FOR THREE YEARS after her ex–husband and their daughter, Yuri, disappeared to California, Mrs. Shin had designed clothes by day and sold handprinted scarves by night to save the necessary sum of money to depart Seoul and come to America. In order to find her daughter, she had assented to move into a stranger’s two-bedroom condo on the fringes of Culver City—like two apartments! They would share the common space, nothing more. That had been the agreement.
But now that she had arrived, she saw that the living arrangements could be dangerous. The duplex was hot and cramped inside: a thready chintz sofa, the display cabinets heavy with souvenirs, the cumbersome oak table stained with the marks of sweating glasses, all seemed to touch one another. The kitchen faced the living room, and the living room, Mr. Rhee’s bedroom. If he leaves the door open, she thought, we will see each other each time I look up from the cutting board. The lamp that Mr. Rhee switched on cast more shadows than light.
“Welcome to your new home.” As Mr. Rhee spoke, his hands fluttered skittishly, batting at the air as if there were invisible mosquitoes. “Well, not really so new, but everything works well, well enough.”
“Yes, it is a new home for me, isn’t it?”
She did not want to look at him, understanding that she was aware of him as a man, and that gave him an immediate advantage over her. But she found herself looking. He was gangly and quick like a badminton player, unlike her ponderously built, strong ex–husband, and she disliked her disappointment. His doughy eyelids and sagging cheeks wore more sadness than she approved of, aging his face beyond his fifty years; his baggy peppermint-striped sweatpants smelled like a hospital gown and telegraphed his recent misfortunes. Even after the shame of her husband’s departure five years ago, she had behaved like the fashion designer she was: she had never sanctioned mix-matching her bras and panties or privileged anyone to see her without an Hermès silk scarf, all efforts that gave her the appearance of confidence. Even after she lost her daughter, she had not allowed herself public displays of grief.
“I’ve left you the large room upstairs,” he said. “I don’t need a lot of space.”
Mrs. Shin thanked him, all the time wondering if he was as innocuous as he looked.
“Well, shouldn’t we document this—predicament?” she asked.
They needed photos to authenticate their engagement, then their marriage, to immigration.
“Predicament?” he said. “Well, yes, I suppose that’s what it is.”
She tolerated Mr. Rhee’s arm around her shoulder, his parched white hair like the roots of spring onions, the dry-cleaning chemicals on his plaid shirt—a professional hazard of running Pearl Express, a dry-cleaning business. His garlicky breath scraped her nose. He, too, must have endured her stale travel smells.
After he set up his camera on the living room table, they both forced a smile until the timer clicked, the shutter snapped back, and she drew away. He continued to gaze.
She said into the silence, “Is there a rice grain on my nose?”
She had chosen not to marry some lonely Korean widower in America the old-fashioned picture bride way. The K–fiancée visa, and the next step, the marriage visa, had cost her a tidy sum precisely so he would not confuse this “predicament” with love.
“You have such young skin,” he said, admiring her smooth, round face, her eyes the shape of plumped kidney beans.
She said, “I’m not looking for a real husband. I thought that was clear.”
She was tired and frightened, so her words clicked like stilettos on tile.
She added, “I prefer a world without men.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, blushing, twisting bunches of his hair with his hand. “I live for my boys. If you had children, you would know what I mean.”
During Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship nearly thirty years ago, Mr. Rhee had quit his engineering job at Hyundai Heavy Motors and immigrated to America with his wife. The family of four had settled in the basement of a kind American couple and cleaned office buildings until purchasing their own dry-cleaning store. They had done well enough until the recent recession, which had even lawyers watching their expense accounts. Until Mr. Rhee’s wife had abandoned him for an American man she met in salsa classes, he had watched Korean news clips of the developing country’s daily disasters—student demonstrators attacked by pepper-spray bombs in 1986, the Sampoong Department Store collapse that killed generations of families in 1995—and convinced himself that he had been right to leave, even after the country flourished and began giving academic scholarships to the brightest from Guatemala to Mongolia, and setting trends in film and technology.
