Min Lee - Pachinko

None of the Chung brothers could afford to marry, but Gombo, the eldest, had said on more than one occasion that a girl like Sunja would have made a fine wife for a man who wanted to go up in the world. Fatso admired her, but prepared himself to adore her as an elder sister-in-law, though she was only sixteen years old, the same age as he. If any of the brothers could marry, Gombo, the firstborn, would take a wife before the others. None of this mattered anymore, since recently Sunja had lost all of her prospects. She was pregnant, and the baby’s father was unable to marry her. A week ago, Sunja had confessed this to her mother, but, of course, no one else knew.

“ Ajumoni, ajumoni !” the older servant girl shrieked from the front of the house, where the lodgers slept, and Yangjin rushed to the room. Sunja dropped her rag to follow her.

“There’s blood! On the pillow! And he’s soaked with sweat!”

Bokhee, the older sister of the two servant girls, breathed deeply to calm herself. It wasn’t like her to raise her voice, and she hadn’t meant to frighten the others, but she didn’t know if the lodger was dead or dying, and she was too afraid to approach him.

No one spoke for a moment, then Yangjin told the maid to leave the room and wait by the front door.

“It’s tuberculosis, I think,” Sunja said.

Yangjin nodded. The lodger’s appearance reminded her of Hoonie’s last few weeks.

“Get the pharmacist,” Yangjin told Bokhee, then changed her mind. “No, no, wait. I might need you.”

Isak lay asleep on the pillow, perspiring and flushed, unaware of the women staring down at him. Dokhee, the younger girl, had just come from the kitchen, and she gasped loudly, only to be hushed by her sister. When the lodger had arrived the night before, his ashen pallor was noticeable, but in the light of day, his handsome face was gray — the color of dirty rainwater collecting in a jar. His pillow was wet with numerous red pindots where he had coughed.

“ Uh-muh —” Yangjin uttered, startled and anxious. “We have to move him immediately. The others could get sick. Dokhee-ya, take everything out of the storage room now. Hurry.” She would put him in the storage room, where her husband had slept when he was ill, but it would have been far easier if he could have walked to the back part of the house rather than her attempting to move him by herself.

Yangjin pulled on the corner of the pallet in an attempt to jostle him awake.

“Pastor Baek, sir, sir!” Yangjin touched his upper arm. “Sir!”

Finally, Isak opened his eyes. He couldn’t remember where he was. In his dream, he had been home, resting near the apple orchard; the trees were a riot of white blooms. When he came to, he recognized the boardinghouse keeper.

“Is everything all right?”

“Do you have tuberculosis?” Yangjin asked him. Surely, he must have known.

He shook his head.

“No, I had it two years ago. I’ve been well since.” Isak touched his brow and felt the sweat along his hairline. He raised his head and found it heavy.

“Oh, I see,” he said, seeing the red stains on the pillow. “I’m so sorry. I would not have come here if I had known that I could harm you. I should leave. I don’t want to endanger you.” Isak closed his eyes because he felt so tired. Throughout his life, Isak had been sickly, his most recent tuberculosis infection being just one of the many illnesses he’d suffered. His parents and his doctors had not wanted him to go to Osaka; only his brother Yoseb had felt it would be better for him, since Osaka was warmer than Pyongyang and because Yoseb knew how much Isak didn’t want to be seen as an invalid, the way he had been treated for most of his life.

“I should return home,” Isak said, his eyes still closed.

“You’ll die on the train. You’ll get worse before getting better. Can you sit up?” Yangjin asked him.

Isak pulled himself up and leaned against the cold wall. He had felt tired on the journey, but now it felt as if a bear was pushing against him. He caught his breath and turned to the wall to cough. Blood spots marked the wall.

“You will stay here. Until you get well,” Yangjin said.

She and Sunja looked at each other. They had not gotten sick when Hoonie had this, but the girls, who weren’t there then, and the lodgers would have to be protected somehow.

Yangjin looked at his face. “Can you walk a little to the back room? We would have to separate you from the others.”

Isak tried to get up but couldn’t. Yangjin nodded. She told Dokhee to fetch the pharmacist and Bokhee to return to the kitchen to get the supper ready for the lodgers.

Yangjin made him lie down on his bedroll, and she dragged the pallet slowly, sliding it toward the storage room, the same way she had moved her husband three years before.

Isak mumbled, “I didn’t mean to bring you harm.”

The young man cursed himself privately for his wish to see the world outside of his birthplace and for lying to himself that he was well enough to go to Osaka when he had sensed that he could never be cured of being so sickly. If he infected any of the people he had come into contact with, their death would be on his head. If he was supposed to die, he hoped to die swiftly to spare the innocent.

June 1932

At the very beginning of summer, less than six months before the young pastor arrived at the boardinghouse and fell ill, Sunja met the new fish broker, Koh Hansu.

There was a cool edge to the marine air on the morning Sunja went to the market to shop for the boardinghouse. Ever since she was an infant strapped to her mother’s back, she had gone to the open-air market in Nampo-dong; then later, as a little girl, she’d held her father’s hand as he shuffled there, taking almost an hour each way because of his crooked foot. The errand was more enjoyable with him than with her mother, because everyone in the village greeted her father along the way so warmly. Hoonie’s misshapen mouth and awkward steps seemingly vanished in the presence of the neighbors’ kind inquiries about the family, the boardinghouse, and the lodgers. Hoonie never said much, but it was obvious to his daughter, even then, that many sought his quiet approval — the thoughtful gaze from his honest eyes.

After Hoonie died, Sunja was put in charge of shopping for the boardinghouse. Her shopping route didn’t vary from what she had been taught by her mother and father: first, the fresh produce, next, the soup bones from the butcher, then a few items from the market ajumma s squatting beside spice-filled basins, deep rows of glittering cutlass fish, or plump sea bream caught hours earlier — their wares arrayed attractively on turquoise and red waxed cloths spread on the ground. The vast market for seafood — one of the largest of its kind in Korea — stretched across the rocky beach carpeted with pebbles and broken bits of stone, and the ajumma s hawked as loudly as they could, each from her square patch of tarp.

Sunja was buying seaweed from the coal man’s wife, who sold the best quality. The ajumma noticed that the new fish broker was staring at the boardinghouse girl.

“Shameless man. How he stares! He’s almost old enough to be your father!” The seaweed ajumma rolled her eyes. “Just because a man’s rich doesn’t give him the right to be so brazen with a nice girl from a good family.”

Sunja looked up and saw the new man in the light-colored Western suit and white leather shoes. He was standing by the corrugated-tin and wood offices with all the other seafood brokers. Wearing an off-white Panama hat like the actors in the movie posters, Koh Hansu stood out like an elegant bird with milky-white plumage among the other men, who were wearing dark clothes. He was looking hard at her, barely paying attention to the men speaking around him. The brokers at the market controlled the wholesale purchases of all the fish that went through there. Not only did they have the power to set the prices, they could punish any boat captain or fisherman by refusing to buy his catch; they also dealt with the Japanese officials who controlled the docks. Everyone deferred to the brokers, and few felt comfortable around them. The brokers rarely mixed socially outside their group. The lodgers at the boardinghouse spoke of them as arrogant interlopers who made all the profits from fishing but kept the fish smell off their smooth white hands. Regardless, the fishermen had to stay on good terms with these men who had ready cash for purchases and the needed advance when the catch wasn’t any good.