Blood Sisters Page 13

  “What, do you wish that I had remarried a rich man, so I could give you some pocket money?”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t been with anyone other than your father. I’m married to God.”

  “Ha,” I laugh awkwardly. “Very funny. Why don’t you put on any makeup? If you put on some makeup and dye your hair black again, you’d look very nice. Younger.”

  “I don’t care for such things. I like keeping things natural. My silvered hair will turn black soon, anyway. I’ve been praying for that, so I shall receive it.”

  Amazing Grace

  Mother calmly places her hand over mine. Her hand is cold and rough. Beneath her large pupils, tears well up. I imagine those tears to be cold as the winter rain.

  Mother says when I get married and have kids, I will understand. She adds that the easiest way for me to understand her would be sharing her belief in Jesus Christ, but, “That’d be too hard, hmm?”

  Like a condescending reporter interviewing a fanatic in a cult, without making eye contact, I spit a few curt questions at her. Her responses are lengthy and complicated each time.

  She explains her absence like this: when my father quit his job, which was a fine job, and opened a factory, she had to work herself to death, cooking for all the factory workers while working as well. He slept with almost every female worker and was drinking all the time. One day he brought a woman with a three-year-old son to the house and insisted that they move in. When they started unpacking their things, she had no choice but to leave.

  “Why did you abandon me?”

  “Well, you are an extension of your father.” And she’s rambling again. Does she ramble this way because she is a pastor? “Your father’s line is tainted. They are all immoral and unethical people. When I looked into the family history, your paternal great-grandfather, grandfather, uncles, they all turned out to have had multiple mistresses and concubines. That blood is in you, and I wanted to sever all connection with your father. I didn’t even take his dirty alimony.” Yes, your hands are clean, I get it. I’m getting sleepy and nod half-heartedly and chime in here and there. Instead of laying out this convoluted story, I wish she’d just reach out and hold me.

  My mother proudly shares the story of her bountiful and blessed new life, going to the seminary college as a nontraditional older student, becoming a youth pastor at the church, oh how miraculous it is to be alive, how blessed she is to be able to help other impoverished seminary students. She tells me that I have the blessing of being healthy, I didn’t end up a no-good screw-up or a cripple, all thanks to God, as He guarded me as the apple of His eye. You don’t even know me, Mother. She adds that I need to continue pushing on, living with father, studying hard. I must endure it all until I can move out.

  “But, don’t you regret anything? Shouldn’t you tell me, at least, you’re sorry to have left me? I feel like you are rationalizing your choices by using God.”

  “Yeoul, I didn’t have a choice. Don’t you get it? If I didn’t leave your father, I would’ve gone mad or killed myself … You still don’t get it? I see. You are just like him and his sister. You refuse to listen, insist on your point, and you even smile like them, that slimy smile. You are just like everyone else in his family, uneducated and badly mannered, barging into my place unannounced like this! Perhaps we should talk some other time. We can’t communicate because we’ve lived away from each other for too long. You need to leave now. I’m busy today. I need to do the church members’ house visits. Thank you for coming. Watch your step on the way down the hill. It’s steep.” To me, she is acting like an interviewee whose feelings are hurt by my questions.

  “Okay, I’ll leave. Should I come back to see you some other time, or should I say my goodbyes?”

  “Yeoul. Why do you talk like that? Such a tone! Well, considering the culture of the household you were raised in, I understand. Your father’s financial situation is probably better than mine, so you should stay with him. Be nice to him. He is a slave to his desires, that poor man. Don’t mention seeing me, he might not like that and lash out at you. I hope you do come back to see me, but after you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. I hope that day comes soon. Goodbye.”

  As I open the door and walk through it, I hear her immediately start singing behind me. It’s as though she’s been dying for this inconvenient intruder who ruined her holy morning to leave.

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.

  That saved a wretch like me.

  I regained my lost life, and received the light

  Blessed by Amazing Grace.

  You lift me up from the swamp of Sin

  I thank Thee.