Mrs. Shin knew another Korea. In 1996 she had married up. A glittering four-hundred-guest Hyatt Hotel wedding, a Tiffany diamond flashing on her finger, and a villa nestled high in the hills, like a medieval castle overseeing the neon signs and pollution of Seoul, had transformed her. But money in Korea meant residing with the in–laws until the new bride was made acceptable; it meant surveillance and criticism. While hip-hop became the rage and women were sworn in as senators in the National Assembly, Mrs. Shin had subordinated herself to her husband’s will, rivaled her mother–in–law for his affections, and accepted all blame when she remained childless the first six years of marriage. After nine years of a difficult, exciting life together, her husband had said that he could not do it anymore, that they were not healthy for each other, and left with their daughter. She was no different from Mr. Rhee; she felt that she had failed at living.
On that first night in America, Mrs. Shin’s failures returned to her in her dreams. As she slept, her hands, those animals of habit, clutched at her crotch, a spot that she forbade herself to touch when awake. She dreamed of a missed appointment, a flippant remark, and the rituals of violence they would cause. Her husband lifted her by the slant of her black hair. His fist smashed her nose; his right foot bruised her ribs, her breasts. A purple flower bloomed across the ridge of her back, her hair fell out like dried leaves. She woke up trembling with excitement, her arms filmy with sweat and the residual scent of sex. She reached for her dressing gown in the dark and covered herself.
Downstairs she sat and sipped from a glass of water only after she spread a handkerchief on the sofa. The carpet roughened up by previous tenants and the desperate cheer of the coffee table’s dusty plastic roses insulted her sense of propriety, so she started up, unwilling to sit any longer in the germ-infested room, when she heard a repetitive tapping. She could not bear not knowing, so she tiptoed over and cupped her ear to Mr. Rhee’s door. To her horror, and delight, the door gave in and opened.
There he was, in ridiculous reindeer-patterned shorts and a shirt covered with tiny coconut trees. He stood behind a Ping-Pong table, the room’s only substantial piece of furniture—if it could be called furniture. Across the table from him, a squat ball machine spat out a ball from one of the five mouths in its rotating head. The whip of his paddle shook the net as he chopped, covering the entire table with his forehand. He was more aggressive behind the net than the man she had determined him to be.
She laughed nervously. “Surprise,” she said.
Mr. Rhee dashed to the robot and switched it off.
“Have visiting hours changed in 2011?” he said. “It must be past two in the morning.”
He fanned himself with the paddle as he took in her billowing white gown and her cropped hair matted to her scalp like hairnetting.
He added, half-smiling, “I thought you liked your world without men.”
His mouth was thin and stretched back. A line of sweat ran down toward his solar plexus. Her body became alert when she saw the bottle of rice wine that he had been drinking alone, and with head bowed, hands clasped behind her, she approached, aroused by the idea of this man out of control.
“A drink? Korea’s finest,” he said, balancing the cheap rice wine that Korean men favored on his head.
She nodded, suddenly thirsty.
He walked to an orange crate, his table, and poured her a thimble-size glass of the soju. She accepted the clear rice wine. She was so close she could see a vein in his neck throbbing, and she found herself wanting his dry lips, his hands tight around her neck. But when he kissed her, his lips were tame, disappointing. His hands stayed limply at his sides.
She turned so his second kiss missed her lips and descended on her cheek.
Immediately after, she patted her lips dry on her sleeve—she would wash before bed. He rubbed furiously at his hair, his eyes looked for somewhere to rest. Then he crawled underneath the Ping-Pong table and fumbled with the cotton yo that he now lay on top of, escaping into sleep.
“Sleep will do us good,” she said decisively, and fled upstairs. She locked the door behind her.
