“Wake up,” my mother whispers. “Wake up. This is Sunday, you know, and you have a lot of things to do today.”
I am awake—I have been awake for some time, basking in the glorious sunshine that seeps through the pale blue curtains on the window in my room, letting it touch my bare feet and make them feel warm and toasty, and, once in a while, peeking out the window to see if I can catch a glimpse of my father. I know this is Sunday, and that is why I am still lazing around in bed, pretending to be asleep when my mother comes into my room to wake me up.
“Wake up now,” she says a little louder, aware that I am only feigning not to hear her. “Your father is up and working already, and here you are being lazy. Tut, tut. Come on.”
I toss in the bed, grunting, to make sure that it looks as if I am really just waking up, against my will, however. I take my time, though, keeping my eyes shut tight, toss around and roll over once or twice, then open my eyes, rubbing them hard with my hands to show her that they feel as though glued together . . .
But she is already gone from my room. She is, I admit to myself rather reluctantly, getting used to the theatrics I put on every Sunday morning for her benefit. I get up and open the curtains and the window. It is quiet outside, and the azure sky is cloudless. A cool breeze, rustling the leaves of the trees outside, leaps into the room, waving aside the open curtains. I don’t see my father outside. I can’t hear him either, but I can hear my mother in the kitchen slicing something on a cutting board—click, click, click. “My little sister must be still sleeping,” I think, because, if she is up, I wouldn’t fail to hear her jabbering around all over the place, trying to engage my mother—or my father, if he is unfortunate enough to be around—in an endless, nonsensical conversation. My mother is going to have a baby in a few months, and I am certain it is going to be a boy, and—ha!—that’ll teach the little girl. . . . Just then, I hear my little sister in the kitchen—jabbering away.
It is summer, toward the end of August, sadly enough, but the school is still on vacation for another week or so. In the summer, my parents and we, the children, go out to our apple orchard and live in the cottage my father built on a small knoll in the middle of the orchard. My grandparents stay in the main house in town, coming out to see us once in a while—only once in a while because we go into town every Sunday morning and, also, on market days. I don’t mind getting up early on market days when we all go into town, where I am allowed to roam about in the crowded, bustling open-air market, with two coins, my allowance, to do whatever I please with. Going into town is half of the fun and excitement on market days.
My mother and sister ride on an oxcart, “chauffeured” by one of the younger tenant farmers, while my father and I ride our bicycles. I got my own bicycle when I moved up to the third grade and became the leader of my class; it was a present from my maternal uncles, all three of them—one a concert singer, another an actor, and the youngest a concert pianist. “A very artistic, otherworldly family your mother has,” says my father often, teasing her. “All up on the stage! What would you all have done if man hadn’t invented art!” He doesn’t quite dare to bring my maternal grandfather, a theologian and minister, into it. She would reply, teasing back, “We would be down to earth like your family is,” meaning, of course, my father’s family—or my grandfather and father, anyway—which is a farming family. My paternal uncles, the three of them, are more down to earth, really, than my maternal uncles—one of them is a student of political science, now working for a farmers’ cooperative; another is a soldier; and the third is an executive of a trading company in China. Anyway, my mother, the eldest daughter in a very artistic family, is riding on an oxcart with my sister, both of them holding parasols to shade themselves from the hot sun, mother’s pink parasol giving a soft, shimmering pink tint to her face and her white blouse and pale blue skirt, and my little sister’s multicolored toy parasol, as she twirls it around and around, engulfing her in a weird conglomeration of red, orange, green, and blue. The farmer rides in the front, a big straw hat nearly covering his bronze-red face. He holds the reins in his hands, though he rarely has to use them, because the big, fat, sturdy animal, his deep tan hide glistening and his mouth foaming and drooling white saliva, knows the way by heart as he plods along, unhurried, nonchalant, and staring ahead fixedly with his enormous bloodshot eyes, only occasionally swinging his tail to chase the buzzing flies away. And, if the flies are too persistent, the farmer reaches over in his seat for a swatter and goes slap, slap! on the big rump of the animal. . . .
And the oxcart goes creak, creak over the bumpy, rutted dirt road leading out of our apple orchard, past farmers’ houses that always have something—pale green gourds, red peppers, white radishes—drying on their straw-thatched roofs, and past the farmers and their wives and children, and I can see the parasols tilting and swaying as the oxcart rolls along. As soon as we are on the new main road, which at least is smooth, though not paved, I can almost hear my mother give out a deep sigh of relief as she straightens up in her seat. My father then waves at her and little sister, telling me to stay with them, and shoots forward on his bicycle and goes fast down the road, as if he has been waiting for days for the opportunity to show how fast he can ride on his bicycle. Actually, he has to be at the market early to supervise the selling and buying and so on. I ride alongside the oxcart, demonstrating, on my part, my dexterity, going zigzag and looping around and going fast and stopping quickly, ignoring my sister, who, I know, is making derogatory comments to my mother about me. I go forward fast when I see a sharp curve ahead, until they lose sight of me; then, I hide in the bush or behind a clump of trees and wait for them to pass by, and I take my time so they will begin to wonder where I am, and then I appear behind them, as if out of nowhere, casual and whistling—that is, until I run out of breath and strength. I then ask the driver to stop the cart, and he comes down and puts my bicycle onto the back of the cart and helps me hop in. I sit apart from my mother and my sister, ignoring them, as if to say that I could really have gone with my father but for his instructions to stay with them, and, well, here I am. . . . My mother hands me an apple or a piece of candy sometimes, and I tilt my straw hat back and try to look grown up and, therefore, wise and go forward to sit next to the farmer on the driver’s seat. I snap in two the long stick of candy, which has become sticky in my hands, and give a piece to the driver, who grins and pops it into his mouth, crunching the whole thing, and we plod on. . . .
