AS THE BREEZE COOLED THAT SUMMER, I FELT HAPPY AS A CHILD should. I stored memories of ordinary but beautiful moments—accompanying Mother on her visit to relatives; walking with her to parks and alongside the trees on the roads; Little Sister jumping up and down in a basin of warm water and Grandmother washing her with a bar of baby soap; Big Sister, Big Brother, Less Big Brother, and I splashing our faces at the water pump with Mother pumping on and on for us; Father coming home from a long-distance trip with a box of cookies wrapped in a red ribbon. Grandmother loved Little Sister, although she never stopped lamenting that she wasn’t a boy, and Mother loved me and tried to show me her love out of Grandmother’s sight.
Mother would sneak me out to a market to buy me rice cakes, creating one of the shining moments in my life. Alone with her, I could feel her compassion and catch her tender gaze. In her eyes, I got a glimpse of the love she wasn’t allowed to express to me and of the circumstances keeping her from showing it. Often, she would sneak into my room to see me fall asleep and say, “Your face is so intense, even when you’re asleep. I’m afraid you think too deeply.” “It’s because I have strange dreams,” I would assure her. “But they disappear when I wake up.” As the hard, worn knuckles of her fingers stroked my hair and braided it, I could feel her devotion touching me. The covert but clear manifestations of her love became the life buoys that kept me floating on the ocean of painful memories. How I wished we had more money! With a refrigerator to reduce her labor, central heating to lessen her back pain, and a washing machine to protect her hands from constant wear and tear, she would have had so much more time to spend with her children and to learn new ways of life. But she had to spend all of her time on just surviving.
Big Sister clutches me as a baby in front of our house. Big Sister was always the model oldest daughter, or “family capital”—she looked after her younger siblings as if she were our mother; she sacrificed endlessly on our behalf; whip-smart, she came in top of her class at school; and she quietly submitted to the will of the men of her family.
Although far more moderate than Grandmother, Mother was bound to traditional practices as much as any woman of her age, and I knew she couldn’t stop putting her boys above her girls. How could she treat gods equally to people? Big Brother was the one to set up the table for ancestor worship, the one to bow to her and her husband’s names pasted on the folding screen, to recall their struggles for their children, and to pass on their names to his sons. She couldn’t defy the system she had learned from her mother, who in turn had inherited it from her mother. Even as a fourth grader, I was aware of the forces working against Mother.
Still, Mother loved us all. On some Sundays, whenever there were only women around, we were a happy family, and Mother was devoted to her girls. No one was better or worse than anyone else, and even Grandmother seemed to put her bitter tongue on hold. We shared some gourmet dishes we normally couldn’t, including freshly cooked meat and fish and vegetables, and Grandmother smiled and laughed with us over the comedies on the small TV we borrowed from a neighbor, clapping her hands and cheering.
Our favorite show was about cartoon vampires who fought bad people in the hopes of becoming human someday. The nine-inch black-and-white TV gave us an opportunity to unite ourselves against the villains on the screen. While our eyes were glued on it, we were happy. “Good job! Well done!” we shouted, applauding the vampires, who lashed their long, black leather whips at the loan sharks who “drained the blood” from poor people.
All the women in the family identified with the vampires—Vam, Vera, and Vero—who could choose to be male or female as they wished. We whooped with joy at the screams of the villains, gasped with anxiety at the hazards facing the heroes, and sighed with relief at their final victory, oblivious of everything else in the world. We felt sad because they worked so hard to earn the right to turn human, doing all the dangerous work for people. It wasn’t fair for them to have to wait for a full hundred years before having a chance to be judged and approved by the gods. But every Sunday afternoon, we were happy to witness them moving, if at a snail’s pace, toward the eventual day of glory. We could celebrate freely because the Three Men of the Family weren’t at home to tell us how foolish women were to enter such a heated discussion over a silly cartoon movie.