The next morning Mrs. Shin disinfected the bathtub with a travel-size spray she always carried with her. She showered, dried her bob into two symmetrical points, and steam-pressed her white linen skirt suit, though she had nowhere to go. When she came downstairs, Mr. Rhee was preparing bean curd stew, dried yellow corvina, and small plates of cooked bracken and balloon flower roots. Mortified to see a man in a kitchen, she tried to wrench the spatula away, then she remembered last night’s scene. This was America, she reasoned, as Mr. Rhee hugged the spatula. Hadn’t she come to live differently?
Over breakfast they were careful and cordial to each other, their eyes converged on the bubbling ttukbaegi of stew.
“America’s a dangerous place,” Mr. Rhee warned her.
“I’m not afraid of danger,” she said, unwilling to take advice from a man who slept under Ping-Pong tables.
He told her that to their right sat the Verdugo Mountains, and to their left, a shopping center the size of Seoul’s Olympic Park with a Korean supermarket, video store, and salon specializing in Asian hair. And in a small building rented from the American Methodists was a Korean church, where the community’s business deals were made. A Korean lawyer, a dentist, an optometrist, even a pet stylist, populated the mini-mall. Two cable stations broadcast Korean programs exclusively. She could, he reasoned, comfortably manage by confining herself to this one-mile area.
Mrs. Shin listened, nodded agreeably, and within a week purchased a burgundy-colored Hyundai Excel from a used-car lot. Its back door didn’t open, she had to hit the driver’s window twice to roll it down, the left signal indicated right, and the right signal indicated left. She inched the car onto the highway toward Koreatown. Her broad forehead beaded with sweat as a truck the size of a small house whizzed by on a curving overpass and sent her car rolling on its axles, but she sang loudly to herself until her car stabilized. The sky outside the window was empty even of clouds, and the mountains were an unfamiliar, vast landscape of desert. She was not certain that Yuri still lived in California; she considered herself without a country. She couldn’t afford to be scared.
Detective Pak was a lean silver-haired man in black slacks, white collar shirt, and wire-frame eyeglasses, an unadorned, efficient costume that matched his straight nose and blunt fingernails. His greeting was crisp and uninflected, unhurried and uninterested. He was a man who cared about details: handpainted bookmarks were stacked neatly at the edge of bookshelves crowded with books of poetry, a greenhouse of plants in descending sizes lined the small office, and, most worrying, an accounting exam certificate with his name, Gilho Pak, stenciled in, and a diploma from Korea’s best university, Seoul National, were displayed in matching cedar frames behind him. She had hoped for a second generation with sloppy Korean, a man raised on hamburgers and fries, someone who might not have crossed the Pacific with his patriarchal ideas intact. Instead she got Detective Pak.
He shut her skinny file. “When you first called me, you claimed your daughter was kidnapped.”
“But in a way, Dr. Pak, she was.”
She always called people doctor when the situation required flattery.
He did not look flattered.
“If she’s been kidnapped, I’m the last Joseon prince. I learned your husband got legal custody when you divorced.” He gazed at her with a coolness she was unused to in men, and she wondered with amusement and worry if she, despite her efforts, now looked her age. He said, “And now you’re remarried?”
So that was what he was thinking. That she was another Korean mother who had abandoned her daughter in order to remarry.
She looked for family photos on Dr. Pak’s desk: for the young son and daughter, a svelte wife in golf shirt and shorts, but there was only a photo of Dr. Pak standing beside a young man with large, despondent eyes. Dr. Pak turned the photo over when he saw her looking. Still, she assumed he called his wife jip-saram, literally houseperson. Undoubtedly she made him two hot meals a day, the children would attend Ivy League schools, or at least UCLA or UC Berkeley. Nothing truly terrifying had ever happened to him, which gave her the small comfort of someone who had suffered. The vision of that excruciatingly ordinary life, that bonhomie, made her shudder. She wanted to want it; she loathed it.
He doodled question marks on letterhead stationery.
