Min Lee - Pachinko

“I want to,” she said. “And I want to be forgiven, sir.”

Pastor Shin got on bended knees and placed his right hand on her shoulder. He prayed at length for her and Isak. When he finished, he got up and made the couple rise and married them. The ceremony was over in minutes.

While Pastor Shin went with Isak and Sunja to the municipal offices and the local police station to register their marriage, Yangjin made her way to the shopping street, her steps rapid and deliberate. She felt like running. At the wedding ceremony, there were many words she had not understood. It was preposterous and ungrateful for her to have wished for a better outcome under the circumstances, but Yangjin, no matter how practical her nature, had hoped for something nicer for her only child. Although it made sense to marry at once, she hadn’t known that the wedding would take place today. Her own perfunctory wedding had taken minutes, also. Perhaps it didn’t matter, she told herself.

When Yangjin reached the sliding door of the rice shop, she knocked on the wide frame of the entrance prior to entering. The store was empty of customers. A striped cat was slinking about the rice seller’s straw shoes and purring happily.

“ Ajumoni , it’s been a long time,” Cho greeted her. The rice seller smiled at Hoonie’s widow. There was more gray in her bun than he remembered.

“ Ajeossi , hello. I hope your wife and girls are well.”

He nodded.

“Could you sell me some white rice?”

“ Waaaaah , you must have an important guest staying with you. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any to sell. You know where it all goes,” he said.

“I have money to pay,” she said, putting down the drawstring purse on the counter between them. It was Sunja who had embroidered the yellow butterflies on the blue canvas fabric of the purse — a birthday present from two years back. The blue purse was half full, and Yangjin hoped it was enough.

Cho grimaced. He didn’t want to sell her the rice, because he had no choice but to charge her the same price he would charge a Japanese.

“I have so little stock, and when the Japanese customers come in and there isn’t any, I get into very hot water. You understand. Believe me, it’s not that I don’t want to sell it to you.”

“ Ajeossi , my daughter married today,” Yangjin said, trying not to cry.

“Sunja? Who? Who did she marry?” He could picture the little girl holding her crippled father’s hand. “I didn’t know she was betrothed! Today?”

“The guest from the North.”

“The one with tuberculosis? That’s crazy! Why would you let your daughter marry a man who has such a thing. He’s going to drop dead any minute.”

“He’ll take her to Osaka. Her life will be less difficult for her than living at a boardinghouse with so many men,” she said, hoping this would be the end of it.

She wasn’t telling him the truth, and Cho knew it. The girl must have been sixteen or seventeen. Sunja was a few years younger than his second daughter; it was a good time for a girl to marry, but why would he marry her? Jun, the coal man, had said he was a fancy sort from a rich family. She also had diseases in her blood. Who wanted that? Though there weren’t as many girls in Osaka, he supposed.

“Did he make a good offer?” Cho asked, frowning at the little purse. Kim Yangjin couldn’t have given a man like that any kind of decent dowry; the boardinghouse woman would barely have a few brass coins left after she fed those hungry fishermen and the two poor sisters she shouldn’t have taken in.

His own daughters had married years ago. Last year, the younger one’s husband had run away to Manchuria because the police were after him for organizing demonstrations, so now Cho fed this great patriot’s children by selling his finest inventory to rich Japanese customers whom his son-in-law had been so passionate about expelling from the nation. If his Japanese customers refused to patronize him, Cho’s shop would shut down tomorrow and his family would starve.

“Do you need enough rice for a wedding party?” he asked, unable to fathom how the woman would pay for such a thing.

“No. Just enough for the two of them.”

Cho nodded at the small, tired woman standing in front of him who wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“I don’t have much to sell,” he repeated.

“I want only enough for the bride and groom’s dinner — for them to taste white rice again before they leave home.” Yangjin’s eyes welled up in tears, and the rice seller looked away. Cho hated seeing women cry. His grandmother, mother, wife, and daughters — all of them cried endlessly. Women cried too much, he thought.

His older daughter lived on the other side of town with a man who worked as a printer, and his younger one and her three children lived at home with him and his wife. As much as the rice seller complained about the expense of upkeep of his daughter and grandchildren, he worked hard and did the bidding of any Japanese customer who’d pay the top price because he could not imagine not providing for his family; he could not imagine having his girls live far away — in a nation where Koreans were treated no better than barn animals. He couldn’t imagine losing his flesh and blood to the sons of bitches.

Yangjin counted out the yen notes and placed them on the wooden tray on the counter beside the abacus.

“A small bag if you have it. I want them to eat their fill. Whatever’s left over, I’ll make them some sweet cake.”

Yangjin pushed the tray of money toward him. If he still said no, then she would march into every rice shop in Busan so her daughter could have white rice for her wedding dinner.

“Cakes?” Cho crossed his arms and laughed out loud; how long had it been since he heard women talking of cakes made of white rice? Such days felt so distant. “I suppose you’ll bring me a piece.”

She wiped her eyes as the rice seller went to the storeroom to find the bit he’d squirreled away for occasions such as these.

At last, the lodgers had relented and allowed their work clothes to be washed. The smell was no longer bearable even to themselves. Carrying four enormous bundles, Bokhee, Dokhee, and Sunja went to the cove. Their long skirts gathered up and tied, the women crouched by the stream and set up their washboards. The icy water froze their small hands, the skin on them thickened and rough from years of work. With all her might, Bokhee scrubbed the wet shirts on the ridged wooden board while her younger sister, Dokhee, sorted the remainder of the filthy clothing beside her. Sunja was tackling a pair of dark trousers belonging to one of the Chung brothers, stained with fish blood and guts.

“Do you feel different being married?” Dokhee asked. The girls had been the first to be told the news immediately after the marriage was registered. They’d been even more astonished than the lodgers. “Has he called you yobo ?”

Bokhee looked up from her work for Sunja’s reaction. She would’ve chided her sister’s impertinence, but she was curious herself.

“Not yet,” Sunja said. The marriage had taken place three days ago, but for lack of space, Sunja still slept in the same room with her mother and the servant girls.

“I’d like to be married,” Dokhee said.

Bokhee laughed. “Who’d marry girls like us?”

“I would like to marry a man like Pastor Isak,” Dokhee said without blinking. “He’s so handsome and nice. He looks at you with such kindness when he talks to you. Even the lodgers respect him, even though he doesn’t know anything about the sea. Have you noticed that?”

This was true. Routinely, the lodgers made fun of upper-class people who went to schools, but they liked Isak. It was still difficult for Sunja to think of him as her husband.