Not long after Sonju returned to her room, Second Sister came in smiling and sat down. “I saw you and Jinwon going into Mother-in-Law’s hobby room. What did you talk about?” She asked as though she had the right to know everything that happened in the family.
Sonju’s heart was still heavy. She dreaded a talk that would certainly excite Second Sister who often criticized Mother-in-Law when they were alone. She said, “Jinwon coaxed her grandmother to educate me about the family. Mother-in-Law told me she didn’t have a legal name.”
“I’ve heard that. Because she was born a girl. Yet,” Second Sister shot her index finger up in the air. Sonju braced herself for Second Sister’s speech to turn feverish. Second Sister said, “She tells Chuljin right in front of his sister that he is special because he is a boy and that he’ll be the head of the family one day. Do you know why we women are still treated the way we are? Because of mothers-in-law like ours.”
Sonju had to take a deep breath. How did her neutral comment turn into yet another opportunity for Second Sister to vent her grievances against Mother-in-Law? Sonju pulled her lips in.
Second Sister reshuffled her skirt, then her words came again, “I’m not going to force my children into marriage. I’m not going to force my son and his wife to live with me and my husband. And I’m not going to enslave my daughter-in-law.” Her face flushed as she thrust her index finger up into the air every time she emphasized the word, “not.”
Sonju waited until Second Sister’s face had gained her normal peachy complexion to ask, “Mother-in-Law said your husband was a frail youth. Is that true?”
“Yes. Even though he looks healthy, he isn’t all that sturdy. After the wedding, Mother-in-Law wouldn’t allow us to bed together for a month. She said, ‘He has a pretty wife and he will overexert himself and get sick.’ She kept me up nights teaching me how to play cards until my husband fell asleep. I was so tired that I often dozed off while playing. Nothing happened between my husband and me for a month. In a way, I was glad. By the time we consummated, we were familiar.”
Sonju imagined if her husband were not endowed with great physical health, she too might have had a month to get to know him better and learn what to expect before they consummated. She sometimes thought that her wedding night’s experience colored her perception about intimacy. She had once tried imagining Kungu in bed with her while under her husband’s weight, but only ended up feeling contempt for herself for the wrong of it.
On the day of the rice planting, the Second House women and maids woke up at dawn to cook. Soon the workers swarmed into the inner courtyard and sat on the straw mats and crowded around the tables waiting for breakfast. Maids carried food to the tables one tray after another. Just before noon, lunch was carried to the fields. The same busy work repeated for three more days. On the fourth day, three village women came to the kitchen and placed food in large baskets to carry to the fields. With the baskets on their heads, they were ready to leave.
“I want to follow them,” Sonju said.
Second Sister gawked at her and chuckled. “A field trip?”
“Yes. Let me carry something.”
Sonju carried water jugs, and trailing behind the women, walked beyond the underpass of the railroad toward the rice fields. The women chattered among themselves and laughed.
“What are you laughing about?” Sonju asked.
“We were saying that you talk so fast with that Seoul accent, we missed half of what you said.”
“Do you want me to speak slowly?”
“No. We’re getting used to you now.”
Sonju looked up at their baskets full of bowls and food. “How do you balance a basket on your head?”
“We have carried things on our heads since we were children,” one of the women said. “But, Second House Lady, why do you want to go to the fields?”
“I want to see the rice planting. My family has overseers to manage the family’s farmland on the outskirts of Seoul, so I never saw our farm. My younger brother thought rice came from a tree.”
The women grabbed their baskets, exploding with laughter. “Rice from a tree,” they repeated it and laughed until they reached the fields. Sonju laughed along until a chorus from the distance brought her attention to the men and women stooped in rows in the flooded muddy fields, singing. They were planting rice in concert with the rhythm of the song, their faces steady on the seedlings, their legs bare all the way to the knees, water up to their ankles.
Sonju and the women placed the food, water, and liquor on rice straw mats on a raised platform under a lone shade tree at the edge of the fields. More food came. At the end of the song, the workers stopped planting and came to the mat, carrying the smell of sweat and wet soil. They rubbed mud on their legs to scrape off the blood-gorged leeches. They wiped the blood droplets from their legs with their muddy hands. Before they sat down to eat, the women poured water on the workers’ hands.