“It’s a lovely family photo,” she said.
“Samo-nim, why’d you let her go?” he said, his voice and gestures mechanically polite. “Do you know what it means, to lose your kids?”
She sat as erect as a queen. Then smiling, she said, “Dr. Pak, your job must be so emotionally taxing. I consider myself permanently bound to you.”
“I need the real story.” His gaze was unswerving in its need to understand. “So you gave up and agreed, and now you don’t?”
“You’re paid to be a detective, not a….” She struck the table with her purse. “You don’t know what happened. Dangshin, you know nothing about me!”
He apologized, suddenly confused and upset in a way that made him more human, but she was too furious to stay. She marched out of the office. From the car, she watched pigeons snap at scraps of rotting pickled radish. The trunks of palm trees that she felt an urge to dress swayed precariously. She had lost face. Still, she would not share her secrets: how powerless she had been when her husband had bribed judges and taken Yuri away. How, on their last meeting, he had jammed a fat envelope of bank checks into her hand, saying, “You will start over.” Or how she had refused the money that she needed, refused to retreat in the quietly disgraced way hundreds of divorced Korean women had, to one of the many Koreatowns in America. Only then the unexpected had happened. Within a year her husband and his lover had disappeared with Yuri.
She reknotted her scarf and jiggled her facial muscles loose with her knuckles. Look humbled, look wrong, she told herself, and turned back to his office.
She waited. Between Detective Pak’s rare updates, Mrs. Shin fabricated a paperwork life for the marriage interview and adhered to a punishing productivity. She took brutal hour-long runs at five in the morning, then attacked the house with an artillery of vacuums, mops, and toothpicks; she negotiated an under-the-table sales job at a Koreatown boutique, which soon enjoyed a twenty percent sales increase. Twirling her ivory sun parasol above her head, she sought out strangers to practice English on, including Jehovah’s Witnesses that Mr. Rhee said were “reliable company.” She charged at her new life, but without hope, because hope was painful, dangerous.
As they amplified their story of marital bliss with new photographs, she learned that Mr. Rhee chewed green tea leaves to clean his teeth and that his nervous hand motions were usually practice swings for upcoming tournaments. That he donated extravagant sums he could not afford to the Los Angeles Mission, that he was intimidated by his English-speaking children attending East Coast universities. He was the retiring type but could not abide the abuse of women or children, which he said was as common as the flu in the immigrant community. Once, when Mr. Rhee stopped a man from spanking his child, the man smashed Mr. Rhee’s eye and might have knocked out his teeth next if Mrs. Shin hadn’t clubbed the man with her Bottega Veneta handbag. He was lonely and wanted her friendship, her company, and more, but she pretended not to notice.
One evening after work, she caught a random bus out of Koreatown, hungry to break up the routine of the days, and finally disembarked in an area called San Julian Park. It was the other America that had Mr. Rhee trembling, but she stepped off the bus so bored, she welcomed disaster. She strolled around the perimeter of the park, wanting the terrible to happen, but a trolling group of teenage boys merely stared at her and left her alone. A few homeless men crawled out of their cardboard tents and asked her for change, glue, anything you got, they said, their hands patiently held out for the token kindness they did not seem to expect. She tripped over a man with a Jesus beard lying on the grass, his blue eyes wasted, a bloody needle jammed into his emaciated thigh. Only one black boy on a tricycle briskly slapped her buttocks as he blitzed by, giving her a tiny thrill. But that was it.
She wandered until she saw a gas station phone booth lit by a dim streetlight. The foreign, starless sky oppressed her. A woman wearing only white sports socks and a torn trench coat limped across the street without looking left or right as if she no longer valued her life.
Mrs. Shin called after her, “Where am I?”
The woman cackled. “Don’t you know?” And she went on.
She didn’t know what else to do. She called Mr. Rhee.
“Pearl Express!” Mr. Rhee’s foggy voice crackled. “How can I help you?”
