“You have a good face,” he said. “You look honest.”
The market women had told her this before. Sunja could not haggle well and didn’t try. However, this morning she hadn’t told her mother that she was meeting Koh Hansu. She had not even told her about the Japanese students picking on her. The night before, she told Dokhee, who did the laundry with her, that she’d do the wash herself, and Dokhee had been overjoyed to get out of the task.
“Do you have a sweetheart?” he asked.
Her cheeks flushed. “No.”
Hansu smiled. “You are almost seventeen. I’m thirty-four. I am exactly twice your age. I am going to be your elder brother and your friend. Hansu-oppa. Would you like that?”
Sunja stared at his black eyes, thinking that she had never wanted anything more except for the time she’d wanted her father to recover from his illness. There wasn’t a day when she didn’t think of her father or hear his voice in her head.
“When do you do your wash?”
“Every third day.”
“This time?”
She nodded. Sunja breathed deeply, her lungs and heart filling with anticipation and wonder. She had always loved this beach—the unending expanse of pale green and blue water, the tiny white pebbles framing the black rocks between the water and the rocky soil. The silence here made her safe and content. Almost no one ever came here, but now she would never see this place the same way again.
Hansu picked up a smooth, flat stone by her foot—black with thin gray striations. From his pocket, he took out a piece of white chalk that he used to mark the wholesale containers of fish, and he made an X on the bottom of the stone. He crouched and felt about the enormous rocks that surrounded them and found a dry crevice in a medium-sized rock, the height of a bench.
“If I come here and you’re not here yet, but I have to go back to work, I’ll leave this stone in the hollow of this rock so you’ll know that I came. If you’re here and I’m not, I want you to leave this stone in the same spot, so I can know that you came to see me.”
He patted her arm and smiled at her.
“Sunja-ya, I better go now. Let’s see each other later, okay?”
She watched him walk away, and as soon as he was gone, she squatted and opened the bundle to begin the wash. She took a dirty shirt and soaked it in the cool water. Everything had changed.
Three days later, she saw him. It took nothing to convince the sisters to let her do the wash by herself. Again, he was waiting by the rocks, reading the paper. He wore a light-colored hat with a black hatband. He looked elegant. He acted as if meeting her by the rocks was normal, though Sunja was terrified that they might be discovered. She felt guilty that she had not told her mother, or Bokhee and Dokhee, about him. Seated on the black rocks, Hansu and Sunja spoke for half an hour or so, and he asked her odd questions: “What do you think about when it’s quiet and you’re not doing much?”
There was never a time when she wasn’t doing anything. The boardinghouse required so much work; Sunja could hardly remember her mother ever being idle. After she told him she was always busy, she realized she was wrong. There were times when she was working when it felt like the work was nothing at all, because it was something she knew how to do without paying much attention. She could peel potatoes or wipe down the floors without thinking, and when she had this quiet in her mind, lately, she had been thinking of him, but how could she say this? Right before he had to go, he asked her what she thought a good friend was, and she answered he was, because he had helped her when she was in trouble. He had smiled at that answer and stroked her hair. Every few days, they saw each other at the cove, and Sunja grew more efficient with the wash and housework, so that no one at home noticed how she spent her time at the beach or at the market.