Blood Sisters Read online

  LOOKING AT THESE PICTURES I START WONDERING: how does a person show improvement with age? People say one matures with time, but how does it manifest? Does the energy in one’s eyes change? Does one grow more considerate toward others? Does one show more humility? More self-control? Become more patriotic? As I age, will I become more patient and cultivate a loving attitude toward others? Will I become selfless? Will that really happen just because of age? I remember the day my high school principal retired. It was a particularly hot day and the sun was blazing. During the retirement ceremony the students were told to stand in an open field with no shade, while the principal, and only the principal, got an awning over his head. He went on and on about his accomplishments. People like to say teaching is selfless and noble, but he seemed pretty self-absorbed, oblivious to the students’ wish for his speech to end so we could clap a bit and head back into the classroom. I don’t even remember that oblivious asshole’s name. What does it mean to become a “grown-up?” How does one go about doing that, growing up? Will I just become like my parents? I’d like to know if I can actually become a better person. Will I survive long enough to look back at my life and reflect on it fondly?

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY KIM YIDEUM

  Cheer Up, Femme Fatale

  Translated by Jiyoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, & Johannes Göransson

  Hysteria

  Translated by Jake Levine, Soeun Seo, & Hedgie Choi

  BLOOD SISTERS

  Kim Yideum

  TRANSLATED FROM THE KOREAN

  BY JIYOON LEE

  Deep Vellum publishing

  Dallas, Texas

  Deep Vellum

  3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

  deepvellum.org · @deepvellum

  Deep Vellum is a 501C3

  nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.

  Blood Sisters © 2011 Kim Yideum

  Original Korean edition published by Munhakdongne Publishing Group

  English translation rights arranged with Munhakdongne Publishing Group

  Translation Copyright © 2019 by Jiyoon Lee

  First edition, 2019

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-941920-77-0 (paperback) | 978-1-941920-78-7 (ebook)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2019937124

  Blood Sisters is published under the support of

  Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

  Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.

  Cover design by Anna Zylicz | annazylicz.com

  Typesetting by Kirby Gann

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Note

  PART I

  Blue Stockings

  Instant Days

  Zarathustra

  Aldebaran

  Blue Moon

  Virus Complex

  Merry Gloomy Christmas

  PART II

  Death Mask

  Alibi

  Pendulum

  Hitchhiker

  Wedding Cake

  Matryoshka

  Proxima Centauri

  Face-Off

  PART III

  Formaldehyde

  Übermensch

  Metamorphosis

  Hey Hey Hey

  Plastic Fish

  Crossword Puzzle

  Spare Tire

  Bruschetta con Formaggio e Miele & a Lollipop

  Stop, Stop

  PART IV

  Interview

  Amazing Grace

  Algorithm

  Russian Blue

  A Game of Roulette

  Bravo, My Life

  Opening Ceremony

  Translator’s Note

  “You must care a lot about this novel to spend so much time with it,” a new friend who had just learned about my translation project asked me. “What made you choose Blood Sisters for your project?” My answer at the time was something like this: translating this novel was an opportunity to create a productive conversation between two intertwined and porous cultural spheres: America of the late 2010s and Korea of the 1980s. Both spheres speak to struggles with mental health awareness, sexual violence, and hostile political climates. Also, describing and translating the Korean cultural practice of addressing each other by the role one plays (“teacher,” “boss,” “older brother,” and so on) allowed me to meditate on how we as humans seem to encounter one another first through the role we play in each other’s life with its accompanying expectations, and how puncturing the boundaries of those roles (dropping the honorifics and titles, falling in love) can be a precarious and daring act, a site of contact where desire, hatred, and identification take place.

  In addition to those answers I’d like to share a personal reason for spending so much time with Blood Sisters. While translating Blood Sisters, I was going through major life events and my mental health was suffering. I witnessed Yeoul the protagonist struggle to navigate a hostile world with no parents, no mentor, and no reference point to give her direction, and I saw how art could become a hypnotizing space of projection where she could trace her own desires. I found myself engaging with the novel in a similar way. I projected my own past experiences—with depression and dissociation and my own negative inner dialogue—onto Yeoul’s, and I experienced an intense identification with her and with a Korea that felt at once familiar and strange.

  A few weeks before sending off the final version of the manuscript, while in Korea, I decided to go visit Kim Yideum at her recently opened bookstore-café in Ilsan, Café Yideum. Having lived in the United States for over fifteen years, as regretful as it is to say, Korea has become something of a foreign country to me: I don’t know how to navigate it as I once did, and the food no longer sits as well. After a long, confusing bus ride with multiple transfers, I managed to meet up with Yideum at her Café Yideum, a cozy place brimming with a great selection of books. The posters for the reading series she hosts and a handwritten menu for teas perch on the wall, and a handwritten sign that says BOOK PHARMACY hangs on the doorway. When I asked her what a “book pharmacy” was she explained to me (while preparing some oolong tea) that upon request she “prescribes” a book for her customers after a conversation with them. In a way, I felt like Blood Sisters was the book Yideum Unni* prescribed for me, without either of us realizing. The novel asked me the questions that I needed to be asking myself. I believe there is healing in being asked the right questions and meditating on the answers. Isn’t that the reason why we are drawn to a particular work of art or particular people in the first place? Each encounter allows us to ask ourselves important questions and to search for their answers. On that note, I’m grateful to the books and the people who are close to me in my life. I hope you find in this novel the questions that you need someone to be asking you.

