I flew so far west I landed east, in Korea. My mother’s homeland—my homeland. I don’t think I was fully aware of it as I crammed a few articles of clothing into my backpack and hurried to JFK, but as I tossed about in my too-upright seat on the flight over, it was painfully clear: I had come back to atone. From Incheon Airport I would rush to Gangnam Sinnara Hospital and present myself to my grandfather, Sang sitting at his bedside. And I knew they would know. They’d smell it radiating off me. I could still feel the burn of Ed’s finger splitting me in two.
But on the other side of the custom gates, a thick, dark tension coated the air. At first I thought it was just nervous energy, the collective aftermath of a long flight. The people in front of me stopped abruptly in their tracks, muttering cries into their cell phones. Impatiently I weaved my way around them toward the exit. A crowd had gathered in front of a TV monitor suspended from the ceiling. And that was when I saw: against a clear blue sky, one of the Twin Towers suddenly crashing in one fell swoop. It went whoosh!—disappearing into ballooning clouds of ash, imploding, collapsing in on itself rather than exploding outward, as if even in the midst of disaster it was desperately trying to observe nunchi.
What the F—
“Always inconveniencing!” I heard someone shout behind me.
It was Sang, wearing a rumpled black suit, his eyes bloodshot and pouchy with fatigue. He alighted from his spot with his usual harried gait. When he reached me, his tired eyes still mustered enough energy to flash a shiny black. “You! Why you not tell anybody where you go!” he said, gripping me by the shoulders. He whipped his head from me to the television. “Lowood,” he uttered in a hoarse whisper. Lowood’s offices had occupied the 103rd floor of the North Tower.
I blinked at the TV screen. The images were still not registering. “How did you know I was here?” I said dumbly.
“Uncle calling here, there. Nobody know! You alive, you not alive. Finally airline say you boarding flight Monday night. I guess you deciding listen your uncle.” He tutted. Then he switched over to Korean, continuing in a more serious tone. “Jane-ah. New York is like a war zone right now. We’ve been attacked by terrorists.”
My uncle explained about the four hijacked planes that had taken flight, two of which had crashed into the Towers. It had just happened, that morning, on the eleventh. My flight had left JFK the night of the tenth, and I touched down in Seoul before dawn on the twelfth. As I flew west, the day kept trailing behind me. I never experienced September 11; the day was lodged in a space-time vortex, hovering somewhere over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. And here in Korea, 9/11 was literally yesterday’s news.
In those early moments of disorientation, I could barely make sense of my uncle’s words. My thoughts skittered in every direction. If I had taken that job at Lowood. If I had spent that night with Ed. Ed. He’d been down there—because of me. I had stood him up at the bar. Wasn’t the hotel in the shadow of the Towers? What if it had collapsed on top of . . .
“Why you not pay attention?” Sang snapped me back to focus. “I say you make whole family worry about you.”
“You heard from them! Is everybody okay?”
I realized my mistake. Sang, too. “That family worry, too. Uncle already call them.”
“Uncle, please.” I looked to the pay phones. “I need to speak to them.”
He handed me a phone card. “Tell them you okay. Hurry up.”
I punched in the numbers I knew by heart. I heard the foreign dial tone, then a click; someone picked up. “Mazer-Farley residence. Devon speaking.”
There was an unfamiliar, grown-up tinge to her voice, as though she’d matured years in the span of half a day.
“Devon! It’s Jane.”
When she cried my name in response, her voice resumed its childlike tone. “Jane! Daddy and Ma are so worried! Your uncle’s been calling like a million times.” As Devon explained the sequence of events, starting with the first tower falling, her voice kept modulating: adult, child, adult, child. How my uncle had finally gotten through, demanding to know my whereabouts. But no one knew. How her father, coated in ash, had arrived at her school to take her home early. How they got back to the house to find Beth waiting for them—she’d caught an earlier flight and had arrived at dawn to an empty house. How Devon was relieved she wasn’t going to get into trouble about attending Alla’s sleepover. And finally—how my uncle had called to say he’d heard from the airline, who confirmed I’d boarded a flight to Seoul the night before.
“Where’re your parents?” I demanded.
“Daddy just ran out to pick up some heroes for lunch.” Heroes. “No one feels like cooking. Hang on, I’ll put Ma on—”
“I . . . can’t.” Sang was gesturing for me to wrap it up, but that wasn’t the real reason. “I have to go. My grandfather . . .”
“Your uncle said.” Devon paused, then put on her mature voice. “My condolences to your family.”
I had been too late. “Please tell your parents . . .” I’m sorry for everything. “I’m sorry for inconveniencing them.”
