“They don’t call them WACs anymore,” I told Ernie. The Women’s Auxiliary Corps had been disbanded a few years ago, and female soldiers were integrated into regular Army units.
“Whatever you call them,” Ernie said. “And anyway, I received a note from an old friend.”
He pulled a piece of lined notepaper out of his pocket. It was folded elaborately into the shape of a swan.
Suk-ja grabbed it and, without asking permission, unfolded it. Quickly, she read the note.
“Who’s this?” she said.
“An old girlfriend.”
Written in broken English, the note said that she missed him and she wanted to be with him, and she had no place to go on Chusok. She asked him to meet her at the Seven Dragon mokkolli house. It was signed Miss Na.
I knew the Seven Dragon mokkolli house. It was a little dive in a back alley. It served warm rice beer. The type of place cab drivers and fledgling Korean gangsters hung out.
Exactly the type of place Ernie loved.
“Who is she?” I asked.
“What are you, my mother?” Ernie sipped on his ginseng tea. “One of the Seven Club waitresses slipped the note in my pocket while we were in there drinking the other night. I met Miss Na when I first arrived in country. Sexy lady. I was with her for a while, but she went to the States on a yobo visa.”
Invited to immigrate to the United States for the purpose of matrimony.
“If she’s back in country, why didn’t she talk to you herself?”
“The waitress said she’d been in there three or four times looking for me, but we’ve been busy on this case. So she asked the waitress to hand me this note if she saw me.”
“Why Chusok?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Maybe she figured I’d have that day off.”
Suk-ja tugged on my arm. “We go to my brother’s house, okay Geogi?”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
Her face beamed with joy.
Burnt pine needles.
I had smelled them before and now I was smelling them again. Suk-ja and I had taken a cab to the northern district of Seoul known as Mia-dong. The cabby let us off on the main road, and we hiked through winding pathways up the side of a hill. I lugged a basket of Asian pears that Suk-ja made me buy, because it would be impolite to enter her brother’s house with “empty hands.”
It was a rickety hovel made of splintery wood, like all the others in the neighborhood. Her brother was a construction worker, she said, trying to become a carpenter, working secretly for a union that the government had declared illegal, like all the other unions in Korea. His wife was a stout woman with a ruddy smiling face, and they had three kids; one infant, two toddlers. When I shook hands with Suk-ja’s brother, his brown eyes were moist, earnest. This meeting meant a lot to him. And somehow, in that brief moment, I read the anguish he felt at not being able to properly take care of his younger sister. Of being poor and seeing her go with foreigners in order to survive.
Suk-ja and I slipped off our shoes and stepped up onto the raised wooden floor. The main room of the small home had been cleared of furniture, and against the far wall were two large photographs, lined in black, of a wrinkled-looking man and a plain-faced woman.
“My parents,” Suk-ja said. “They die long time ago.”
“What’s that smell?” I asked.
“Pine needles,” Suk-ja answered. “We roast them at Chusok time. Makes house smell good. How you say? Cozy.”
The brother lined up the children first. The infant in his small crib. The two toddlers knelt on the floor, bowing their heads three times to the photographs of their grandparents in front of them. Then it was our turn. Suk-ja moved the crib, and we four adults knelt. She motioned for me to watch her. She placed her slender hands-thumb and forefinger touching-flat on the floor in front of her. Her brother chanted something I couldn’t quite catch, and then they bowed, touching their foreheads to the floor. Quickly, I mimicked their movement. The brother chanted again and we bowed. In all, we repeated this three times.
Then Suk-ja’s brother brought in a rectangular table. I helped him unfold the legs, while his wife carried in the food: cabbage kimchee, steamed rice, tofu stew, roast mackerel, strips of dried turnip. Before we ate, a plate of song-pyun was placed in front of the photographs.
Suk-ja’s brother motioned for us to dig in. I picked up my chopsticks and inhaled deeply of the clean scent of roasted pine needles. How wonderful it was to be welcomed by such a warm family. They were poor, they suffered through much, but they had each other.
I set down a slice of kimchee. Suddenly my hunger left me. Everything rushed together in my brain: Chusok, the warm family setting, the scent of pine needles, the dumplings, the photograph of ancestors.
I turned to Suk-ja. “What’s next?” I asked.
She stared at me blankly.
“At Chusok,” I said. “You first roast pine needles, then you bow to your ancestors, then you serve them songpyun. What’s the next step?”
“Oh. Understand. Next step is we take food for us and dumplings for the dead up to Happy Mountain.”
“Happy Mountain?”
“Yeah. You know, place where dead people live.”
“The cemetery,” I said. Then I corrected myself. “The burial mounds.”
In Korea, people are buried in mounds, six-foot-high round hills. Not flat graves. The idea is the dead can sit there and gaze out upon pleasant surroundings.
“Yes. Place where ancestors live. We have picnic there, perform ceremony again.”
“Will you go today?”
“No. Too far. My parents’ home in Taejon. Many people go daytime. All train, bus, too crowded.”
“How about going at night?”
Suk-ja’s eyes widened. “At night? Too many ghosts.
Anyway, my parents, how you say, burned?”
“Cremated,” I said.
“Yeah. Cremated. We keep ashes before, but I think my oldest sister in Taejon, she take them.”
“So does anybody go to the grave mounds at night?”
“No, no. Nobody go. But today, during daytime, many people will be at all the cemeteries around Korea. On Chusok, bury places very crowded.”
I rose from the table, apologizing to Suk-ja’s older brother and his wife and then to Suk-ja.
“Where you go?”
“This case we’ve been working on, it has to do with Chusok. Everything about it has to do with Chusok. I was just too dumb to see it.”
Each crime scene ran through my mind, like a movie film fast-forwarding through the projector. And now, when I compared those scenes to what I had learned here with Suk-ja’s family, they all made a weird sort of sense.
First, Captain Noh, the Korean cop in the village of Songtan, didn’t want to explain to me the significance of the roasted pine needles at the murder site of Jo Kyong-ah. He thought someone was mocking Korean custom, and he didn’t want to admit such a loss of face to foreigners like me and Ernie. Second, both Jo Kyong-ah, and later Specialist Five Arthur Q. Fairbanks, had been forced to kneel face-down in an awkward position, as if they were performing the seibei bowing ceremony. Third, Haggler Lee’s young serving girl was found with songpyun dumplings shoved in her mouth- the next step in the Chusok ceremonies.
The final step? Grave mounds.
“I have to go,” I said.
“I go with you.”
I didn’t argue.
I had to find Ernie. Even if that meant interrupting his tryst with his old girlfriend, Miss Na.
The proprietor of the Silver Dragon mokkolli house was a rotund man with a bushy black mustache and a white apron tied around his waist. As soon as I walked in the door, he looked perplexed. Then he pulled out a sheet of lined notebook paper and handed it to me.
This one folded in the shape of a turtle.
I unfolded it. It was written in hanmun, Chinese characters, and said only: Hyodo. Filial piety.
I remembered the words because they were the first two Chinese characters my Korean language teacher had written on the chalkboard. The basis, she’d told us, upon which Confucian society is built.