5

As Koh Hansu was putting her on the ferry, Sunja had the opportunity to observe him up close without distractions. She could even smell the mentholated pomade in his neatly combed black hair. Hansu had the broad shoulders and the thick, strong torso of a larger man; his legs were not very long, but he was not short, either. Hansu was perhaps the same age as her mother, who was thirty-six. His tawny brow was creased lightly, and faded brown spots and freckles had settled on his sharp cheekbones. His nose—narrow, with a bump below a high bridge—made him look somewhat Japanese, and small, broken capillaries lay beneath the skin around his nostrils. More black than brown, his dark eyes absorbed light like a long tunnel, and when he looked at her, she felt an uncomfortable sensation in her stomach. Hansu’s Western-style suit was elegant and well cared for; unlike the lodgers, he didn’t give off an odor from his labors or the sea.

On the following market day, she spotted him standing in front of the brokers’ offices with a crowd of businessmen and waited until he could see her. She bowed to him. Hansu nodded ever so slightly, then returned to his work. Sunja went to finish her shopping, and as she walked to the ferry, he caught up with her.

“Do you have some time?” he asked.

She widened her eyes. What did he mean?

“To talk.”

Sunja had been around men all her life. She had never been afraid of them or awkward in their presence, but around him, she didn’t have the words she needed. It was difficult for her to stand near him even. Sunja swallowed and decided that she would speak to him no differently than to the lodgers; she was sixteen years old, not a scared child.

“Thank you for your help the other day.”

“It’s nothing.”

“I should have said this earlier. Thank you.”

“I want to talk to you. Not here.”

“Where?” She should have asked why, she realized.

“I’ll come to the beach behind your house. Near the large black rocks where the tide is low. You do the wash there by the cove.” He wanted her to know that he knew a little about her life. “Can you come alone?”

Sunja looked down at her shopping baskets. She didn’t know what to tell him, but she wanted to speak with him some more. Her mother would never allow it, however.

“Can you get away tomorrow morning? Around this time?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is afternoon better?”

“After the men leave for the day, I think,” she found herself saying, her voice trailing off.

  

He was waiting for her by the black rocks, reading a newspaper. The sea was bluer than she had remembered, and the long, thin clouds seemed paler—everything seemed more vibrant with him here. The corners of his newspaper fluttered with the breeze, and he grasped them firmly, but when he saw her approaching, he folded the paper and put it under his arm. He didn’t move toward her, but let her come to him. She continued to walk steadily, a large wrapped bundle of dirty clothes balanced on her head.

“Sir,” she said, trying not to sound afraid. She couldn’t bow, so she put her hands around the bundle to remove it, but Hansu quickly reached over to lift the load from her head, and she straightened her back as he laid the wash on the dry rocks.

“Sir, thank you.”

“You should call me Oppa. You don’t have a brother, and I don’t have a sister. You can be mine.”

Sunja said nothing.

“This is nice.” Hansu’s eyes searched the cluster of low waves in the middle of the sea and settled on the horizon. “It’s not as beautiful as Jeju, but it has a similar feeling. You and I are from islands. One day, you’ll understand that people from islands are different. We have more freedom.”

She liked his voice—it was a masculine, knowing voice with a trace of melancholy.

“You’ll probably spend your entire life here.”

“Yes,” she said. “This is my home.”

“Home,” he said thoughtfully. “My father was an orange farmer in Jeju. My father and I moved to Osaka when I was twelve; I don’t think of Jeju as my home. My mother died when I was very young.” He didn’t tell her then that she looked like someone on his mother’s side of the family. It was the eyes and the open brow.

“That’s a great deal of laundry. I used to do laundry for my father and me. I hated it. One of the greatest things about being rich is having someone else wash your clothes and cook your meals.”

Sunja had washed clothes almost since she could walk. She didn’t mind doing laundry at all. Ironing was more difficult.

“What do you think about when you do the laundry?”

Hansu already knew what there was to know about the girl, but that was different from knowing her thoughts. It was his way to ask many questions when he wanted to know someone’s mind. Most people told you their thoughts in words and later confirmed them in actions. There were more people who told the truth than those who lied. Very few people lied well. What was most disappointing to him was when a person turned out to be no different than the next. He preferred clever women over dumb ones and hardworking women over lazy ones who knew only how to lie on their backs.

