If I Had Your Face(35)
Kyunghee did not notice me much. Her brain was always puzzling out things that interested her and she did not care for friends of her own. My aunt and uncle generally left me alone as well. They ran a “taxi food hall” for taxi drivers that served three varieties of hangover stews and simple side dishes. It was probably the cheapest restaurant in our town, on the edge of a patchy field of wildflowers, and we lived in two rooms at the back of the restaurant.
I don’t know where it came from—that drive of Kyunghee’s. She lived for praise and she was relentless in her studies. While I loafed around and watched the TV that was on for the customers, she would sit in the corner and finish her homework as soon as she got home, and when she did not understand a problem, she would walk to school early and find any teacher or staff person and ask until they showed her the answer. Needless to say, the grown-ups all loved her for this. My aunt and uncle did not know how to help her, but they were grateful to her for being so self-sufficient.
“I don’t know who she gets it from,” they said, shaking their heads proudly when customers would notice her studying and inevitably remark upon it.
In contrast, I was terrible at school. The only class I liked somewhat was art, but even in art class I struggled with following the very precise directions. I dreaded math, I dreaded Korean, science bewildered me, and sociology I thought was absurd. “This comes from her mother’s side of the family,” I heard my aunt say often to my uncle. She made no effort to hide her dislike of my mother, who my aunt said had made an alcoholic of my father. My parents had gambled, they drank, they fought, and finally they borrowed money from my aunt and uncle and went off somewhere—together or separately, nobody knew.
They did not hold my parents against me, however, my aunt and uncle. If they’d had a second, slower daughter of their own I think they would have treated her the same way they treated me. Kyunghee was their sun and that was a very natural thing.
When I was in fourth grade, and Kyunghee in the third year of middle school, her teacher came home with Kyunghee and me one day and said that Kyunghee should apply for the accelerated science high school.
“She will almost certainly be accepted if she has just a little direction, a little push,” said her teacher, a solemn young woman with harsh bangs and owlish eyes. “She does, however, need to start preparing immediately for the test if you decide to do this.”
Preparation meant tutoring, and tutoring meant money and the restaurant had not been doing well for a long time. More and more, I had not been able to watch TV because my aunt and uncle turned it off when there were no customers, to save electricity.
* * *
—
“SO THAT’S WHEN they sent you to an orphanage?” Ruby asked incredulously. They were all amazed as they listened to my story. Ruby, Hanbin, their friend Minwoo, and I were at a small, crowded izakaya on St. Marks Place, eating yakitori and drinking shochu. Ruby and Minwoo were fascinated and rapt, while Hanbin was expressionless.
“Well it sounds bad when you say it that way,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever told this story to friends. I did have to write a personal essay for my scholarship application, and had to touch on a few of the points in my interview with the committee that ultimately sent me to New York, but this was different. This was like taking a shower in the middle of the room with everyone watching.
“How else would you say it?” Ruby asked.
* * *
—
I DO NOT REMEMBER what they said to me about going to the Loring Center. I don’t think I protested. I suppose it must have been difficult for me in the beginning. I do not remember. Or, to be more accurate, I have put a great deal of effort into not remembering. And now, I really do think I was fine.
For my first few months, my aunt and uncle still came to visit me every few weeks. Kyunghee came with them once and looked around and did not say much. She was too busy to come after that. My aunt would bring large containers of food and sometimes ice cream and sometimes they would take me somewhere in the car—mostly to the stationery store, where I was allowed to pick out what I wanted. I usually picked fluorescent gel pens, the ones from Japan that cost over two thousand won each and never developed scabs on the points. I knew they felt bad and I tried to show them all the best parts of the Center—the toddler classroom was bright and neat and the toddlers were cute to look at when they were not crying, and we even had a small, colorful library of English books that Miss Loring had put together herself. Other than in the infant and toddler rooms, there were only girls at the Center. The older boys were sent to other Centers around the country. The older girls—there were four of us in the same age range—had our own large room with our own cubbies and beds and desks and a TV, which we were always fighting about. And Miss Loring had decided to dedicate a room to art when she discovered I liked drawing. It had been a staff meeting room with a long table and plastic chairs, but now there were tin buckets of colored pencils and paints and large sheets of recycled paper stacked on the shelves. While the other girls went to the local public school, Miss Loring arranged for me to attend a small experimental arts school later on, when it became time for me to enter middle school.
* * *
—
“DID YOU MISS HOME?” asked Ruby. “When I first went to boarding school, I couldn’t eat for weeks.”