But it is not a market day. It is Sunday—and I have grown to dislike Sundays. Usually, on any other day during the vacation, my mother would let me sleep as long as I want, but a Sunday is a Sunday, and we have to get up early to make sure that my parents and my sister get to our church, the only Presbyterian church in our town, in time for my mother, who is the church pianist, to practice a little with the choir; also, we get up early to make doubly sure that I get to my school. All the school children who are neither sick—with a doctor’s permission—nor out of town—with a teacher’s permission—must attend the Sunday-morning assembly, a regular phenomenon at the school all year around, for a long lecture by the Japanese principal, usually on the progress of the Imperial Army occupying this and capturing that in China and on how we must all do this and that to match ourselves with the Imperial soldiers at the front, and so forth. Then, we have an hour of calisthenics, designed to help us grow up strong and healthy, both in mind and body, in order to be able to offer ourselves someday to the sacred tasks demanded by the Emperor of all the loyal subjects of the colony. After that, we hand in our weekly homework assignment to our teacher, and, then, the other children are allowed to go home, but the class leaders stay. The class leaders must remain and perform whatever duties the teachers assign them, such as grading the children’s homework or visiting on behalf of the teachers the children who are supposed to be sick, mainly to collect certificates of their illnesses or, as is often my case, to run various errands for the teacher, “just to keep you away from the church,” according to my grandmother. For that matter, all Christian children in our town—Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist—are unable to attend their churches because of the Sunday-morning assembly at the school. “Like leeches,” says my grandmother, “the Japanese won’t leave the children alone, even on Sundays.”
I do miss out on a lot of games with other children on Sundays, after the morning assembly. Many a time, I want to decline the unwanted honor and ill-fated privilege of being the leader of my class, but my teacher won’t hear of it. He is a thirty-two-year-old Korean who is quite pro-Japanese, though he comes to our house once in a while to pay his respects to my father—to “play it safe and look good on all sides, just in case,” according to my grandfather, who never offers his wine cup to him. “It is the principal himself who appoints all the class leaders, you know,” says the teacher blandly, grinning rather condescendingly. “Anyway, you are the best student in the class, you get the highest grades, and everybody in the class wants you to be the class leader. Besides, it is a great honor, you know.” I can hardly think it an honor to spend my Sundays running errands for him and, often, for other teachers and going around collecting sick reports from bed-ridden children. I even think of not studying too much, so that my grades will go down, but, when I suggest that way out of my predicament, no one in the family has the heart to tell me, “That’s right. Don’t study too hard, and don’t try to pass the tests.” My father says, rather enigmatically, though a little sadly, “There are other reasons for your being the class leader. You’ll see. But, you shouldn’t let it depress you that much, should you?” I don’t see the “other reasons” for the dubious distinction of being the leader of my class, but, I will soon have a chance to find them out for myself. . . .
So—this is Sunday. I dress quickly and dash out of the cottage before my little sister has a chance to pester me with silly questions about such things as what I am doing and what I am going to do. The cottage, as I said, is on a small knoll right in the middle of the orchard, and, from the cottage, I can see the whole range of the orchard, which spreads out on a more or less circular flatland, which is fringed on all sides by rising mountains. I stand by the small flower bed in front of the cottage and look around. To my right, where a dirt road leads out from the orchard past several cottages that my father has built for our tenant farmers, there is a gate, a main entrance to the orchard. On one of the gate posts, there is a white wooden board bearing the name of the orchard—New Life Apple Orchard—which, according to my mother, “has several meanings.” Just inside the gate, there is a row of chicken coops and a huge pigsty and a separate building for cows and oxen. A narrow dirt path veers off the main path into the orchard and crawls up the knoll to our cottage. To the left, down the knoll, is a small stream, where we take a dip and splash around in the ever gurgling cool water under the green canopy of the leaves of the trees; often at night, I lie awake, listening to the rippling water’s whispering that comes through the tumultuous chirping and croaking of crickets and frogs and all those little things that come out at night. By the flower bed, there is a little stone terrace, which is covered with an overhang of vines that makes a natural sunshade.
We sometimes have our lunch on the terrace, under the vines, or sit out there in the evening, drinking tea, watching the sunset, until the sweet and pungent smoke of the green incense (which keeps mosquitos and gnats off) wafts away into the gathering darkness and blends with the bluish gray mist that drifts in and hangs over the apple trees, and my father puts out the red, glowing ember of the incense, and my mother goes inside and lights kerosene lanterns. Yellowish light shines out of the windows, rendering the darkness outside darker and a little forbidding, and we can see my mother inside, letting down mosquito nets over our beds. . . .
