Min Lee - Pachinko

“Can you get away tomorrow morning? Around this time?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is afternoon better?”

“After the men leave for the day, I think,” she found herself saying, her voice trailing off.

He was waiting for her by the black rocks, reading a newspaper. The sea was bluer than she had remembered, and the long, thin clouds seemed paler — everything seemed more vibrant with him here. The corners of his newspaper fluttered with the breeze, and he grasped them firmly, but when he saw her approaching, he folded the paper and put it under his arm. He didn’t move toward her, but let her come to him. She continued to walk steadily, a large wrapped bundle of dirty clothes balanced on her head.

“Sir,” she said, trying not to sound afraid. She couldn’t bow, so she put her hands around the bundle to remove it, but Hansu quickly reached over to lift the load from her head, and she straightened her back as he laid the wash on the dry rocks.

“Sir, thank you.”

“You should call me Oppa . You don’t have a brother, and I don’t have a sister. You can be mine.”

Sunja said nothing.

“This is nice.” Hansu’s eyes searched the cluster of low waves in the middle of the sea and settled on the horizon. “It’s not as beautiful as Jeju, but it has a similar feeling. You and I are from islands. One day, you’ll understand that people from islands are different. We have more freedom.”

She liked his voice — it was a masculine, knowing voice with a trace of melancholy.

“You’ll probably spend your entire life here.”

“Yes,” she said. “This is my home.”

“Home,” he said thoughtfully. “My father was an orange farmer in Jeju. My father and I moved to Osaka when I was twelve; I don’t think of Jeju as my home. My mother died when I was very young.” He didn’t tell her then that she looked like someone on his mother’s side of the family. It was the eyes and the open brow.

“That’s a great deal of laundry. I used to do laundry for my father and me. I hated it. One of the greatest things about being rich is having someone else wash your clothes and cook your meals.”

Sunja had washed clothes almost since she could walk. She didn’t mind doing laundry at all. Ironing was more difficult.

“What do you think about when you do the laundry?”

Hansu already knew what there was to know about the girl, but that was different from knowing her thoughts. It was his way to ask many questions when he wanted to know someone’s mind. Most people told you their thoughts in words and later confirmed them in actions. There were more people who told the truth than those who lied. Very few people lied well. What was most disappointing to him was when a person turned out to be no different than the next. He preferred clever women over dumb ones and hardworking women over lazy ones who knew only how to lie on their backs.

“When I was a boy, my father and I each owned only one suit of clothes, so when I washed our things, we would try to have them dry overnight and wore them still damp in the morning. Once — I think I was ten or eleven — I put the wet clothes near the stove to speed up the drying, and I went to cook our supper. We were having barley gruel, and I had to stir it in this cheap pot, otherwise the bottom would burn right away, and as I was stirring, I smelled something awful, and it turned out that I had burned a large hole in my father’s jacket sleeve. I was scolded for that severely.” Hansu laughed at the memory of the thrashing he got from his father. “A head like an empty gourd! A worthless idiot for a son!” His father, who had drunk all his earnings, had never blamed himself for being unable to support them and had been hard on his son, who was keeping them alive through foraging, hunting, and petty theft.

Sunja had not imagined that a person like Koh Hansu could do his own laundry. His clothes were so fine and beautifully tailored. She had already seen him wear several different white suits and white shoes. No one dressed like he did.

She had something to say.

“When I wash clothes, I think about doing it well. It’s one of the chores I like because I can make something better than it was. It isn’t like a broken pot that you have to throw away.”

He smiled at her. “I have wanted to be with you for a long time.”

Again, she wanted to ask why, but it didn’t matter in a way.

“You have a good face,” he said. “You look honest.”

The market women had told her this before. Sunja could not haggle well and didn’t try. However, this morning she hadn’t told her mother that she was meeting Koh Hansu. She had not even told her about the Japanese students picking on her. The night before, she told Dokhee, who did the laundry with her, that she’d do the wash herself, and Dokhee had been overjoyed to get out of the task.

“Do you have a sweetheart?” he asked.

Her cheeks flushed. “No.”

Hansu smiled. “You are almost seventeen. I’m thirty-four. I am exactly twice your age. I am going to be your elder brother and your friend. Hansu-oppa. Would you like that?”

Sunja stared at his black eyes, thinking that she had never wanted anything more except for the time she’d wanted her father to recover from his illness. There wasn’t a day when she didn’t think of her father or hear his voice in her head.

“When do you do your wash?”

“Every third day.”

“This time?”

She nodded. Sunja breathed deeply, her lungs and heart filling with anticipation and wonder. She had always loved this beach — the unending expanse of pale green and blue water, the tiny white pebbles framing the black rocks between the water and the rocky soil. The silence here made her safe and content. Almost no one ever came here, but now she would never see this place the same way again.

Hansu picked up a smooth, flat stone by her foot — black with thin gray striations. From his pocket, he took out a piece of white chalk that he used to mark the wholesale containers of fish, and he made an X on the bottom of the stone. He crouched and felt about the enormous rocks that surrounded them and found a dry crevice in a medium-sized rock, the height of a bench.

“If I come here and you’re not here yet, but I have to go back to work, I’ll leave this stone in the hollow of this rock so you’ll know that I came. If you’re here and I’m not, I want you to leave this stone in the same spot, so I can know that you came to see me.”

He patted her arm and smiled at her.

“Sunja-ya, I better go now. Let’s see each other later, okay?”

She watched him walk away, and as soon as he was gone, she squatted and opened the bundle to begin the wash. She took a dirty shirt and soaked it in the cool water. Everything had changed.

Three days later, she saw him. It took nothing to convince the sisters to let her do the wash by herself. Again, he was waiting by the rocks, reading the paper. He wore a light-colored hat with a black hatband. He looked elegant. He acted as if meeting her by the rocks was normal, though Sunja was terrified that they might be discovered. She felt guilty that she had not told her mother, or Bokhee and Dokhee, about him. Seated on the black rocks, Hansu and Sunja spoke for half an hour or so, and he asked her odd questions: “What do you think about when it’s quiet and you’re not doing much?”

There was never a time when she wasn’t doing anything. The boardinghouse required so much work; Sunja could hardly remember her mother ever being idle. After she told him she was always busy, she realized she was wrong. There were times when she was working when it felt like the work was nothing at all, because it was something she knew how to do without paying much attention. She could peel potatoes or wipe down the floors without thinking, and when she had this quiet in her mind, lately, she had been thinking of him, but how could she say this? Right before he had to go, he asked her what she thought a good friend was, and she answered he was, because he had helped her when she was in trouble. He had smiled at that answer and stroked her hair. Every few days, they saw each other at the cove, and Sunja grew more efficient with the wash and housework, so that no one at home noticed how she spent her time at the beach or at the market.