  —Jiyoon Lee, April 2019

  * Unni is used to address a younger woman or an older sister.

  Part I

  Blue Stockings

  I open my eyes. I close them. Shit. Goddamned sunshine. I squint and gaze at the blurry moving object before my eyes. Wavering pale ankles. Long legs that keep extending. And blooming buttocks … Fuck! Let me see the whole you. My head is splitting apart. The woman is facing the window askew; her brassiere is wrapped around her waistline, full with two lovely rolls. She closes the hooks, turns the bra around, and pulls it up to her breasts—her round, full, warm breasts. Her face is hidden by her bushy hair. Turn toward me. Hold me! Kiss me!

  Throughout my life I’ve seen countless naked women’s bodies. Beautiful ones. Well, to be spe
cific, I’ve seen hundreds of paintings of women’s nudes. From Botticelli to Courbet to Dali, all their female nudes. I’ve seen them all. Realism, Surrealism, the year of completion, blah blah blah, I don’t really care. I just liked the ones reprinted in high resolution. One day in the corner of the silent library, I put my tongue on the print of L’Origine du Monde. When I did that, it felt like my body turned into wet foam, curling into itself, sucked into that hole—leaving this filthy, noisy world, its pop quizzes and minimum wage.

  This live nude painting—here and now—is sensual in her toasty peach-fuzz. “I would never have taken up painting if God didn’t give women breasts in such marvelous ways.” I recall Renoir said something like that, then painted his life away. I probably indulge in women’s nudes as much as he did. It doesn’t really matter whether I see the marvel of the cosmos or merely a voyeur’s object.

  The plaster casts for fine arts students that stood along my high school’s corridor were always mottled in graffiti and dirt. As a member of the Fine Arts Club, I was in charge of cleaning them. It was an endless cycle: if I erased the beard off one face the night before, the very next morning a crotch would be covered in pubic hair, a chest covered with twenty nipples. “Lowbrows, they just don’t get art,” muttered the art teacher. He tenderly held the Venus he had sculpted himself, and sleazily slow danced his way into the art room. He shrouded her in a white veil, placed her in the corner of the drawing room, and then told me to lock the door behind me and to make sure to check the lock before I left.

  The next day I just had to scream. Oh, Jesus, which one of you perverted motherfuckers crawled in here? Who knocked over our Venus and sprayed fucking semen everywhere? I tenderly wiped Venus’s lips and throat with a rag for a while, but then threw the rag aside and stormed out. I thought about asking my friend to get my brushes and palette from the art room, but I didn’t care anymore. That was it—I was done with the Fine Arts Club where I mostly killed time anyway.

  “Keep pushing on as though you just started” was the motto given to the club, but mine was the polar opposite. I never finished anything. It was easier to erase it and start over. Easier than swatting a fly.

  There she is between my half-closed lids. “Are you awake?” Jimin Sunbe1 is asking. “I’m gonna be late again.” Brassiere fastened, her form clothed. “See you later!”

  “Wait a sec!” I start coughing. I want to say I’m sorry, I want to say I went over the line last night, but the door slams shut. What’s the occasion? She’s putting on a skirt? And even lipstick? Ever since I started crashing at her place, Jimin Sunbe’s outfit was consistent. She always had her hair tied in a tight ponytail, wore a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and threw on a black jacket and gray scarf. When she added her giant backpack, she looked like a traveler about to go on a trip.

  Last night, Jimin, without warning, led a woman with an outfit similar to hers and two men into the room. I was just splitting the hard ramen noodles in half to throw them into a pot of boiling water. I didn’t know we were having guests. Awkward. I crushed the ramen with my fist.

  “Say hello, everyone! Here are my dear friends, and this is … well, I’ve talked to you guys about her. This is a talent who hopefully will join our Blue Stockings Club.” Jimin tapped my shoulder as she smiled—her pink chewing gum emerged between her lips. This was the first time I’d even heard of the Blue Stockings Club or anything about me joining it, so I was mostly confused. I turned the stove off and bowed my head to the guests. My big toenails were blue (and they weren’t the only things on my body that were bruised). The woman with a mole on her nose added more water and two more ramen packets into the pot. When she noticed the crushed smithereens of my ramen noodles, she abruptly blurted out, “So, are you and Jimin dating? Just kidding!” and cracked an egg into the pot. My ears felt hot.

  We set up the foldable table to eat ramen together, but one guy said he’d already eaten and instead of joining us opened a book on the floor, and started rambling away. Words like “gender,” “sexual minority,” “social class,” “proletariat,” and “anarchists” were being thrown around. I couldn’t swallow any of it—not the ramen, nor the kimchi, but especially not these words that felt heavy like lead candies. Fucking hell. I hate these pretentious intellectual types. It’s gonna be rough if they talk like this all day.