I am now standing on the stone terrace, looking for my father, who is somewhere in the middle of the orchard, but I can’t find him. The apple trees’ leaves are soft green and radiant in the bright morning sun, their branches drooping, heavy with all those apples. In the spring, when the trees blossom white and pinkish, I can’t see their branches or trunks from the cottage; the panorama is spectacular, and all I can see is an undulating ceiling of white and green and pink as far as my eyes can reach. With the towering rocky mountains giving it an air of security and remoteness from the outside world, the beautiful orchard basks in its own quietness and dignity and, of course, its fertility. My father and I often stroll in the orchard, walking by rows and rows of apple trees, looking at thousands and millions of tiny green buds, and my father says, “It takes years and years for apple trees to grow big and strong enough to create apples, and years and years of hard work to help them grow.” Bees humming and buzzing, wild rabbits dashing in and out of bushes, and all that is nature astir in the early morning—and I take my father’s rough, weathered hand, remembering the time he wept openly when the orchard was ruined by a sudden, violent out-of-season hailstorm, and I trot along, happy and proud. . . .
I take a chair from under the vines and stand on it to see if I can find my father. My sister comes out of the kitchen with a pair of binoculars. “What are you doing with Father’s binoculars?” I say to her. “You don’t even know how to adjust the lenses.”
“I know how,” she says. “I am going to find Father with these.” She comes beside me and looks through the binoculars, scanning the orchard down below.
“What do you think you are doing?” I say. “Spying on him or something, like that Japanese detective snooping around our house?”
“You are just being mean!”
“Give them to me.”
“I will not!”
“Oh, come on. Please?”
My mother calls out from the kitchen. “You’d better call your father. We must be going.”
I shout out, as loud as I can, “Father! Father!”
My sister squeaks, “Father! Mother says we must be going!”
Our voices spread out through the orchard and quickly come back to us in waves of echoes. There is a moment of silence before my father’s voice is heard in the orchard: “I am coming!”
We shout back.
He replies.
Echoes of all our voices ring out again and again.
“That’s enough, now,” says my mother, emerging from the kitchen. “You’d better come inside and wash up.”
My sister hands me the binoculars and runs inside. I stay outside and look through the binoculars for my father. I spot him between the rows of trees to the left of the cottage. Seen through the binoculars from where I am, it is as if he is in a slow-motion silent movie. His dark brown arms are raised above him, as he examines a branch; his white shirt looks whiter against the reddish brown of the back of his neck; he starts walking, slowly, looking at the trees this way and that; he carries a long stick with which he taps the tree trunks or lifts up a branch; the bottoms of his white trousers must be wet from the dew on the grass. He can see me now, and he waves his arm and swings his stick in the air. He is coming up the path. . . .
* * *
On a day like this, that is, on Sundays when, unless it rains, we go into town, we have breakfast with my grandparents. As usual, my grandmother is up early and bustling around in the kitchen, preparing our breakfast—frying this, boiling that, tasting the soup that we have with every meal, making sure the rice is cooked just right to suit my grandfather, who likes it on the moist side. Unlike my mother, my grandmother never thinks she has cooked enough to feed everyone, and she enjoys serving big meals; for example, this morning’s breakfast: spinach soup with beef in it, fried eggs for my father and me, boiled eggs for everyone else, fried squash, fried beef slices, fried fish, boiled and salted fish eggs, pickled cucumber, spiced eggplant, pickled Chinese cabbage, spiced bean sprouts, fried bean curd, dried sea weed—oiled, salted, and sautéed—and, of course, rice; then, there is an assortment of summer fruit. My grandmother can never sit still during meals, because she simply has to make sure that everyone is having plenty and that every dish is replenished as soon as the food in it has been consumed. Feeding the family is her life’s mission, and this she goes about accomplishing with determination and stamina and, naturally, great joy.
But this morning, we are a little late in getting started from the orchard, and so I rush through my breakfast, under the watchful eyes of my grandmother, who does not approve of hasty eating, and I dash out of the house, not giving her time to wrap something up—a piece of cake, sticks of candy, or fruit—for me to take with me, “either for yourself or for your friends.”
At this moment, I am actually anxious to get to the school as quickly as I can. There is one thing good about the Sunday-morning assembly, because I can see my friends and exchange information about what everyone has done during the week and what everyone is planning to do in the coming week, and so on. The only chance I have to talk and play with them a little comes before the assembly, so I want to get there early, before the teachers start trooping out of the principal’s office, where they have their own assembly. During the vacation, there is one exception to the rules for the Sunday-morning assembly: We don’t have to wear our school uniform. It always amazes me, on Sunday mornings at the assembly, to look at everyone and suddenly realize that everyone wears different clothes, according to the different tastes of either the children themselves or, most likely, of their parents. Anyway, it is more colorful than a field full of black caps, black jackets, and so forth. Girls, naturally, look more colorful than boys, and each one looks suddenly unique and more distinct than she would as one of an identically clothed multitude.
Several of my friends in the fourth grade are telling me about their plan to fly kites in the afternoon. Kite-flying is really at its peak in the winter, around December and, especially, during the New Year holidays, but we have to do something besides homework, and we can’t always go swimming in the river. So, they are going to climb up the hill beyond the school and fly kites. We all know how to make our own kites. Making a kite is an art, and, among us, it is considered absolutely out of one’s class either to buy a kite or to have a grown-up make one for him. I am regarded by my friends as one of the kite experts in our class; that is, I not only make my own beautiful kites of all designs but know when to let out the string and when to reel it in, how much to let out and when to give a pull or a tug to the string to make the kite dip, dive, turn, and do all sorts of other maneuvers. One must learn when to pull at the string in order to take advantage of a string that is “reinforced” with gluey paste mixed with pulverized glass, so that one is able to cross the string with those of other kites and cut them off—and that is the whole point in flying a “fighting kite,” one of those fast, agile, little, but tough, sharp-witted, mean kites. . . .