“When I was a boy, my father and I each owned only one suit of clothes, so when I washed our things, we would try to have them dry overnight and wore them still damp in the morning. Once—I think I was ten or eleven—I put the wet clothes near the stove to speed up the drying, and I went to cook our supper. We were having barley gruel, and I had to stir it in this cheap pot, otherwise the bottom would burn right away, and as I was stirring, I smelled something awful, and it turned out that I had burned a large hole in my father’s jacket sleeve. I was scolded for that severely.” Hansu laughed at the memory of the thrashing he got from his father. “A head like an empty gourd! A worthless idiot for a son!” His father, who had drunk all his earnings, had never blamed himself for being unable to support them and had been hard on his son, who was keeping them alive through foraging, hunting, and petty theft.

Sunja had not imagined that a person like Koh Hansu could do his own laundry. His clothes were so fine and beautifully tailored. She had already seen him wear several different white suits and white shoes. No one dressed like he did.

She had something to say.

“When I wash clothes, I think about doing it well. It’s one of the chores I like because I can make something better than it was. It isn’t like a broken pot that you have to throw away.”

He smiled at her. “I have wanted to be with you for a long time.”

Again, she wanted to ask why, but it didn’t matter in a way.

“You have a good face,” he said. “You look honest.”

The market women had told her this before. Sunja could not haggle well and didn’t try. However, this morning she hadn’t told her mother that she was meeting Koh Hansu. She had not even told her about the Japanese students picking on her. The night before, she told Dokhee, who did the laundry with her, that she’d do the wash herself, and Dokhee had been overjoyed to get out of the task.

“Do you have a sweetheart?” he asked.

Her cheeks flushed. “No.”

Hansu smiled. “You are almost seventeen. I’m thirty-four. I am exactly twice your age. I am going to be your elder brother and your friend. Hansu-oppa. Would you like that?”

Sunja stared at his black eyes, thinking that she had never wanted anything more except for the time she’d wanted her father to recover from his illness. There wasn’t a day when she didn’t think of her father or hear his voice in her head.

“When do you do your wash?”

“Every third day.”

“This time?”

She nodded. Sunja breathed deeply, her lungs and heart filling with anticipation and wonder. She had always loved this beach—the unending expanse of pale green and blue water, the tiny white pebbles framing the black rocks between the water and the rocky soil. The silence here made her safe and content. Almost no one ever came here, but now she would never see this place the same way again.

Hansu picked up a smooth, flat stone by her foot—black with thin gray striations. From his pocket, he took out a piece of white chalk that he used to mark the wholesale containers of fish, and he made an X on the bottom of the stone. He crouched and felt about the enormous rocks that surrounded them and found a dry crevice in a medium-sized rock, the height of a bench.

“If I come here and you’re not here yet, but I have to go back to work, I’ll leave this stone in the hollow of this rock so you’ll know that I came. If you’re here and I’m not, I want you to leave this stone in the same spot, so I can know that you came to see me.”

He patted her arm and smiled at her.

“Sunja-ya, I better go now. Let’s see each other later, okay?”

She watched him walk away, and as soon as he was gone, she squatted and opened the bundle to begin the wash. She took a dirty shirt and soaked it in the cool water. Everything had changed.

  

Three days later, she saw him. It took nothing to convince the sisters to let her do the wash by herself. Again, he was waiting by the rocks, reading the paper. He wore a light-colored hat with a black hatband. He looked elegant. He acted as if meeting her by the rocks was normal, though Sunja was terrified that they might be discovered. She felt guilty that she had not told her mother, or Bokhee and Dokhee, about him. Seated on the black rocks, Hansu and Sunja spoke for half an hour or so, and he asked her odd questions: “What do you think about when it’s quiet and you’re not doing much?”

There was never a time when she wasn’t doing anything. The boardinghouse required so much work; Sunja could hardly remember her mother ever being idle. After she told him she was always busy, she realized she was wrong. There were times when she was working when it felt like the work was nothing at all, because it was something she knew how to do without paying much attention. She could peel potatoes or wipe down the floors without thinking, and when she had this quiet in her mind, lately, she had been thinking of him, but how could she say this? Right before he had to go, he asked her what she thought a good friend was, and she answered he was, because he had helped her when she was in trouble. He had smiled at that answer and stroked her hair. Every few days, they saw each other at the cove, and Sunja grew more efficient with the wash and housework, so that no one at home noticed how she spent her time at the beach or at the market.

Before Sunja crossed the threshold of the kitchen door to leave the house for the market or the beach, she would check her reflection on the polished metal pot lid, primping the tight braid she’d made that morning. Sunja had no idea how to make herself lovely or appealing to any man, and certainly not a man as important as Koh Hansu, so she endeavored to be clean and tidy at the least.