“Jane, when are you coming back home?”
“As soon as I can,” I murmured.
“Pinkie swear?”
“Pinkie swear.” But I was lying as I said it. After what I’d done, I knew I could never set foot in the Mazer-Farley home again.
I hung up the phone. “I’m sorry. About Grandfather.”
Sang tutted. “What you sorry for? You too late. We all too late.” His usually impatient tone softened. “He die when Uncle flying in airplane.”
The same night I was doing what I had done with Ed. My grandfather’s death and my transgression in the attic—like two memories fused together.
“What wrong you? Why you look so suspicious?” Sang’s ever-scanning eyes were reading me again; I must have been staring into space.
“Nothing.” I snapped back to reality. “Uncle, you knew I was on this flight. And you left a message with all the hospital info. I could’ve found my way.”
“Uncle not sure, maybe again something happen. . . .” He blinked, then cast his eyes upward, away from me. He stood like that, not speaking, for a few moments. Then he pointed to my backpack, voice shaking with irritation. “Why you not bring suitcase?”
If I had brought a suitcase, he probably would have said, in the same agitated tone, “Why you bring suitcase?”
He turned on his heel and clomped away from me, the thick, worn soles of his orthopedic shoes squelching against the airport’s polished floors. “Hurry up!” he called out. “Everybody waiting for you.”
In the cab ride from the airport, I stared out the window, dawn rising over the sprawl of Seoul. Gray high-rises shot up all around us. They stood tall, erect, and smug, oblivious to the fact that halfway around the world their counterparts had come tumbling down, down, down.
* * *
The taxi pulled up in front of Sinnara Hospital, in the Gangnam district of Seoul. “I thought you said Grandfather already die—I mean, passed away,” I said.
“Here Korea funeral home inside hospital,” he said. “And everybody suppose to have sleepover here until we go cemetery.”
The funeral home was a separate wing of the hospital. It looked like a catering hall, hosting multiple (grieving) parties. Six-foot-tall flower arrangements bearing calligraphied messages of consolation framed the entrance to each private suite.
Sang pried off his shoes in the foyer, but I hesitated. “His body . . . is it in there?”
“They already take away. But you too late, like always.” He jutted his chin in the opposite direction, indicating, Over there. “Go hurry up say hello Big Uncle and Emo. They still awake.”
The suite consisted of several chambers. Sang led me to the dining room. A man and a woman were seated on the floor at a low table, speaking in hushed tones. I knew they were siblings of my mother and Sang. The man was Big Uncle, the eldest. Emo, my mother’s sister, was the youngest of the four. “Ga,” Sang said. With a push of his hand, he launched me forward.
I greeted Big Uncle first, tucking my head into a bow. His cheeks were flushed red. “You came,” he said in Korean, pouring himself a drink from a small green soju bottle. Then I turned to Emo. Again I lowered my head. She shot up from her spot on the floor. At full height she reached my chin. Although she gazed up at me, her eyes did not feel intrusive but soft and almost gentle. I did not look away.
“I have been waiting for you!” she said. Or she could have meant “We” or “They” or “It.” In Korean, subjects were often dropped, implied—the onus was on the listener to fill in the blanks.
I was not expecting Emo to take me by the shoulders and fold me so fiercely into her embrace. At first I held myself back, afraid to lean my full weight against her. But she held me tightly, her body fleshy and soft. It was as sturdy as Beth’s first hug had been.
“Look, Big Brother,” Emo said. “She grew up so beautiful! Just like her mother.”
Beautiful. The only other person who had ever called me beautiful was Ed. The last time he said it to me, his face was hovering just inches above mine.
“She looks nothing like her,” Big Uncle said dismissively. He hraaack-ed a spit wad into a napkin. Then he jerked his head to the glass-doored refrigerator at the far end of the dining room and told Emo to bring over another bottle.
Emo had started toward it when Sang let out a hssst! of reproach. “Jane, you go.”
“Yes, Uncle Number Two,” I said. In the presence of his elder brother, Sang was relegated to second place.
As I made my way to the fridge, Big Uncle shouted, “And grab another glass, too!”
I placed the bottle and glass in front of Big Uncle, and he began to fill the second glass. “Take a drink, Sangduk.”
Sang waved away the proffered glass. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.”
Emo nudged me toward the door. “It’s late. We should go to sleep, too.”
“Hssst!”
I turned around, but the hiss was not directed at me. Big Uncle was hssst-ing Sang. “I said take the drink.”
Emo pushed me along. But when we reached the doorway, I saw that Sang was not following behind us. Instead he lowered himself to the floor and received the drink from his older brother.
