Forgotten Country Read online

  FORGOTTEN

  COUNTRY

  Catherine Chung

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  2012

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA•

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,

  Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,

  England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) •

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  Park, New Delhi– 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd,

  24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2012 by Catherine Chung

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any

  printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy

  of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote an excerpt from Li-Young Lee, “The City in Which I Love You,” from The City in Which I Love You. Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chung, Catherine.

  Forgotten country / Catherine Chung.

  p.cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56049-5

  1. Korean American women —Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction.

  3. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.H853F67 2012 2011047577

  813′.6—dc23

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book design by Michelle McMillian

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  FOR MY

  MOTHER AND FATHER

  But this is the only world.

  —PILAR GÓMEZ-IBÁÑEZ

  my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,

  in league with stones of the earth, I

  enter, without retreat or help from history,

  the days of no day, my earth

  of no earth, I re-enter

  the city in which I love you.

  And I never believed that the multitude

  of dreams and many words were vain.

  —LI-YOUNG LEE

  Table of Contents

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  Acknowledgments

  FORGOTTEN

  COUNTRY

  1.

  The year that Hannah disappeared, the first frost came early, killing everything in the garden. It took the cantaloupe and the tomatoes; the leaves of lettuce turned brittle and snapped. Even the kale withered and died. In front, the wine-colored roses froze, powdered gray with the cold, like silk flowers in an attic covered with dust. My father and I had planted the garden over several weekends, and tended it carefully. Then it had overgrown itself, the tomatoes winding themselves up the wall of our house and stretching out to span the distance to the fence. After the frost we’d left it all winter without trimming anything back. Now we stood on the lawn, surveying the ruin, tracking damp patches of ground wherever we stepped.

  “We’re selling the house,” my father said, blowing warm air on his hands.

  “That makes sense,” I said, but it felt suddenly difficult to breathe. My parents had told me they were going back to Korea, so I’d known selling our house was a possibility, but I hadn’t expected it.

  “We’re going to have to clean this up,” my father said, gesturing at the garden.

  “It’s cold,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”

  He nodded. The tendons in his neck were taut. His breath steamed slowly around his face. Everything was inside out, or at least the cold had turned the insides of things visible. The green tomatoes were now gray and translucent, their skins puckered at the stems, still hanging from their frozen vines. “We want you to find Hannah,” he said.

  “When are you leaving?” I asked.

  “As soon as possible,” my father said.

  “I want to go with you.”

  My father shook his head. “Find your sister,” he said. He had blamed me after the initial panic, when we discovered that Hannah hadn’t been abducted or killed, but had simply left without telling us, without leaving us a way to contact her. I was her older sister, living in the same city. He thought I should have seen it coming.

  When I moved back home for the summer, my father grilled me about her. He wanted to know everything about the months prior to her departure: what she had looked like, what she had said. What I had noticed: why I hadn’t noticed more. He was already sick then, but didn’t know it yet. I wonder if Hannah would have been able to pick up and leave like that if she had known.

  Inside, we made tea and sat at our kitchen table, waiting for my mother to come down. My father’s hands relaxed on the table, his fingers eased into a slight curl around his mug. They looked fragile against the smooth blue ceramic, his veins raised thick and soft. For a moment I wanted to cover his hands with mine, even though they had always looked like that.

  Growing up, Hannah and I worried we’d inherit those veins, huge and tinged blue. It was true that my father’s body had pulled into itself in the last couple of years so that his bones protruded, but his eyes were still sharp and discerning, and his hands were the same hands that had built this table, the same hands that refused to let anything go.

  “I want to go with you when you go to Korea,” I said.

  My father grimaced. “It’s more important that you find Hannah. You need to bring her home.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “She’s your only sister.”

  “She’s a brat.”

  My mother’s footsteps sounded down the stairs, and together we looked toward the hallway. My father tilted his head and called out, “We’re in the kitchen
!” He leaned forward and took my hand in his. It was warm. He whispered, “Don’t upset her.”