Sonju watched the workers return to their planting after lunch. Next year those men and women would still be sharecroppers and field workers doing the same back-breaking work in the same fields for the people like herself who didn’t bend and dirty their hands. Yet she didn’t detect any of the bitterness in their sun-soaked faces that she would have felt. There was dignity in that, an attribute she lacked.
When she returned to the kitchen with empty jugs, Second Sister asked, “So what did you see?”
Sonju replied, “There’s something beautiful about a person hard at work.”
“My husband will appreciate your take on it. You two must have a kindred spirit. Not me.” Extending her arm outward, Second Sister said, “I would get far away from here if I could.” Perhaps Second Sister was right about the kindred spirit. She thought she could learn to understand Brother-in-Law better than she did her husband. He was a quiet and thoughtful man who chose his words carefully. She once saw him take down a set of Koryo-period celadon pottery from the attic above the kitchen, place it on a table and study it, turning each piece slowly with a satisfied smile the whole time. Sonju liked that about him, his ability to appreciate beauty.
When her husband came home, she was excited that she had something to tell him. “I went to the fields to watch the workers plant rice. Do you know? They sing while planting.”
He averted his eyes from her. “Why do you mingle with them? It’s not …”
Deflated, she tried to justify herself and resenting the need to have to. “Your brother goes to the field and talks to the sharecroppers and farm workers. He tells your father about how many workers they will need this year and how much yield they expect and at what price they think they can sell the rice. I find all of that interesting.”
“My brother goes to the fields because that’s his duty,” he said tersely, and added, “not yours.” Just like that, he shut her down. She wondered what was safe to talk about with him but she wasn’t going to censor herself just to appease a man, even her husband, and neither would this be her last time to go to the field.
Less than two months after rice planting, the monsoon rains poured and brought sweltering heat and humidity. Everyone in the family was forced to stay home. They moved around as little as possible and remained inside under mosquito nets and ate simple food.
When the rain finally abated after a solid month of daily downpour, Jinwon took off saying, “I’m going to Big House to do my summer break homework.”
“Homework?” Second Sister snickered. “She hates to read. A card game is more likely. She and the clan boys play for money. I heard she wins almost every time.”
Sonju was fanning the napping children. “Interesting girl,” she said. “She does what we cannot do, coming and going any time anywhere.”
“She is spoiled,” Second Sister said.
Sonju wondered if Second Sister’s opinion of Second House family would be different if she were allowed to leave the village.
On a hot and sluggish Sunday morning in August, Sonju was passing by the living room on the way to the kitchen, but paused when Jinwon suddenly declared to the family with a sly smile, “I have a brilliant idea. I think I’ll sell candies.” Jinwon turned to Sonju’s husband. “Little Uncle, bring some candies for me next time you come.” Wrinkling her nose in a scowl and waving her hand, she said, “The people here only know of cheap, colored candies. I’ll have a servant make a wooden tray that I can hang around my neck so I can sell candies door to door to our clan.”
Second Sister was watching and listening from the work area. Mother-in-Law shook her finger at Jinwon. “You will do no such thing. We are not merchants.” She left the room mumbling. Sonju’s husband smiled and watched his brother pull out his wallet. With money in her hand, Jinwon took off.
Sonju went to the work area and squatted next to Second Sister who was pouring water over soybeans that had started to sprout in a glazed pot. She asked, “What does Jinwon do with the money?”
“It’s a mystery to me. She will get another brilliant idea when the money runs out.”
“And money from winning card games?”
“I know she buys dried squid and roasted peanuts at the village store.”
“We have a store?”
“The hunchback, you saw him the other day talking to Mother-in-Law, didn’t you? He owns a small store near the school gate. He sells snacks, candles, matches—that sort of thing.” Second Sister covered the clay pot with a burlap cloth and stood up.
Sonju rose too. “Maybe she buys for everybody she plays with.”
“Not likely. She’s not a generous person.”
On the way to the kitchen, Sonju whispered, “Just think where we would be now if we had Jinwon’s ingenuity and force of personality to get what we wanted.” She just wished Jinwon would be more thoughtful for her mother.
September arrived with much awaited coolness in the air. For over a week now, Mother-in-Law had been muttering loudly enough for Sonju to hear, “It’s been over six months, more than enough time to conceive a child.” She soon began her ritual of burning incense and praying to Buddha first thing in the morning.
