DURING MY ENTIRE CHILDHOOD, MY MOTHER SEEMED LIKE A SAINT. She lived above natural feelings, celebrated the good she salvaged out of the wreckage of her family, and seemed immune to misery. Despite the grueling daily routines, she somehow sustained compassion. She didn’t retaliate against those who hurt her without provocation and could grow roses in a cement dumpster full of plastic trash. At twelve going on thirteen, though, I never imagined I would covet that ability. I only saw what she did in the kitchen.
The truth was, Mother was no saint by nature. She had simply made her choice between the two impossible roles open to Korean women of her age and situation: a saint or a bad woman. In a poor household torn by hardship, someone had to become an incinerator into which the family could dump their pain and anger without fear of retaliation. The other role, that of a bad woman who fought her venomous mother-in-law, was beneath her. It was degrading to punish her children for nagging at her or to fight her husband for venting his rage upon her. The grief and frustration haunting her family weren’t going to end in the near future. She understood the circular nature of oppression, and by playing a saint she tried to put an end to this circle.
Mother played her role for so long that it indeed became part of her personality. She was a saint more often than not. When Grandmother complained about her frequent nightmares about her late husband, Mother was genuinely moved, and went to the lengths she did to host the expensive exorcism. Nobody could tell whether Grandmother stopped dreaming of Grandfather after the exorcism, but she no longer talked about her nightmares. The old woman appeared to have gained some ability to clamp down her destructive attitude, thanks to her daughter-in-law.
Here I am as a baby, strapped on my mother’s back.
But there was a secret self in Mother, one that appeared in flashes when she was sorely tried. In a moment her face would turn from nurturing to frighteningly cold, an iceberg chiseled into an egg shape. Her eyes would turn icy, her mouth draw a thin line of disapproval, and her chin thrust out in silent protest. Whenever this happened, I would steal fearful glances at her, trying to stay out of her way. But she would only ever allow her true feelings to come through for a moment at a time, before the martyr’s calm returned, her cheeks lovely and plump, her eyes twinkling.
Mother wasn’t beautiful in a conventional sense. Her nose was on the flat, short side and her brow flew up in a straight, steep line with no curve. But she had a peculiarly charming aura. With her glasses on, she could pass for the chancellor of a university, I thought, or a gifted feminine scholar. Her skin, silky smooth and elastic, gave her a virginal look. Even after she had five children, it was almost as soft and milky as it had been during her youth. Mother was nearly as tall as Father, but with narrow shoulders and a slender waist she looked a lot more petite than women of her height; her girlish physique contributed to her youthfulness. I saw in her face a scholar’s rigor, a fighter’s anger, a conqueror’s pride, and a martyr’s surrender, all at once, and I was amazed by this spectrum. Mother was a warrior and a slave, a leader and an obedient follower. I most admired the grace she exercised toward her enemies, the strength of character it required, and the wisdom with which she applied it. It was a means of conquering without fighting.
As I admired Mother, however, I felt an intense sadness. Her sainthood was a choice without a choice, an enforced martyrdom and self-erasure. Her life mirrored the lives of so many other women, and I would work as hard to escape that life as she worked to maintain it. Between playing a saint and playing a bad woman, I had to find a happy medium.
As it is human nature to remember the bad more than the good, I remember the times when Mother’s saintly face disappeared. When I was twelve and half, I saw the other face. I had not washed the dishes she had left in the sink, so when she dragged her heavy feet back from the market with groceries, she saw the pile waiting for her.
“Once you die, you’ll be able to sit on your ass in heaven and read!” she screamed. “But until then, you’ve got to do your job! You’ve got to know your place in this house, which is the kitchen!” She snatched the book from my hand and threw it to the floor. It was Jane Eyre, one of several books Big Sister had borrowed from a local library. Big Sister was an avid reader, and at nineteen knew by heart all the English classics available in translation. She passed her book recommendations and her love for reverie on to me. I pretended to understand, too proud to admit that I was still a child. Just like our great-grandfather who read Confucian scripts under a leaking roof, we read advanced Western novels in a house heated by coal briquette, convinced of our superior intellect.
