This Burns My Heart (2 page)

Soo-Ja smiled, her eyes thrilled by the kinetic energy of carts zigzagging swiftly in all directions. Bodies came at her one after the other, faces shuffling as quickly as pictures in a deck of
hato
cards; mobile stands selling used clothes wheeled down unexpectedly, causing her to have to duck and sidestep. When she reached the edge of the market, Soo-Ja stopped and took a breath. She watched as a bulldozer across the street from her dug into a fenced-off patch of soil. It had long been a fascination of hers, watching construction workers rebuild bombed-out sites. It felt miraculous, how a factory could be sliced in half during the war, and then regrown, like the stubborn perennials. Soo-Ja loved this sense of reconstruction, her only complaint being that all the new buildings and houses looked exactly the same. She couldn’t tell a newspaper office from a fire station, as if both structures were interchangeable plastic toys in a child’s board game. Soo-Ja wondered if the men who erected these stone castles secretly feared that they would be bombed or burnt down once again.

“Is he still following us?” Soo-Ja asked Jae-Hwa, smiling. She already knew the answer.

Jae-Hwa turned around to look and saw the stranger walking toward them. He strained to keep his confidence, though he was clearly out of breath.

Jae-Hwa dug her fingers deeper into Soo-Ja’s arm. “I see him. What’re we going to do?”

Soo-Ja pulled her friend close, with a daring look on her face, and they started running again. This time, Soo-Ja moved away from the main road and slipped into a tiny little street. She had entered a maze, a corridor about a meter wide. As they raced deeper into it, the two of them zigzagged into never-ending turns—enough to lose hound dogs, detectives, and even the young man on their trail. They squeezed past an old woman carrying a load of laundry on her head; evaded a group
of children running in the opposite direction; ignored the hunger pangs from smelling
soon-dae
—the sausage-shaped delicacy filled with vegetables and rice—sold by a peddler on the corner. They giggled like schoolgirls, bumping onto the white clay walls as their bodies emerged in and out of shadows.

They made their way out into the other side of the labyrinth, darting into a second main road—a much quieter one, trodden by tired bodies rushing home. The peddlers here looked more worn-out, and so did their wares. A group of paraplegics huddled around a fire, listening to the radio. In the distance, a streetcar went by, its overhead wires slicing the sky into two.

Jae-Hwa—tired, hungry, confused—turned to Soo-Ja. “I wish he’d stop following us! Should we ask someone for help?”

“Listen, he’s not the one following us. We’re the ones
leading
him.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jae-Hwa.

“I’m taking him someplace where they’ll take care of
kkang-pae
like him.”

“Where are you taking us to?”

“It’ll be a nice little surprise for our new friend.”

Soo-Ja took Jae-Hwa’s hand again and led her onward, diving into the night like an expert swimmer, splashing dots of black onto the asphalt. She knew she was only a block or two from her final goal—the police station.

Soo-Ja waited for the stranger to turn the corner, as she stood in front of the police station—a one-story brick building with high windows and a pointy spire on its awning. Next to Soo-Ja, a police officer appeared ready to lunge, eager to play hero for the young damsels. He fit the part—burly, with massive hands, wearing his black cap low above his eyes. His dark blue uniform molded onto his large frame, his chest shining with the police insignia.

When the stranger finally turned the corner and realized where Soo-Ja had led him to—saw the punchline of the joke that had been
told—he immediately turned around to flee. The officer jumped at him, his hands and arms so quick as to make him seem like an octopus. The man in white struggled—elbows hitting rib cages, hands made into fists, feet on tiptoe attempting to launch. But he looked like a teenager, so much larger was the officer. While subduing the young man, the officer kept taunting him by slapping the back of his head.

“
I-nom-a!
You like following girls? Would you like me following you around all day?”

Soo-Ja watched the complicated mechanics of the fight, the way the officer teased him by letting him go and then grabbing him again. The young man thrashed about like a boy being dressed down by his father, who happened to be a bear. Soo-Ja could see the frustration in his eyes, the long, desperate breaths.

He had hunted her down through the alleyways of Won-dae-don, only to walk into a trap. Finally, the officer tossed the young man onto the ground, face against grime. The officer placed his foot on the young man’s chest before he could even try to get up.

