32.
Tae-yul was up very early. I heard him rustling about and slipped out of bed to join him.“Good,” he said with a smile. “I didn’t want to wake you, but I was hoping you’d get up.”
He beckoned me to follow him and led the way outside to the workshop area. “We have a job to do,” he said. I knew what he was thinking.
Together we dragged the rose of Sharon tree from under the eaves. It was still scrawny, but it had grown and was once again as tall as I was.
“By the front door,” I said. “In a place of honor.”
As we worked to transplant the tree, Tae-yul asked, “Are there any flags? I think we should fly a flag on our gate. Uncle would like that—a flag to greet him.”
Uncle . . . I’d made up my mind, at last. He would hate it if I felt bad every time I thought of him. Omoni was right. I would never forget what had happened, but I had to forgive myself if I wanted to think of him with gladness.
“No, we don’t have a flag,” I said. “But I’ll sew one for you to put up.”
He nodded, then stopped digging and looked at me, his face serious. “I saw Uncle’s shop in town. It’s boarded up.”
“Yes. It’s been vacant all this time, but Abuji refused to sell it. He wanted to keep it for—for when Uncle comes back. . . .” For the thousandth time I wondered when that would be.
The war had changed so many things. Uncle gone, Tomo gone. Jung-shin gone, too. Her family had left town immediately after the Japanese surrender, because anyone who had helped the Japanese was in as much danger as the Japanese themselves—more, maybe. I didn’t know where they’d gone; I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to her. I hoped with all my heart that she would write to me one day and let me know she was safe somewhere.
We were quiet for a little while. Then Tae-yul said, “I was thinking of training to become a printer myself. I could run Uncle’s shop for him—until he gets back.”
“That’s a very good idea, Opah. The press is still there, you know. They used it a lot, but then it broke and no one could fix it.”
Tae-yul grinned. I knew what he was thinking: Only Uncle could fix that old press. “I helped him lots of times,” he said. “Maybe I can figure it out.”
I nodded and he went on, “The shop needs a new sign. You could paint one. ‘Printing—Kim Young-chun,’ that’s what I think it should say.” He moved one hand across an imaginary sign, indicating two lines of large lettering.
Kim Young-chun. Uncle’s real name.
“Abuji might be disappointed that I don’t want to become a scholar,” Tae-yul continued. “I’ll convince him by telling him that my being a printer will honor the work he and Uncle did during the war.” He paused. “But there has always been a scholar in the family. If I am to be a printer, it’ll be up to you to become the family scholar.”
I frowned. Me, a scholar? Girls hardly ever became scholars. And there was so much work to be done everywhere, in our home, the neighborhood, the whole country. It was hard to imagine a time when books and studying would be important again.
Still, Tae-yul had come back from the dead. That made it seem as if anything was possible. I felt myself start to smile.
Tae-yul smiled back at me and picked up the shovel again. I took the trowel, and we continued our work side by side.
Soon we were finished putting the little tree in its place by the front door. Tae-yul fetched a bucket of water for it.
“Let’s not tell Omoni about this,” I said. “Let’s just make it a surprise.”
He agreed. After we put the bucket and tools away, I turned to him and said, “If you’re going to be a printer, we have a lot of work to do.”
“‘We’?” he asked. “Have you changed your mind already—do you want to be a printer, too, instead of a scholar?”
“No,” I said, laughing. “Come inside, I’ll show you.”
I collected my diary and a pencil, went to Tae-yul’s room, and sat on the floor beside him. “I’ve been working with Abuji for a few weeks now,” I said. “I’ll show you what I’ve learned so you can catch up, and then we can study together.”
I wrote something and showed it to him. “You’ll be a terrible printer if you don’t know how to read and write,” I said in a stern voice. But I couldn’t keep the smile from my eyes.
He started to answer indignantly. “What do you mean—” Then he saw my face, stopped speaking, and glanced down at the page.
“Ga, na, da,” I said softly.
“Ga, na, da,” he repeated, his voice barely above a whisper.
The first three letters of the Korean alphabet.
We looked at them for a long moment. Then I handed Tae-yul the pencil and watched as he copied the letters in a neat row under mine.