The restaurant was the largest storefront on the short side street parallel to the train station. Unlike the other businesses nearby, its sign was lettered handsomely by a professional sign maker. The two women admired the large black letters carved and painted into a vast wooden plaque. They wondered what the words meant. It was obviously a Korean galbi house—the scent of grilled meat could be detected from two blocks away—but the sign had difficult Japanese lettering that neither of them could read. Sunja grasped the handlebar of the carts loaded with all the kimchi they’d put up in the past few weeks and took a deep breath. If the kimchi sales to the restaurant were steady, they’d have a regular income. She could buy eggs more often for Isak’s and Noa’s meals and get heavy wool cloth for Kyunghee, who wanted to sew new coats for Yoseb and Noa.
Yoseb had been staying away from home, complaining of the sight and smell of all the kimchi ingredients spilling out from the kitchen. He didn’t want to live in a kimchi factory. His dissatisfaction was the primary reason why the women preferred to sell candy, but sugar was far more difficult to find than cabbage or sweet potatoes. Although Noa didn’t complain of it, the kimchi odor affected him the most. Like all the other Korean children at the local school, Noa was taunted and pushed around, but now that his clean-looking clothes smelled immutably of onions, chili, garlic, and shrimp paste, the teacher himself made Noa sit in the back of the classroom next to the group of Korean children whose mothers raised pigs in their homes. Everyone at school called the children who lived with pigs buta. Noa, whose tsumei was Nobuo, sat with the buta children and was called garlic turd.
At home, Noa asked his aunt for snacks and meals that didn’t contain garlic, hoping this would keep the children from saying bad things to him. When she asked him why, Noa told his aunt the truth. Even though it cost more, Kyunghee bought Noa large milk rolls from the bakery for his breakfast and made him potato korokke or yakisoba for his school bento.
The children were merciless, but Noa didn’t fight them; rather, he worked harder on his studies, and to the surprise of his teachers, he was the first or second in academic rank in his second grade class. At school, Noa didn’t have any friends, and when the Korean children played in the streets, he didn’t join them. The only person he looked forward to seeing was his uncle, but these days, when Yoseb was home, he was not himself.
In the street, Kyunghee and Sunja stood quietly in front of the restaurant, unable to enter. The door was ajar, but it was not open for business. Despite Kyunghee’s initial excitement at the prospect of selling more kimchi, she’d been reasonably skeptical of the offer and had refused to let Sunja go to an unknown place by herself. She’d insisted on coming along, toting Mozasu on her back. They didn’t tell Yoseb about coming here, but they planned on telling him everything after the first meeting.
“I’ll stay out here with the cart and wait,” Kyunghee said, patting Mozasu rhythmically with her right hand. The baby was resting calmly in the sling on Kyunghee’s back.
“Shouldn’t I bring the kimchi in?” Sunja said.
“Why don’t you ask him to come outside?”
“We can both go in.”
“I’ll wait outside. But if you don’t come outside soon, then I’ll come in, all right?”
“But how will you push the cart and—”
“I can push the cart. Mozasu is fine.” The baby was now laying his head drowsily on her back, and she kept up a reliable rocking motion.
“Go on inside, and I’ll wait. Just ask Kim Changho to come out here. Don’t keep talking to him inside, all right?”
“But I thought we’d talk to him together.”
Sunja stared at her sister-in-law, not knowing what she should do, and then it occurred to her that her sister-in-law was afraid of going into the restaurant. If her husband asked her what had happened, she could say honestly that she was outside the whole time.
3
April 1940
It was the second restaurant she’d ever entered in her life. The main dining room was nearly five times the size of the udon shop in Busan that she’d gone to with Isak. The lingering smells of burnt meat and stale cigarettes from the previous night scraped against her throat. There were two rows of dining tables on a raised tatami-covered platform. Below the platform was a space for the guests’ shoes. In the open kitchen, a teenage boy wearing a white undershirt washed beer glasses two at a time. With the water running and the clinking of the glasses, he didn’t hear Sunja coming into the restaurant; she stared at his sharp profile as he concentrated on his work, hoping he’d notice her.
The man from the market had never specified the time of day for her to show up with the kimchi, and it had never occurred to her to ask whether to come by in the morning or afternoon. Kim Changho was nowhere to be seen. What if he was out today, or only came to work in the afternoons or evenings? If she went outside without speaking to anyone, Kyunghee wouldn’t know what to do, either. Her sister-in-law was susceptible to endless worrying, and Sunja didn’t want to trouble her.
The water in the sink stopped running, and the boy, exhausted from the night-to-morning shift, stretched his neck from side to side. The sight of the young woman surprised him. She wore Japanese trousers and a blue padded jacket that had faded from wear.
“Agasshi, we’re not open right now,” he said in Korean. She wasn’t a customer, but she wasn’t a beggar, either.