Every morning out of Mother-in-Law’s room, the prayer bell sounded and the smell of burning incense wafted. Sonju thought about her childless aunt more and more.
In February, a week before Sonju’s husband graduated, Mother-in-Law called Sonju to her room early in the morning and said, “Your sister-in-law is likely to have complications with her pregnancy, so you will remain here in Maari. Your husband agrees.”
Sonju passed her room and continued to the veranda. The snapping cold morning air seeped into her bones. She gathered her breath, blew out the air and watched the white cloud disperse then disappear. She would have willingly agreed to stay if asked, but why didn’t her husband discuss it with her first? More than anyone, he should understand how hurtful it was to be excluded from family decisions. Would all her years with him be like this? She closed her eyes. Someone once valued her and loved her. Perhaps that should be enough. That was more than most women had.
She entered her room and was closing the door behind her when Second Sister came in. She looked upset. “I didn’t ask Mother-in-Law to keep you here,” she said.
“Of course, I will stay,” Sonju said.
“Mother-in-Law could have hired another maid after First Sister left. I know what she is doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll be here a long time.” With those words, Second Sister left.
Second Sister didn’t smile for a few days. Sonju didn’t bother to ask her to clarify what she meant about Mother-in-Law’s intent nor did she bother to confront her husband when he came home. The same had happened before.
After a week in Pusan, her husband came home with a swagger in his walk, now that he was financially independent. He even said he would give her some money every month. That night she lay facing her husband, and moving closer, asked, “What is your work like?”
“Right now, I’m being trained as a junior engineer. I study the plan, go to construction sites with my supervisor, inspect the materials, and watch how he deals with contractors.”
“It sounds like an interesting job. I would like to work one day.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake.
He said, “You will have your work. Have children and raise them.”
Oh, those cutting remarks. Fine. She edged away from him. “What happens if I can’t have children? Would your parents arrange a mistress for you? It betrays my idea of marriage, but if they do, I will go back to Seoul and find work.” He turned and pulled the blanket to his neck.
It was Sonju’s second May in Maari, yet there was no sign of life in her belly. Her worry was constant. The sound of Mother-in-Law’s prayer bell seemed louder each time, and Sonju couldn’t help conjuring up the images of her infertile aunt living with her husband and his mistress and their children under the same roof.
“Tock, tock, tock,” Sonju was mimicking the sound of the prayer bell when the old servant poked his head into the kitchen and said that a politician had arrived with his assistants and they were gathering villagers near the train station. He asked if he could go there for free liquor. As soon as both Sonju and Second Sister nodded, he took off. While scooping steaming rice into a bowl, Sonju heard a few muffled words of the speech coming over a microphone from the distance. Half an hour later, the happy servant returned, his face red from drinking, his breath reeking of cheap rice liquor. He handed two leaflets to Sonju, each with a large grainy black-and-white photograph. Sonju looked at the pictures and asked the servant, “Which one spoke?”
“I don’t know.”
On the day of the very first general election in the nation’s history to elect people’s representatives for the new republic, Sonju hurried to get breakfast ready so that she could go to the satellite district office to vote. She looked at the leaflets again and asked Second Sister, “I know who I’m voting for, but how do you think the election will go here?”
Second Sister touched her large gourd belly with one hand, and with the other, swirled the boiling soup with a ladle. “The politician who bought the liquor …” She put down the ladle on the counter. “My water just broke.”
A large puddle began to form on the kitchen floor. “Come! Watch the soup.” Sonju yelled out to the maid at the well. “Be careful. There’s water on the floor.” She ushered Second Sister toward her room and on the way announced loudly to the closed door. “Mother-in-Law, the baby is coming!”
Another maid rushed to Second Sister’s room, spread the yo on the floor and left. Second Sister pointed at the wardrobe and said, “Diapers.” Sonju took a dozen from a neat stack. The maid brought a basin of warm water.
Two hours later, Second Sister’s labor started. A telegram was sent to Brother-in-Law. The village doctor and his nurse came. After six hours of labor, Second Sister, her hair soaked, her face red from pushing, and knuckles white from holding onto Sonju’s arms, delivered a baby. When told she had a girl, Second Sister squeezed her eyes shut and groaned. The nurse slapped the baby’s bottom until a loud cry was issued.
Second Sister held her baby all cleansed and swathed in a cotton wrap. “The easiest of my three deliveries. Not a breech baby this time.” Mother-in-Law came into the room, lifted the wrap, looked under it, turned around, and left the room.
Sonju saw water collecting in Second Sister’s eyes, and thought, with all the complaints about Mother-in-Law’s special treatment of boys and all the talk about what she would not do to her own daughter-in-law, Second Sister was a hopelessly passive person. She wished Second Sister would wipe her tears, at least.
Brother-in-Law came into the room. He thanked Sonju and smiled at his wife. Sonju realized that she was wrong about no change coming to Korea. Here, Brother-in-Law came into his wife’s birthing room to check on his wife and watched the baby jerk her arms, kick her legs, and yawn. “A healthy baby,” he told his wife.
