This Burns My Heart

Chapter sixteen

“I’m surprised to find you at home. Everyone’s left town for Seollal,” said Gi-yong on the phone. They had not seen each other in weeks, but Soo-Ja could easily picture his smarmy smile, his blue vicuña overcoat, and his cramped office with secondhand furniture. She was surprised to hear from him; she did not expect to sell the land for at least ten years.

“It’s a long story,” said Soo-Ja, sitting at the front desk.

“Well, I’m glad I caught you. I have news for you.”

“You do?” asked Soo-Ja, intrigued.

“My hopes of making you my mistress are over,” said Gi-yong. “You’re going to be a rich woman, Soo-Ja.”

“What do you mean?” asked Soo-Ja, her fingers nervously intertwining with the coils of the phone cord.

“The government wants to develop your land,” said Gi-yong, rolling each word around his tongue like a lollipop.

“It does?”

“Yes. It wants to buy your land and start erecting buildings there.”

“How much are they offering?”

“Five thousand won per pyeong.”

“What? That’s ten times what I paid for the land!”

“Yes, but you paid for an empty lot in the middle of nowhere. They’re paying for what’s now officially the site of a planned commercial zone. It’s still a bargain to them. We’re hoping big business will follow their lead and turn the area into a commercial center. I’ve said this all along, Seoul is too congested. The city can’t handle the traffic and the crowds.”

“I can’t believe it. This is wonderful.” Soo-Ja started shaking her head in disbelief.

“If you sell the land, you’ll make five million won. How much did you put in? Five hundred thousand won?”

“You knew this would happen, didn’t you? When you sold me the land, you knew its value would shoot up.”

“Yes, I had a tip from a friend in city planning. They were debating between a lot in Gyeonggi-do Province and ours. The lot in Gyeonggi-do turned out to be tied up in a family inheritance. Our lot would be easier for them to buy. They’re eager to start construction soon.”

“If you knew the lot would increase in value and so soon, why did you still sell it to me? Why didn’t you buy it yourself?”

Gi-yong did not answer at once. “You think businessmen are so cold and calculating, and yes, we are, but when it comes to the heart, we’re sentimental folks. I thought that if I helped you get what you wanted… you would like me.”

“Oh, Mr. Im, I like you tremendously right now,” said Soo-Ja, sidestepping his confession. “This comes at such an opportune time. It has been such a terrible week… Thank you for what you did.”

“Don’t be too thankful. There was, of course, a small chance they’d go with the other lot, in which case ours would probably sit idle and worthless for another thirty years.”

“Thirty years? You said ten, or twenty at most.”

“Never trust a businessman, Soo-Ja. Never.”

Soo-Ja laughed. A guest came into the hotel. Soo-Ja gave him a quick nod, but kept her attention, rapt, on the phone. “I have to go. But one last question: Any chance we can negotiate with the buyers?”

“It’s a tricky line there. The thing is, the government could, if they want, just seize the land. So what they’re doing is a gesture of goodwill, too. It is only an offer, but it’s assumed we’ll all accept it.”

“So everyone who bought lots is selling, too?”

“The ones I spoke to so far, yes.”

“Add my name to the list. And oh, one more thing…”

“What is it?”

“I love you, Mr. Gi-yong Im,” she said, in English.

Gi-yong laughed. Soo-Ja knew he could hear the smile in her voice.

“We’re rich! We’re rich!” Hana began to dance around the room, pretending to hit a wall, then falling on the ground, then getting up again, then hitting the opposite wall. Min, eating his dinner, stewed in his silence, sitting in his usual corner in front of a nong armoire.

“Sit down, Hana, and eat your dinner. You’re going to get hurt,” said Soo-Ja, waving her chopsticks at her daughter.

“How much did he say again?” asked Min.

“Five million won,” said Soo-Ja. She was pretending to be nonchalant, but her heart was doing the same thing Hana was doing, just on the inside.

“Don’t tell your brother it’s that much. He may want a cut of the profits,” said Min. Soo-Ja bit her tongue, nodding. One day she’d have to tell him the truth about the source of the original loan. “But you always had a lot of luck. This kind of thing only happens to you.”

“I’m lucky? Is that why I’ve been working as a hotel clerk for the past six years? And before that, I was basically a maid to your parents,” she said.