Looking at the stranger in white, Soo-Ja realized that he was quite young—probably their age, twenty-one or twenty-two. He was also handsome, with a small button nose, slightly puckered lips, and bright, intense eyes. He had an oval-shaped face, as delicate as if it had been penciled in, and marked by a dimple on his straight chin. Seeing him beaten up evoked a feeling of pity in Soo-Ja. She felt relief when the officer finally let go and let the boy lie by himself on the cement floor.

“What were you doing following these girls?” the officer repeated.

The stranger coughed a little and then spoke, between hard breaths.

“I just wanted to find out where she lived,” he said. The cop turned around and looked directly at Soo-Ja, who felt more glad than ever that she hadn’t led him to her own house.

Then the officer turned to the stranger again. “Why did you want to do that?”

“So I could come back another day and ask her for a—”

“For a what?” barked the cop, leaning over and slapping the back of the boy’s head again.

“For a date,” the boy finally said, turning to the other side to evade the cop’s large gloved hands.

A crowd had gathered around them. It was now, officially, a
scene.
The other cops looked at Soo-Ja. In a second, the situation had flipped: they saw themselves in the young man’s shoes and sympathized with him—rooted for him even.

“Then why didn’t you act like a normal person from the beginning and just talk to us?” asked Jae-Hwa. “Instead of following us around and scaring us to death?”

The young man got up slowly. He could probably feel the tide turning, his emotional capital increasing by the minute. He shook the dirt off his clothes and turned to Soo-Ja. His white jacket was no longer white, but rather a combination of sand, grime, and blood. But even like this—his face red, his eyes half shut—he still radiated a certain imperious presence. Soo-Ja could tell that he came from a rich family. They stood there like equals, while the others became mere plebeians, extras in the background.

“Let’s start over. My name is Min Lee,” he said, bowing to Soo-Ja. “My father is Nam Lee, the industrialist. I should’ve had the guts to talk to you. If I promise to behave, will you go on a date with me?”

Soo-Ja looked at his dirty clothes, his bruised face. He reminded her of a fig fallen from a tree, its broken skin an invitation to worms. She sensed a kind of spotlight over her, and the crowd holding its breath, waiting for an answer. The world circled around her body, as she weighed the pros and cons of what seemed like a big decision. How could she offer another blow to this young man, who’d already been so mangled and mistreated by all of them?

“All right,” said Soo-Ja, and she could feel the collective relief of the crowd watching. “You can pick me up for a date sometime. But you’ll have to find out where I live on your own. Because I’m not planning on telling you.”

“Where have you been? Your father’s been waiting for you!” called the servant, in her gray hanbok uniform, with rags in her hands. Soo-Ja
had just rushed past the main gate, entering the hundred-year-old compound that she called home. She stood in the middle of the courtyard, her human presence instantly providing balance to the elements—the dark sky melted into the wave-shaped black tiles on the rooftop, ebbing into the curved eaves connecting the head and the body of the one-story house, which in turn blended into the lighter shades of the thick wooden doors. On the ground, the white, hand-washed stone floors flowed into the roots and stems of a grove of pine trees, their needles swaying to the side, their cones hatching open like chicken eggs.

“Did he say why?” asked Soo-Ja, glancing at the main house.

The round lamp bulbs illuminated her father’s familiar, rotund shape, sitting expectantly in the middle of the room.

“What have you done this time? Now go in! Don’t keep your parents waiting any longer,” said the servant, before heading back to the kitchen.

Soo-Ja ran up the stone steps leading to the main house, but took her time reaching the room, letting her shadow announce her arrival first. She glanced down at the dark yellow paper doors, the fiber thick and rough to the touch, the surface porous, almost alive. Her breathing slowed a little, and her fingers carefully slid the doors open, one in each direction, revealing the waiting figures of her parents inside, both sitting on the floor.

Soo-Ja’s father looked up from the account book in front of him on his writing table and put away the square rubric he used to sign checks. Next to him, Soo-Ja’s mother held a luminous silver-colored brass bowl, with loose grains of white rice scattered around its rim. They had just finished dinner, and half-empty plates of
banchan
sat on the lacquered mahogany dining tray in front of them: spicy cabbage, soybean sprouts, baby octopus dipped in chili pepper paste.