Second Sister looked up from the yo mattress at her husband and sighed. “Another girl.”
He smiled at her. “That’s fine.”
After Brother-in-Law left the room, Sonju said, “Let me hold the baby.” How light the baby was! She smelled the baby and cooed to it. “You are the first to be born in this family after the end of Japanese occupation. And you were born on an important date,” she told her. “1948 May 10, the very first general election for the National Assembly. Three years after the Japanese left, our country is finally going to be an independent republic. So, what is your future plan?”
That evening, Sonju saw a rice straw rope hanging above the double gates to announce the birth. Charcoal sticks protruded in regular intervals in the rope’s twists to ward off evil spirits. When Second Sister’s labor had started, in anticipation of a baby boy, Mother-in-Law had had a servant insert a dried red pepper in the loop in between the charcoal sticks. After the delivery, she had all the red peppers taken out from the rope before hanging it. The rope was taken down three days after it went up. After the customary one month with the baby in her room, Second Sister returned to the kitchen to resume her regular kitchen work.
The baby was robust, and her cry was loud and frequent. The grandparents complained. Second Sister twisted her lips and said, “They wouldn’t complain if it were a boy.”
It was three months before the baby calmed down. Only then did Jinwon come into Second Sister’s room for a second look at the baby. Sonju moved to make room for her to sit close to the baby. “Jinwon, look how much the baby has grown already,” she said.
Jinwon studied the baby, then turned to Second Sister. “I heard babies change, but after three months, she is still ugly. Don’t tell people she is yours.”
Second Sister had a crooked smile, appearing insulted by that comment, but surprisingly she said, “But look how her eyes sparkle.” Sonju knew then that this child her parents named Jinjin would grow up knowing that she was special in spite of her grandmother’s disdain for her being just a girl.
By September, eighteen months into her marriage, Sonju was sure she was pregnant. She tired easily. Her breasts felt heavier. Her nipples turned darker and were tender to the touch. In less than ten minutes of being told, Mother-in-Law waddled out the gate, her arms and large hips swinging. By that evening, everybody in the clan seemed to know of Sonju’s pregnancy, and many clan women came to wish for a healthy baby boy.
A few days later, Sonju entered Mother-in-Law’s hobby room and waited until Mother-in-Law finished the last line of interlaced yarn and turned to her. She said, “I came to ask you about your sister-in-law. How bad was her deformity?”
Mother-in-Law peered into Sonju’s eyes. “Your sisters-in-law have healthy children without any deformities.”
“I still want to know.”
“My sister-in-law was fourteen years old when I married into the family. She had a short neck and back and walked with her knees bent, standing about a meter tall. Other than that, she seemed fine. She grew into a healthy spirited young woman. She even got married. At seventeen. I worried about her but she wanted to be married.” She made small nods, her eyes seeming to recede into memory. “My father-in-law and my husband arranged her marriage to a young man who had a widowed mother. They bought him farmland in his village. The young couple seemed to get along. Within a year she died of complications from childbirth. She was six months along. Can you imagine, a baby in such a short body?” With a nod and a sliver of a smile, she said, “Her husband was good to her. I believe she was happy.”
“What was wrong with your Mother-in-Law? You said she died shortly after you married.”
“I don’t know. I heard she was sick most of her married life.”
Sonju returned to her room, grabbed the thinking-stone from her bridal chest and rolled it furiously to shake off the images of the baby with frog arms in her dream, the way Jinwon walked low to the floor with her knees bent, and the young woman’s pregnant belly.
The question of “what if” remained with her for a while. She now imagined what her child might be like and what kind of parent she would be.
It was mid-October, a month after she told her Mother-in-Law about her pregnancy. She heard an unfamiliar voice coming from the courtyard. A young woman’s voice said she needed work. She said she was childless and had been thrown out of her Mother-in-Law’s house after her husband’s death.
Mother-in-Law must have considered her daughters-in-law—one pregnant and the other with an infant. She hired the woman and gave her a servant’s room next to the gates. This young woman proved to be a hard worker and a good cook. She also knew how to throw a nice inviting smile and swing her round young hips in a seductive way.
With the new maid working out well, Sonju thought she would be able to join her husband in Pusan after her baby came. One night as she turned to lie down to sleep, she saw something move in the courtyard. Three days before, during their hide-and-seek game, Second Sister’s two older children had made several holes on the papered window and one was big enough for Sonju to see outside without squinting. Under the dusky blue light of the waning moon, Father-in-Law took careful steps, passing leafless peony shrubs and the maple tree near the well, toward the servant’s quarters. He came out about a half hour later and stole toward the main house. This occurred every night. Sonju tried to fight off her disappointment in him. What would Mother-in-Law do if she found out?
