A tower of magazines toppled onto the floor, knocking over several figurines and picture frames from one of the end tables placed in the middle of the living room. I stooped to pick up a wooden owl, a porcelain clown holding a bunch of balloons, a tea-cup, and the pictures. As I unfolded the backs of the silver frames to make them stand upright, I studied the people my husband’s family once were: a gray-haired, thin-lipped man with heavy eyebrows, dressed in a military uniform; a bony woman with pointy glasses on a sharp nose, pressing a fat boy against her breast; the same fat boy, several years older and starting to stretch into the man who was my husband, with his hair curled about the high-necked collar of his private school uniform.
For a long while after that first day, I could not live with the dead woman and her possessions. I could not touch her things, even the carpet that I walked on, without feeling her spirit trying to squeeze me out.
Help me tag and box everything, my husband would say, as he sifted through mountains of his mother’s old magazines and letters, through her armies of tiny dolls and animals. And when I would not move, letting the dust fall and settle over everything like snow, he’d scold: Wife, be subject to your husband, as sayeth the Lord, for as Christ is head of the church, the husband is the head of the wife and savior of her body.
A good wife will turn a house into a home, he’d say. It’s your duty as wife and helpmeet.
Then, after lecturing on cleanliness and godliness, he’d beg: Please, please, at least help me tidy up.
But I could not forge through the space filled by the mother. It was as if she sucked all the air from my body and pressed me down with the weight of her possessions. I spent most of my time hiding in the bed that had conformed to her body’s indentations, under her mustard-and-green knitted blanket that smelled like lavender and must, dreaming of Induk and people who looked like me peeking in through the windows.
Finally, perhaps by way of my dreams, Induk slipped into the mother’s apartment. After she rolled me out of bed, she slid her hands over the mother’s desk, over the pictures, over the wooden animals and ceramic figurines, until her fingers were coated with dust. With the dust of all the mother’s possessions cupped in her hands, Induk lured the ghost mother into her palms, where she pressed and pushed until the fat spirit became as small as a speck of dust. Then, bringing her fingers to my mouth, Induk told me to suck, to taste, to make this—the apartment, the city, the state, and America—home my own.
When I was pregnant with my daughter, I made tea with the black dirt from the garden outside our room at the Mission House for Boys. I drank the earth, nourishing her within the womb, so that she would never feel homeless, lost. After her birth, I rubbed that same earth across my nipples and touched it to my daughter’s lips, so that, with her first suck, with her first taste of the dirt and the salt and the milk that is me, she would know that I am, and will always be, her home.
11
I dreamed.
The sentries at the Yalu River checkpoint aimed their rifles at me instead of letting me hurry across.
Shall we make her eat a few beans? one of them asked, laughing.
I looked up at them just as the other mouthed, Pat-ta-ta-ta-tat. As his lips moved, I dreamed I could see the words leaping like the feet of a fire dragon from his gun.
When I turned to run, I felt the bullet words enter my back, burning through skin and blood, muscle and bone, so hot that I could feel myself evaporating. My legs still pumped but became heavier, denser, as the water in my body boiled into the air. Finally there was nothing left of me except for salt and the fire inside of me.
I heard more laughter. And felt pricks of brilliant heat from the dragon’s teeth before a blessed coolness blew my body apart. When the grains settled, all that was left was the dragon, blue-white with its heat, chasing its tail around and around, faster and faster until it spun like the sun.
Because of that tae-mong, the first birth dream, I knew my baby was a boy. I was so sure of this, I told my husband. See, fire and dragon and sun, I said, all yang. And salt, really good luck because it’s so valuable. I am having a boy.
He told me he had not heard such superstitious nonsense since leaving Korea. Didn’t he teach me to leave all that behind, to give it up for the Lord? Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
But still, underneath the words of disapproval, I read the pleasure and the pride in his eyes.
Consequently we were both surprised when we saw the baby’s genitals. I remember how hazy everything looked to me, how the faces of the doctor and the nurses blurred until they turned into those of Induk, my mother, my sisters. When they held my baby up to me, I remember first thinking: Oh no, something is wrong with his jajie—where is it? And then I realized I had a daughter and knew a fierce joy, more awesome because of its unexpectedness.
This baby was for me, mine, not my husband’s son but my daughter.
I still feel that joy as if it were brand-new, so hot that it hurts, burning blue-white and brilliant, sharp as a dragon’s teeth.
Like my mother, my daughter was born in the month of the dog. Fierce, loyal, bold, and fearless. If we were in Korea, and if I had married a Korean, I am sure my husband’s father would have insisted on a name to counteract these traits, to inject meekness into the dominant natures of those animal signs.
I asked my husband to pick an American name that is very strong, one that will protect her throughout her life.
It does not matter that I cannot pronounce Roh-beccu.
I will call her Bek-hap, the lily, purest white. Blooming in the boundary between Korea and America, between life and death, this child, with the tendril of her body, keeps me from crossing over and roots me to this earth.
Watching my daughter sleep, arms and legs flung wide, her body like a star, I find myself fighting both overwhelming joy and overwhelming grief. I lightly touch each fold in her fat baby arms, stroke her wrists and fingers. I lift her hands to my face, inhaling her sweet, sweaty baby smell, and I know in that moment how much my own mother must have loved me—more than anything in this world or in heaven, including God.
I wonder if my own mother ever dreamed dreams so filled with yang that they could only mean sons, and I wonder whether she was happy or disappointed when yet another daughter emerged from between her legs. Did she feel betrayed by her night visions, by the signs, by Samshin Halmoni, the grandmother spirit who takes care of babies and mothers? I know my mother and father would have made the appropriate offerings in hopes of a male infant.
Maybe by the fourth daughter, she could not feel the love that I now feel, all maternal instincts diluted with the disappointing birth of each successive child, all girls. Maybe by the time I was born, my parents had no need to pretend unhappiness to placate jealous spirits. There would have been no need to think of protective, misleading nicknames like Dog’s Dung or Straw Bag or Rockhead, because the truth, announced by the kumjul of pine branches and charcoal hung across our gate, would have been demeaning enough: one more girl for the mountain Kims.