Ji-min Lee - Marilyn and Me

“Did you read Mrs. Freedom yesterday?” Yu-ja asks, heating steel chopsticks in the flame of the stove. “What do you think will happen next? Don’t you think Professor Chang’s wife will sleep with her next-door neighbor? I’m positive she will. Isn’t the very term ‘next-door neighbor’ so seductive? I’d say it straddles the line between melodrama and erotica.”

Yu-ja works as a receptionist at Myong-dong Clinic, which is set back from the bustling main thoroughfare. That may be why it’s never too busy when I stop by to see her. It’s a dull place for a vivacious girl like Yu-ja, who seems always to be moving to the music of a dance hall band.

“That’s all anyone talks about these days,” I say. “As if they don’t know how contradictory the two words are together—Mrs. and Freedom.”

Seoul Sinmun, which is publishing Mrs. Freedom as a serial, is open on Yu-ja’s desk. It’s the talk of the town. Yu-ja reads each installment passionately. In fact, she rereads it several times a day.

“That old-maid intellectual sarcasm of yours! You know men hate that, right?” Yu-ja counts slowly to twenty, twirling her bangs around the heated chopstick. When she takes the chopstick out, her hair emerges not as Jean Harlow’s Hollywood wave but as a sad, limp curl like a strand of partially rehydrated seaweed. To make up for her failed attempt at a wave, Yu-ja pats another layer of Coty powder on her face. She tugs on a new skirt, struggling on the examination table. She’s quite alluring. When I look at her round, peach-like face, I can’t believe she signed up to be a cadet nurse in the war.

In order to secure a place on an evacuation train during the Third Battle of Seoul, Yu-ja had run to the recruiting district headquarters inside the Tonhwamun Gate at Changdokgung Palace, having seen a recruitment ad for nurse officers in the paper. She was ordered to assemble at Yongdungpo Station that same day, and she dashed across the frozen Han River just as the last train evacuating the war wounded was about to leave. As soon as she boarded, Yu-ja was tasked with helping soldiers to go to the bathroom and spent the next few days working incessantly on that train, which traveled only at night. One early morning, as the train pulled into some countryside station, Yu-ja was using the dawn light coming through the window to search for and eat the bits of rice the patients had dropped, and in that moment she truly knew despair. Once in Pusan, Yu-ja put on a US Army work uniform and even went through basic training, but, worried about her family, gave up her dream of becoming a cadet nurse. Yu-ja experienced her own hardships during those years; not until fairly recently has she been able to powder her face so liberally. I understand why she’s rushing around with her womanhood in full bloom. A flower’s lifespan is ten days but a woman’s spring is even shorter. Many a spring died during the war. The mere fact that she survived has given Yu-ja the right to bloom fully.

“Are you going back to the officers’ club tonight? Your dance steps aren’t up to standard,” I tease.

Yu-ja smiles confidently. “You’re going to want to buy me a beer when you hear what I have to tell you. Ready for this? Remember I told you that one of our patients is married to the chairman of the Taegu School Foundation? Her family operates several orphanages and daycare centers. I mentioned Chong-nim and she said she would ask around. I think she has some news for us!”

Chong-nim. My mouth falls open and my breathing grows shallow.

“Go ahead and close your mouth,” Yu-ja says teasingly. “How do you earn a living when you act like this?” Yu-ja is hard on me and at the same time worries about me. I wouldn’t let anyone else do that but I humbly allow her. Mrs. Chang saved me from death while Yu-ja took me in when I went crazy. All of that happened in Pusan—goddamn Pusan, that hellish temporary wartime capital of South Korea. Each time Yongdo Bridge drew open, stabbing at the sky like the gates to hell, I believed that an enraged Earth had finally churned itself upside down to proclaim complete disaster. The streets were lined with shacks built out of ration boxes and the smell of burning fuel mixed with the stench of shit. I spent days lying like a corpse in a tiny room as rain dripped through the roof reinforced with military-issue raincoats. I want to eat Japanese buckwheat noodles, I told anyone who would listen. Yu-ja would empty my chamber pot when she got home from work and snap, Please get a grip on yourself. Why are you acting like this? Why? I could understand Yu-ja’s frustration. To her, it was unimaginable that I could have a tragic future. I knew Yu-ja, who was a few years younger, from the church I attended for a bit after liberation. We were never close but she always showed an interest in me. When I was transported to a hospital in Pusan, Yu-ja was working there as a nursing assistant. I didn’t recognize her; I was at my worst, unable to utter my own name, but Yu-ja remembered even my most trivial habits. I had been the object of envy to young Yu-ja, having studied art in Ueno, Tokyo, and worked for the American military government. She remembered me as quite the mysterious and alluring role model. It might have been because I was harboring the most daring yet ordinary secret a young woman could have—being in love with a married man. That was a long time ago, when I was still called Kim Ae-sun.

And now she is talking about Chong-nim. Her name makes me alert. I’ve been looking for that girl for the last three years, that child with whom I don’t share even a drop of blood, the five-year-old who grabbed my hand trustingly as we escaped Hungnam amid ten thousand screaming refugees, where we would have died if we hadn’t managed to slip onto the ship. If I were to write about my escape I would dedicate the story to her. To the girl who would be nine by now, her nose cute and flat and her teeth bucked, from Huichon of Chagang Province. Her hopes were small and hot, like the still-beating heart of a bird. Her will to survive roused me from Hungnam and miraculously got us on the Ocean Odyssey headed to Pusan. It was December 24, 1950. The night of Christmas Eve was more miraculous and longer than any night in Bethlehem. I wouldn’t have lost her if I hadn’t acted like a stupid idiot. She disappeared as I lay in the refugee camp infirmary, conversing with ghosts. She became one of many war orphans, their bellies distended and their hair cut short, buried in the heartless world.

“The orphanage is somewhere in Pohang,” continues Yu-ja. “There’s a nine-year-old girl, and she came from Hungnam around the time you did. I heard she has the watch you talked about. What other orphan would own an engraved Citizen pocket watch?”

My—no, his—watch that I gave to her, which she tucked in the innermost pocket of her clothes. It had been our only keepsake. That small watch is probably ticking away with difficulty just like me, cherishing time that can’t be turned back.

“Where is it? Where do we need to go?” I spring to my feet.

Yu-ja tries to calm me down. “I don’t know all the details. I’m supposed to meet her this evening at the dance hall. Why don’t you come with me? There are too many orphans, and the records are so spotty it’s hard to find them. The lady managed to get in touch with a nun who saw a girl that fits her description somewhere in Pohang.”

But Yu-ja is unable to convince me to wait and has to run after me without putting the finishing touches to her makeup. Next to fresh, fashionable Yu-ja I look even more grotesque. Yu-ja is a young female cat who’s just learned to twirl her tail, and I’m an old, molting feline who can barely remember the last time she was in heat. I’m not yet thirty but I feel like an old hag who has forgotten everything.