Mother, however, was unimpressed. “Your mother doesn’t have the energy to stand, and you are reading some fancy book about a foreign woman who marries a rich man!” Mother shouted. “You’re not some privileged foreign woman! You’re just a little nobody born to serve people! Who’s going to marry such a conceited, self-involved bitch?”
I was silent, cringing, my hands on my head.
“You know nothing but books,” she warned. “Didn’t I tell you what happened to your Aunt Haeok who read all those English books and ended up dead?” Mother’s rage had turned to misery, and she wiped her tears with her skirt. “Even for me, an ignorant housewife with no time for books, life is hard enough. I want to kill myself sometimes. Last night, I took thirty-five sleeping pills to die.”
Overcome by shock and guilt, I suppressed a gasp. Mother was in too dark a place to realize I was only a child or to consider the weight her confession put on me. With nobody to listen to her, she would have talked to the persimmon tree in the backyard, to any walking creature on the street. I stayed by Mother’s side more than any of her other children, and Mother was used to unburdening on me; I, too, was accustomed to listening. I had not expected, however, a confession about a suicide attempt.
“Thirty-five sleeping pills,” she almost whispered. “But I just woke up this morning, feeling sick. The pills were no good because I bought them last summer and kept them in the closet for a year. Besides, I drank a bottle of wine before I took them. I thought alcohol would get them into my system faster, but I guess it washed them out, and I woke up.”
Her face was as pallid as it was after she gave birth to Little Sister, when she had lost so much blood I had feared for her life. But this time her face terrified me. It petrified me in the pit of my stomach. Without a word, I leaped to my feet and darted out of the living room. I couldn’t care less where I was going; I just wanted to go away from the house as far as my feet could carry me. I wasn’t old enough to process Mother’s pain. I could only think about myself, a child whose mother told her she wanted to die.
I wanted a home, a home with no ghosts and no stories about people who committed suicide or wished to die. I wanted a home where I wouldn’t be scolded for reading a “fancy book.” Yes, I had to fly away to America. America was a country much kinder to women, a place where women could be brave and desirable at the same time. Wasn’t I destined to go to that big, beautiful country?
All the way home, I rolled my tongue—“buttering it up,” as Koreans say—to try to master difficult English sounds: distinguishing an R from an L, the th sound, and an F in the middle of a word. The phonemes that didn’t exist in Korean made English a nightmare for most Koreans, so for a week I rolled my “buttered up” tongue. While going to school and coming back home, on sidewalks and beside traffic lights, walking to a store to run an errand for Mother, and washing socks near the pump, I muttered to myself.
“Th-ea-ter, Ca-th-e-rine, th-ou-ght, th-ir-teen,” I repeated, dividing the syllables to give myself a long pause after each agonizing th sound. Fumbling for a sentence with as many th words as I could think of, I would chant until my tongue was sore. I simply had to go to America. If the Three Men of the Family were right—if America had the power to ruin the lives of women who drank its water—it was a country I felt I had to explore. A forbidden fruit was that much more attractive to me.
In junior high, I did poorly in every subject, even English. I rarely paid attention to the grammar in class. I spent all my time instead wondering about things like why Judy from the grammar exercises said “Thank you” to her mother whenever she was paid for running an errand for her family. I wondered why she was paid at all. Being praised, let alone being paid, for serving one’s family struck me as selfish and unnatural.
I tried to memorize theorems of algebra and rules of geometry, but my eyes kept wandering off to distant places, my ears listening to faraway drums. Folding cotton baby diapers in home economics, I asked myself why people made babies, why they wanted to expose them to all that pain and suffering. Life, as everyone seemed to agree, was full of sadness, and to me, it seemed particularly nightmarish. Gazing at the pictures of diapers in the home economics text, I found myself dead set against having children.