  …

  Over there in Eternity

  Basking in the Sun of Amazing Grace

  Bright as the Sun we shall sing.11

  Oh, so amazing, I’m sure. Oh, so blessed. I lean against the wall to listen to her sing. Amazing Grace. She sings better than Jo Sumi,12 but Jo’s singing style is too contrived. For the life of me I can’t sing (I’m always out of tune), but my mother is a great singer. Further proof I inherited my lecherous father’s blood, not my noble mother’s. No wonder I didn’t inherit her dimples.

  I pray to God to keep my emotions still. I want to be able to control my tears, this hurt—what did I do to deserve this? Fuck. I should’ve memorized the Lord’s Prayer or something. Our Father who art in heaven, please let my feet move. O, I thank Thee, my shoes are moving me. O, dear God. Fuck you, my mother’s so-called God! Whether You art in heaven or on this earth doesn’t really matter. Father, you motherfucker, you made my life to be your plaything. Did you steal my mother from me, too? Did you command her to sing? Did you damn her to sing for all eternity? Is that her sacred mission that she serves now? Was it you who turned her into a wind-up doll that has to sing or go mad and kill herself? You narcissist motherfucker! Did you turn her into this nauseatingly composed human being? So suspicious and cold to her own daughter? What torture devices did you use to train her to become the kind of person who doesn’t even cry upon seeing the daughter she abandoned at three?You cruel motherfucker! Fuck, did I screw up coming here? Did I do this all wrong? Is this my fault?

  Do I even love her? Do I hate her? Maybe it’s all the same? Hear me out, o Lord! Didn’t you see me whining like a dog, trying to sniff out whether I could stay with her or not? You also saw me chastising her, cornering her with my questions, sneering at her answers … God, if you are there, please, call my mother to run out after me, bare feet and all, please hurry, have her yell, “Don’t go, Yeoul! Stay. You can live with me from now on. It’s never too late to start again, right?” Please make her beg on her knees. Fuck, amen, amen, amen.

  I gave God ten minutes but he didn’t do anything. God, that lazy piece of shit who doesn’t even exist. My chest is caving in. I want to pull out my heart and feed it to the birds and dogs. Peck away, birds, gobble it up, dogs. A cloud of dust floats along at the skirt of the hill. An old man is bending over, and it looks like he is burning something. Ashes fly in the wind. Like crows in formation, the ashes circle around and around. My mind spins with the ashes and becomes infinite.

  11. Koreans have imported this well-known hymn and transformed its lyrics. Translated here is the Koreanized version of the song.

  12. Jo Sumi is a Korean celebrity opera singer.

  Algorithm

  I feel a twinge of pain in my injured leg. My stomach is upset, too. I feel like throwing up. With the amount of coins I have I can’t take the bus and the subway like I did to get here. I have to walk to Gwangbok-dong, and then take the subway from there. I’ll go back to Dad, and I will tell him what rights I have to live in his house. To avoid him and his wife is to be defeated. They won’t kill me as long as I play along, suck up to them. No shame, no pride. In the definitive pivotal moment I will take a stab, attack strategically. Did my mother’s prayer give me the power of wisdom? The word wisdom stinks of slyness and compromise. The moment I start
ed calling the stepmother “Mom, I learned my capacity for wisdom.

  There’s a cat stretched out in the intersection. I startle and jump aside to avoid stepping on it, but then realize that it’s just a fur hat that looks like it came from a Persian cat. It was probably white or cream-colored, but now it looks ashy and ugly from the rain and pedestrians’ feet. I squat down to confirm that it really isn’t a cat, but a hat. It doesn’t look like a fur hat. It looks like a dead dog. A scarf. What the hell is this? Everything in this world is a mess.

  •

  “What are you doing Yeoul?”

  “Oh, hi, teacher! How are you? Do you live in this area?”

  “Yeah. I moved here a while back. Do you live here too?”

  “No. I just … have business to take care of.”

  “This early in the morning? What kind of business?”

  “You know … stuff.”

  “Ha, okay. What are you looking at so intently?”

  “Is this really a hat?”