“Women like to cry. They like to be sentimental,” Father would sniff whenever Mother emoted over her favorite TV dramas. “They like to waste their emotion and throw out their reason.” He spent his Sunday afternoons catching up with his friends, while my brothers spent weekends playing basketball. Less Big Brother would jeer, “You women stay in a dark room all day, doing nothing but watching that stupid TV and gabbing about it.”
Still, Sunday afternoons in 1965 were ours, and we spent them freely with Vam, Vera, and Vero. Occasionally, I thought I was Vera, lashing her serpentine whip around a villain’s body, smothering and paralyzing him. I thought of Big Sister as Vam, whose whip, slightly shorter and thicker than Vera’s, would fasten around a swindler’s torso, turning him into a dummy with a broken back. Mother was Vero, the smallest and pudgiest of the three and the one with the most common sense and strategic wisdom, responsible for the harmony between hot-tempered Vera and reserved Vam. I fantasized about her binding a hoodlum’s body with her whip, pulling him in all directions, and finally striking him down on the ground with circus-style adroitness. Although too little to be a fighter yet, Little Sister was one of the vampires, too. I added an imaginary character, Vira, to include her, making her a trainee and potentially the most powerful combination of everyone’s merits. At nine, I thought I could take an active part in vanquishing the evils of the world.
That winter, as the cool breeze changed into icy winds, my brothers taught and encouraged me, and helped me to do better in school. Spending days tutoring me in math, giving me science pop quizzes, and explaining geometric axioms in detail didn’t seem to tire them at all.
“You know my friend Dongil. His sister is going to the best junior high school for girls in Seoul,” Big Brother said. “You’d better go to the best in Taegu at least.”
“You’ve got to do better than you have so far,” Less Big Brother joined in. “You can’t make your family ashamed.” I didn’t understand I was a pawn for their competition with their peers, but had I known, I would have been grateful nonetheless. In my mind, my brothers awakened in me a passion for knowledge and a desire to push myself much as the fairytale prince woke up the sleeping princess. It was the princes in them that made it possible for me, as an adult, to forgive them for their other cruelties, to replace the sharp edges of my anger with the softening power of gratitude.
At fourteen, Big Brother had a constantly full schedule and was entrusted with the most respected—and demanding—duties a teenage boy of his age could be charged with. He was the student body president for a junior high school of fifteen hundred boys, an amateur painter who won awards for his school in national fine arts contests, and a young critic who was invited to lead after-school discussions of classical Korean and world literature. He hardly had an evening free of commitments. After going to school all day, working intensely to keep his number one spot among his five hundred peers in all twenty subjects in liberal arts and math and sciences, he dedicated his extracurricular hours to helping his peers as well as to improving his own leadership skills.
That winter, Big Brother spent several of his packed evenings painting the “twelve most important foods of our lives” for my class, sacrificing precious homework and sleep hours. A poster in watercolors, his painting was pasted on the board in the back of my classroom for one whole semester, serving as a guidepost for my teacher whenever she needed to explain nature and nutrition. I won celebrity status in school as the sister of the great watercolorist, and it made me glow with pride I had never felt before. The potatoes, apples, meat, cabbage, rice, barley, eggs, and tomatoes in the painting looked so real and delicious that children from other classes came by to look, throwing envious glances at me. The fame Big Brother brought me was the only visibility I ever had a chance to enjoy in my grade school years, and for this I was eternally grateful to him. I could bear a million sarcastic remarks if I could have one more round of that reflected glow.
Children skating on a makeshift ice rink in 1973.
Less Big Brother, too, planted a sparkling memory in my mind. When he was twelve, he taught me how to skate on the Crystal River, where some merchants had poured liquid nitrogen from a truck into the half-frozen water to set up a tent house. They charged about a quarter for unlimited use of the rink and less for renting a pair of skating boots.
“My friend Jay Ho’s sister skates real gracefully,” Less Big Brother goaded me warmly. “My sister should do just as well.”