On the eighth night, Father-in-Law was out again and turned the corner toward the servant’s quarters and disappeared. Then she saw Mother-in-Law following, carrying a chamber pot with both hands, going the same way. A few minutes later, short, startled shrieks tore the night’s still air, then silence. Shortly afterwards, Mother-in-Law emerged and walked back to the main house without the chamber pot. Father-in-Law ran to the well and poured water on his head and face. He shook his head like a wet dog, drew his crossed arms to his chest, and shivering, walked toward the room to his wife.
The next morning when Sonju walked into the kitchen, Second Sister and the maids were asking among themselves: what happened to the woman, where did she go on this chilly November day? Sonju knew then the woman had left. She grabbed a large bowl and stepped out to the garden next to the kitchen, took two heads of kimchi from a pot buried in the ground. When she returned, one maid was saying, “Maybe she was lying about the whole thing, being a widow and all that. She was too happy to be a widow. The way she acted, she could have been someone’s mistress thrown out by the wife.”
“She did have a seductive streak in her,” Second Sister said, and turned to Sonju. “I forgot to tell you. After Father-in-Law finishes his breakfast, we’re going to a clan home to make a yo mattress.”
Sonju watched the two maids leave the kitchen and was relieved the gossip came to an end. “A yo for whom?” Sonju asked, cutting the kimchi into bite sizes.
“One of the clan daughters is getting married in a month. It’s a tradition for the clan women to make the nuptial yo for the clan’s daughters.”
On the way to the yo making, Second Sister said, “The hostess’s husband has a habit of leaving home for days. Everyone knows he has another woman somewhere. He always has a woman somewhere. He is gone again so women can talk freely in his house without men around.”
By the time Sonju and Second Sister arrived at the yo making, the clan women were spreading cotton in layers on a large white muslin cloth. Big House Lady slid sideways on her hips to make room for Sonju.
“Isn’t Second House Lady coming?” one of the women asked Second Sister who situated herself between two women and was presently arranging her calf-length dirndl skirt to cover her legs. Sonju noticed that Second Sister was always polite and obedient and smiling in the presence of elders, even at the house. The elders often praised her for those qualities.
A woman next to her answered instead, “Why should she? Unlike Big House Lady here, she has not one but two daughters-in-law to take her place.” Big House Lady smiled and didn’t make any comments.
The cotton batting was thick. The women covered it with muslin cloth and started stitching the edges.
Cocking her head toward the hostess, a woman with a mole on her chin asked the hostess, “Where is your husband this time?”
“I don’t know, but I can tell you he is having fun.”
A woman with tanned skin smirked. “Is he any good?” Sonju’s face turned hot. The women were so bold.
“I don’t know,” the hostess said, her voice flat and detached. “It’s been such a long time. The women must think he is good. Some people saw him in the cities carrying on with young ones.” The hostess sighed and said, “I don’t grieve over that anymore. He will always chase women.”
Sonju vowed that this would not be her fate and that she would not tolerate such behavior in her husband. As it was, she was finding it hard to see her father-in-law the same way as before even though her mother-in-law seemed fine after getting even with her husband.
A woman with unusually large drooping ears like Buddha’s said, “At least your husband leaves you alone. Mine complains about my looks, covers my face with my skirt, and does it like chickens do. Quickly.” Everyone laughed. Sonju could tell this wasn’t the first time they’d heard this. It was so sad and infuriating that she could almost cry.
The one with a mole expelled a loud sigh before she asked no one in particular, “Do you ever wonder what we live for?”
Sonju wouldn’t have known how to answer if that question had been directed at her. She would raise children and guide them, but what else? She had once thought she would do good for the country but was it possible now? She heard the hostess snap at the woman. “Why do you ask such a question? That kind of question gets you nothing but trouble. You know the answer. You’re born, serve men folk, get married, serve your husband’s family. Raise children, marry them off, then become a mother-in-law with a firm hand so your daughter-in-law learns her place and won’t treat you badly in your old age. That’s what we live for.” No one argued.
They placed the muslin covered batting on the white cotton fabric, laid the satin cover on top, and began stitching them together, leaving a crisp white border around the bright pink satin. The woman with tanned skin turned to Sonju. “You’re from Seoul. Do all women live the way we do?”
All eyes were on Sonju. She looked at each woman before she spoke. “There are women who go to university and work outside the home. Not all women live the way you describe.” Some women nodded. All quiet again. The yo was finished.
Big House Lady folded it into thirds and laid it in the center of the room. “This is a gift of hope and dreams from the clan women to the bride-to-be.” Everyone stared at it. “My dreams have long ago ceased, even in my imagination,” Buddha Ears said after a sigh.
On the way home, Sonju asked Second Sister, “Why was Big House Lady snubbed?”
“Because she has two sons, but neither lives here with their parents. They rarely visit. Our Mother-in-Law won’t let that happen.”
They walked home without further words, each in her own thoughts about their mother-in-law. When Sonju saw Mother-in-Law, she told her about the holes on the papered windows and asked her to have her windows newly papered. She didn’t want to see other people’s private affairs. It took only three days for the old servant to scrape the yellowed paper off the frame and apply bright white rice paper with glue. In a few hours, the paper dried as taut as a face of a shameless youth.