Every time she heard the soft tick-tock of Mother-in-Law’s wooden prayer bell, Sonju’s heart shrank. For the past few months, she had been wondering if she were barren like her aunt. Now that Mother-in-Law was speaking the words, the possibility of infertility seemed more real to her. Until recently she had thought that a child might bring a change to the misaligned state of her marriage, but now she wanted a child for her own to love and to guide. But what if she couldn’t conceive? Like what happened to her aunt, would her parents-in-law arrange a mistress for her husband to have his children?
She escaped to the hill. Down below from where she stood, the barley in the fields undulated like music and whistled when the wind changed its direction. There she imagined a very different life, the life she could have had. Once away from the hill though, she felt guilty for imagining so much less about her husband and their life together. She at times thought she focused too much on her disappointments and tried to let them go, but they all came back at every new disappointment. Like the time she flipped through his engineering books when he wasn’t around and found them utterly indecipherable, and having read no books since her marriage, she had asked him to buy some for her. She made the same request a few times. Eventually she stopped asking.
The week before, she had asked him what he talked about with his father. “Oh, about my studies and my future goals and about the discussions that came up in classes,” he said. “I would like to hear that too,” she said. “Hmph! What a useless curiosity!” he said and turned away.
The next time he mentioned his classes, she asked if there were any women in his class. He said, “No. After graduation, we will all go to the construction site and deal with the contractors and workers. They are all men.” Then he proceeded to tell her how well his professors regarded him. His lips moved in a curious way in a smile and his eyes shimmered as he said, “I’ll get strong recommendations from them when I graduate.”
She could tell that he was extremely proud of himself. She looked at his boyish face and said, “I’m sure you will. People like you.”
“I’m hoping for a post in Seoul,” he said. “It’s a quicker way to move up.”
She might return to Seoul soon despite her parents’ desire to keep her far away. She grinned. They couldn’t do anything about it because she was now married and was no longer under their care.
The workers cut the stalks with sickles, stacked them, and transferred them to rice straw mats in the outer courtyard. Afterwards, they separated the grains from the stalks with threshers. Then they spread the grains to dry, hulled them, had them polished, packed the white rice in rice rope sacks and stacked them in the storage building. Most of them would be sold.
The moon was getting fatter each day, which meant Chuseok holiday was approaching to give thanks for this year’s harvest. Half a dozen village women came to help the Second House women prepare for the feast. Several worked into the night under the light of the moon.
On the morning of the feast, the same village women with their children in tow showed up early to help. Then the clan members from the city came for the holiday and stopped by. The house was noisy and saturated with mingled smells—the raw scent of freshly picked fruits and vegetables; the scent of nutty smell of rice cakes steaming; and meat, fish, and poultry sizzling. The spirits of the ancestors were served first before the family had the feast in the living room and the sharecroppers and their children ate in the anteroom. Pinned between two women, a sharecropper’s little boy quickly shoved two pieces of rice cake into his pocket, then glanced around. Sonju looked away.
The next morning, the family walked to the burial mountain. A servant carried the food, drink, and a reed mat on an A-frame back carrier. Sonju, Second Sister, and First Sister carried the extra food.
In front of Father-in-Law’s parents’ graves, the servant spread the mat, and the three daughters-in-law laid out food and drink on the marble offering table. After the family bowed to the dead ancestors three times, they walked down to the first son’s grave. While the parents-in-law watched, the rest of the family bowed, then stood for a moment in silence. Sonju turned and saw Mother-in-Law wipe her eyes on her sleeve and smile down at Chuljin, the future head of the Second House family.
After lunch, the children romped in the yellowed grass or hid behind the bushes to relieve themselves. Father-in-Law pointed at empty grave sites midway up the hill and told his second son that he wanted those sites for his wife and himself. Sonju’s husband complained to his brother about the poor maintenance of the family burial site, so Brother-in-Law went down to the caretaker’s house and returned shortly, putting his wallet back in his pocket.
Without anyone noticing, First Sister was back at her husband’s grave and was pulling the weeds that had grown tall. Sonju walked down and squatted near her. Some weeds came up easily but others she had to fight. The stubborn roots of the dry, rough weeds surrendered only after clinging dearly to clumps of dirt and leaving scratches on her hand. The core of all living things, the will, should persist to the absolute end like that, and she too should have stood up to her mother to the end, she told herself, and swallowed her regret before moving on to the next weed.