From underneath the dead boy, from the sides of her eyes, my mother said she saw streets littered with the bright fragments of clothes, hats, shoes, strips of fabric torn from banners and flags, and bodies. And wading through air thick with groans and smoke from burning churches and the fertile smell of blood, the spared and the wounded came to reclaim their dead.
My mother held on to her body and waited.
When my mother’s eyes could see again, my grandmother was wailing the death chant and clipping her fingernails to bury next to her.
Never cut your nails at night, my mother would break into this part of the story to warn my sisters and me. Sign of a life cut short.
My mother said she tried to take back her hands and tell my grandmother she was not dead, but according to the story, my grandmother pushed her back down and hissed, “Yes, you are!” Then she wailed loud enough for people on the next street to hear. When she was supposed to catch her breath for the next death cry, my grandmother hissed, “Stupid girl, I’m saving your life.”
In order to protect her, my grandmother killed her daughter off. She sent my mother north, to Sulsulham, to marry my father.
It was because she loved me so much, my mother explained. They were burning the homes of suspected revolutionaries and arresting or shooting the people who ran out.
In her special box, in which my mother stored treasures from her past life or for her daughters’ future ones, my mother kept two types of clippings. Among the first was a newspaper article from the June 1919 issue of the Daedong Kongbo denouncing the official report of the arrest of young hoodlums rioting in the streets and said what my mother said: Most of the city was dead. Churches and homes burned. Forty-six thousand, eight hundred forty-seven Korean nationalists arrested. Fifteen thousand, nine hundred sixty-one wounded. Seven thousand, five hundred and nine—including one boy significant only to one insignificant girl—dead.
The second type of clippings: the burial nails her mother pared from her fingers too soon.
When she arrived in Sulsulham to marry a man she had never seen, someone that had not even been picked out by a matchmaker, who at least would have ensured that their Four Pillars—the year, month, day, and hour of their birth charts—were well aligned, my mother felt her life was over. She was so alone that she knew she could cry forever and never again would there be anyone to comfort her.
My mother did not make her yonae love match, nor did she receive a chungmae, an arranged match, complete with the ceremonial exchange of gifts and celebration. When she arrived in the dust and dead of night, my mother was rushed to her future husband’s home. She did not have time to wash or eat or change into her own mother’s red-and-blue wedding dress, a dress that should have come as a gift from the groom. She had time only to listen to her future parents’ lecture: Marriage is not about love but about duty. About having sons. About keeping the family name. My mother bowed twice to her new in-laws and was married by morning.
My mother never heard her name again.
When I was a child, my father would call her anae, wife, and the village ahjimas would mostly call her by my father’s name, Kim Uk. Or sometimes ttal omoni, the mother of daughters. Only when the time came to bury her did my sisters and I even wonder what name my mother was born with. In the end, we merely carved Omoni, mother, into the sixth plank of her coffin, the one that faced the sky.
My mother died just before winter, during the kimchee-making time. Our family had harvested the cabbage and turnips from our field and were preparing to wash and salt them. My sisters and I had finished our day chores, and our mother had just rolled out the ceramic jars, each as high as her hip, that we would place the salted vegetables in overnight, when she began to complain about how tired she was. Still, she wrung the dripping, salted cabbage until her wrinkled hands stung from the brine. When all the jars were packed tight, my mother rinsed her hands in a bucket of clear river water and went to lie down.
My sisters took that as the sign to prepare the back room for the night and went to spread out our sleeping mats. Instead of joining them, I went to our mother. Mother, would you like some water, some soup, a massage? I asked her, hoping to trade my service for a story. Want me to pull your white hairs?
My mother touched her hands to my lips, then sighed, a long, tired exhalation, as if to shush me, but I knew from the way her eyes closed, lashes sealed against her blue-tinged skin. I put a blanket over her, as if she were only asleep. In Korea, whenever someone died, the oldest son took the dead person’s coat up to the roof and invited the spirit to return to the house to feast and prepare for the long journey to heaven. Instead of getting her coat, I, her youngest daughter, went to her special box and pulled out her red-and-blue wedding dress.
I climbed onto the roof, sliding across thatching made slick with ice, and stayed there most of the night, holding her dress open to the wind until my body ached from the weight of the silk and from the cold bite of the stars. I waited on the roof, holding my omoni’s dress in the bitter night air, calling for her spirit to come back, calling, Come back, Mother, come back, until finally, after a sudden blast of wind almost knocked me from my perch, I folded the arms of her dress into myself and knew I held nothing.
On the twenty-second anniversary of my mother’s death, I try to think of what I will tell my daughter about her grandmother, and I remember the box. In her special box, my mother kept treasures for times other than the present, among them: fingernails and newspaper articles; a red-and-blue wedding dress; gold thread that she was forever saving to sew her first son‘s, then later her first grandson’s, birthday coat; the fine hemp cloth with which she wanted, but would never have the time, to stitch her own shroud.
As I prepare the chesa—laying out the table with my mother’s favorite foods, with wine, with a set of chopsticks and spoons for the members of my family, dead and alive, who will never eat from them—my daughter screams her displeasure from the crib she will not sleep in.
My husband has tried to put her in it for the night, but each time she whimpers, I jump to her side. I do not want her to feel the bite of loneliness, to feel she has been abandoned. When I leave her in her basket to take a shower or do the laundry, I hear her frantic screams in the running of the water; yet when I run to check on her, I find her quietly contemplating her hands or toes.
And each night, after my husband has fallen asleep in exasperation, I bring my baby to my bed, where we sleep, cocooned. The milk from my breasts fills her as she sucks from them even in her dreams; and the warmth of her solid body, the gentle waves of her breathing, soothe my own hunger.
Now, as her cries subside into soft hiccuping chirps, I wrap my daughter into a towel, tie her onto my back, and prepare to introduce her to her grandmother. I pour the scorched rice tea and, bowing twice, present it to Induk’s spirit in gratitude, to my oldest sister’s spirit—wherever she is—in forgiveness, and finally to my mother’s spirit in love.
While I sip, I try to think of the words to a prayer I can offer for my mother. I cannot. Instead I will tell my daughter a story about her grandmother. I sift through memory, and this is what I say: She was a princess. She was a student. She was a revolutionary. She was a wife who knew her duty. And a mother who loved her daughters, but not enough to stay or to take them with her.