I was so overwhelmed to be the focus of his attention that the pressure to do well seemed only an additional blessing. He held my hand and helped me to stand on the blades, pulling me slowly, doubling up his energy on his feet to maintain his balance against my struggling legs. His hands were an oasis of warmth in the frosty ring. They were just like the small radiator in my classroom, around which girls fought to occupy a spot to escape the icy drafts creeping through the poorly insulated walls. I realized he loved me, and my entire world seemed to stand on that moment in that cheap tarpaulin tent house pitched up by some poor merchants trying to scrape children’s coins together.
But the liquid nitrogen had become less effective because the weather was getting warmer, and the ice beneath my feet cracked when I had barely made three stiff rounds of the ring. Suddenly, I was almost entirely immersed in the cold water. I cried hysterically, swinging my arms in vain, trying to grab the ice above me. Pandemonium broke loose on the ring and children ran in all directions, screaming. Some of them lay flat and crawled to the outside beneath the tarpaulin and others rushed to the exit at the end of the tarpaulin sheets. In total panic, I pawed the air, wriggling my arms to and fro, my head barely above the water and my legs numbed by the freezing water, until Less Big Brother darted toward me, followed by two of the merchants carrying metal poles. By the time Less Big Brother reached me, I had almost lost mobility in my arms. I felt a burning pain, as if I were dissolving in heat in the midst of icy water, and when Less Big Brother squatted down on the ice near the hole and extended his hands to me, my arms grabbed them with desperate energy.
“Get away from there, boy!” one of the merchants cried to him. He thrust one end of his metal pole in front of Less Big Brother, blocking him from the broken part of the ice.
“Don’t go any further!” the other hollered to his partner. “Give him the end of the pole! Hurry!”
The ice beneath Less Big Brother had cracked. Falling into the rapidly expanding hole of water with me, he began to kick his legs and swing his arms, clenching his teeth to fight the pain. But he refused to scream, playing the big brother comforting his screaming little sister, and he was soon able to gain his balance in the water after a few erratic strokes. Struggling to keep a stoic face, he held my waist up to help me to get hold of the metal pole extended by one of the merchants, and when my torso came safely above the water, I climbed up on the pole. Relieved, the merchant swung around and walked toward the entrance to drop me on the gravel outside, coming back to help his friend, who was doing the same thing for Less Big Brother. They were at ease with the whole rescue mission, as if we were as light as a pair of balloons; I thought they had probably done it before.
Stamping our feet on the gravel, we tried to stop the chattering of our teeth. “Get on my back,” Less Big Brother ordered. “I can carry you home. It’ll be faster.” He squatted. Reluctantly, I sat on his back and wrapped my arms around his neck, laying my face flat between his ribs. I was afraid that people might see me, nearly grown, on my brother’s back and laugh at me. But we were home much sooner than we would have been had I walked.
“Your Father told you not to go skating on temporary rings like that!” Grandmother yelled. “If you don’t come down with some awful chills, I’ll be surprised.”
Begging her not to tell Father, Less Big Brother and I changed our clothes and sat on the warm floor to thaw our toes. Then I fell asleep to the sound of Grandmother washing our clothes in the bathroom. When I woke up, I was lying in another room, beside Little Sister. I could hear Grandmother grumbling to Mother, “The merchants would have got her out anyway. He was stupid enough to try to rescue her himself. Why should a boy get sick for a worthless chick?” Mother didn’t respond, her eyes fixed on the shirt she was ironing. “I’m glad it happened during the break, though,” Grandmother muttered. “I would have cried if he had missed school because of a stupid flu he didn’t deserve.”
For once, Grandmother’s tirade didn’t bother me. My heart had no room to feel anything other than gratitude toward Less Big Brother. Crooning to Little Sister in my arms and watching Less Big Brother slowly recover, I felt free from the grip of a tiger’s stomach. I was happy because I felt loved. Less Big Brother had risked his safety for me.