  “So, like, I have a … previous commitment. Goodbye.”

  “What? Where are you going in the middle of the night? You have nowhere to go,” Jimin asked, perplexed.

  I picked up my jacket anyway and fled the room. Picking at the crumpled heel of my shoe with my finger, I tried to think of a place I could go. I had nowhere, it was true. I felt lost.

  I was squatting by the corner of the narrow alley for about thirty minutes when I saw a black cat with a perky tail walking along the brick fence. I meowed at him, but this Monsieur White Whiskers ignored me and kept going. I threw a pebble at him. After a while teenagers, probably middle schoolers, entered the alley. They were staggering and looked drunk. They were about to light their cigarettes, leaning against the fence, when their eyes met the pair of eyes belonging to a squirming heap in the darkness—me. They slowly backed away, tripping over trash cans, and ran out of the alley. Assholes, I wasn’t gonna bite. I swear I am not hostile-looking, nor am I the kind of trash who mugs children. I’m just a defeated youth, a scream, a lamentation thrust into the sky. I enjoy my excellent loser attitude. The squirming heap in the darkness whispered into my ear: You coward. What are you afraid of? Go on. Destroy yourself. You have the right to self-destruct. Good thing I wasn’t naive enough to be persuaded by nonsense like “a right to dream” or “a right to self-destruct.”

  Arf arf arf. A dog emerged. Was today the Thursday when all the dogs and cats on this earth hang out together? I doubt it was God dropping him on my lap. Probably a UFO threw this dog out along the way. Holding the ugly dog, I walked out of the alley, into the street. The street felt warmer. The main street was brimming with people.

  I kept walking mindlessly. I found myself walking along the exact trajectory of the bus line heading toward my parents’ home. I don’t know about my father and stepmother … no, those fuckers, but I should’ve kissed my cat goodbye when I ran away from home. I didn’t know things were going to get this bad when I first left. My cat probably threw a tantrum to get them to bring me back, probably went on a fasting protest. But by now she would be purring, comfy in my dad’s crotch. My cat, Leche. When I would call Leche! she would run toward me. She would lap up milk—funny, Leche lapping up leche—the way she licked her jet-black paws. My calculating, lazy, petulant creature. I missed her.

  I stopped in front of the pet shop. A shopgirl about my age opened the glass door to pull down the metal shutter. Her thighs were bulging out of her short leather skirt. She scowled at her nails. Her manicure must have been ruined. I approached the shopgirl, and showed her the stray dog I’d been carrying.

  “Do you guys buy dogs by any chance? How much can you give me for this?”

  “Wait, this isn’t your dog! That’s Nana. Her mama was looking everywhere for her!”

  She told me Nana’s mama was at some café right now. She painstakingly described the café, which turned out to be super easy to find. It would have been simpler if she just said the café was on the second floor of the building across from the Farmer’s Coalition market, on the street that connects the university to the subway station. The interior of the café was dark and stuffy. The first snow is falling, the song that won some collegiate composer’s award, was playing. It didn’t suit the stale space. Don’t be sad, the white snow, the first one of this season, is falling. I liked the song’s opening; I’d spent my senior year of high school singing this song. It didn’t snow then, however.

  The café’s owner yelped when she saw the dog in my arms, and started screeching, tears pouring out of her eyes. “Oh my god, where have you been, Nana? What happened? Did you get hurt, my love? Oh, my baby, you must be starving!�
�� She showered the dog with tender words I’ve never heard directed toward myself in my entire life. For a long time, the café owner was hysterical, but she finally got it together enough to bring up the words I was waiting for. “How can I thank you? How can I reward you for bringing my Nana home?”

  “Well, I wasn’t really looking for a reward …” I coyly trailed off like I was some sort of kind animal rescue volunteer. I couldn’t tell her what I was really thinking, not to her face, comically mottled with mascara. I hoped she’d just give me some cash and let me go, but she kept on asking what my name was, where I lived, what I was majoring in, all while her eyes were rapidly examining me up and down.

  “Okay, okay. What do you think about working here? It doesn’t matter if you have no experience as a server.” She trailed off, watching for my reaction. “This is such a fortuitous situation, I will pay you a better rate.”

  1. Sunbe is a term used by underclassmen to address older students. In Korea, it’s expected to address others in terms of their social relationship to you, with names for upperclassmen, boss, older brother, younger sister, etc.

  Instant Days

  I drank too much with the café owner that night. When I got back to Jimin’s place there was no one there. The room was a mess. It looked like the secret police had raided the place. The chairs were toppled over among beer bottles, and books, notes, and pamphlets were strewn about everywhere. I zigzagged left and right to clean up the place. A little later, Jimin was back and explained that there had been an argument among her friends, but they eventually stopped fighting out of consideration for her. She’d just seen them off. I drank from one of the open bottles and curtly asked why they had to do the group study here. I shouldn’t have said it, I was just a freeloader who wasn’t paying rent or buying groceries—not even a single ramen packet—just hanging out for over two weeks now, a full moon cycle. I added further insult by telling her about my new job.