  One word about Hannah was enough to make my mother dissolve into tears for at least an hour. “Dissolve” was not too strong a word. When my mother wept, the whole world vanished. My father and I ceased to exist, and even Hannah’s shadowy figure was obscured. This could happen anywhere, at any time—even in public. At first I wondered how my mother could sustain such anxiety, how one body could hold it all. Then I realized it was a question of density.

  There’s a theorem in mathematics that says if you take something the size of an onion and cut it into small enough pieces, you can take those pieces and construct something larger than the sun. In those first months after Hannah went missing, we learned to be careful around my mother. We had no past. Everything was off limits. Coming home was entering oblivion—my father was obsessed with my last conversations with Hannah, and my mother resolutely surrounded herself with silence. So when she came padding into the kitchen, I slapped a smile onto my face, same as my father.

  To be honest, I never really understood what Hannah had against my parents. Sure they’d made mistakes, but nothing we shouldn’t be able to get over. They had tried their best. When Hannah left for college in Chicago, I was already in my junior year at the University of Michigan. My dorm was a forty-five-minute drive from our house, and I came home every other weekend to visit. The summer before Hannah left for school, she broke curfew nearly every night. At first my parents waited up for her. As the summer wore on, they waited until morning to pound on her door. How she slept through all that pounding, I’ll never know. I woke up after two seconds of it. I’d jump into the shower to drown out the noise. Besides, I knew what came next. After several minutes my father would call, “I’m coming in!” and pick her lock open with a toothpick. Then my parents would stand over Hannah’s defiantly sleeping body, prodding her shoulders to wake her up. And Hannah would turn, scowling, hugging her pillow over her head.

  “Let me sleep,” she murmured. “Go away.”

  In the end it was her unwillingness to engage that defeated my parents. Even when she was awake she didn’t argue, a polite little smile frozen to her face. “I got into college, what more do you want from me?” she asked at breakfast one morning after a late night out.

  My mother unleashed a tirade about gratitude, filial duty, and decency.

  “I guess I just don’t agree,” Hannah said, as if there was nothing more to say.

  When she left for college she wouldn’t even let my parents drive her. She took her own beat-up Corolla packed full of clothes and books and music. “I don’t need anything else,” she said when my parents insisted on going with her. “I’ll be fine.”

  My mother cried the day Hannah left, but Hannah pulled away. “I’ll call you when I get there,” she mumbled, shaking my father’s hand. Then she got into her car and pulled the door shut. My parents and I stood on the driveway, watching her. She started the car and didn’t look back, but opened the window and waved once. Then her arm relaxed as though all the good-byes she had to make were taken care of, and she let her arm hang limply out the window as she drove away.

  You’ll never understand,” she said the last time we came home together for Thanksgiving. “They were useless as parents—when did they give us what we needed?” The sleeves of her red shirt were pulled over her hands; her thumbs beginning to wear familiar holes along the seams.

  “They gave us food,” I said. “They gave us water, shelter, life.”

  “Whatever.” Hannah waved those things away. “Big deal.”

  I’m not sure when things changed for her, but until Hannah forgot how to speak Korean, we had spent hours pretending to be our parents in their youth: it had been the best and deepest of mysteries to us. Long ago, my father used to jump trains as they passed. He was very poor and lived in the mountains: walking to school took over an hour. If there was a train going by he jumped on and took it as far as he could and jumped off. He had shown us the scar on his hand from a particularly bad fall.

  Hannah and I pretended that our swing set, which our father had built for us, was a train. We ran at the swings, yelling, “We have to catch this one if we’re going to make it on time!”

  Sometimes Hannah missed the swing on purpose. “Give me your hand!” I yelled, pulling her along until she leaped up. “That was a close call,” we said to each other, wiping our brows. We didn’t know then that wiping your brow meant that you’d been sweating. We had just seen movie actors do it after tense situations, and it felt grown-up and dramatic. Then we’d swing, standing up, until I cried, “It’s time to jump! Clear the track!” and off we leaped, rolling into the grass.