Mother’s confession about her suicide attempt came back to me again and again as I stared at the blackboard. It also made me hyper aware of the mini-dramas that happened every day in my house, and I started to see the episodes stacking against Mother’s psychological well-being. One morning not long after her confession, Father was bitching as usual about Mother’s tardiness. With a husband, a mother-in-law, and five children to feed at six in the morning, Mother was a machine and a model of efficiency, but Father worked himself into a violent rage over his un-ironed shirt.
“I’ll iron it for you,” Grandmother offered, gloating over Mother’s failure. Her osteoporosis had caused spinal degeneration, and she could no longer stand up without holding onto someone else. But whenever she saw a chance to turn her son against her daughter-in-law, she maximized it. She crawled to the closet, took the iron out, well aware of the effect such a sight would have on him.
“You let my mother do the ironing for you!” Father bellowed at Mother. His anger made my hair stand up. He knew perfectly well she never let the old woman do anything that required her to crawl or stand up.
“The youngest one kept crying all morning,” Mother replied calmly, biting her tongue. “I got delayed trying to feed her.”
“You stupid, sluggish bitch! Don’t you give me any back talk!”
He picked up a beer bottle lying beside him and smashed it, with all his might, on the wall right above Mother’s head. I screamed as the glass fragments rained down on her shoulders, and then I ran out of the house, tears flooding my face. I heard Mother weeping behind me, but I couldn’t stop running. I was afraid she might die of grief.
I was late for school that morning, and endured a sharp scolding from my teacher. All day long, I pretended to follow her instructions, staring blankly at the books and the board. But my hand took no notes, my ears heard no sounds. I asked myself why Mother’s devotion to the family came back to her as a boomerang. At forty-four, she was suffering from problems that ordinarily struck women in their sixties: pain in her back, weakening bones in her legs. She couldn’t walk longer than ten minutes without plopping down on a sidewalk bench. It was easy to see that she would be a dysfunctional old woman just like Grandmother. A permanently disabled life was what awaited women, I thought.
Coming home from school, however, I hit upon an entirely different question. I wondered where the beer bottle had come from. Father didn’t drink, nobody else in the family drank, and as far as I could remember, there never were any alcoholic beverages kept in the house. Women weren’t supposed to drink at all, and I was certain none of the women in the family brought it in. It had to have been Big Brother: I had once overheard him talking Less Big Brother into sharing a bottle of beer that he had snuck into the house. Student body president, valedictorian, and somewhat of a straight arrow, Big Brother rarely violated rules. But he was still a teenager, and couldn’t entirely resist peer pressure.
“Nothing is as good as the taste of cold beer at the end of a hot day,” he whispered to Less Big Brother, taking him to the outhouse. I pressed my ears against the wall and overheard them gulping. While listening to their giggles, I felt fresh envy. They were best friends, but I had no friend in the family. Little Sister was too young, and Big Sister was too old.
I had a golden chance to get even with my brothers. Father was stricter than Confucius when it came to rules for minors. One word from me would be enough to inflame him, and I would have the glee of watching them get whipped by Father. But I said nothing. They called me ugly and stupid, but they were still my beloveds, and I wanted to protect them. If I promised them not to snitch, they might even let me have a sip of their secret beer. So when I got home that day, I had something to smile about. I told Big Brother what I wanted, and, surprised at my cleverness, he promised me a sip from the next bottle he was planning to sneak in.
Puzzled by our high humor, Father looked at us and laughed. He clearly had no memory of what he had done that morning. Mother managed to make a faint smile, too, and we were back to the normal routine. But smiles were scarce in our family. We either frowned or laughed explosively, seldom hitting the middle. Always in need of escaping something, we involved ourselves in high-pitched brawls and raucous reconciliation. Being locked in a tiger’s stomach together divided us deeply, but it united us as well.