  “Ha!” He laughs. “Of course it’s a hat. Does this look like a shoe? You still are an oddball.”

  “Did I seem like an oddball missing a screw back then?”

  “Yeah, I guess. That’s your charm.”

  I stay quiet.

  “Do you still paint? Speaking of hats, that reminds me: Have you seen the Max Ernst painting The Hat Makes the Man?”

  “Of course, you put that up on the wall of the art studio at the school. Twenty or so hats forming a shape of man. It was a low-quality print.”

  “I don’t remember putting that up.”

  “Well, you did.”

  “Well, let’s stop standing around like this, let’s get tea. Do you have time right now?”

  “A little bit.”

  The teacher walks ahead of me and I see that the heels of his shoes are worn. His jeans are wrinkled. If he takes off his black jacket, there will be suspenders. He keeps pulling up a shoulder bag strap that keeps sliding off his slumped shoulders. The bag is stained with a speck of blue oil paint.

  We arrive at Jasmine, the coffeeshop at the Gwangbok intersection. The shop must have just opened, and the server reluctantly gets up and welcomes us. He takes us to the sofa next to a dying tree. It looks like it might’ve dried or frozen.

  “This tree is a jasmine tree.”

  “Oh yeah?” I follow with a question: “Teacher, how’s school?”

  “I quit.”

  “When?”

  “The semester after you guys graduated. It’s been less than a year but it feels like forever ago.”

  “Why did you quit? Teaching is a stable job.”

  “Well, after ten years or so of doing the same thing, it was becoming stagnant. I had no time to make my own art.”

  Gwangho Lee, my teacher, is a fairly well-known up-and-coming artist. I heard he even got a sculpture into an international biennial art festival somewhere, but, weirdly, here in Busan, not many have heard of him. They say even Jesus wasn’t a prophet in his own hometown.

  But now I’m remembering hearing a rumor about him being fired for being inappropriate with a girl in his painting class. Was it Hyunmi who told me that? I don’t feel like asking him about it, it would be a cruel thing to do. As the person I knew, he wouldn’t do things like that. He also didn’t have a great relationship with his coworkers, so who knows what happened.

  There’s a reason why I think highly of him. It was sometime around June, the last stretch of the monsoon season, in my freshman year. Every school has problems, but our school was rife with bullying. The cliques divided severely. The male and female students were segregated in our school, but the student body was a mix of the rich students from the newly built luxury apartment district and the pre-existing open-market merchants’ children.

  One fateful day I was late for school, so I ran into the building with my skirt fluttering behind me. Entering the classroom, I let out the sigh of relief because I didn’t see any hall monitors or student-conduct-enforcement teachers. But the vibe was weird. Everybody was pacing in and out of the classroom, whispering about something.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Well …” The girl who sat next to me was a well-connected delinquent social butterfly. She said Jo Yonguk, a freshman, killed himself by jumping from an apartment building, and the story was appalling. His classmates liked to bully the introverted Yonguk, ostracizing him from the rest of the class, physically bullying him, until one day they said they would stop bullying him if he performed a task they ordered: shoplifting three bottles of imported liquor from the megamart Yonguk’s mother worked at. Yonguk was caught stealing those bottles and his mother got fired. That night, Yonguk’s sister blamed him and mocked him for the situation. In response, Yonguk stabbed her multiple times with a kitchen knife and proceeded to throw himself off from the top of the apartment building. The school tried to keep it hush-hush and let the whole thing blow over. But my art teacher, Gwangho Lee, made it his personal mission to call out the bullies and to put them through due process. All the students watched from the classroom windows, nearly spilling out, as the parents of those bullies—a businessman with connections to a school board member and a school commissioner were among them—came to get their bratty children. There was a rumor about the art teacher being the only person who touched Yonguk’s dead body. We all knew that two of the bullies who were expelled moved on to another school just fine, but we decided not to tell the art teacher.

