into sex slavery. But Kwang Ja was six when she was told this, and she did not see the significance. She simply stored it in the soft, spongy part of her mind and watched her adopted mother die.

But on her fourteenth birthday, she’d remembered. She’d finally known, just by looking in the mirror on her fourteenth birthday, that there was a touch of Japanese that contaminated her blood. The narrowness of her face, the subtle difference in the shape of her eyes. To her, her eyes were a darker brown—almost black and all pupil— than anyone else she had seen (though this was not a Japanese trait, she thought its rareness would draw attention to her, followed by questions). She couldn’t believe it. Maybe it was because before turning fourteen, she could never see things objectively; maybe it was because her birthday was the first time she’d seen a mirror in two years, but whatever it was, she now knew. Though others did not seem to notice, like she didn’t during all of her childhood, she wasn’t going to wait around until they did. It was a bad thing to be part Japanese or part anything but Korean in North Korea. The memories of the people, even in her small village, were long. Communism in the North represented for many the cure for the disease of Western imperialism and the monstrosities of Japanese occupation. That night, she walked out of the village with nothing, except for her fear and the knowledge that she should never stay in one place for too long because sooner or later she would be discovered. It would be a year before she would realize that her brown eyes were just as brown as anyone else’s, and her sudden awareness of her uniqueness had nothing to do with blood, but had everything to do with adolescence and beauty.

So she made it to Seoul and found that it was neither kind, beautiful, nor magical. It was a broken city, like a shattered piece of china. The great stone wall that surrounded the city was knocked down in many places. Once-beautiful temples with their majestic, sloping roofs were partially burnt or simply piles of bricks. Poor people crowded the streets, and they all seemed in a rush with indifference towards each other. The air was filled with the harmonization of screaming Koreans and honking horns. Female vendors were desperately trying to sell pickled eggs and
pinbae duk
, a Korean pancake with vegetables cooked in it, to all passersby. Occasionally, sputtering cars, with chassises made completely out of American beer cans, would make their ways through the thick crowds.

Two-story buildings were surrounded by beggars, young hustlers, and prostitutes with clothes a lot nicer than hers. Sometimes these buildings pushed the people so close together that it seemed as if there was a river of black hair separating the two structures. The smell of
kim-chee
mixed with exhaust fumes made Kwang Ja feel sick. But worst of all, the mountains surrounding the city were not green. In fact, they looked very much the same as the mountains she’d passed during her great walk. As for the city itself, when the North Korean army had attacked Seoul over a year before, it had definitely left its mark.

So Kwang Ja was alone in this great city and all she had with her were hard-callused feet, a golden tan, the knowledge that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, and a promise to herself that she’d commit suicide before she’d go back north. But despite all of this, she felt lucky that no one seemed to suspect or care that her blood had been tainted.

-2-

Luck struck again. After two days in Seoul, half-starving in the streets and running out of hiding places to wait out American-imposed curfews, Cho Kwang Ja was hit by a car. She’d been running away from an old woman accusing her of stealing some rotten grapes from her fruit stand, which Kwang Ja was guilty of, when the fancy black car hit her. It didn’t hit her hard; it glanced her just enough to knock her off her feet. Still scared of the woman, she slowed her breath and relaxed all her muscles. She let her mouth gape slightly. She closed her eyes, but made sure her lids were not closed too tight. She knew it would be better to look limp rather than stiff. She’d seen people dying before, and she knew that the stiffness came later. She would have looked completely lifeless, except her hand was still gently clenched around the six grapes she had stolen. She was so hungry; she unconsciously refused to let them go. The woman stood above her and shrieked, telling her she’d gotten what she deserved.

The doors of the car opened then slammed shut. A man’s deep voice chastised the angry lady. When she felt a pair of arms lift her up, she tried as hard as she could to feel like dead weight. She let her arms dangle and her neck stretch back as far as it could. Nothing alive likes to expose its neck, so she fearlessly exposed it. Someone slapped her in the face. She didn’t move. She was slapped again. The few who stopped and were actually interested were murmuring, “She’s dead; she’s dead.”

She wanted to smile. She was proud of herself. She was really good at this. This pride suddenly melted when she felt a hand on her breast. She wasn’t good enough to make her heart stop, but if she were, she would have done it right there. She would have died. Her attempts at motionless suicide were interrupted by the laughter of a man. Knowing the ruse was over, but still refusing to open her eyes, Kwang Ja heard the laughing man say, “What we have here is an actress.”