Min smiled. “My parents think we’re barely scraping by. Imagine their surprise when they hear this.”

“They like to think we’re barely scraping by. They like the idea that they’re better off than we are.”

Hana, as if feeling neglected, stopped running around the room and landed on her father’s lap, where she barely fit. Right now she was the giddiest twelve-year-old Soo-Ja had ever met.

“What are we going to do with the money?” asked Hana.

“What do you think we should do?” Min asked her, his head buried in her silky black hair.

“I think we should go to America,” she said.

Soo-Ja immediately looked up from her rice bowl. But why was she so surprised, when it seemed like everyone she knew fantasized about immigrating to America? Why should her daughter be any different?

“Who put that idea in your head?” Soo-Ja asked gravely, figuring it was Min.

“Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman,” Hana replied.

“Your America exists only in movies,” said Soo-Ja.

Hana quickly got up and reached into the nong for a cylindrical can of Pringles chips, left behind by some American guests. She’d been saving it. She opened the lid, and pulled out a chip shaped like a wave, admiring it.

“This is America,” she said, before biting into it. “I eat America.”

“Ah, and of course, she can’t travel alone, so you’d have to go with her,” Soo-Ja said, turning to Min, letting him know she was onto him.

“I don’t want to visit America, I want to live in America!” Hana almost yelled.

“Go. Go live with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Hana, the life you want is a dream, a movie-star life. If we moved to America, we’d start at the bottom. I’d probably still be a hotel clerk, just in a place where nobody can understand what I’m saying. Nicer background, same life.”

“But we have money!” Hana protested.

“Hana, I already told you before. We’re not keeping all the money. We have to pay back your grandfather in Daegu.” Soo-Ja smiled at herself, proud of being able to pay her father back for the money he had loaned to Min’s father so many years ago.

“I thought you said the money was for me! You told me, the reason you invested was so you could invest in my future!” Soo-Ja heard an unexpected desperation in her daughter’s voice.

“Yes. It is, of course it is. If we had sold the land twenty years from now, especially, all of it would be yours. But my father is still alive, and I want to pay him back.”

“It’s not fair! It’s my money.” Hana got up and ran out of the room, leaving the paper door open on her way out. Soo-Ja wondered if she spoiled her by letting her do whatever she wanted. How would she ever learn to appreciate their love?

Soo-Ja patiently rose and closed the door. She didn’t want guests to look in and see into their room.

“My parents still offer to pay back what they borrowed from your father,” said Min evenly, without looking up from his bowl of doenjang soup.

“What kind of insulting offer are they making this time? The exact same amount he borrowed, not adjusted for inflation, only enough to pay for a TV? Your father borrowed enough to pay for three houses!”

“You can’t get back what you lost.”

“What do you mean?”

“The years you spent with them. The money can’t make up for that.”

“I was their slave.”

“I know, I know. But they’re my parents you’re talking about!”

“You want to go to America, too, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said quietly, the pinched sound hinting at some larger sorrow.

“And if it were up to you, we’d fly there tomorrow, right?”

“But you won’t let us,” said Min, letting more of his anguish emerge. “You’re trying to keep us away from them.”

“I’m not,” she said. “And I don’t have my parents with me, either.”

“They’re four hours away by train.”

“My father’s too sick to travel. I hardly ever get to see him.”

“But you see him. I haven’t seen my parents in almost ten years.”

Min was as restless as a cast-off lover. He would often talk about his plans to join his parents—plans that Father-in-law neither supported nor discouraged. In the past, whenever Soo-Ja listed the reasons why they couldn’t go—Min’s parents had betrayed them, she did not wish to live with them, she couldn’t leave her own parents—Min only repeated, But they are my father and my mother. She knew at those moments that he did not, could not think ill of them, regardless of what they’d done to him. He rationalized the past, did elaborate somersaults in his head, concocted versions of the story in which his parents finally emerged as victims, and Soo-Ja—Soo-Ja, whom he had to live with, the one who was left—turned out to be the villain.

• • •

But the idea somehow took hold. It came back in the morning, in the bitter coffee and the spicy udon noodles. It lashed at her ears, tugged at her ankles.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I can go live with Grandpa and Grandma on my own,” said Hana.

“Don’t say that,” said Soo-Ja.

“Why?”

“Because I need you to need me.”

