If I Had Your Face(13)

After circling to find a spot, my father finally parked the car in a hotel lot, something I had never seen him do before. It was a sign that he had resigned himself to spend some serious money that afternoon.

He had recently discovered that I had stopped going to classes, and instead was spending my days in a comic book café, immersed in piles of comic books. One of the ladies who worked in the supermarket next door tattled on me—she lived in our apartment and told my father that I was hanging out all the time looking homeless.

I had no answer for my parents when they asked, then yelled about why I had stopped attending classes. “You know exactly how much tuition is!” my father stammered in his anger. “Do you think we have money to throw away like that!” My stepmother just rocked back and forth in silent agitation.

I had no desire anymore to go to school. My major was a joke and so was my school. I would not be able to find a job since my father had been forced into retirement from his company at fifty-five and so had no “pull” anymore, which was what anyone needed to get employment. So what was the point?

Leave me alone, I wanted to say. Besides, you owe me. But I didn’t say it—I didn’t say anything at all when he slapped me hard across the face and threatened to shave off my hair.

At night, I heard them discussing me in low tones in their bedroom. It was about a week after that that he told me he was taking me to talk to somebody in Itaewon.

“Do I have to speak English?” I asked, alarmed when I saw the English signs on the building and a heavy blond American woman emerging from the door that said, MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELING AVAILABLE.

“She speaks Korean,” he said. “I’ll wait here.” He pointed to the fast-food restaurant across the street. “Call me when it’s time to pay.”

I thought about just walking away, but in the end curiosity propelled me. I had never seen a therapist before and haven’t since, and I was curious what sorcery elicited these precipitous prices.

So we sat there, the therapist and I, for an hour of valiant, gentle parrying on her part. She was a disappointment to the imagination in both looks and speech, from the moment she walked into the small room wearing a cheap nylon sweater and faded pants that hardly inspired any respect, let alone soul-sharing.

“Would you like to talk about school? Why do you feel like you can’t go to class?”

“I don’t know.”

She consulted her pad of paper. “Do you think you can talk to me about the blinding of your cousin when you were a child? I understand it was a freak accident.”

“What? No.”

My father paid for the hour, cash, in a fat wad of ten-thousand-won bills that made me flinch, but he looked relieved. For that much money, copious fixing must have taken place. I could see him recommending this to his friends in the future—an instant solution! An American-educated therapist!

He did not respond when the receptionist asked what day I would be returning for my second session, and I was the one who said we would call to schedule later that week.



* * *



—

IF YOU ASKED me why I married my husband, I would say it was because his mother was dead.

I found out the second time I met him—our first had been a blind date—and when he described his mother’s brain cancer and her daily radiation therapy and metastasis and ultimately her death, surrounded by her children in her hospital bed, he did not see the flash that must have leapt into my eyes. He was bent over his dish of pasta, his face closed in sorrow as he told me of her pain and his, while I listened, electrified.

There was actually another thing that made up my mind that day; the fact that he had chosen a restaurant near my house so it would be convenient for me. I had been on many a blind date at restaurants that were near the man’s work, or near the man’s favorite bar, or, the very worst, near the man’s home. The better he looked on paper, the more selfish he was, that much I knew.

But this man, not only was he kind, but he had a dead mother. If we had a child—and I wanted a baby, a wee creature who would be completely mine—she would not interfere with its upbringing. Nor could she ever take it away from me. It was too good to be true.

You see, I have long understood what most women learn by fire after they are married—that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genes of all women in this country. The bile festers below the surface, dormant but still lurking, until the son becomes of marriageable age; the resentment at being pushed aside, the anger of becoming second in their sons’ affections. It was not just my grandmother; I have seen it time and time again. That is the one storyline of every Korean drama that I recognize and understand, if I do not comprehend much else. So I rose from my torpor and jumped at my chance to avoid it.

That was what was most important to me. At the time.





Miho


I wake up to the sound of rain on our roof. After years of living in soundproof, prewar student apartments in New York, the sound reminds me of my childhood dorm room at the Loring Center. There, my bed was by the window and I would often go to sleep to the sound of rain hitting the pavement. Now, I live on the top floor of a small cheaply built four-story office-tel. The building is called Color House, although the outside is painted gray and the lettering is white. There isn’t a speck of color anywhere across the entire four stories and the rent is dirt cheap, but only on our floor. I didn’t realize the aversion to the number 4 was only an Asian superstition until I went to America, where they have an aversion to the number 13 because of some horror movie with a clown. Or a vampire, I forget. Anyway, the owner can’t hide the fourth floor of a four-story building like you can in tall apartments by just skipping the elevator buttons from three to five, and so I’m one of the small group of girls living in the two tiny apartments on this floor, grateful for the zip code and the subway station two blocks away.