“It’s Mrs. Shin.”
“Oh, yes, of course. I must have had a little nap—I have a mat, you see. Saesang-heh! It’s nine-thirty! It’s the Sealy mattress, a very comfortable mat.”
Mr. Rhee would spring up from a creaky mattress with his nervous energy. The smells around him would be the clean, honest smells of chemicals and stale coffee grounds, and this comforted her somehow.
“Did you have rice?” she asked, which always meant, Did you eat?
“I had a sandwich,” he said, and they both knew that this meant that he had not truly eaten.
“I’m somewhere near Julian Park—”
“Skid row! Where exactly was the accident?” There were the sounds of panicked preparation. “Don’t move! I’ll find you soon.”
She said, “Ani, I’m safe, I think. It’s just that—” She was mortified to find herself crying.
“Our poor Okja!” With genteel, outdated gallantry, he said her name for the first time. “Saesang-heh! What has befallen us?”
“Mr. Rhee.” Her body sagged against the cold glass of the telephone booth. She laid her head against the sticky surface left by hundreds of hands, and into the receiver, she whispered, “I lost my daughter. Her name is Yuri.”
Mr. Rhee insisted on visiting Detective Pak on his own, and by the week’s end, Mrs. Shin consented. It was four months into her time in America. Friday after work, time dragged even more than usual while she cleaned. She scoured the immaculate kitchen and bathroom tiles; she furiously dusted the shelves sinking with books. She kept her eyes off the clock. While she polished the plaques that served as bookends, she noticed the engraved names: his name, Moonhyung Rhee, and underneath, Kyunghee Rhee. Doubles in the 1996 Koreatown League Championships. They moved her, those worthless monuments.
Now that the house shone like a trophy, there was nothing to distract her. She flipped through the movie channels, but make-believe stories did not interest her. She paced back and forth, clapping her hands together repeatedly to improve her circulation. Finally, after she had paced through all corners of the house available to her, she entered Mr. Rhee’s bedroom. She strolled around the Ping-Pong table. Before bed he would place his eyeglasses on the wooden crate printed with FLORIDA ORANGES. In the fractured moonlight he would crawl under the table that he and his Mrs. Rhee had prized, unfurl the yo, and sleep, and in sleep, return to a past that never quite ended for anyone. She contemplated Mrs. Rhee’s photograph, her salty smile, the brown smudge of a mole on the woman’s chin.
Within a half hour, she rifled through the closet’s woolly sweaters, telling herself that she must help this hopeless man coordinate, though she knew what she wanted. She pushed to the back of the closet and found what had been left behind: churchy floral dresses, ruffled blouses. And though it was inappropriate—no, invasive—she tried on one of the polyester washing-machine-safe dresses. She pinned her hair to the right and smoothed it into place until the mirror gratified her. Finally, she was freed from herself.
The new Mrs. Shin set the robot at a low level, and thrust the paddle at the table. The balls came at her like a relentless argument. She missed, missed, struck. The dress soon cleaved to her like plastic kitchen wrap. After a time the machine spawned only gurgling sounds. Sweat bubbled on her upper lip and hair fused to her cheekbones. Tired but refreshed, she tossed the paddle across the table. It collided with the net.
She traced the table’s crude divisions, one of the good, simple things left from a life that had gone wrong. She, too, understood escape.
“Sleeping under the table,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
Her hand was feeling across her back for the zipper when the bedroom door clicked open. He had returned earlier than he had said he would.
“You didn’t go to practice,” she said.
“How, how devious,” he stuttered. “How dare you insult me?”
“I had no right to….” With her head bowed, she fell to her knees, one at a time.
He said, “Please, Mrs. Shin. This isn’t the theater….” He walked past, then swiveled back, his fingers twitching. “You wanted to play, let’s play.”
She remained on her knees. “You should slap me,” she said. She offered him her body.
“I would never hurt a woman.”
He wanted to hit her, she could tell; his hands were balled into bony fists.