I am standing in front of the bustling, chattering group of my friends and the other children of my class. We all have short hair, cropped so short that it looks as though it has been shaved off our skulls, all of us looking like a bunch of little Buddhist monks. The thought makes me laugh. A boy ambles over to me.
“What’s so funny?” he says, looking around. He is one of the bigger boys in our class, a year or two older than most of us. He joined the class in the third grade, coming to us from a small school in one of the outlying villages. Tall and husky, with a bullethead, he is not very bright and refined—as some of my precocious friends would say—and, being unfamiliar with the life in town and unsure of himself among the town children, he has somehow attached himself to me, his class leader, and he makes a point of coming to me with all sorts of questions and also of being seen with me when we are in the presence of other children. I like him, however, because I know what it is like to be a transfer student and also because he is very strong, though a bit clumsy, and he often stays after school to help me clean and tidy up the classroom, which is, also, one of a class leader’s many duties.
I tell him what I was laughing about.
“Hey, you’re right,” he says. He has a habit of always agreeing with me. He rubs his head with his hands and says, “Once, I saw a little boy-monk with a couple of big ones begging for food in our village. I think he was younger than I was, maybe six or seven, at most. Come to think of it, though, my big brother said that, once, he thought of running away and becoming a monk. That was before they took him away to the army, though.”
“Took him away to the army . . .” The Japanese are now allowing Koreans to volunteer for their army. Special Volunteer Soldiers, they call those young Koreans. The boy’s brother gets drunk one day and gets into an argument with a Korean detective working for the Japanese police and winds up beating up him and a Japanese policeman. The next thing he knows, he receives a notice from the local police that his application for volunteering for the army has been approved and that his village is honored to have produced a Special Volunteer Soldier, who is now allowed the privilege of fighting in the war alongside the Japanese soldiers, and so forth. He tries to run away from his village and is hunted down and caught and shipped off to China.
Four other classmates of mine have brothers and uncles who were sent to China as Special Volunteer Soldiers.
“Have you heard from your brother yet?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No, nothing from him. Well, he doesn’t know how to write anyway. He never went to school, you know. I am the only one in the family who’s ever gone to school. My father says to my mother that, probably, the only time we’ll ever hear about my brother is when he is dead.”
I don’t say anything for a while.
He seems to think about what he has told me. “If my brother gets killed,” he says, “I’ll be the eldest son in the family then. I guess.”
“Come on,” I say. “He will come back someday.”
“I don’t know,” he says. He points a finger at one of the boys in the class next to ours. “That boy’s brother was already killed in China. Did you know that?”
“No. When?”
“Who knows? Just a little urn with his ashes came back. No telling whose ashes they really were, come to think of it.”
I am uneasy and uncomfortable, suddenly thinking of my uncle in the Manchurian Army. “Come on,” I say to him. “You’d better get back in your line.”
Without a word, he takes out of his pocket a sling shot. He gives it to me. “I made it myself. You want it? You can have it.”
I admire it. I am learning how to make one, but I have not yet been too successful. “Don’t you want it?”
“I made that for you,” he says; then, in whispers: “Don’t tell the other boys.” He trots away from me even before I can thank him. His sneakers are dirty and tattered. His trousers have big patches on the knees and on the seat.
Later on, I tell my father about the sling shot and about the boy and his brother who is in China. A week later, when I see the boy again, he tells me that my father’s foreman has been to his house with a box of apples and a big sack of rice.
“White rice,” he says, in front of everybody. “We haven’t had white rice for as long as I can remember!”
I think of my grandmother, her cooking, and our dinner table.
Everybody wants to know what the boy is talking about.
“Do you have white rice every day, with every meal?” the boy wants to know, not knowing when to stop.
I feel hot tears welling up in my eyes—from embarrassment, from shame, or from sympathy, I don’t know which. I nod and turn away from him.
“I will make you a bow and some arrows one of these days,” he says, following me, either ignoring or not comprehending the giggling going on among the other boys.
I keep on nodding my head, quickly walking away from him.
“I mean it,” he says, trying to keep up with me.
I face him. “I know you mean it,” I say. “Oh, come on! Do you want to race?” Before he can say anything, I am running as fast as I can toward the swings and the jungle gym at the far end of the field. “Come on!”
He gives out a joyful yelp and sprints after me. He knows he can run faster than I can—and I know that, too. In no time, he is running ahead of me, gleefully screaming, “I win! I win!”
. . . and now I am standing alone in front of the children of my class, watching them, waiting for our teachers to come out of the principal’s office. “What a crowd,” I think and marvel, looking around me at all the children—boys and girls, big ones and little ones: white shirts, blue shirts, brown shirts; white pants, black pants, brown pants, even green pants . . . round faces, square faces, long faces, flat faces, small faces . . . skinny bodies, chubby bodies . . . leather shoes, rubber shoes, sneakers, straw sandals . . . loud, quiet, sullen, cheerful, happy, miserable. . . . I am going to lose my name. They are going to lose their names. We are all going to lose our names. . . .
* * *
I am in the classroom with my teacher. With the shades half-drawn, it is dim inside, and the air is dank and musty. All the chairs are piled on top of the desks, and the wooden floor is spotless, having been washed, rinsed, waxed, and polished the day before the vacation began.