Emo led me to the back room, where two figures—Hannah and Mary—were sleeping on the floor. Guided by the thinnest sliver of light peeking from under the closed door, I changed into a T-shirt and boxer shorts; Emo slipped into long johns. She had already made our floor bed, and she patted the mat. “It’s late, let’s sleep.”
We slept. When I woke up at one point in the smallest hours of morning, I found Emo’s head nestled in the crook of my shoulder. Her thick, stout arm was thrown over me. She smelled of fresh spittle and warmth.
* * *
The next morning I awoke to the sounds of people bustling about. The whole family was already up. Mary knelt down by my bed. She was dressed in a black two-piece hanbok dress with white trim. It strained across her bust, and the skirt’s hem trailed the floor. A white ribbon was pinned in her hair. When we were little, she used to wake me up with a jab of her big toe to my ribs. Now she was touching my shoulder gently with her fingers.
“Jane,” she said. “You’re . . . okay, right?”
I sat up. She wasn’t wearing her usual smirk. Instead she looked stricken. When I met her eye, she looked away. She tugged at her dress. Mary and I didn’t really do corny moments—nothing about our family was touchy-feely. Quickly she tossed a packet of clothes onto my lap. After I folded away my blankets, I put on the black hanbok dress. The cold, cheap fabric—polyester masquerading as linen—chafed against my skin, a different kind of chafing from Ed’s stubble grazing my thighs. The sleeves stopped short of my wrists, and the skirt’s hem stopped above my ankles, exposing my socked feet. The dress was one-size-fits-all; neither Mary nor I was built for it.
* * *
I had missed most of the funeral. That morning the last of the mourners came to pay their respects to Re Myungsun’s altar before we went to the cemetery. And what an altar! It was covered in long-stemmed flowers and lacquered plates of steamed meat, dried fish, sticky rice cakes, and pears and apples with their tops lopped off. Incense burned in a brass bowl. At the center of the altar was a framed portrait of Re Myungsun. His frown was forever memorialized in that photo; his beady eyes casting their displeasure across his funeral spread. Even in death nothing seemed good enough for Re Myungsun.
The mourners came and went. With each new arrival, Big Uncle and Emo let out a renewed cry or yelp of grief. Big Uncle’s deep, rumbling shouts especially made a show. Tears spilled from the slits of his eyes. I had never seen a grown Korean man cry, and it was uncomfortable to witness. At some moments Emo would collapse to the floor, wailing, “Father! Father!” Her hanbok dress spilled out all around her, and she was lost in its many folds.
Their sobs made Sang’s reserve seem all the more conspicuous. Unlike his siblings he sat straight in his chair: quiet, dry-eyed, and unmoving. Hannah was rubbing his back, yet his eyes remained fixed on the bowl of incense on the altar. One of the sticks was propped precariously in its bed of ash. It was tilting to the side, trailing a thin wisp of smoke. But my uncle did nothing to right its downward wake.
I lifted myself from the floor and walked to the altar. My hand stretched toward the brass bowl. But before I could right the falling stick, I felt a gentle pressure on my back; it was Emo’s hand, and it had the dual effect of offering me comfort and forcing me into a bow. By the way her hand hiccupped on my back, I could tell that her tears had tapered off. Reluctantly I succumbed to the pressure, but as I bent forward, I refused to meet my dead grandfather’s disapproving gaze. Try as I might, I could not muster the same sorrow for the man who had sent both my mother and me away.
Sang was equally unemotional as we drove to the cemetery. Out of the city limits, the high-rises gave way to empty stretches of what was once farmland, littered with the skeletons of new buildings.
When we arrived, we saw burial plots cut into the side of a mountain like terraces. We unloaded mats and the funeral food from the trunk of the car. With these in hand, we ascended the mountain to Re Myungsun’s spot at the top.
The men driving the hearse had beaten us to the grave; my grandfather’s coffin lay beside his dug-up rectangle of dirt. The men stood off to the side, smoking cigarettes and speaking in hushed tones. I watched as Sang knelt on the mat and bent over into a bow, while the men lowered Re Myungsun’s coffin into the ground. Suddenly a muffled sob escaped my uncle’s chest; it made an ugly sound, like a terrified cat. Mrkgnao! Sang clamped his hand to his mouth, rose, and with a sweeping sidestep he took refuge behind a tree.
It was just that one, sharp, quick cry before it was drowned by the sounds of the wind rushing at the empty branches—the cherry blossoms were long past their bloom. When Sang rejoined the group, he was dry-eyed. As he brushed off his wife’s attempts to soothe him, I caught a glimpse of a man racked with pain. But I couldn’t distinguish between his anger and his grief.