“You’re angry.” Her entire body was prepared. She leaned toward him. “You’ll feel better, after.”
Instead he punched the wall, wincing even as he did it.
“Mr. Rhee!”
He wiggled the hand in the air, still shaking. “Don’t ever, ever speak like that again, please.”
“You were so angry.” She stood, slowly. “I only asked for what I deserved.”
After they iced and wrapped the modest spectacle of his swelling hand, and he washed off what must have been the day’s humiliations, he opened a bottle of rice wine. They sank into the sofa by a stack of jigsaw puzzles and a checkered baduk board—hobbies of a solitary person.
The thimble-size soju glass clattered as Mr. Rhee set it down. The paper lampshade above them swung, then rocked to a stop. She did not remove his hand when he laid it on hers.
After Mr. Rhee’s visit, the detective made regular reports to Mrs. Shin. He told her of his own difficulties immigrating eight years ago when he had abruptly decided to leave accountancy and leave Seoul. “I opened a store and before the first year was over, I had a bullet in me.” His left hand became a gun that jabbed at his right shoulder. “And my—boy, he almost dropped out in his first semester at university.” He looked excited, almost wistful, as he recalled those years of hardship, and she thought it must be possible for the past to someday be rendered harmless. It ended happily, he assured her, as it will for you. The detective’s overtures of friendliness surprised her almost as much as the Ping-Pong lessons Mr. Rhee insisted on, and she could only wonder at how unknowable man was. As for her Ping-Pong game, it improved rapidly. Mr. Rhee trained her to use a pimple-surfaced rubber paddle, then a sponge-covered one for topspin, and even monitored her practice hours. They went on a picnic where they were surrounded by geese the size of her daughter; they held hands and rode a creaking roller coaster on the Santa Monica promenade, facing the setting sun while holding hands and laughing, as if they were a young couple with a long, hopeful future ahead of them. Sometimes she woke up under the Ping-Pong table with her hair in the thicket of his pubic hair, though she insisted they still shower separately, like civilized people. Her own attempt at updating Mr. Rhee’s wardrobe was a quiet failure.
Each pleasant, uneventful night passed much like the next. It was as if another her was married again with an actual future ahead, as if there was the possibility of love. Except that none of it felt real until she stepped outside of the house for a walk and saw the tidy suburban landscape sprawled out in front of her, and heard a nation of people of all colors speaking a language that wasn’t hers.
In November, Detective Pak called.
“I’ve located your daughter,” he said.
She couldn’t speak. She had to remind herself to breathe, one, two, as she imagined her daughter’s sleeping face. The memory was frozen, a photograph that had replaced her actual daughter’s face as unpredictable as the flight pattern of a moth; and though she willed the image to move and become alive for her again, the image dominated and the sleeping face remained slightly puzzled, with eyebrows raised as if the face had never experienced another expression. That was the last time Mrs. Shin had seen her daughter.
After a swallow of coffee, in the same unhurried voice, Detective Pak told her Yuri’s home address in Beverly Hills, three blocks from the school she attended.
She traced the scribbled address with her index finger, not quite believing it to be real. More than four years had passed since she had touched her daughter, four years that had taken away her child, and her husband, from her. Those four years—they were not real to her, either. She began wondering what to wear—the navy skirt suit or the forest green wraparound dress?—already anxious. She had faith in appearances.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you.”
“Well,” he said, “you’re only getting what you deserve.”
She drew back from the phone. “You’re quite right, yes.”
Softer this time, he said, “I also lost my children…It was a terrible choice to have to make, a necessary loss.”
Startled, she waited for him to continue. But he wished her the best, then there was the click of the receiver.
Children dressed in clothes as colorful as marbles spilled out across the yard. Through the aluminum fence built so high she could not touch its top, she watched her daughter’s life: the queue of American children waiting to play (Queuing! Children!), the jungle gym made for larger bodies, these harsh, glottal syllables, the few Asian faces, boys and girls, that belonged to bodies moving with an ease that she had thought belonged only to men.
