If I Had Your Face(10)
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IT’S NOT an original thought perhaps, but I think people watch so much TV because life would otherwise be unbearable. Unless you are born into a chaebol family or your parents were the fantastically lucky few who purchased land in Gangnam decades ago, you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn’t even enough to buy a house or pay for childcare, and you sit at a desk until your spine twists, and your boss is somehow incompetent and a workaholic at the same time and at the end of the day you have to drink to bear it all.
But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.
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UNTIL I WAS EIGHT, I lived with my grandmother in a small stone house in Namyangju, northeast of Seoul. It had a low stone wall that ran around it, an outhouse with a leaky roof, and a pair of raised urns by the front door that my grandmother used to keep goldfish.
My grandmother slept in her room and I slept in the living room, on the floor next to a small white statue of the Virgin Mary, who had tears of blood painted down her cheeks. At night, when the rest of the world was asleep, the statue would seem to glow as it stared down at me, with the tears turning black. When my grandmother’s prayer group from church would meet at the house, she would sometimes tell the story of how I once tried to scrub the blood off the Virgin’s cheeks with a kitchen brush, and she’d had to get the tears repainted.
The churchwomen chuckled and patted my head. But what she didn’t tell them was that it had taken over a week for the cuts to fade from the backs of my legs after she beat me that night with a branch from a tree in the garden. I had loved that tree very much.
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IN THE WINTERS, the house would get so cold that I would wear three or four sweaters at once and burrow under several of my grandmother’s coats that still had the tags on them. Every fall, my aunt and uncle would send a new winter coat from America as a gift for my grandmother, but they were always too big for her, even though they were the smallest American size. Whenever she had company she would bring out the coats to show them off, and if the guests expressed admiration, she would shrug and say they weren’t her size and she was hoping someone would buy them. I was always terrified that someone would rise to the bait, but I guess everyone thought a coat from America would cost too much.
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OURS WAS NOT a wealthy neighborhood but the children who went to our school were usually dressed in neat clothes and had things like siblings and haircuts and change to spend in the stationery store. I didn’t know this then, but when I look at the few photos I have from my childhood, I see I am dressed poorly, in my grandmother’s old undershirts. I have never seen a photo of me wearing children’s colors. It was not something I missed or craved or even noticed. The other children did not pick on me, but they did not seek my company either, and so it was a natural thing for me to play alone by the creek after school or in the garden of our church, where one of the nuns had given me a patch to plant things. The nuns, who saw my grandmother every week at services, had a better idea than most people what she was like.
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IT WAS a pretty spring day when the letter arrived from America, I remember. Cherry blossoms had erupted over garden walls earlier that week, and my grandmother and I were walking back from the well on the mountain where we pumped our drinking water every few days. The mailman was at our gate.
“Letter from your son in America,” he called, waving when he saw us.
“Really? He writes too often,” said my grandmother merrily. She had not spoken to me for several days, but she was good at hiding her moods from others.
Because she wanted to brag more about the letter, she made a show of opening it on the spot.
“He’s coming to visit this summer,” she said, reading it slowly. “His wife and children too.”
“My goodness! What an event. Is it his first time since he left for America?” The mailman, like the rest of our street, knew about my uncle, the prodigy who had been offered a job at a think tank in America after marrying my aunt, a treasured only child from a wealthy family.
My grandmother pursed her lips. “Yes,” she replied, and then abruptly went inside the gate, leaving him puzzled.
I flew in after her. My cousins were coming! The thought made me dizzy. My cousins, Somin and Hyungshik. I knew all about them from my aunt and uncle’s letters. They were six and three to my eight years and they lived in Washington on a street where no other Asian people lived. Somin went to a school with American children and was learning wonderful things like ballet and soccer and violin while Hyungshik was starting a gymnastics class for toddlers.
My grandmother would plummet into her morose rages every time a letter came, but I would pore over the details in my aunt’s graceful handwriting. My aunt would often include small gifts for me in her packages and letters, and every year she sent an American birthday card with flowers or animals. She also sent photos from Somin’s birthday parties, which always showed her daughter in a frilly dress and a party hat, blowing out candles and surrounded by other little girls and boys, some with yellow or orange hair and skin the color of paper.