It was my first international flight, and on the other side of the world I shrank from those throngs even as I saw you and your friend reach out to them, and I thought how arrogant you were. And I also thought how kind, even as I hurried past. I didn’t think I’d see either one of you again.
I had immigrated to the United States when I was a year old, and here I was seventeen years later. I remembered nothing from back then, of course. The entire experience was new. My uncle, my mother’s sister’s husband, was a legal adviser in the government, so I was immediately swept away by his chauffeur. You expected it to be so. “You have a princess telephone in your bedroom,” you said to me later. And I couldn’t admit you were right about that. I had a white-and-gold phone on my white-and-gold dresser in my gold-wallpapered bedroom in Lakeburg, New York. But the rest of what happened in my house was a secret I didn’t tell you.
Outside the airport, the air was heavy with July monsoon-season rain, and my uncle’s small black Daewoo sedan was conveniently waiting for me curbside along with dozens of other cars lined up, occupied and not, with people shouting and whistles of traffic officers shrieking. The chauffeur referred to the other teenagers and me that day as jemi kyopo. “Korean students who study abroad,” he explained in Korean.
“But I’m American,” I said in my hesitant Korean.
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied.
20
No matter what Lloyd says here now in this room, don’t believe the part that he loved me. That I gave him the impression that I loved him. You’re the only one I ever loved. I don’t know what he means by you being alive or how he can save you by killing us. I wanted to believe Lloyd at first. I wanted to believe you had survived as he had survived. I wish I could believe him now, but he’s ranting like a lunatic, and he has guns. And I’ve pushed him to this—it’s my fault he’s enraged. But I couldn’t help it. I wanted him to be right about you.
21
I remember in Korea, driving from the airport that day, I saw a girl on a corner, no more than a child herself, with a sleeping baby tied to her back, kneeling on the concrete. At another intersection, a man my father’s age with a blue cap on was riding a green bicycle. He cut in front of us and then swerved just as suddenly out of sight in the sea of glinting cars ahead. A man with a bent back pulling a wooden-wheeled cart, too old to be doing such work, came into view. I saw an old woman in a white hanbok, her silver hair in a neat roll at the nape of her neck, a white handkerchief in her hand, held to her mouth. She was coughing. Standing still in the middle of the street, nearly motionless in front of an uneven row of small Hyundai and Daewoo sedans all edging forward. For a moment I thought she’d be struck by one of them. I leaned forward. Her eyes looked straight into mine as our car passed. She leaned toward us, and our car brushed her chima. Or was it just our speed that made her skirt billow for an instant? Wait.
At one of the stoplights, a woman my mother’s age, an ajumma, my mother would have said, an auntie, stood by the curb. With a gap in her front teeth, her gums receded to the point that I could see the beginning of her teeth’s roots, where the white narrowed. She tapped my window. I unrolled it.
“Let me touch your face,” I heard her say in Korean.
I recoiled in my seat behind the driver.
“Not ‘touch,’” the chauffeur said to me as if reading my mind. “Turn closer to her. She wants to see your face.”
I did as he directed. The woman spoke again, but I didn’t understand her words this time, and the driver shook his head. “I see the resemblance,” he answered.
“What does she mean?” I asked him.
The woman’s hand, calloused, stroked mine on the sill of the car door.
“She thinks you look like Yuk Yeong Su, President Park’s wife. Park was president before President Chun. You have the same complexion, white like powder. She was a beauty. Too bad about her death.” Then he said to the woman, “My dear, we must go. Careful now,” in such a gentle voice I thought they must secretly rendezvous at this light every day.
When the car lurched forward, my stomach jumped to the back of the seat. I swallowed. We cruised easily down the street, one of a million of those tiny cars, to my aunt’s apartment in Seoul. She had two maids: one who lived in the apartment with her and another who came every day to help out. They cooked and cleaned. I thought my aunt treated them well. She said everyone had at least one person who worked for them. “It’s not like America,” she said.
She had two children, both a handful of years older than I was, both married. She insisted I take a short nap before we went out for lunch. I was surprised at how quickly I fell asleep. She had laid out a bed for me on the floor, a yo, a thick futon with layers of blankets on it and then a thin cotton comforter to pull up over myself. The rest of the hardwood bedroom floor was covered in a large green bamboo mat that felt cool to my feet. The smell of bamboo after the smoke and exhaust from city streets was calming. I fell asleep imagining I was lying in a cool wooded hollow.
22
I used to climb out of my window to sit on my roof and watch the car lights go up and down the avenue. Where were they going? Inside my house came sounds of furniture being overturned. I’d tried once to stop my father’s rage by calling the police, but when the patrol cars pulled into our driveway, the furniture was right side up again and the door was opened to reveal a pleasant set of parents. Upstanding citizens. They explained it was a misunderstanding. A wayward child. A child on punishment who was playing a prank. I watched the whole encounter from the landing of the staircase. The police officers didn’t call me down to question me. My father offered them tea, and my mother went to the kitchen to prepare it. He was careful never to strike her on the face.
I went back upstairs, clambered out through my bedroom window, and huddled on the roof under the branch of the oak tree. I could picture it: the fall forward on the sloping roof of my old house and the feel of the sparkly shingles on my head and back and arms as I rolled down, hit the gutter and the yard. Not high enough to be fatal, but it made me think I should stop fighting.
23
The phone rings. Lloyd grabs it and is at attention, listening to every word, the handset pressed against his ear. Is President Reagan on the phone right now? Then he thrusts the receiver at me. TELL HIM I HAVEN’T HURT ANY OF YOU.
Faye, Heather, and Daiyu hold their breaths. Heather’s cheek has stopped bleeding.
“Lloyd?” I can hear Sax’s voice, and he sounds friendly.
“He hasn’t done anything to us,” I reply.
“He’s not forcing you to lie, is he?” Sax’s voice is tentative.
Lloyd presses his head closer, which rams the phone against my ear, which makes me call out in surprise and pain, and Sax says, “What’s going on?”
“No,” I say louder than I mean to. “He’s not making me say anything. We’re fine.”
Lloyd pats my back, the gun in his hand. GOOD.
Sax says, “What sorts of weapons does he have?”