If I Had Your Face(34)
When I think of my grandmother, though, I understand my mother for leaving. If I’d had any backbone as a child, I would have run away too.
She is out there somewhere—my mother. Whenever she sees a baby, she is thinking about me.
* * *
—
I HAD NOT even known that all the venomous things my grandmother spewed about my mother abandoning me had been true. I had thought that my mother was with my father overseas as he worked. I did not understand until he came back that my mother had left both of us.
It had been a few weeks after my cousin’s accident that my father came for me at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother had not spoken to me in those weeks—she had also stopped feeding me—she had stopped being at home altogether during the day because she said she could not bear to be in the same house with me. I made my own rice and ate the dried food that tasted bad uncooked.
But when my father came for me—that was one thing to his credit, that he had packed up and left his life in South America with a local woman when he heard about the accident—my grandmother kicked up a fuss you couldn’t believe! She shrieked, she gagged, she threw things and clutched me to her so hard that her nails dug into my neck and I wriggled away and ran to my father, whom I did not even know, calling out, “Father, Father.”
When he took me to his new apartment in Seoul, he said that we were both starting over. That we could be happy now.
* * *
—
IT’S PAST 1 A.M. and I’m stooped over the toilet bowl again.
My morning sickness only comes at night, rearing its head after my husband has already gone to sleep. It’s mostly in my throat—it feels like I’m going to throw up every few minutes but I never do, then I feel ravenous, but when I go through the list of things to eat in the house, I want to throw up again.
Something not agreeing with you, baby? I want to ask as I gingerly touch my lower stomach. Was it the ice cream? The noodles? They’re the only things I can bring myself to eat these days and the reason why my stomach looks like I’m five months pregnant instead of two. I’ve taken to wearing drapey, shapeless dresses to try to mask my protruding belly—but I’m sure the razor eyes at work will notice before long. My fists clench when I think about what they’ll say—and it’ll be even worse if I lose this one too. Not that they knew about the other miscarriages—they just gave me hell last time for calling in sick for three days in a row.
Currently, in my New Product Development role, my immediate boss is a thirty-seven-year-old unmarried woman whom I almost feel sorry for every time we have team night. The minute dinner starts, the talk always turns to why no one has married her.
“Why don’t we go around the table and offer some theories for Miss Chun?” Department Head Lee says once the meat order has been placed by Chief Cho. “Chief Cho, what do you think?”
Then the men take turns dissecting her height (too tall), her education (too threatening), her personality (too strong), her clothes (too dark), and start offering advice about how to attract a man (incorporate cute mannerisms in speech).
Throughout it all, she titters and jokes along with them about her shortcomings. “I know, I really need to tone down my first impression,” she says with a pained, toothy smile. All night, she tries desperately to seem like a good sport.
The ones who pay for the ravages of the firing squad are of course us, her underlings. The next day, she will invariably scream at us for “unacceptable work,” and make us stay at the office well into the night with her. She’s happy at the office—there’s no one to go home to. But even if she wasn’t such a sour bitch, her complete ineptitude would keep me from feeling sorry for her. The only reason she continues to get promoted is because she stays past 11 P.M. most nights and broadcasts it loudly the next day, with us as witnesses. Management pegs her as “loyal.”
I have no desire to stay past midnight every night for a company that treats me like an ant to be crushed by the heel of a shoe. But those who do, the ones with no families, those are the ones that get ahead. The career woman I imagine my mother to be—she is probably one of them too.
I know it’s too early for the baby to be kicking—or for me to feel it kicking, anyway—but I could swear that I feel a gentle movement just under my belly button. I place my hand there and listen and wait. For what, I have not a shred of an idea.
“Please stay,” I whisper. “Please, please stay.”
Miho
I often wonder where I would be today, if my aunt and uncle had not decided they couldn’t keep me anymore.
They might have continued to raise me, if my cousin Kyunghee had not been so smart. She was five years older than I was, and from the fifth grade, she had exhibited flaring signs of intelligence that her teachers—even in our forlorn, sleepy school in the middle of the reed fields—were quick to single out and praise. Kyunghee can do long division in her head, Kyunghee can sketch a startling still life from memory, Kyunghee can memorize every king in Korean history. I was proud of her too, my gifted cousin, and my favorite thing to do was take my sketchbook and sit under the big tree outside my aunt and uncle’s restaurant and draw while she did her homework beside me, her lip curled in concentration as she worked slowly through her textbook. “Don’t get your fingers all dirty,” she’d say sometimes when she looked up from her homework, because even back then, I preferred to smudge out all of the edges in my drawings with my fingers. I don’t work with pencils much anymore, but when I do, they remind me of her.