“Where have you been all night? Never mind. Do you know what this is?” Soo-Ja’s father asked, removing his eyeglasses and waving a letter at her.

Soo-Ja sat down across from him on the bean-oiled floor. She tried to look ladylike, with her knees touching and her feet behind her. She couldn’t bear to stay in that position long and switched her legs around. “No, Father.”

“I received a visitor at the factory this morning.”

“Who was it?” asked Soo-Ja, pressing her fingers against the floor, where the shiny laminate had turned yellow over time.

“It was a man from the Foreign State Department. He came to talk to me about a job for you in the Foreign Service. Do you know about this?”

Soo-Ja bit her lip. “What did he say?”

“Some nonsense about a daughter of mine applying for their diplomat training program. Although I can’t imagine a daughter of mine would go behind my back and do this without asking my permission.”

“But, let’s say, if a daughter of yours did apply for the program… did she receive news that she’d been accepted?” asked Soo-Ja, anxiously moving her body forward, her back perfectly straight.

Soo-Ja’s father looked at her, exasperated. “How could you do this without even asking me first?”

“I’m sorry,
abeoji.
But you wouldn’t have let me if I’d asked you.”

“For a good reason,” said Soo-Ja’s mother, speaking for the first time, as she rearranged the oval millet-filled pillow under her. “If you want to work before you get married, you can become a teacher or a secretary. A diplomat? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

Soo-Ja glanced at her mother. She was a small-boned woman, who looked older than her forty-four years. She kept her hair in a net a lot of the time and wore grandmotherly clothes: layers of heavy wool sweaters, old-fashioned loose pantaloons, and duck-shaped white socks. She never acted like a rich woman, and possessed no jewelry.

“That’s not what I want to do. I want to travel,” said Soo-Ja. “Can I—can I see what the letter says?”

Soo-Ja’s father hesitated, then handed her the letter.

Soo-Ja read it eagerly, and she reached the middle before realizing she’d been accepted. Her heart immediately began to flutter, as if she had a bird trapped inside her chest, madly trying to break away. Soo-Ja looked up at her parents, smiling, expecting to see pride reflected in their eyes. But she found none.

“You must be out of your mind to think you’re going to Seoul,” said Soo-Ja’s mother. She leaned her face over a small container of
cooking gas until the tobacco in her pipe began to burn. “What would people say if we let you go live alone in a strange city? That just isn’t done.”

Next door, in the kitchen, the cook and her helpers had been on their feet for hours by the kitchen furnace. They were preparing the food for the next day’s Seollal holiday, steaming
song-pyeon
over a bed of aromatic pine needles in a gigantic iron pot. But no sounds emanated from the kitchen, as if the preparations for the feast were on hold, and the servants, too, were being chastised.

“We have to protect you,” Soo-Ja’s mother continued. “What do you think would happen with no one to watch out for you? What would our friends and business associates say if they heard we let you go to Seoul on your own? They’d think we’ve gone mad, that we’re incompetent parents.”

Soo-Ja could hear noises coming from the kitchen again, as the servants resumed their cooking. She heard the sound of a pig’s head being chopped off with a butcher knife, its entrails thrown into the pan, sizzling over the fire. The air in the room felt heavy, and Soo-Ja felt bound to her spot.

“I would work very hard,” pleaded Soo-Ja. “I would go from my classes to my room and from my room to my classes. I would not speak to anyone. I would visit Aunt Bong-Cha frequently, so she could verify that I’m all right.”

Soo-Ja’s father looked pensive. “Your mother’s right. Seoul is not a safe city. You hear on the radio every day about clashes between protestors and the police.”

“There have been clashes everywhere!” said Soo-Ja, making her hands into fists.

“But not quite like in Seoul,” her father retorted. “It’s the nation’s capital. The Blue House is there. It attracts all kinds of troublemakers.”

“These demonstrations aren’t going to last forever. They’ll be over soon,” said Soo-Ja, almost rising to her feet. She made herself as still as a stone pagoda, hoping that their words would slide over her like rain in a storm.

“Stop it, Soo-Ja,” said her mother, signaling an end to the discussion.
She took the pipe out of her mouth and waved it in her daughter’s direction. “Are you a good daughter, or are you a fox daughter? This is for the best.”