He is talking to me about the maps in the room. Although he is a Korean, he is speaking to me in Japanese, and I have to reply to him in Japanese. From the third grade up, we have been speaking Japanese at school and supposedly at home, too. Of course, all lessons are conducted in Japanese. We are not taught the Korean language or Korean history any longer. My father teaches me these subjects at home. We don’t speak Japanese in our house.
The teacher says, “We must take down that map and put the new one up.” He has brought a homemade map of the world, and he points his finger at a map that he and I put up the year before to replace an older one. He moves a desk against the wall, places a chair on top of the desk, and wants me to climb up on the chair to take down the old map. The new one is a world map that shows “who is with us and who is against us.” It shows Japan, Germany, and Italy, and all their possessions, colonies, and recently annexed nations in one color—blue—and England, France, Russia, and most of the other countries in another color—red. America has no color—it is just a big white blank. The map has lots of arrows and lines drawn in blue and red, indicating which countries have what treaties, and so forth; for example, Germany, Italy, and Japan are linked by blue lines and arrows to indicate that they are the signatories of the Anti-Communist Treaty of November 6, 1937; it also records battles fought, countries and areas occupied, and so forth, for example, the battle on July 10, 1938, between Japanese and Russian troops, along the Mongolian-Manchurian border, an incident that has whipped the Japanese into an intense anti-Soviet Union, anti-Communist campaign throughout the Empire.
I pry thumbtacks from the wall and take down the map.
He takes it from me, tears it up, and throws it into a waste basket. He unrolls the new map and slides it up against the wall so I can thumbtack it on.
I jump down to the floor after I put the map on the wall. I look up at the map. It is nearly identical to the one he just threw into the waste basket.
He steps back a few paces. I stand by him.
“What do you think of the new map?” he asks.
I try to find words; I can read Japanese well, but I am not yet quick enough with Japanese words and sentences.
“Do you find something changed? Anything different?” he asks.
“Yes—I see changes.” The Soviet Union now has a different color—green—and Germany and the Soviet Union are linked with a green line that runs through the Baltic Sea, connecting the two countries. In the middle of the Baltic Sea is a rectangular card that says, “German-Russian Mutual Nonaggression Treaty, August 23, 1939.”
I ask him if this means that Germany and the Soviet Union are now allies and, therefore, that the Soviet Union is, also, an ally of Japan’s now.
He does not answer for a moment. “I suppose you can say that,” he says, at last, after gazing at the map, with a scowl on his face.
His voice does not convince me that I can really say that.
“I can tell you more about it later,” he says, brushing off my further question, which deals with the battle between Japan and the Soviet Union along the Mongolian-Manchurian border. “I’ve just learned about this treaty myself,” he says, “from the principal himself.”
“Couldn’t the principal explain it to the teachers, sir?”
“Of course, he could,” he says; then, taking me by surprise: “Is your father in town now?”
“He is at the church,” I say, puzzled as to why he would want to know about my father’s whereabouts. A question like that does not portend anything good—for me, that is. “This is Sunday, you know, sir. Everyone in the family is at the church, except me, of course.”
“Oh, I know that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What I meant was,” he says, rearranging the desk and the chair, “what he is going to be doing after the church.”
“He is taking me down to the bookstore.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir.” There is only one bookstore in our town. My father is taking me there to tell the owner, who is a good friend of his, that, from now on, I will come in once a week and pick out a book of my choice in the store’s children’s book section; I am allowed to charge books to my father’s account. I tell the teacher about it.
“You are a lucky boy,” he says—rather enviously, I think.
“Yes, sir.”
“When will you go down to the bookstore?” he asks. “I am going to be there myself, it so happens.”
“After lunch, I imagine, sir,” I say, picking up the waste basket, “that is, if you’d let me go home early, sir.”
He gives me a funny look. “Empty that basket, and then you may go home. Give my regards to your father, will you?”
Ecstatic, I leap out of the room with the waste basket, which has a torn old map in it.
* * *
I tell my father about the teacher and his question and also about the new map, trying to explain as best I can about the Mutual Nonaggression Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union. I ask him the same question I asked my teacher as to whether or not the Soviet Union is now to be considered Japan’s ally. He, too, cannot answer that question, except to say that it is all very complicated and rather mysterious. “The teacher said he is going to go to the bookstore, too,” I add, concluding my report.
My grandfather frowns and asks himself, “Now, what is he up to?”
My mother says quickly to me, “Run along now, and ask the maid for your lunch.”
I move away from the grown-ups but not before I overhear my grandmother speaking to my father, “You’d better be careful with your words with him. He can’t be trusted. He has always been a little sneaky since he was a boy, if you ask me.”
My father says something about my teacher’s being a little confused . . . and timid by nature. . . .
I giggle on the way to the kitchen, and I laugh hysterically once I am inside the kitchen, out of the grown-ups’ range.
“Well, what are you so gleeful about?” asks the young maid, herself giggling for no good reason.
I look behind me and whisper to her, “I’ve got a timid teacher!”
“What? What?” she asks, though she is already laughing. “That’s why you are home so early today?”
“Oh, you don’t understand!” I announce. “There are certain things you girls do not understand.”
She makes a face.
My little sister trots into the kitchen.
“You, too,” I say, throwing up my arms.
“What did I do?” my sister asks. “Now, what did I do?”
“He thinks he’s all grown up,” says the maid. “Ha!”