“It’s America!” Hana yelled, like a mantra. Soo-Ja understood her daughter’s frustration. She probably couldn’t fathom why her mother was keeping her away from sun-drenched afternoons and wide-laned streets and air so clean you could drink big happy gulps of it. In America, no one would honk in traffic, or cut in line, or speak ill of you. In America, every day was a vacation, including the workday.

When it wasn’t Hana, it was Min. Did they conspire to take turns cornering her? Soo-Ja wondered.

“She’s not just being frivolous,” Min said to her over lunch, between bites of thinly sliced beef and spiced cubed radishes. “She’s worried about her future. She’s not doing very well at school.”

How awkward it was, to have to hear news of your daughter from your own husband! thought Soo-Ja. “She’ll do fine. She’ll spend the summer studying.”

“In America, you don’t have to be good at school. You just have to know how to smile brightly and shake hands firmly. Hana could learn how to do that.”

“Listen, if she wanted to go to America to go to school, I’d give it a second thought. But you know Hana. She wants to sit by a swimming pool in a nice hotel, and marry some Kennedy.”

“Fine. We just might go without you then,” said Min, with his mouth full, pushing his empty plate away from him, the leftover chili pepper staining it red.

“I’d kill you if you did that,” said Soo-Ja, heading back to the front desk.

Soo-Ja had no time to listen to either of them. She couldn’t wait to tell her father that she could finally pay him back. She would go visit him and give him a check for the money.

For the last eight years Soo-Ja had lived full of guilt, thinking of all the money he had lost because of her. In his sixties, her father was supposed to reap the rewards of an industrious life, and finally rest while Soo-Ja and her brothers took care of him. But Soo-Ja had not been able to help him in this stage of his life; and not only that, she had moved to another city.

Her brothers still lived in Daegu, but the eldest, Tae, had turned against their father (he felt that his father played favorites toward Soo-Ja), and it had been left to Kwang-Ho, the youngest of the three, kindly but a bit reluctantly, to take care of their parents (which was the job of the eldest, not the youngest).

After Soo-Ja moved to Seoul, she tried not to think too much about the family she was leaving behind. She felt terrible when they lost their ancestral home and had to move into a small apartment. Now, finally, Soo-Ja could make it up to her father.

“Eomma, can you please put Father on the phone?” asked Soo-Ja excitedly.

It was late in the evening, and Soo-Ja sat in the alcove that served as her office. The day’s check-ins and checkouts were done, and she knew she could talk to her father in peace.

“Soo-Ja, is this you? I don’t remember what my daughter’s voice sounds like,” said Soo-Ja’s mother.

“Eomma, please,” said Soo-Ja, trying not to let her mother kill her good mood. “Just give the phone to Father.”

“I’m just saying, it’s been so long since you called. And you didn’t come home for Seollal.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“If you won’t even come home for the holiday, when will you ever come home?”

“Eomma, please put him on the phone. I have good news for him,” said Soo-Ja.

Soo-Ja heard the faint sound of her father’s voice in the background. Her heart leapt with joy, until she realized he was singing. She heard the hesitation in her mother’s breathing, and then finally the sound of the phone being handed to her father.

“Soo-Ja? Is this you?” He sounded like a man who had swallowed a microphone. His words seemed to stretch for miles.

“Hello, appa.”

“Your mother doesn’t want to sing for me! Nobody wants to sing for me. But you will sing, right?”

“Appa, no, I—” Soo-Ja squinted her eyebrows, worried. The phone cord tangled in her hands, an unruly bracelet.

“Sing for me. Sing for me!”

“Appa, you’re going to wake up Kwang-Ho. He has to get up early for work,” said Soo-Ja. She heard some talking in the background, and she thought she could hear her brother’s voice. She had not spoken to him in months.

“Kwang-Ho is not my son!” her father proclaimed loudly. “I have disowned him!”

“Appa, you live in his house. He takes care of you.”

“He drags me out of the sul-jib, and embarrasses me in front of my friends. What kind of a son is that?”

Soo-Ja closed her eyes, mortified by her father’s drunkenness. For a moment, Soo-Ja heard the sound of the phone changing hands, and then she heard her mother’s voice.

“Soo-Ja, your father is tired. Why don’t you call again tomorrow?”

“What’s wrong with him? Why do you let him drink?” asked Soo-Ja, pulling the phone cord so tightly she almost broke it.

