Now, years later, I recognize those same body movements and hear the words to the songs he sings to our baby. When she is fretful, crying so loud that the only thing she hears is the pain within her, only he can quiet her. He holds her tight against his chest, pinning her arms within her blanket, and sings. Soon she stops struggling, and as her screams fade into hiccups, she lifts her head toward the sound of his voice singing about whales of Jo-jo-jonah. Noah’s art-y art-y made out of go-phers barking barking. Jesus loving children.
They are silly songs that my husband sings to comfort our child, but I hate them and I hate him.
I hate that he can quiet her with his voice, the same voice that lulled and lured the girls from the Pyongyang mission. The same voice, sounding so honest and joyful that you want to believe, even when you know the truth. The same voice that fools everyone but me. I hate that voice because my daughter loves it.
I cannot sing to my daughter like that, in a voice full of laughter, for I never learned funny songs, songs that make you laugh and laugh. I remember only bits and pieces from those my mother sang when she was working. And they were songs that filled you with sadness, that made you want to cry until your throat swelled with salt.
After one of the missionaries’ communal dinners, the person who came to take the chopsticks from my hand was the minister the girls always followed. By then most of the people there had stopped speaking to or looking at me, unnerved by the silence by which I was surrounded. But when this man took the chotkarak away from me, he held my chin and looked into my eyes. He looked until I was forced to stop listening to the women crying in the comfort camps, until I looked back and saw him. And then he smiled, rubbed a napkin over my lips, and helped me stand. He took my hand and led me down the basement stairs, where the world turned on its side once again.
In the basement meeting room, he placed me on a bench between two other missionaries. I concentrated on watching him walk down the aisle to the pulpit, but my vision narrowed and buckled under the increasing intensity of camp sounds. During his speech, each time I saw him slap the pulpit for emphasis, I heard the sounds of women’s naked buttocks being slapped as they were paraded in front of a new arrival of troops.
When the congregation stood, opening and riffling through their black books, I heard the shrieking of bullets ricocheting at the feet of women the soldiers were momentarily bored with.
And when the people around me all at once opened their mouths wide, I heard every sound from every day I spent in the camp all at once, so loud I felt I was drowning under a raging river, until, in a rush, my ears shattered.
After a moment of utter silence I heard singing, but singing like I’ve never heard before. The only songs I had heard before that day were sung by one person at a time, or by a group of people who all sang the same part in the same way.
What I heard after my ears cracked open was a single song, with notes so rich and varied that it sounded like many songs blended into one.
And in that song I heard things that I had almost forgotten: the enduring whisper of women who continued to pass messages under the ears of the soldiers; a defiant Induk bellowing the Korean national anthem even after the soldiers had knocked her teeth out; the symphony of ten thousand frogs; the lullabies my mother hummed as she put her daughters to sleep; the song the river sings when she finds her freedom in the ocean.
My daughter’s cries filter into my dreams. Just before I wake, her crying turns into my mother’s singing. My mother is crying and dancing and singing a song that I heard her sing repeatedly in my childhood, but in my dream I cannot quite make out the words. I try to embrace my mother, but she dances away from me again and again. Just as I finally reach her, her song erupts into the screams of an infant.
I look toward my husband’s bed, see his unmoving form huddled beneath the blankets. Dazed with sleep, still seeing my dream, I go to my daughter. As I pick her up, her body stiffens with her screams, and out of my mouth comes my mother’s voice, singing the song I forgot I knew:
It’s a song full of tears, but one my mother sang for her country and for herself. A song she gave to me and one that I will give to my daughter. I want to shake my baby into listening, force her to hear, but I only sing louder and louder:
Over my daughter’s cries, I continue to sing and sing, until she begins to quiet. Her body falls into mine and the air in her room becomes sweet and heavy with the breath of her sleep, and still I sing. I sing until I reach the end of the song, until I can remember no more.
8
When I entered the world, bottom first, arrows impacted my body with such force that it took twelve years for them to work their way back to the surface of my skin. My mother said she tried to protect me from the barbs the doctors who delivered me let loose into the air with their male eyes and breath, but they tied her hands and put her to sleep. By the time my mother saw me, two days later, she said she knew the sal had embedded themselves deep into my body by the way my yellow eyes turned away from her breast. My mother spent two weeks in the hospital waiting, she said, to see how the arrows would harm me: so swift and deadly that she would never have time to fight their power, or slow detonating, festering for years, until I formed either an immunity or an addiction to its poison.
Years later, when the evil-energy arrows began to work their way from my body, I often wished the sal had killed me outright so that I would not have had to endure my mother’s protection.
At the start of each Korean New Year, my mother would throw grains of rice and handfuls of brass coins onto a meal tray to see my luck for the coming year. In the year of the fire snake, I turned twelve, and my mother missed the divination tray completely.
“Mistake! Mistake!” my mother yelled toward our ceiling as she scooted on her hands and knees to pluck coins and rice from the carpet. As soon as she collected enough to fill both fists, she held her hands above the tray, closed her eyes, and chanted, calling down the Birth Grandmother to reveal my yearly fortune. When my mother cast for the second time, she poured the riches from her hands rather than threw them, hoping to fill the tray with a better reading.
When she opened her eyes and saw that she had again missed the tray, she cried. She wrapped her arms around her body and rocked. “Aigu, aigu,” she moaned. My mother chanted and swayed until she fell into a trance. Then she got up and, eyes sealed, danced through the apartment: on the sofa bed, around the black-lacquered coffee table, over dining room chairs, around me. And as she danced, my mother touched our possessions, reeling—she later explained—for the red. My mother held her hands in front of her, and like divining rods, they swung toward the color of blood. She ripped red-bordered good luck talismans from our walls and furniture, where they fluttered like price tags. She knocked over our altars, sending the towers of fruit and sticky rice crashing to the floor, and rummaged for the apples and plums. Clawing through the bedroom closets and drawers, she collected everything red, from T-shirts and running shorts to a library copy of The Catcher in the Rye to the bag of Red Hots I bought with my own money and stashed in my sock drawer.