I stride out of the kitchen, thinking that, suddenly, I do understand certain things, such as why my teacher wants to see my father, to meet him at the bookstore as if by chance, so that no one would think it strange. . . .
* * *
The bookstore is beside the graveled main street, a block or two from the open-air market place. The store is flanked, on the right, by a small restaurant with colorful dishes of noodles and fried fowls behind its dusty display windows and, on the left, by a doctor’s office that has been opened recently by a young Korean doctor from Seoul. The store itself is spacious and is divided into a book section and a stationery section. I am going through the shelves of children’s books, while my father is talking with the store owner and another friend of his. The store owner, a short man, leans against the counter, his elbows propped on it, his black hair falling on his pale, high-cheeked, bony face.
Once in a while, I look toward the door to see if my teacher is coming. I pause before a shelf containing adventure stories and pick out a book about the hunting of wild animals in Africa. Most of the books are written in Japanese. Only novels for adults—some of them, anyway—are in Korean. I am looking at pictures of animals, when the door opens and my teacher walks in. Standing by a magazine rack near the door, he nods to me. He leafs through a Japanese magazine, puts it down, picks up another, goes toward the counter with it. He bows to my father, his friend, and the store owner. There are, as it happens, no other people in the store.
The store owner says to my teacher, “The book you’ve ordered hasn’t come in yet.” He says this in Korean.
The other man, who also has a large apple orchard outside the town, says good-by to my father and walks away from the counter. He says, on his way out of the store, to me, “Be a good boy to your father now, hear!”—in Korean.
I go up to the counter, with the book. I bow to my teacher.
He wants to see my book. “It looks interesting,” he says, in Korean, looking up from the black and white pictures of animals. “Do you enjoy reading books?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” I reply in Japanese—out of habit. “My uncles in Tokyo send me books and magazines, sometimes, and I read them all.”
He says, smiling, “It’s all right for you to speak in Korean.”
I look up at my father.
My father says, in Korean, “Why don’t you look at some magazines over there? Maybe you can pick one up for your sister.”
“Yes, sir”—in Korean. I know when I am dismissed. I move off to the children’s magazine section.
“How is everything with you?” my father asks my teacher. “How is the school work?”—in Korean.
The three of them are whispering now, and I can see my father nod or shake his head once in a while. I can’t hear them too well, but I manage to catch a word or two . . . “Poland” . . . “war” . . . “Nonaggression. . . .” My teacher shakes his head, too, looking rather uncomfortable; then he says, loud enough for me to hear, “Sometimes I don’t know what is going on in the world.”
My father and the store owner exchange a glance, and my father says, “We’ll soon find out.”
“. . . We’ll soon find out.” . . . And we find out soon enough what is going on in the world. A week later, on September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland, while the Soviet Union stands by watching, only to invade Poland a little later to divide it up with Germany. Two days after the German invasion of Poland, England and France declare war against Germany; another two days later, America, which everyone thought was an ally of England and France, declares its neutrality, an occasion that causes my father to brood all day and mutter to my mother, “I don’t understand this at all. Just what is going on?”
What is going on in the world? Even my father does not know. We do not know what is happening in the world or why, except that there is a war going on between the Japanese and the Chinese and there is another war going on in Europe among all the powers—and Americans are watching, sitting safely in that big white blank on our map, between the Pacific and the Atlantic. . . .
My father beckons me to him and announces that we have to go. I go up to the men and bow to them, bidding them good-by.
My teacher says, “See you back in school soon.” He turns to my father. “When the school opens,” he says, “even the first- and second-graders won’t be taught the Korean language and history, and I am afraid that’s the end of any instruction in Korean.”
“We knew it was coming to that,” says the store owner. “It was just a matter of when and how soon.” His eyes flash, taking in the store. “Look at it!” he says. “I see fewer and fewer books in Korean, and you know that, pretty soon, there won’t be any book in our language being published.” He glares at my teacher. “Well, what the hell do you think of that?” He shakes his finger at my teacher, as though my teacher is largely to be blamed for his anguish. “You can’t even teach your own language and history to the children of your own race. What the hell kind of a teacher are you going to be anyway?”
“What can I do?” asks my teacher. “What can I do!”
“For one thing,” says the store owner, “you can shape up and start deciding just who you really are and what your duties are to our children. I’ve been hearing a lot of disgraceful things about you lately and I don’t care what you think of me or what you can do to me, but you’d better keep your eyes wide open and keep your wits about yourself.”
“I don’t know, sir,” says my teacher. “I just don’t know.”
I am quietly standing by them, trying to look as inconspicuous as I can and, watching my teacher suddenly shrinking, as it were, in stature and manliness in the presence of the two men—the two most illustrious members of the small elite in town who have been to college—I, somehow, begin to feel a little sorry for him—presumptuously enough—and, also, begin to think that I can understand his problems, whatever they may really be. The bookstore owner went to a college in Seoul, as did most of his regular customers (his friends). My teacher graduated from a normal school in our province, a public school whose students are subsidized by the Japanese.
The store owner is saying, “Just because the Japanese paid for you to go to a normal school doesn’t mean you have to sell your soul to them and become their slave.”
“Those are strong words, sir,” says my teacher. “I am not that rotten.”
“Look here, you two,” says my father, drawing me near to him, putting his arm around my shoulders, as if to remind them of my presence. I try to look innocent and small, pretending to be absorbed in the pictures of lions and elephants in Africa. “Patience,” he says.
“Patience! Patience, indeed!” says the store owner.