  My homeroom teacher, on the other hand, lectured us to feed our feelings of curiosity and camaraderie to the dogs. Just study silently, we were told, because people who don’t go to college are “pieces of garbage.” Over time I started to sleep during class, face down on the desk, as though I had made up my mind to become that garbage, rotting and discarded. If I got tired of sleeping, I’d play Galaga on my friend’s portable video game player. When I got kicked out of class and was made to kneel in the hallway with my hands up as punishment, I considered going out at night to hang out with the boys like my friend suggested, but decided against it. My stepmom would’ve liked, even cheered me on, seeing me turn into one of those lost-cause girls, on the path to becoming my lowest self. I never even missed a single class. Instead, I went to the art room after school. I’d paint grotesque shit. The art teacher once caught me stabbing my sketchbook with a pencil knife.

  On the other hand, my brother, Hyunwoo, really got into being a good student around the time Yonguk died. They’d been in the same class, and Hyunwoo studied like he’d die if he didn’t. The math genius that everybody complimented was born around this time. Calculus, confusing graphs, 3-D vectors filled his notebooks. One day I went to his room because I wanted to listen to his Velvet Underground tapes, but he gave the entire box to me. “They are yours now.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to listen to music anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m tired of things that can’t be proved.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m tired of music and its unsolvable problems.” He walked out of the room holding a glass of water, and that was it. There was a thick book open on his desk.

  “Please leave. I don’t want to see you.”

  From then on, Hyunwoo stopped listening to music altogether, not even radio at night. He also acted like he couldn’t see me. He stopped peeking through the bathroom door while I bathed, didn’t ask through the door if I was constipated, and he didn’t blush when I stared at him. He stopped telling me, “Stop talking back at Mom,” or, “You have no talent for painting. Give it up and prepare for college.” He didn’t even say it half-heartedly.

  * * *

  “Yeoul, do you still paint?”

  “Nope, I quit.”

  “Quit?You make it sound like painting is the same thing as drinking or smoking. Don’t think about life in terms of closed-off segments, marked with quitting. Continue flowing with it.”

  “Says you who quit teach
ing. What are you up to lately?” Without even thinking about it, I grab a cigarette out of his pack and light it. For a moment he stares at me, then he follows my lead and lights a cigarette for himself. We look at each other in silence, then laugh.

  “I opened an art studio to teach classes. Gotta pay the bills.” He hands me the card. “When you have time, come in and teach the kids, will you? I need to work on my upcoming exhibition.”

  “Maybe. I’ll have to see.”

  “Okay. How’s Hyunwoo. Do you guys still butt heads like before?”

  “No.”

  “I remembering him being on the top of the class, very smart. Didn’t he go to KAIST?”13

  “No, he got accepted into Seoul University’s physics department. And he went.”

  “Is that right?”

  “My parents didn’t have enough money to support both of us. If I hadn’t gone to college, Hyunwoo would’ve been able to pursue what he wanted. If he hadn’t gone to Seoul, that thing wouldn’t have happened. So my parents treat me like a thorn in their sides. They think it’s my fault that Hyunwoo had to move so far away from us. That might be true. I mean I demanded to be sent to college, you know, Hyunwoo isn’t the only human with rights in this family! If I had known college was a bummer like this, I would’ve just gone to work in the factory.”

  “What are you talking about? If you could both go to college, that is of course the ideal arrangement. It’s another story if you failed the college entrance exam. And Seoul isn’t that much farther away from Daejeon.” He let my silence linger for a moment. “Did something happen to you guys?”

  The teacher doesn’t usually pay close attention to others, but once something captures his attention, he digs in. Nothing good comes of it but he does it, like that June my freshman year. I guess artists need to get themselves overinvolved.

  “No, nothing. I’m rambling like I’ve been drinking! Sorry about that.”

  I borrowed a ten-thousand-won bill from him with the promise that I would soon come by the studio to teach a class. I get the feeling that I won’t be able to deliver on the promise. My eyeballs feel like they are going to fall out. I woke up too early this morning. Today feels like it’s taking a million years to pass. When I return to being alone after meeting someone, I regret everything I said and feel deep in my bones how trivial life is. I might be a speck of paint or ink that was accidentally rubbed off on someone. My soul is evaporating.