She didn’t open her eyes. But she felt herself being put into the fancy black car. At first, the leather seat cooled her arms and hands. But then the seat and her skin grew hot, and she felt drops of sweat roll down her forehead. As the car drove on, she listened to the treads of the tires pick up tiny pebbles and hurl them against the metal of the car. She wondered if she should try to sneak a rotten grape or two into her mouth. “Look at all the refugees,” the man said. “From the north, from Seoul to Pusan, now back to Seoul. Even I almost had to run to Pusan. I must go there today. Where are you from?”

Kwang Ja didn’t move.

About an hour later, the car stopped. She was pulled out by what she guessed were small female hands. She still did not open her eyes. She realized that they knew she was not dead, but decided to feign injury just in case. The man who had picked her up spoke to the woman who held her up. He instructed the woman to take care of her, and said he would call later to give further instructions. The car door slammed shut, and Kwang Ja heard the car drive away.

She opened her eyes. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. The house was tall and made of a dark, almost reddish wood. Its roof was like those she’d seen on the burnt temples in Seoul, sloping downward from the center. Behind the house stood a mountain of pure green. It was so unlike the balding mountains of North Korea and Seoul that Kwang Ja could not believe she had traveled so far in just an hour drive. It was as if she flew from the sun to the moon. Then she looked at the woman holding her up. It was a familiar figure; short, slumped over, hunchbacked. It was the body of a woman who, for years, carried tremendous weight. It was a woman who was so used to bowing to men, carrying their children on her back, and holding the weight of an entire house on her shoulders that her back was permanently bent. Women like this lived in North Korea, too. It was Confucianism at its worst. Kwang Ja no longer felt as far away as she’d have liked.

She walked from the woman’s arms and went up to the large wooden door. A brass circle which had elaborate engravings of dragons intertwined hung from the door. She rubbed the brass ring, then brushed her fingers on the dragons. Behind her a voice spoke. “So you’re not so sick after all.”

Startled, Kwang Ja dropped the grapes. A couple bounced once, then slowly rolled toward the woman, but the rest splattered on the wooden porch. The woman stooped over to pick up the grapes. Embarrassed, Soong tried to beat her to them. The woman slapped Kwang Ja’s reaching hand lightly. “I got it, I got it. You ridiculous child, you move as if it were diamonds you dropped.”

Kwang Ja stood back up and wondered what diamonds were and what they tasted like.

The woman made Kwang Ja wash her bare feet before she went inside. This woman, who was dressed in simple white clothes and wore white rubber sandals, sighed when she saw the bottoms of Kwang Ja’s callused feet. Then the servant’s old face smiled. She led Kwang Ja into the house.

Kwang Ja saw things in this house that she had never seen before. Things like faucets, toilets, and beds were foreign to her. As were embroidered rugs, framed paintings, glass cases filled with fine china, and wooden tables that shined so much that she could see her reflection in them. But none of these things were as beautiful as the garden beyond the patio in the back. A huge glass door (another thing she’d never seen before) separated the patio from the house, but the glass was so clean that it was like the door wasn’t there. Kwang Ja almost walked through it, but the old woman pulled her back and opened the door for her.

The garden, which was about twenty yards long and ten yards wide, was separated from the mountain by a huge stone wall. It was the same kind of stone she saw as temple rubble in the city. While the vegetation of the mountain grew beautifully green, but wild, the garden was meticulously cared for. Each blade of grass seemed of exact equal length. A tiny river ran through the center of the garden where koi, fish wearing beautifully bright and diverse colors, swam above a bed of fine black gravel. Kwang Ja stepped off the patio and walked to the bridge, which was of the same wood as the house. She watched the fish, some bright orange, some white, and some mixed with both colors, swim in the clear water. Their fins fluttered, but they didn’t move forward.

Then she crossed the bridge and inspected the flower garden. Sunflowers, daisies, and roses grew out of the darkest soil she’d ever seen, while several bees buzzed around them. To the right of the garden stood an enormous ginko tree, its yellow blossoms covering every branch. A black and white magpie flew from one of the branches. To the left of the flower garden, several bamboo poles were staked into the ground. Vines of ripe, purple grapes wrapped themselves around the poles. Kwang Ja walked to one of these vines and pulled off a grape. She bit into it and tasted the sweet-sour juice spread on her tongue. This was what the woman meant by diamonds, she thought. Suddenly she felt like crying. This garden, this house was what Seoul was supposed to be to Kwang Ja. To her it was the heart of Seoul. Though the body, the city may be contaminated, the heart was pure. She held in her tears, swallowed the grape, turned around to the old servant woman and asked, “What is expected of me?”