“I am beginning to see a certain pattern emerging from the world situation,” says my father, in a tone of voice that reminds me of my maternal grandfather, who is a minister in Pyongyang. “It will become clearer very soon, and, meanwhile, we should be quiet and look for a revelation, if you know what I mean.” His words and his tone make me think again of my grandfather when he prays, not with his entire congregation in the church but with a small group of his friends at home.
“You are right, sir,” says my teacher to my father.
“But—oh, how long!” says the store owner. “How long!”
“It won’t be long,” says my father firmly and, I think, rather cryptically.
After that, no one says anything for a while.
Patience . . . patience. Lord, how long, oh, how long? Someone asked that in the Bible, and there was no answer, or was there?
We all part in silence. At the door, I bow to my teacher and bid him good-by once more.
He bends down a little, puts his hand on my head, and, abruptly, pulls me to him, with his arm around my shoulders.
Startled, I look up.
He mumbles a word or two to my father and walks out of the store.
“Come,” says my father. “We must get back to the orchard.”
With my new book and a magazine for my sister in hand, I follow him outside into the hazy afternoon sun.
My teacher walks across the dusty street, dodging a row of rattling, jingling oxcarts, and disappears into a shadowy alley by a hardware store and a grain store.
“Father,” I say, when I can’t see my teacher any longer, “the teacher was crying.”
He nods but does not say anything while we walk through the open-air market place, which is now deserted, cross an intersection, and march past a row of Japanese-owned department stores, restaurants, and other shops. He says, “I am sure he was not crying for you.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Let’s hope he was crying for himself,” he says, looking straight ahead. “It is a small beginning.”
I do not understand his words, though I sense they are “significant,” because my father speaks them in such a grave tone of voice, which suggests he is speaking to himself more than to others, even me.
I follow him in silence, feeling important and secretive. For I know that, either by chance or by design, I was allowed the rare distinction of being with the three men while they were engaged in what the grown-ups call a “dangerous” conversation, and that I saw inexplicable tears in the eyes of my teacher—this sight is, for me, a somber and overwhelming secret that I resolve not to tell my friends, mere children. I quicken my pace and stride down the street, which is shimmering in the blazing hot afternoon sun, holding my head high, following my father’s steps.
* * *
Today, unlike on other Sundays, we stay for dinner with my grandparents and start back to the orchard in the early evening. My father gives his bicycle to the oxcart driver and tells him to go on ahead of us to the orchard, so that he can be with his family for dinner. “The moon will be out,” my father says to him, “and we will be all right. Don’t wait up for us.” My father is going to drive the oxcart.
Before dinner, I help feed our oxen, helping another tenant farmer who lives in small quarters by the west gate. He is young and unmarried, and helps around the main house, doing odd jobs but, mainly, taking care of the oxen and carts. Near the stall, he has a big open-air kitchen with enormous iron kettles for boiling beans and other feed for the oxen. With a big shovel, he spoons the cooked green beans, husks and stalks and all, into wooden troughs, while, with a pump, I fill other troughs with water from the well nearby. It is dusk, and the air is hazy and smoky from the smoldering fire in the kitchen. The farmer gives me beans still in their husks, which he has cooked by burying them in hot ashes. I crack the husks and eat the beans, savoring the warm, smoky taste. He likes to teach me all sorts of tricks—how to trap squirrels, so that I can keep them in a big cage he helped me make, which has a couple of wheels inside that the squirrels can ride on, or how to catch sparrows, which get fat and delicious in the fall, after harvest time. To catch sparrows, we set up a large bamboo basket on a piece of stick and tie a long string to the stick and hide in the farmer’s room; then, when sparrows come directly under the basket to eat the grain we have sprinkled there, we pull the string and trap the sparrows inside the basket. He then covers the basket with a big sheet, puts his hand inside the basket and catches the birds. He sends me away for a few minutes, saying that I am still too little to watch him and learn what to do after we catch the sparrows. I come back when he calls me—and he has the birds in a skewer, already cooked in the fire. . . . The young farmer wants to get married, and he is looking for a girl. When he finds a girl, he will tell my father about her and her family, and my father will begin negotiating with her parents as to the terms of the marriage, and, eventually, the farmer and his bride will get free, from my father, a house near the orchard and money to start their new life. When they have a baby, they will get free, from my father, a piece of farm land, and, when their children are big enough to go to school, my father will pay for their schooling. The village by our orchard is settled by farmers who have worked for my father and who are still working for him, even after they have their own families. Standing outside the stall, watching the big oxen munching on the beans, the young farmer and I are sharing the cooked beans, and, emboldened by a sense of camaraderie, I dare ask him, “Have you found a girl yet?”
He gives out a great big guffaw, rolling his eyes heavenward. “If your mother could just hear you!” Then, in a conspiratorial hush, he says, “I’ve found two girls, and I’ll let you know which one I will marry when I decide which one I like better.”
I nod, wisely. “I won’t tell my father about the two girls. Not yet anyway.”
“That’s a good boy. No need to rush, right?”
“Anyone I know?”
“Sure.”
“Who?”
He looks at me with sly, amused eyes. “Next time I come out to the orchard, you just keep your eyes on me and you’ll know.”
“All right.”
“You’d better run along now,” he says, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “You’d better go get your supper.”
“All right.” I wipe my mouth with my sleeve.
“Hey, don’t do that!” he says. “Where’s your handkerchief?”
