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GUEST LITERATURE – KOREA foreign land. “Hello, I am Lee Chae-geum,” she’d said. But I no longer felt as antagonistic toward her as I had when she called. She bowed deeply, offering awkward greetings as she had over the phone. Still, she was my first visitor and the only one in the country, in fact, who knew me even slightly. She stood waiting on the other side of the threshold and didn’t seem to expect to be asked inside to sit down, like a debt collector whose only purpose is to recover what is owed. My little girl, who, like a butterfly stuck to the window, had been fixated on the view of the street since our arrival, was suddenly behind me with her arms wrapped around my waist. I recognized the anxiety that flickered across Chae-geum’s eyes as the same emotion in the warmth of my daughter’s tummy pressed up against me. She could not have been more than 25 years old, and she had yet to learn to hide the anxiety in her eyes. “How could anyone think of marrying off her daughter to a man that age? Gold and silver, bullshit! How greedy and shameless can she be? Even grass can’t grow beneath her! And what can you expect of a guy who’s well past 40 and still a bachelor? If he’s rich there’s got to be something wrong with him, and if nothing’s wrong with him, then he’s penniless. Or I’m sure there’s something wrong with her daughter. What’s so great about Korea? What could make her sell her daughter like that just to bring her over?” Those were my mother’s words the day she discovered that the Chinese lady had entrusted me with money for her daughter in China. She worked in the kitchen of my mother’s restaurant and, according to my mother, had sold Chae-geum off to the bachelor vegetable supplier just to get her into Korea legally. Just goes to show you what a horrible witch she is. My mother issued that last pronouncement with a look of incredulity on her face, like she would never understand such a woman for the life of her, while I let her words flow in one ear and out the other. Her reaction seemed bizarre to me because what she’d said about Chae-geum’s mother could easily have been said of her, my own mother, as well. My mother was mercenary, so tightfisted that she’d managed to buy several condos with the earnings from her restaurant, and so miserly that she refused to show her children any of her property 164 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
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KIM IN-SOOK deeds. For some reason that I would never comprehend her hole-inthe-wall drew long lines of customers every mealtime. People would drive all the way in from other cities for a bowl of broth, which tasted like any other to me. She drove the restaurant crew to work themselves down to the bone, like the very soup bones they boiled down to make my mother’s special broth. Most of them simply stopped showing up for work once they got their first pay, disgruntled after slaving so much for so little. To feed her greed, my mother had no choice but to hire migrant workers like Chae-geum’s mother, who, being Korean Chinese and having overstayed her visa, had no choice but to endure month after month at my mother’s restaurant in spite of the low wages and hard work. My mother often speculated that Chae-geum’s mother planned on severing her daughter’s marriage as soon as the girl had earned Korean citizenship, so she’d chosen a pliant old bachelor who would fall for her trap. In a single stroke, my mother had painted the vegetable supplier as a sucker for a young girl. I’d been told that he had met Chae-geum twice in China, the first time to get acquainted and the next to start processing marriage papers. Later I learned that he’d actually registered their marriage with the authorities on that second visit. I could only begin to flesh out the details of the story with the bare bones my mother had given me. The Korean vegetable supplier, a bachelor well past 40, must have been desperate for a wife, so desperate that he was willing to take the risk, while Chae-geum badly wanted the visa needed to join her mother in Korea. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that kind of story. The social problems created when a Korean Chinese woman married to a Korean man picked up her registration card one day and ran away, abandoning her children in the process, had been widely reported on TV and in newspapers. But it was none of my business what drove a Korean Chinese woman to flee under the cover of darkness.What happened between her and her husband? How often he beat her?What humiliations she endured simply because she was Korean Chinese? What pushed her over the edge? Affront, rage or homesickness? She stole away with not only her registration card but all her stories, too. “How old are you?” I’d blurted it out, the hand I’d extended to give her the money from her mother stuck in midair. Of course it is rude to ask a young BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 165

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GUEST LITERATURE – KOREA

foreign land.

“Hello, I am Lee Chae-geum,” she’d said. But I no longer felt as antagonistic toward her as I had when she called. She bowed deeply, offering awkward greetings as she had over the phone. Still, she was my first visitor and the only one in the country, in fact, who knew me even slightly.

She stood waiting on the other side of the threshold and didn’t seem to expect to be asked inside to sit down, like a debt collector whose only purpose is to recover what is owed. My little girl, who, like a butterfly stuck to the window, had been fixated on the view of the street since our arrival, was suddenly behind me with her arms wrapped around my waist. I recognized the anxiety that flickered across Chae-geum’s eyes as the same emotion in the warmth of my daughter’s tummy pressed up against me. She could not have been more than 25 years old, and she had yet to learn to hide the anxiety in her eyes.

“How could anyone think of marrying off her daughter to a man that age? Gold and silver, bullshit! How greedy and shameless can she be? Even grass can’t grow beneath her! And what can you expect of a guy who’s well past 40 and still a bachelor? If he’s rich there’s got to be something wrong with him, and if nothing’s wrong with him, then he’s penniless. Or I’m sure there’s something wrong with her daughter. What’s so great about Korea? What could make her sell her daughter like that just to bring her over?”

Those were my mother’s words the day she discovered that the Chinese lady had entrusted me with money for her daughter in China. She worked in the kitchen of my mother’s restaurant and, according to my mother, had sold Chae-geum off to the bachelor vegetable supplier just to get her into Korea legally. Just goes to show you what a horrible witch she is. My mother issued that last pronouncement with a look of incredulity on her face, like she would never understand such a woman for the life of her, while I let her words flow in one ear and out the other. Her reaction seemed bizarre to me because what she’d said about Chae-geum’s mother could easily have been said of her, my own mother, as well. My mother was mercenary, so tightfisted that she’d managed to buy several condos with the earnings from her restaurant, and so miserly that she refused to show her children any of her property

164 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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