She had dressed up for her daughter as if for an interview. But despite her navy pin-striped suit and her supple leather shoes and purse, the horizontal lines of the fence now imprinted on her face made her look unhinged. Its hot metal pricked her skin. The crowds thinned as parents picked up their children. She continued looking.
Then there was Yuri. Mrs. Shin held herself; she began rocking back and forth, the pressure of feeling in her heart, her feet, her stomach, so strong her body would explode if she did not contain it. Yuri was clustered with other second grade girls, two formidable fists on the hips of designer jeans that Mrs. Shin recognized by the detailing on the pockets. Her face was still round, pumpkin-shaped like Mrs. Shin’s, and her darkly alert eyes were her father’s, but her hair had lightened to a nutty brown. She was so adult, not the same girl who had promenaded each of her toys for guests. When her friends began a round of hopscotch, Yuri sighed as she joined in, as if surrendering to their nonsense.
Her daughter’s deportment was a reprimand. Yuri had not stopped for time. The girl that Mrs. Shin had expected was changed, anchored by confidence, by friends, by a gaze that took in the playground as if she owned it—her father’s gaze. Somehow she had stopped being the girl who looked for her mother everywhere, and somehow, while some other woman had taken care of her, she had grown. Mrs. Shin’s explanations—the years it took to cobble a life together and hoard the money to return to Yuri—all of it became excuses that might no longer be relevant.
Still, she called out her daughter’s name; Yuri only continued to look periodically from the hopscotch to the parking lot. Only when Mrs. Shin tossed a pebble her way did her daughter look up and look around. She saw her mother.
Yuri had been three when her parents separated; she shyly regarded her mother as if she were a distant relation.
“Yuri,” she said.
“My American name is Grace,” said Yuri. She rocked on her heels, excited and afraid, then Mrs. Shin saw that she was still a child.
“You were Yuri first,” she said, her voice weighted, despite herself, with reproach.
“I know who I am,” Yuri said. “I’m called Grace most of the time.”
Her face was ugly with a stubbornness Mrs. Shin knew as her own, and she felt great pity and love for her daughter; the years ahead would work to undo her girlish certainty.
“Come to your mother,” Mrs. Shin said. “I won’t hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” Yuri looked as if she had not considered this a possibility.
Mrs. Shin had enough of talking. She saw her daughter moving farther and farther from her, so far that soon enough she would be untouchable, moored to this foreign land of perennial drought and swimming pools.
She jogged to the corner of the fence, then turned, her arms out to her daughter, but Yuri ran, ran away—toward the parking lot. Mrs. Shin followed, first trotting in her heels, then running. What lies had they told her daughter?
Yuri rapped on a black sedan’s tinted window with her fists. The door clicked open and Yuri’s terrified face disappeared behind it, but Mrs. Shin caught the door. One acrylic nail ripped off, her wrist bent backward, but the door swung open, and forestalled her exile.
In the rearview mirror, her ex–husband’s gaze stabbed into her. She sank into the leather seat and crossed her legs, ready to negotiate.
His nose flared. “What are you doing? Where did you find her?”
“It’s not my fault,” Yuri said. She recoiled from her mother, demonstrating where her loyalties lay.
Mrs. Shin’s eyes shifted from him to her daughter, her world suddenly unclear. It was too much for her—her husband, her daughter, the car a reliquary of their failings. She reached into her purse, snapped a bamboo fan open, and cooled herself.
“Still living on your family’s money, are you?” she said. “You never could take care of yourself.”
“Why don’t you wait outside, mushroom,” Yuri’s father said. “Go play with your friends. We’ll pick up Mother from the doctor’s soon enough.”
Yuri opened the door and retreated. She sat primly within a few feet of the car. She leaned over as if practicing for an earthquake drill, her eyes riveted to the spokes of the tires. She seemed too afraid to blink.