The more she saw him, the more vivid he grew in her mind. His stories filled her head with people and places she had never imagined before. He lived in Osaka—a large port city in Japan where he said you could get anything you wanted if you had money and where almost every house had electric lights and plug-in heaters to keep you warm in the winter. He said Tokyo was far busier than Seoul—with more people, shops, restaurants, and theaters. He had been to Manchuria and Pyongyang. He described each place to her and told her that one day she would go with him to these places, but she couldn’t understand how that would ever happen. She didn’t protest, because she liked the idea of traveling with him, the idea of being with him longer than the few minutes they had at the cove. From his travels, he brought her beautifully colored candies and sweet biscuits. He would unwrap the candies and put one in her mouth like a mother feeding a child. She had never tasted such lovely and delicious treats—pink hard candies imported from America, butter biscuits from England. Sunja was careful to throw away the wrappers outside the house, because she didn’t want her mother to know about them.

She was enraptured by his talk and his experiences, which were far more unique than the adventures of fishermen or workers who had come from far-flung places, but there was something even more new and powerful in her relationship with Hansu that she had never expected. Until she met him, Sunja had never had someone to tell about her life—the funny habits of the lodgers, her exchanges with the sisters who worked for her mother, memories of her father, and her private questions. She had someone to ask about how things worked outside of Yeongdo and Busan. Hansu was eager to hear about what went on in her day; he wanted to know what she dreamed about even. Occasionally, when she didn’t know how to handle something or someone, he told her what she could do; he had excellent ideas on how to solve problems. They never spoke of Sunja’s mother.

At the market, it was strange to see him doing business, for he was this other person when he was with her—he was her friend, her elder brother, the one who’d lift the bundle of laundry from her head when she came to him. “How gracefully you do that,” he would remark, admiring how straight and strong her neck was. Once, he touched the nape of her neck lightly with both his thick, square hands, and she sprang from his touch, shocked by the sensation she felt.

She wanted to see him all the time. Who else did he talk to or ask questions of? What did he do in the evening when she was at home serving the lodgers, polishing the low dining tables, or sleeping beside her mother? It felt impossible to ask him, so she kept those questions to herself.

For three months, they met in the same way, growing easier in each other’s company. When fall arrived, it was brisk and cold by the sea, but Sunja hardly felt the chilly air.

Early September, it rained for five days straight, and when it finally cleared, Yangjin asked Sunja to gather mushrooms at Taejongdae Forest the following morning. Sunja liked mushroom picking, and as she was about to meet Hansu at the beach, she felt giddy that she could tell him she was going to do something different from her regular chores. He traveled and saw new things often; this was the first time she was doing something out of her normal routine.

In her excitement, she blurted out her plans to pick mushrooms right after breakfast the next day, and Hansu said nothing for a few moments and stared at her pensively.

“Your Hansu-oppa is good at finding mushrooms and wild roots. I know a lot about the ones you can eat and the ones you can’t. When I was a boy, I spent hours searching for roots and mushrooms. In the spring, I’d look for fernbrake and dry them. I used to catch rabbits for our dinner with a slingshot. Once, I caught a pair of pheasants before dusk—it was the first time we had meat in a long time. My father was so delighted!” His face softened.

“We can go together. How much time do you have to get the mushrooms?” he asked.

“You want to go?”

It was one thing to talk to him twice a week for half an hour, but she couldn’t imagine spending a day with him. What would happen if someone saw them together? Sunja’s face felt hot. What was she supposed to do? She had told him, and she couldn’t keep him from going.

“I’ll meet you here. I better go back to the market.” Hansu smiled at her differently this time, like he was a boy, excitement beaming from his face. “We’ll find a huge bundle of mushrooms. I know it.”

  

They walked along the outer perimeter of the island, where no one would see them together. The coastline seemed more glorious than it had ever been. As they approached the forest located on the opposite side of the island, the enormous pines, maples, and firs seemed to greet them, decked in golds and reds as if they were wearing their holiday clothes. Hansu told her about living in Osaka. The Japanese were not to be vilified, he said. At this moment in time, they were beating the Koreans, and of course, no one liked losing. He believed that if the Koreans could stop quarreling with each other, they could probably take over Japan and do much worse things to the Japanese instead.

“People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”

Sunja nodded as he spoke, trying to remember his every word, to hold on to his every image, and to grasp whatever he was trying to tell her. She treasured his stories like the beach glass and rose-colored stones she used to collect as a girl—his words astonished her because he was taking her by the hand and showing her new, unforgettable things.