“Your father’s been having a hard time. He doesn’t like living off of Kwang-Ho. Your father never had to depend on others before. It used to be that other men came to him, asking for money. Now he has to ask them for handouts. He has nothing of his own. Remember, he was once the richest man in Won-dae-don.”

When Soo-Ja was a little girl, and her father owned the biggest factory in their town, he would have her sit next to him when visitors—relatives real and fake, friends of friends—came asking for money. They’d plead their cases, explaining their reasons for needing help. Some claimed they had a daughter getting married, when in fact they had a mistress on the side. Or they talked about funeral costs for an in-law, when what they wanted was a holiday trip to Japan. A few had real reasons, like medical bills for a child, or the costs of sheltering a parent. Soo-Ja and her father would listen attentively. Then, her father would turn to her and ask her to make a decision. He already knew who to give money to and who not to give money to, of course, but he made her feel like she was the one with all the power. Soo-Ja had inherited both her father’s compassion and his ability to spot liars. They always came to the same conclusion, and it was usually the right one. And when she bestowed the money, the supplicant would kneel in front of her and call her sage. And so she had spent her childhood.

By the time Soo-Ja reached Daegu, he had already passed away. As she sat in the train, staring out at the open fields, she wept—she’d been denied parting words, or a last look. For most of the journey, she prayed for the train to keep running forever, never stopping, never dropping her off, never reaching its destination at all.

Later, during the half-hour trip from the train station to her brother’s house, she sat in the back of the taxicab with her body feeling frozen—it was the longest half hour of her life. The taxi dropped her off in front of a series of huge apartment complexes, an entire maze of them, all identical, washed white, with rows of small balconies; each building was set apart only by a giant three-digit number painted on the side. This was the new Daegu, rising upward.

Soo-Ja knocked on her brother’s door, and he himself answered it. When she saw the expression on his face, she felt a lump in her throat. She took in the commotion behind him, the grieving women chanting and crying, arms rising and falling madly in the air. Soo-Ja and her brother did not say anything at all. They simply stood by the door and embraced, and when she felt his warm body against hers (he had their father’s build), she felt her face flood with tears.

Soo-Ja ended up staying in Daegu much longer than she’d anticipated. Her days were busy, since there was always someone to visit with: distant relatives, friends of the family. They all wanted to see her. They said being around her was like being around him—the same smile, the same warmth. So she met with everyone who wanted to meet her, going to visit folks all over Daegu, and becoming her family’s public face, while her mother stayed at home, retreating into her room, her pipe, and her silence.

Min and Hana came for the funeral, but left almost immediately. Min told Soo-Ja someone had to look after the hotel, and she couldn’t argue with that. Soo-Ja didn’t know what was happening with her husband and her daughter at that point. She didn’t know they’d already decided what they were going to do. Later, when Soo-Ja would tell people about what they did to her, they’d always ask, Why did you stay in Daegu so long? Why did you give them the opportunity? This is really your fault, can’t you see?

Soo-Ja liked it in Daegu; she liked the fact that everyone around her was mourning. They were all in love with loss—her brothers, her mother, and she. She liked the fact that their meals magically appeared, courtesy of countless friends, who brought the food not on aluminum or plastic plates, but on real tableware and silverware. She liked the fact that for as long as she was there, she could simply burst into tears at random times, and no one took pity on her, as if it were normal to start weeping while doing the dishes. At night, Soo-Ja read and reread the long, beautiful letters her father wrote her, the blue ink stained by tears, rendered nearly unreadable.

My dear Soo-Ja,

I have not heard from you in a very long time. I can imagine you are very busy, working in that hotel and raising Hana. It hurts me, sometimes, to think of you working such long hours. It is embarrassing to me, to think that I could not give my daughter a better life. Everything I worked for—the factory, the business—they were so that you could have a comfortable future. It seems to me that I have failed.

It pains me to know that I want to give you more, but I have so little left. All I can give you now is my love, and it seems so insignificant, so inconsequential. My love cannot get you a day off; it won’t pay for a bowl of rice. My fortune is gone now, and so is much of my health. I see friends of mine turn to prayer for comfort—and drink, too, which you know I have always been fond of—but I want to tell my friends not to fear what lies ahead. I am not afraid of dying—I am only afraid of the hurt it may cause those I leave behind. If something happens to me, cry, but do not cry too long; mourn, but do not mourn too much.