As summer wore on, I got restless again. Nurturing a taste for danger, I invited two of the neighborhood girls to our house and talked them into walking with me on the raised edge of the rooftop of our two-story house. Because the edge was barely wide enough for my two feet, I had always wanted to experience the sensation of running on it, to feel the fear of being close to death. That’s not quite how I sold it to the other girls, though. “Look,” I coaxed. “You can see the whole city from here.” Stepping on the edge, I pointed at the tower of a radio station on top of a hill. “Once you get on, you won’t be scared anymore.” I started to walk, my arms spread horizontally, my toes turned out. I sang and laughed, fluttering my arms like a bird. Fearfully but eagerly, the two girls joined me, taking little slow steps at first, and after a few paces they managed to spread their arms and giggle awkwardly. When they picked up my song, I quickened my pace. Soon, the three of us were walking in a circle like a group of acrobats, having a good time.
“Look at the kids over there!” I heard a woman scream from below. “Somebody’s got to get them off!”
“Hey, girls, get down! Get down!” another woman yelled. “If you don’t want to break your back, get off!” A throng of women gathered in front of the house, and ripples of shouts and shrieks echoed over the block. The two girls’ mothers ran out, livid with fear, and rushed into my front yard to climb up the stairs. But drugged by the danger, we continued our acrobatics, walking faster and faster.
“They must be possessed,” Mother gasped, climbing up the stairs with the two other mothers. “Grab them by the arms and pull them to the ground.”
Hearing their footsteps, we quickened our pace, singing in higher pitches. Until they yanked us down from the edge, we had no idea how scared they were.
“When your father comes home tonight, he’ll spank you until you lose your mind,” one of the mothers shrilled at her daughter, hitting her on the head with her fist. The other mother followed suit. In a moment, they both had their daughters by the arms, dragging them down the stairs.
“I told you not to go on the rooftop!” Mother shouted, slapping me in the face. “Why do you always go against everyone? What has gotten into you?”
I admitted I had done something extremely dangerous, but I could not understand Father’s reaction that night. He threw me on the floor and hit me in the face and stomach over and over again, accusing me of having tried to harm him deliberately.
“You did it on purpose, didn’t you?” he shouted, his eyes twitching and his lips trembling. “You did it to ruin me, to discredit me, didn’t you?” I just sat on the floor like a sack of wheat being kicked around and picked up. “Did I survive all the fear and humiliation to provide for a wicked child like this?” he raved on, this time to Mother.
Sitting at a corner, Mother was silent. She never interrupted to defend me from any of the Three Men of the Family; her job was to warn me, when the punishment was over, not to provoke the gods again.
“Every day at work I am persecuted and hounded, followed and threatened!” he screamed. “Why should I be troubled at home by my own child?”
I couldn’t tell whether he wanted me to agree with him or not. Either way, he was going to kill me, and I was going to die quietly. He would see he couldn’t break me.
I was so overwhelmed by hate I wanted to kill him. A month after the beating, I took a kitchen knife and snuck into his room as noiselessly as a cat. Father, reading at his desk, didn’t sense my presence behind him. So engrossed in Park Chung Hee’s conspiracy, he couldn’t even tell his life was in danger in his own house. “Good,” I thought, “he will die in the middle of his favorite hobby.” But a powerful hand seized mine and twisted my arm, wrenching the knife away. I looked back and saw Mother’s fierce face staring at me.
“Get up!” Mother shook my shoulder. “You’re going to be late for school.”
It was only when she woke me up that I realized it had been a dream. Mother sided with Father even in my dreams. What was it that made her defend the man who treated her like a slave to be kicked around? I was twenty years away from understanding why. Father was being chased by the ones who could put him right back to a torture chamber. He was torturing me the same way he had been tortured by them.
Trapped in my house and bored, I started a solitary crusade against the rats that stole rice and bits of fish from my family. The rats mated in the dark of the outhouse beside my bedroom, making a shrill sound like porcelain shattering. It was the ugliest, most repulsive noise I had ever heard, and with my hands over my ears, I tossed in bed.
