If I Had Your Face(11)

“Such ridiculous extravagance for a child!” my grandmother would say angrily before tossing the photos in the trash, or sometimes, if she was in a particularly dark mood, cutting them to pieces with scissors.

I didn’t have high hopes for my younger cousin, Hyungshik—I only had a hazy idea of the physical capabilities of a three-and-a-half-year-old (could he even talk? I didn’t know or care) and he would probably only serve to slow Somin and me down as we played. But I dreamed of taking Somin to my plot in the church garden to show her my flowering cucumber plants, which even my grandmother said made good oiji.

If things went really well, I would also take her to the stationery store next to the market, where the neighborhood children gathered to play on the benches out front. I imagined them whispering to each other about how pretty and interesting she was, Wonna’s cousin, the girl from America.

These were the daydreams I had in those days.



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MY FATHER was the second of three sons, but it was my youngest uncle who lived in the big house in America. While my grandmother always belittled my aunt when speaking about her, she always made sure that the gifts my uncle sent from America were on display in the house when company came over. A shiny black camera would be left on the kitchen table, or a pouch of cosmetics would be spilling out on the living room floor.

One time, after her guests had left, she rummaged through her cosmetics bag and said that one of them must have taken her gold cream. At the time it was my grandmother’s most prized possession—a heavy tub of face cream with a gold lid that my aunt had sent the previous month. E-suh-tae Ro-oo-duh was the name of the cream. After going through my little cupboard to make sure I hadn’t taken it, she said that it must have been Mrs. Joo, who had always been bitter that her daughter had been rejected by all three of my grandmother’s sons. My grandmother cursed the poor woman for days with a fearsome breadth of language that I have rarely heard since. I never saw Mrs. Joo at our house again, which saddened me as she tended to have a wrapped yeot candy in her purse and was one of the few women in the village who always had a lovely, motherly smile for me. She once saw me staring at the stationery store from the other side of the street and gave me an abrupt hug and a five-thousand-won bill.



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MY GRANDMOTHER often got into bitter fights over money. Sometimes it was with a shopkeeper who she said had cheated her, or sometimes it was with her sisters, who looked and talked like her and were just as nasty. Her only brother—the youngest of four siblings—had married a poor girl, and the abuse my grandmother and her sisters heaped upon her over the first few years of their marriage caused them to run away to China.

In contrast, my uncle in America not only had married rich but also was the only one of her sons who was making good money. The other sons she treated like idiots—I still to this day don’t know what my oldest uncle did for a living—but she reserved the most contempt for my father, who had gone to a good college but worked at a sanitation company. It was the greatest irony in the world that she had taken in the child of the son who humiliated her the most, she often said to me.

On top of his poor choice of job, his most grievous offense was his choice of wife. “Insolent, stuck-up bitch” was how my grandmother referred to my mother. “I should have pushed her into the river long ago, when she was pregnant with you,” she said to me.

Over the years, I gathered that my mother’s family had erred in sending an insulting dowry that had not included the mink coat or the handbag my grandmother had hinted at throughout the engagement. My mother also had worn “unacceptable, arrogant” expressions on her face during her first year of marriage, when my parents lived with my grandmother.

When people asked why I lived with her, my grandmother said my parents had asked her to take me for a few years while my father went to work in South America. “He’s an international project manager, you know,” she said. “They couldn’t have a baby girl where there are wild animals in the jungle!”

When I was particularly bad, she told me that she would send me to the orphanage in the next town over and no one—especially my parents—would even notice. “When the boy is born, the daughter is cold rice anyway,” she said. “Time to throw away.”

Her eyes would fold into a smile when she said these things.



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THE WEEK my cousins finally arrived, my grandmother hid every present that aunt and uncle had sent her over the years. I don’t even know where she put them all—she must have taken them to her sisters’ houses.

I don’t know if she was born like this, or if my grandfather’s early death had made her go a little insane.



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BUT HOW EXCITED I was! Tremors ran up and down my small body when I woke up on the day they were supposed to arrive. I waited in the garden for hours in the morning, imagining I heard the footsteps. But it was only when I finally went back into the house in the afternoon that I heard the noise of a car outside our gate.

Through the window, I watched them open the gate and walk down our stone path—my stylish young aunt holding Hyungshik as if he were a baby, and Somin, in a sun-colored dress, skipping from one slab to the next. The three of them—my aunt, Hyungshik, and Somin—I could see their unusual brightness even from inside the house. There is something about happy people—their eyes are clear and their shoulders hang lower on their bodies.