“Sheebal.” He cursed, spraying spit onto the mirror. “Yuri finally gets used to her new mother and here you come with your desires and disturb everything.”
“After four years a mother finds her kidnapped daughter.” Her hands gripped the handle of the door as she watched her daughter outside. “How disturbed is that?”
“Still acting up, acting out.” But there was a lubricant heat to his voice, as if some latch had loosened. “Kidnapped? All we did was move.”
Mrs. Shin’s eyes dragged from Yuri back to the mirror.
“Do you beat her?”
“You know I wouldn’t touch Yuri.”
She twisted the silk fan until the wooden frame snapped in two. She shuddered at herself in the mirror, a woman with eyes aflame. She had come to see her daughter; she had. She had not left Korea to be this other woman again.
“I mean, do you beat her?”
He studied Mrs. Shin. “That’s not for you to know.”
“You must help me.” She couldn’t stop herself. “You made me the way I am.”
“No one made you but God.”
“When we first met, you said—”
“We were an earthquake for each other.”
She touched his shoulder. Her palm tingled; he jerked away.
“I was thirty and you gave me—what? Fire, and nothing will ever wake me up again.”
He slumped against the steering wheel. She waited.
“What do you want from me, woman?”
“Hit me. No one can see us.”
“Find yourself a gentle lamb.” His voice had brittled up, was careful again. “Someone quiet you can share your old age with.”
“I’ve tried.” Her nails scraped into her scalp. “Oh, I’m trying.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“Like I got used to you.”
His large right hand made a perfect fist before he composed himself.
He finally faced her.
“If you don’t leave now, Yuri will finally learn what kind of mother she has.” His voice was in control, as smooth as a luxury car engine. “She’s only a child—what will that knowledge do to her?”
The clock had mercifully stopped its ticking. Dust motes spun, zigzagged across the cloth-covered sewing machine, the love seat, the militant rows of perfume bottles on the armoire, settled, then lifted. Mrs. Shin stayed hidden under the tweed comforter as she had for the past few hours or days. It was night, it was day; it was America, it was Korea; it was nowhere, and she was no one. She would not be able to manage Mr. Rhee’s sympathetic gaze.
When she roused herself, she stared out at dusty beams of white light, wondering what they were, until she realized, of course, they were coming from streetlights. Sweet rice and spicy cabbage stew smells saturated the room. Mr. Rhee must be making dinner; he must be tidying up the kitchen, thinking of clearing off a bookshelf for her, maybe hoping for a genteel poke before bed. She pulled her useless clothes off their hangers and carpeted the floor with silk and cashmere. In the mirror, she stared spitefully at her hand-stitched jacket, the garnet brooch adorning her chest. She stripped, cupped her forty-six-year-old breasts. These lumps had nourished a baby but were still ugly, sick breasts, an aging body still betraying her with its monstrous desires. It was better that Yuri had not wanted her.
She removed scissors from her sewing basket and held it to a swatch of her hair. She cut deliberately, evenly, then flung hair at her image. “I hate you,” she said. “I hate you,” she said louder, then even louder until she was screaming.
By the time Mr. Rhee pounded on the door, she had stabbed the cushions of the love seat, swept the perfume bottles to the floor. She took her sewing scissors and ran the edge along the back of her thigh. The pain erased all grief, stripped her of camouflage. A wound so bright it looked pasted on blossomed on her leg. There was no symmetry yet, so she ran the scissors down the other thigh.
“Mrs. Shin!” A distant voice tried to reach her, but she was beyond reaching. There was only the world narrowing to predictable pinpoints of pain. She took off her thin belt and tried it against her back. She was becoming herself again, loving herself, as the door crashed down like a bomb and Mr. Rhee crawled through, his hands blindly pushed out in front of him. But even as he reached for Mrs. Shin, my darling, my love, her wounded body continued its ancient song.