If I Had Your Face(37)
“Oh shut up,” said Ruby, rudely. “If she was uncomfortable, she wouldn’t be telling us in the first place. Don’t you want to hear more?” She wasn’t even looking at him as she said this.
If anything made me uncomfortable, it was the savage way Ruby talked to Hanbin. I looked down at my plate of food. I hoped they noticed that I wasn’t eating very much. I always ate several cups of yogurt or a slab of tofu with soy sauce from the Asian mart before meeting them, to fill myself up.
“Of course I want to hear more,” said Hanbin, looking at me. I stared at his hair, glinting under the lamp, to avoid meeting his eyes. “But not if it brings up bad memories. I’m really sorry to hear about all this. It must have been so hard for you.” The frown line on his forehead grew deeper.
I mumbled something, embarrassed. I did not want him to feel sorry for me and I regretted telling either of them this. I knew that hearing this story would change the way they treated me. Anxiety, like a dark bat, fluttered in my chest.
“The conclusion of the story is that it all turned out for the best,” said Ruby. Her voice was stubborn and triumphant. “She wouldn’t be here if she’d stayed with her aunt and uncle.”
* * *
—
WHAT RUBY SAID was true. I never would have had a chance to win an art scholarship to America because I did not have any idea such a thing existed. It was the Loring Foundation that had such connections, and it had been Miss Loring who made us practice English every week, saying that we would need it someday. She was also the one who left a specific budget for art supplies when she died abruptly, leaving all of her own money to the Center. All I needed to do was ask, and I was given the money to buy plaster and paint and paper and chisels and knives. Then came the big scandal a few years back about all the chaebol scholarships being granted exclusively to the children of politicians and prosecutors that the chaebol families wanted to keep in their pockets. Suddenly, the foundations had to scramble to find actual children in need to give their scholarships to, and an orphan from an orphanage was at the top of the list. And as the oldest and largest foundation, the Loring Center was at the top of the list of orphanages. When I met the members of the scholarship committee who were in charge of the exchange program at SVA, they were practically swooning with excitement as they introduced themselves. “We’ve read all about you!” they said. “We are elated to have someone like you receive the benefits of this program.” My story was the stuff of program brochures, of donor newsletters and feel-good newspaper profiles.
When I graduated and came back to Korea, I never tried to find my aunt and uncle. I would think of them sometimes with pale curiosity, of what they would say if they saw me now, if they would ask me to repay their money. I often wondered where Kyunghee had gone to college, whether she had made it to a SKY university, as had been her goal. She wanted to become a doctor, she said. But I think that’s because it was the only job we knew of at the time that made any money.
* * *
—
AFTER THE IZAKAYA, we headed to a party at one of Minwoo and Hanbin’s friends’ apartments in SoHo. The music was loud even as we came out of the elevator at the end of the hall—a rapacious hip-hop beat which did not prepare me for what the apartment looked like inside. A dark hallway opened sharply into a soaring loft, with a ceiling that must have been five meters high. Sofas and chairs were all upholstered in teal velvet, contrasting sharply with an enormous chandelier dripping with red crystals. I was still not used to the interiors of this world—that of the wealthy Koreans in America. The strange, lavish use of colors in this apartment bewildered and overwhelmed me. Even the scent was heavy and unusual—like burnt roots mixed with flowers and spices. I had never smelled anything like it before, but it was expensive, I could divine that immediately.
A blond, uniformed bartender—the only non-Korean at the party—was in the kitchen mixing drinks on the marble-topped island. There were maybe ten other people there, some of them a lot older—in their early thirties at least. As Ruby and Hanbin and Minwoo said hello to their friends, I detached myself and went to find the bathroom—a dark cave of a room lit with ghostly orbs and stubby white designer candles—where I stared at myself in a gilt-framed mirror, washing my hands and worrying about how I was going to get through this evening. I couldn’t just stick near Ruby and not talk to anyone else because that would be even more awkward, I decided. I would venture out on my own for a few minutes and then circle back to Ruby and Hanbin later, when everyone was a little more drunk and no one would really pay attention to me.
When I finally emerged from the bathroom, I headed for the kitchen and asked the bartender for a cranberry cocktail.
“And an Old-Fashioned, thanks.”
I turned around to find a tall, thin boy in a leather jacket behind me. He had a sharp, triangular face, with sunken cheeks. I thought I recognized him from school.
“Don’t you go to SVA?” he asked, staring down at me. He smelled like American soap.
I nodded. “Do you?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m a sophomore.”
“First-year.”
The bartender held out our drinks and I took both, handing the boy his glass.
“How do you know Byung-joon?” he asked, tilting his head toward the living room, from where the lilt of excited voices trailed back to us.