Know that I count myself lucky that I have had so much love in my life—from your mother, your brothers, and from you. You especially—who keeps running away from me. But I will always find you, no matter where you go. I will always be a part of your life. I will always care for and protect you.

Your loving father

Soo-Ja was sitting on her father’s old bed, looking at photograph albums, when she saw her mother appear by the doorsill. Soo-Ja’s mother had always seemed old to her, even when she was younger. Now that she was a grandmother, she seemed to have finally fit into the role she’d waited for all her life. She’d been wearing the same outfit recently, almost like a uniform—heavy, padded brown pants held down by white socks, and a knitted green vest with white buttons.

“Why did you leave that money on my dresser?” asked Soo-Ja’s mother.

“It’s for all the phone calls I’ve been making to Seoul.”

“That’s more than just for phone calls to Seoul,” said Soo-Ja’s mother, entering the room. Soo-Ja moved aside slightly, so her mother could sit on the bed. “Phone calls cost a lot less than that.”

“It’s all right, Mother,” said Soo-Ja. “You and I both know I owed Father a lot of money. And I will send you more, every month.”

Soo-Ja’s mother squinted at her daughter, as if trying to read her. “Are you still torturing yourself about your father’s loan to old Nam Lee?”

“How can I not? Father living here. Losing all his money. It was my fault.”

“No, Soo-Ja. Your father lost everything because he drank so much. He’d come home, and relatives would ask for money, and he’d give it to them. His brother once stole his signature stamp and used it to fleece one of his bank accounts. Some other scoundrel took money that your father meant to use to build a school, and ran out of town. The money he lost because of you was relatively little.”

Soo-Ja did not reply at first, as she felt the blood drain from her face. She began to feel herself crack open; that detail of her life had long been as much a part of her as her arms and legs. “But I always thought that he had ruined himself because of me.”

“Your father let you think that,” said Soo-Ja’s mother, with a sigh. She produced a bag from under the bed; it was filled with dried rolls of mugwort and incense. As Soo-Ja watched, her mother picked up one roll of dried mugwort and pressed its end against her finger, while lighting the other end with an incense stick. By the time she pulled the incense away, the heat had made the mugwort glue itself on her finger.

Soo-Ja breathed heavily, starting to lose her bearings. “Why did he do that? Do you have any idea how horrible I’ve felt all these years? Do you know how much guilt I felt, every day?”

Soo-Ja’s mother reached for another roll of mugwort and placed it on her index finger. The smell of incense filled the room.

“You’re so ignorant sometimes, it hurts my ears,” said Soo-Ja’s mother. “Behind his tough facade, your father was a cub. And he was terrified of losing you. You had just gotten married. He needed something to hold over you.”

Soo-Ja began to weep. Her mother continued lighting the mugwort rolls, until every single one of the fingers in her left hand had one attached to its tip. Soo-Ja had watched her mother do this many times growing up. The mugworts would burn slowly, and were supposed to heal different ailments. In Soo-Ja’s mind, those sticks were as much a part of her mother as her eyes and nose. They were the kind of thing she’d remember her by, long after she passed away.

“Don’t be angry at your father. Now that you’re a parent, you must know what it’s like to fear losing your grasp over your child.”

Soo-Ja looked at her mother, as the light smoke covered her face in a thin white layer. For a moment, she longed to touch her wrinkled warm hand and feel it against her own skin. Her mother was so small and hunched, but still so strong. Her mother’s life was so different from hers.

Suddenly, breaking Soo-Ja’s reverie, the telephone on the nightstand began to ring. Soo-Ja guessed it would be Min and Hana. It was late, later than the time she usually called them at night, and Soo-Ja figured they were concerned. Soo-Ja’s mother motioned for her daughter to pick it up, as she excused herself from the room.

But when Soo-Ja answered the phone, she did not hear Min’s voice. Instead, she heard the unexpected sound of Miss Hong’s distinct cadences, the round, exaggerated phonemes of a woman from the countryside, sigol. She was half crying, half mumbling, and it took Soo-Ja a while to understand why the chambermaid was calling her. Still, even after the words became clear, Soo-Ja could not believe what she had just been told.

The shock almost made her drop the receiver.