I pat my pants pocket and run off, laughing.
“Your mother will have a fit!” he shouts after me, laughing.
“I won’t tell anyone about your two girls!” I shout back.
“Hey! hey! not so loud, not so loud, will you!”
I laugh all the way back to the main house, panting with joy.
* * *
The big, bright round moon is floating peacefully in the cloudless night sky. I sit by my father, who drives the oxcart, and I watch the shadows of the ox and ourselves creeping along on the road. The hulking body of the ox sways as it pulls the cart slowly, jingling the big brass bell on its neck. My mother sits in the back with my sister, who is asleep. We do not speak, listening to the symphony of chirpings vibrating the night air all around us. Jingling, jingling, chirping, chirping . . . and it is cool and peaceful, and it seems to me that my friends, my teacher, the school, the town—everything—belong to another world and another time. Out of town and in the middle of shadowy, moonlit plains and hills, with no one else in sight and with the twinkling of yellowish lights from the farmhouses and huts studded here and there in the dark hills, I breathe in the comforting presence of my father, my mother, and my little sister, serenely content and secure, joyfully aware of their nearness, unafraid of the dark, the unknown, and the world beyond the plains and the hills . . . and oblivious of the war. My world then is small and private and secure—and I nestle against my father, knowing that he will safely lead us back to our cottage in the peaceful, glorious, and happy orchard. . . .
There is a light tap on my shoulder. I wake up. “We are home,” says my father. His arm is around my shoulders. I look back. My sister is still asleep, with her head on my mother’s lap. The oxcart jingles and creaks its way by the farmhouses. There are people outside, sitting on straw mats on the ground in front of their houses. Men smoking pipes are gathered around a pot of incense. I see the red glow of their pipes and the hazy smoke curling up in the cool, bright night air. They get up as we pass by and bow to my father, greeting him with pleasantries. I wave at them. Ahead of us, a young farmer stands by the orchard’s gate with a kerosene lantern. Fireflies are swarming in the bush by the gate, and I think I might catch them tomorrow night, perhaps, and put them in a paper lantern. Inside the gate, we get down from the cart. My father takes my sister from my mother and carries the girl in his arms. The farmer will take the ox and the cart to the stall. The back of my father’s white shirt is bright in the moonlight as he walks up the knoll toward the cottage. My mother takes my hand, and, together, we follow my father. Soft, yellowish light shines from inside the cottage, and the farmer’s young wife comes down the path and greets us. Half of the cottage is in the thick, black shadows of the towering trees, and the other half is bathed in the moonlight. I linger outside awhile, taking in the tranquil expanse of the orchard, listening to the familiar chirpings of crickets and inhaling the cool, clean air.
The mountains and hills surrounding the orchard, in the shadows, seem taller and more awesome, almost brooding. I look up and see millions of stars and the moon serenely, almost indifferently, gazing down. Suddenly, I think of the maps, with ever changing colors and arrows and lines, with victors and conquerors and the vanquished and the captive, thumbtacked on the wall of our classroom, and it strikes me that the maps ought to show those millions of stars and the moon and the sun, too—all those things that never change and that are always up there in the sky. A silly thought makes me almost laugh out loud: Those who make maps are not aware of the sun, the moon, and the stars because they never bother to look up. I look up—and I am struck by another silly thought: If someone up there is drawing a map, and if he, too, never bothers to look up from his map and down to the earth, then his map won’t show the earth—or, even if he does look toward the earth, the earth will be simply a tiny dot or, at best, a little star. . . .
Gazing up at the dark heaven swirling with millions of twinkling stars makes me dizzy. I look down, once again surveying the dark orchard, the fireflies in the bush, and the soft glow inside the cottage—and I look up heavenward once more—and, for some strange reason, I am suddenly afraid of the night sky, the awesome immensity of the celestial world above, and the omnipresent dark shadows. I run into the cottage.
“Go to bed now,” my mother says. “You can sleep as late as you want tomorrow morning.”
My father rumples my hair. “Good night,” he says. “You had a long day.”
“Yes, sir. Good night.”
In bed, I lie awake for a long time, remembering the day. I think about the tears in my teacher’s eyes, and my father’s words. My teacher “crying for himself.” “A small beginning.” I do not understand these words fully, but I keep thinking and thinking about the tears in his eyes when he impulsively pulled me to him. I think of the words of the bookstore owner, too: “Start thinking about yourself. . . what you really are.” Does an act of thinking about oneself—to know what one really is—make one sorrowful and bring tears to one’s eyes? I think of the way I giggled and announced to the maid that I had a “timid teacher,” and how we laughed about it. My mind wanders, and I think about the cold, dark heaven and the black shadows on the earth, and I think of the strange fright that drove me into the cottage . . . and tears well up in my eyes and slide down my cheeks. I do not know why I am crying. I merely think—again and again—of the tears in my teacher’s eyes and of the terrifying infinity of the night sky.
My mother is standing by my bed. “What’s the matter,” she whispers. “Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know, Mother.”
“Did you have a bad dream? A nightmare?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must be tired. Don’t be afraid of bad dreams. They are just bad dreams, that’s all. We are here, you know. Go to sleep.”
“Yes.”
She holds my hand, for a while, quietly. I hear the rustling of papers in the other room where I know my father is reading a newspaper. I feel limp and very tired and, closing my eyes slowly, taking in the luminous silhouette of my mother drawing the curtains by the moonlit window, I drift into sleep.