Min Lee - Pachinko

“So you’re not a communist, then?” she asked.

“What?”

“You go to those political meetings. I thought if you went to them, then perhaps they’re not so bad. And they’re against the Japanese government, and they want to reunify the country, right? I mean, aren’t the Americans trying to break up the country? I hear things at the market from the others, but it’s hard to know what to believe. My husband said that the communists are a bad lot; they’re the ones who shot our parents. You know, my father smiled at everyone. He always did good things.”

Kyunghee could not understand why her parents were killed. Her father had been the third son, so his plot had been very small. Had the communists killed all the landowners? Even the insignificant ones? She was curious as to what Kim thought, too, because he was a good man and knew a lot about the world.

Kim leaned in to the cart, and he looked at her carefully, wanting to comfort her. He knew she was looking to him for advice, and it made him feel important. With a woman like this by him, he wondered if he would even care about politics anymore.

“Are there different kinds of communists?” she asked.

“I think so. I don’t know if I’m a communist. I am against the Japanese taking over Korea again, and I don’t want the Russians and the Chinese to control Korea, either. Or the Americans. I wonder why Korea can’t be left alone.”

“But you just said, we quarrel. I suppose it’s like when two grannies have a dispute, and the villagers constantly whisper in their ears about the wickedness of the other one. If the grannies want to have any peace, they have to forget everyone else and remember that they used to be friends.”

“I think we should put you in charge,” he said, pushing the cart toward the house. Even if it was just this brief walk, he felt happy to be with her, but of course, it made him want more. He’d gone to those meetings to get out of the house, because sometimes being near her was too much. He lived in that house because he needed to see her every day. He loved her. This would never change, he thought. His situation was impossible.

Only a few paces from home, the two walked slowly, murmuring this and that about their day, content and only a little less shy. He would continue to suffer with love.

Osaka, January 1953

Worried about money, Sunja had woken up in the middle of the night to make candies to sell. When Yangjin noticed that her daughter wasn’t in bed, she went to the kitchen.

“You don’t sleep anymore,” Yangjin said. “You’ll get sick if you don’t sleep.”

“ Umma , I’m fine. You should go back to bed.”

“I’m old. I don’t need to sleep so much,” Yangjin said, putting on her apron.

Sunja was trying to make extra money for Noa’s tutoring fees. He had failed his first attempt at the Waseda exams by a few points, and he felt certain that he’d be able to pass on his next try if he could be tutored in mathematics. The fees for the tutors were exorbitant. The women had been trying to earn more so Noa could leave his job as a bookkeeper to study full time, but it was difficult enough to manage their household costs and Yoseb’s medical bills on his salary and their earnings from selling food. Each week, Kim gave them money for his room and board. He had tried to add to Noa’s tutoring fund, but Yoseb forbade the women from taking any more than what was a reasonable sum. Yoseb would not allow Sunja to accept any money from Hansu for Noa’s schooling.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” Yangjin asked.

Sunja nodded, laying a clean cloth over the large chunks of black sugar to muffle the sound of the mortar and pestle.

Yangjin was exhausted herself. In three years, she’d turn sixty. When she was a girl, she’d believed that she could work harder than anyone under any circumstances, but she no longer felt that way. Lately, Yangjin felt tired and impatient; small things bothered her. Aging was supposed to make you more patient, but in her case, she felt angrier. Sometimes, when a customer complained about the small size of the portions, she wanted to tell him off. Lately, what upset her most was her daughter’s impossible silence. Yangjin wanted to shake her.

The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, and the electric lights emitted a steady light. Against the papered walls, the two bare lightbulbs attached to the ceiling by their electric cords made stark shadows, resembling two lonely gourds hanging from leafless vines.

“I still think about our girls,” Yangjin said.

“Dokhee and Bokhee? Didn’t they find work in China?”

“I shouldn’t have let them go with that smooth-talking woman from Seoul. But the girls were so excited about traveling to Manchuria and earning money. They promised to return when they made enough to buy the boardinghouse. They were good girls.”

Sunja nodded, recalling their sweetness. She didn’t know people like that anymore. It seemed as if the occupation and the war had changed everyone, and now the war in Korea was making things worse. Once-tenderhearted people seemed wary and tough. There was innocence left only in the smallest children.

“At the market, I hear that the girls who went to work in factories were taken somewhere else, and they had to do terrible, terrible things with Japanese soldiers.” Yangjin paused, still confounded. “Do you think this can be true?”

Sunja had heard the same stories, and Hansu had warned her on more than one occasion of the Korean recruiters, working for the Japanese army, falsely promising good jobs, but she didn’t want her mother to worry any more. Sunja ground the sugar as finely as she could.

“What if the girls were taken? For that?” Yangjin asked.

“ Umma , we don’t know,” Sunja whispered. She lit the fire in the stove and poured sugar and water into the pan.

“That’s what happened. I just feel it.” Yangjin nodded to herself. “Your appa —it would make him so sad that we lost our boardinghouse— aigoo . And now this fighting in Korea. We can’t go back yet because the army would take Noa and Mozasu. Isn’t that right?”

Sunja nodded. She could not let her sons become soldiers.

Yangjin shivered. The draft seeping through the kitchen window stung her dry, brown skin, and she tucked a towel around the sill. Yangjin pulled her shabby cotton vest tightly over her nightclothes. She started to crush sugar for the next batch while Sunja watched the bubbling pot on the low flame.

Sunja stirred the pot as the sugar caramelized. Busan seemed like another life compared to Osaka; Yeongdo, their little rocky island, stayed impossibly fresh and sunny in her memory, though she hadn’t been back in twenty years. When Isak had tried to explain heaven, she had imagined her hometown as paradise — a clear, shimmering beauty. Even the memory of the moon and stars in Korea seemed different than the cold moon here; no matter how much people complained about how bad things were back home, it was difficult for Sunja to imagine anything but the bright, sturdy house that her father had taken care of so well by the green, glassy sea, the bountiful garden that had given them watermelons, lettuces, and squash, and the open-air market that never ran out of anything delicious. When she was there, she had not loved it enough.

The news reports from back home were so horrific — cholera, starvation, and soldiers who kidnapped your sons, even little boys — that their meager life in Osaka and their pathetic attempts to scrounge up enough money to send Noa to college seemed luxurious in contrast. At least they were together. At least they could work toward something better. The war in Korea roused commerce in Japan, and there were more jobs to be had by all. At least here, the Americans were still in charge, so the women were able to find sugar and wheat. Although Yoseb prohibited Sunja from taking money from Hansu, when Kim found any of the scarce ingredients the women needed through his connections, the women knew enough not to ask too many questions or to talk about it with Yoseb.