Of course, there were many subjects and ideas she didn’t understand, and sometimes just trying to learn it all without experiencing it was difficult. Yet she crammed her mind the way she might have overfilled a pig intestine with blood sausage stuffing. She tried hard to figure things out because she didn’t want him to think she was ignorant. Sunja didn’t know her letters in either Korean or Japanese. Her father had taught her some addition and subtraction so she could count money, but that was all. Both she and her mother could not even write their names.

Hansu had brought a large kerchief so he could gather mushrooms as well. His obvious delight at their excursion made her feel better, but Sunja was still worried that someone would see them. No one knew they were friends. Men and women were not supposed to be that, and they were not sweethearts, either. He had never mentioned marriage, and if he wanted to marry her, he would have to speak to her mother, but he had not. In fact, after he asked her if she had a sweetheart three months before, he’d never raised the subject again. She tried not to think about what his life was like with women. It would not have been difficult for him to find a girl to be with, and his interest in her did not always make sense.

The long walk to the forest felt brief, and when they entered the woods, it felt even more isolated than the cove, but unlike the openness of the low rocks and the expanse of blue-green water, immense trees stood high above them, and it was like entering the dark, leafy house of a giant. She could hear birds, and she looked up and about to see what kind they were. She noticed Hansu’s face: There were tears in his eyes.

“Oppa, are you all right?”

He nodded. He had talked for the entire length of the walk about traveling and work, yet at the sight of the colored leaves and bumpy tree trunks, Hansu fell silent. He placed his right hand on her back and touched the end of her hair braid. He stroked her back, then removed his hand carefully.

Hansu had not been in a forest since he was a boy—that time before he became a tough teenager who could hustle and steal with the wisest street kids of Osaka. Before he moved to Japan, the wooded mountains of Jeju had been his sanctuary; he had known every tree on the volcano Halla-san. He recalled the small deer with their slender legs and mincing, flirtatious steps. The heavy scent of orange blossoms came back to him, though there were no such things in the woods of Yeongdo.

“Let’s go,” he said, walking ahead, and Sunja followed him. Less than a dozen paces in, he stopped to pluck a mushroom gently from the ground. “That’s our first,” he said, no longer crying.

He had not lied to her. Hansu was an expert at finding mushrooms, and he found numerous edible weeds for her, even explaining how to cook them.

“When you’re hungry, you’ll learn what you can eat and what you cannot.” He laughed. “I don’t like being hungry. So, where’s your spot? Which way?”

“A few minutes from here—it’s where my mother used to pick them after a heavy rain when she was a girl. She’s from this side of the island.”

“Your basket is not large enough. You could have brought two and had plenty to dry for the winter! You might have to return tomorrow.”

Sunja smiled at him. “But, Oppa, you haven’t even seen the spot!”

When they reached her mother’s mushroom spot, it was carpeted with the brown mushrooms that her father had adored.

He laughed, as pleased as he could be. “Didn’t I tell you? We should have brought something to make supper with. Next time, let’s plan to have lunch here. This is too easy!” Immediately, he began to gather mushrooms by the handful and threw them into the basket on the ground between them. When it grew full, he put more into his handkerchief, and when that was heaping, she untied the apron around her waist and gathered more.

“I don’t know how I will carry them all,” she said. “I’m being greedy.”

“You are not greedy enough.”

Hansu moved toward her. She could smell his soap and the wintergreen of his hair wax. He was cleanly shaven and handsome. She loved how white his clothes were. Why did such a thing matter? The men at the boardinghouse could not help being filthy. Their work dirtied all their things, and no amount of scrubbing would get the fish smell off their shirts and pants. Her father had taught her not to judge people on such shallow points: What a man wore or owned had nothing to do with his heart and character. She inhaled deeply, his scent mingled with the cleansing air of the forest.

Hansu slid his hands beneath her short traditional blouse, and she did not stop him. He untied the long sash that held her blouse together and opened it. Sunja started to cry quietly, and he pulled her toward him and held her, making low, soothing sounds, and she allowed him to comfort her as he did what he wanted. He lowered her on the ground tenderly.

“Oppa is here. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

He had his hands firmly under her buttocks the entire time, and though he had tried to shield her from the twigs and leaves, bits of the forest had made red welts on the backs of her legs. When they separated, he used his handkerchief to clean the blood.

“Your body is pretty. Full of juice like a ripened fruit.”

Sunja couldn’t say anything. She had suckled him like an infant. While he was moving inside her, doing this thing that she had witnessed pigs and horses doing, she was stunned by how sharp and bright the pain was and was grateful that the ache subsided.

When they rose from the carpet of yellow and red leaves, he helped to straighten her undergarments, and he dressed her.

“You are my dear girl.”

This was what he told her when they did this again.