If I Had Your Face(65)
I see Miss Chun at the far end, stabbing her tuna with her chopsticks.
“A child is like a sinkhole for money,” says Bora. “The more money you throw in there, the bigger the hole gets.”
Everyone laughs. It is safe to assume from Bora’s wry tone that she is joking. She can talk about money like this only because she has a lot of it. Her husband is a lawyer whose father is a famous doctor of Korean medicine in Shinchon.
“Why?” I ask, willing my voice to sound lightly curious. “Why does a child require so much money?” I know that strollers cost more than one would think, and then once your children enter elementary school, you need to start paying for after-school classes and tutoring, which builds up exponentially, and then there is of course college tuition, but why a three-year-old would require a lot of money is beyond my imagination. Perhaps she is projecting those future costs? Or buying her baby ginseng extracts and silver spoon sets? The state pays for nursery school and I heard that they give you cash in monthly installments for having a baby at all, because they need the population to grow.
Bora sunbae looks at me and laughs. “I mean, it’s no wonder no one is having babies these days. I don’t blame them. Let me just recount this past month, OK? Let’s see—he’s at school, which, I applied for the free state-run daycare but of course he didn’t get in, so we decided to go with an English daycare, which is 1.2 million a month.” She does not hear my sharp intake of breath here, and continues. “School is from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M., which means my ajumma has to come in the morning at eight and stay until I get home at night. So I have to pay the ajumma two million won a month. Then, clothes. I don’t know why, but kids need a lot of freaking clothes. I feel like I have to go buy some every week. And every time I take him grocery shopping, we have to buy a toy or else he throws a screaming fit in the middle of the store and I want to die of shame. And books! Do you know how much books cost? They sell children’s books in sets of thirty or fifty. And I had to buy that fox robot that reads books out loud because everyone in his class has one.” She rattles on and I am listening to her in a murky dream.
I know that most of the things on her list are frivolities. There will be no extra toys or reading robots or book sets of fifty for my child. But I’m also not na?ve enough to think that I won’t want them when the time comes. It will wring my heart that I can’t buy things for my daughter.
The conversation switches to vacations because Bora sunbae is talking about how she “had to” book the kids’ suite and the children’s activities package at a hotel in Jeju. I give up on asking her about maternity leave as she clearly exists on a different planet, where it does not matter. She probably didn’t even ask for paid leave.
* * *
—
WE ARE BACK in the office when at around 3 P.M. Miss Chun calls me to the meeting room. She does not specify what report to bring, or what update I am to give her, so I gather everything I am working on to have whatever she needs.
She is sitting at the end of the table, looking grimly down at a sheaf of papers. She loves calling people in here because she can pretend that this is her office and that her desk isn’t the same size as ours out on the floor. I bow and sit down two seats away from her, fumbling with my reports.
“Hold on,” she says without looking at me. She flips through the rest of the papers for a good five minutes, and all I can do is stare at the first pages of my reports and wonder when I wrote them because I do not remember writing these words at all.
“So,” she says. “Miss Wonna.”
“Yes?”
“I’m not going to beat around the bush here. Are you pregnant?”
I am so shocked that I actually gasp. My hands fly to my stomach.
“How did you know?” I say.
“I have eyes,” she snaps. “And a brain. And your reports have been the worst I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something because they were never very good.”
I stare down at them and nod. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. I don’t know if I am apologizing for the pregnancy or the reports.
“When are you due?” Her voice is crisp. I can feel her eyes boring holes into my skull.
“September ninth.”
“And have you talked to HR?”
“No…”
“Good.”
I look up in fear. She settles back in her chair and sighs.
“I am going to tell you this now very clearly,” she says in a weary voice. “I cannot spare you because there is a companywide hiring freeze on top of a giant round of layoffs coming our way. Honestly, if there wasn’t a hiring freeze, I would have fired you a long time ago, but now I have to make do with you because if I lose even you, I can’t replace you and that is more work for the rest of us. Do you understand?”
I nod silently.
“We have four new projects coming up in the second quarter of next year. If we don’t deliver on them, this entire department will be gone. My boss has told me that this project is a test to determine whether to keep us or not. Now, if the department goes, I will stay because of my position. I will just be moved to another department. Everyone under me, however, will be laid off. So I don’t think it’ll be quite fair for you to take a long maternity leave when your colleagues will all be working to save their livelihoods, do you? Especially when we don’t have the head count to add anyone else?”