I cut a sturdy branch off of the persimmon tree in the back of the house and trimmed the lean end for a club. With my club and a butcher knife, I watched the rats rushing into holes in the wall. I imagined the rats were the late Syngman Rhee, the current dictator Park Chung Hee, the Yankee bastards who set them up, and the fellows who built the Ulsan Pollution Center. The rats were the herds of brainless people who celebrated the supposed economic progress of these industrial complexes, who believed government propaganda. But rats are fast, and my club could hardly end our infestation.
I finally convinced Mother to get a cat, although it took some work. Koreans have all sorts of myths about the supposed wickedness of cats, and when I was young, few people liked them. Once Mother conceded, I was so infatuated with the cat that I insisted on sleeping with her beside me. My family thought I was slightly demented. Because cats are aloof and often disobedient, people projected into them the qualities they deemed as being treacherous in any living creatures; they believed cats were cunning in a mysterious way and were capable of the most relentless, secretive vengeance. How unfair it was of them, I thought, to blame the lovely felines! Because cats were smart, they knew how to be willful and independent, to use human beings for their own good. They were clever enough to “betray” people and make them mad.
I became an avid fan of cats after reading a legend. It was about a particularly venomous cat, about a female one that seemed to be an incarnation of the craftiest, most spiteful characteristics that were ever imagined by the Koreans about the feline species. This cat came back to the living from the dead to revenge herself on her former owner who had abused and then killed her, to destroy his family in a most prolonged, aggravating manner. She entered the body of his seven-year-old son, to make him shrill and meow in her voice, to make him climb up the walls and hang upside down the ceiling of the grass-roof house. The boy had a fever, too, hallucinating while asleep and unable to eat anything. Finally, a shaman was called in to exorcise the cat’s ghost, to ask her to forgive the boy’s father and to accept his apology. “You shouldn’t be so selfish,” the shaman admonished him after the cat had returned to the dead. “You hated the cat because she had her own mind. She didn’t come with a wagging tale when you called her name. You were being a typical human being. Human beings are so self-centered that they do not like any creature that doesn’t blindly follow them.” How I admired the legendary cat!
Cats were my favorite animal because a lot of people disliked them. Because most people wanted them purely for the purpose of removing rats and mice, I wanted mine for the sake of love. Because most people kept them outdoors, I wanted to keep mine indoors.
“She belongs outdoors!” Big Brother yelled. “She’s an animal!”
But I snuck her in to my room as often as I could and held her on my lap. Wrapping her front paws around my neck, she switched her tail, clinging to me like a baby, and I thought she was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. She was brave, too, and a heartless killer. She would catch a rat, chew it up, and swallow everything but the tail, which she let hang from her mouth, and I would cheer and clap my hands. But less than two months after I adopted her, she left. The consensus in my family was that she’d left me because she didn’t like me.
“She’s probably dead by now,” Mother tried to console me. “Or she’s a fat, ugly cat with a horde of kittens. It’s nothing to be so sad about.”
After the cat disappeared, I was very depressed. I had been abandoned by my only friend. I stopped eating and talking. To coax me into eating, Mother promised to open a can of shredded peaches on condition that I have three meals a day on time. Canned peaches were a luxury item available only in foreign markets. “Get that stupid cat out of your mind,” she said. “She left you.”
“Why would she want to leave me?”
“You suffocated her. You loved her too much. You go too far even with loving.”
After several nights of hard thinking, I decided that I preferred my cat dead than alive with a bunch of kittens. If she had left me for a male cat, she deserved to be fat and ugly with no control over her body. Mother was right; I always went too far, even with loving.
But knowing myself didn’t help me figure out division and multiplication. My grades were terrible; I couldn’t memorize; I’d never marry well. The pressure was intense even when I was more than five years away from college.