  Sometimes we reenacted our father’s injury by smearing berry juice on Hannah’s hand. “It hurts!” she said.

  I peered at it worriedly. “I think it’s going to leave a scar.”

  Other days, we played the Dead Auntie game. My mother’s sister had died when my mother was still a child. When we still lived in Korea, we followed our parents up the mountains to the graves of our ancestors to offer them food and wine on the day of the harvest moon, and I wondered why we left my aunt’s burial mound unattended. In front of the other graves we shouted out our names.

  “Grandfather, we are here! Haejini and Jeehyuni! We are saying hello!”

  We bowed to our grandparents, then to their parents, then to the seven generations of ancestors buried on that mountain. The path to my aunt’s burial mound was overgrown, full of snakes and biting insects. We did not bow in front of her grave, or call out our names. My mother quietly trimmed the grass that grew over the mound with her long curved blade, chanting the Buddha’s name.

  Once Hannah cried out exuberantly, “Auntie, we’ve come to visit you!” and my mother knelt and slapped her in the face. After that we were not allowed to visit that grave, but waited for my parents at the edge of the path and played among the trees that shaded the mountain, tapping long sticks on the ground to keep the snakes away. Hannah swore she saw a woman following them once, picking her way through the overgrown path, her long white dress catching on the brush underneath and snagging on the trees around her. Hannah swore she heard her singing as she braided her long black hair.

  The adults would never tell us how our auntie had died. But alone, we pretended I was Auntie, and Hannah was our mother. Sometimes we switched roles so I could play the bad guys who killed her, or the doctor who diagnosed her with a fatal disease. We would actually weep as we played this game, imagining my mother’s family at the news that our auntie was dead. I always played our auntie brave, never giving up hope to the very last, never betraying national secrets to the North Korean spies, always standing up for what she believed in and protecting those she loved.

  The year I became a math major, Hannah and I started growing apart. She never understood my chosen field, and considered it a defection to my father’s fortress of reason and logic. “You can’t even divide up a bill,” she said. “You’re horrible with numbers.”

  I tried to tell her about complex and imaginary numbers, primes and transcendentals, numbers with families and personalities, but she rolled her eyes.

  “I don’t know how you can think any of that is important,” she said. She was studying to become a biologist, deep in the gunk of life and committed to saving the earth, and could see no beauty in what I did.

  But math had come with me from Korea to America, and its familiarity had pulled me through those first bewildering years. I liked its solidity, the possibility of discovering a truth around which no further argument need swirl. And Hannah was right to feel left behind, maybe even betrayed. Because something changed between my father and me when I started talking shop with him.

  My father had always wanted a son. We women were unreliable creatures, prone to fits of emotion and flights from logic that generally ended with him at the receiving end of a pointed finger. “Yes!” he’d said, when I told him I’d decided to stu
dy math. He reached out his hand and said, “Shake!” While he pumped my hand up and down, he said, “Math lasts.”

  One day in the summer after my sophomore year of college, my father and I tried to construct the seventeen-gon with a straightedge and compass. As we talked, something in him eased up and fell away. He laughed, made jokes about our family in mathematical terminology. When we talked math, the words flowed, pure and easy. Here were rules we could both abide by, here was a language that was eloquent, and spoke to us about the world.

  Later, we sat in our backyard going over what I thought at the time was a particularly complex proof. My mother’s roses were in bloom at the edge of our lawn, and we could smell them faintly, their perfume drifting over on the occasional breeze. A beetle flew onto the picnic table and landed on our paper.

  “Do you see this beetle?” my father said, pointing at its shiny back with his pencil. “Just think—it’s mathematical fact! Even the tiniest insect has as many points on its back as the entire universe.”

  He tapped his pencil by the beetle several times. “Life is like that,” he mused. “Think about it! The tiniest insect contains infinity on its back: each life contains as much meaning as all of history.” Then he leaned forward and blew a quick, sharp breath on the beetle, which unfolded tiny translucent wings, lifted into the wind, and flew away.