Bae Suah - Nowhere to Be Found

“Why do they do it?”

“I’m sure they have their reasons.”

“Is this how all of your lectures go?”

“Of course not. I make it a rule to read directly from the textbook. If I want to confuse the students, I read the chapters in reverse. That keeps them on their toes, since none of them have read to the end yet. It’s a simple method but an effective one. So do you think you can come on Saturday?”

“I don’t think so. I work nights downtown.”

“Every night?”

“Yes, every night.”

“What do you do?”

“Dishes and cleaning,” I said with a sigh.

There was silence for three seconds.

“You’re not serious,” he said. “Anyway, I’ll take that to mean you can’t make it.”

If anyone in my family could be described as still incomplete of character that would be my little sister. She was a bony wisp of a girl with a chest that seemed to have stopped in the middle of developing and gangly arms and coltish legs, but among us siblings she had the highest grades in school. Still in middle school, she would amaze my brother and me by using a clever technique to solve simultaneous equations or figuring out perfectly and in less than twenty seconds some type of square root that we’d never seen before. But that was the extent of what I knew about her. We were too far apart in age to really feel like sisters, and we hadn’t had much opportunity to spend time together as we were growing up. We’d never shared a room or liked the same boy or fought over a pair of lacy underwear; instead we lived our lives barely aware of each other’s existence.

One Sunday afternoon, possibly in the spring of that same year, I woke up late, took a bath, and was passing through the kitchen to hang my wet towel outside when I heard her crying. I wondered what was wrong. The first thing that came to mind was that she must’ve finally started her period. It was a silly idea. I had no idea whether she was already menstruating, but I assumed that was what would make a girl her age cry. She was too old to be crying over cookies or watercolor pencils, and too young to be crying over a boy.

“Mia, what’s wrong?”

Out of a desire to help my young sister, I told her it was nothing. She wasn’t alone. All girls went through it. It was a little uncomfortable at first but once she got used to it, she would hardly notice it at all. It was just something you had to deal with, no different from brushing your teeth in the morning or showering. And so on, and so on.

“I want to go on a class trip.”

Her words took me completely by surprise. I would truly never have guessed that she would want to go on a trip with her class. I’d certainly never gone on one, and I can’t imagine it was any different for our brother: school excursions had never been an option for us. When the other kids went off on trips, I reported to school and did my homework alone in the empty classroom. I neatly copied hundreds of pages from the Korean textbook into my notebook, solved equations, drew apples on plates, and wiped down the tops of the desks with a damp rag. The leisurely spring or autumn sky would stretch out beyond the windows of that deserted classroom, and the only sound I would hear was a pencil rolling across the floor between the empty seats. For my brother and me, staying behind wasn’t that bad.

“Neither of us ever went on a class trip,” I told her, not bothering to conceal my surprise. “We didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

“This is different. They’re going on an airplane. On an airplane . All anyone can talk about is this trip. If I don’t get to go, my friends will stop talking to me.”

Her voice was so firm. Our brother and I had never had any friends — at least not the kinds of friends you wanted to go on a class trip with or hold hands with on the way home from school. When we were in school, we probably wouldn’t have been that sad at the thought of being ditched by our friends. But our sister was different. She wanted to braid her hair exactly like the other girls did and fold over her socks exactly as they did. On her birthday or other special days, gifts of cookies and flowers from her friends would show up at our house. Mia had an androgynous charm about her, like Tyltyl in Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird , which attracted other girls to her. For all I knew it was an act of cruelty to tell a child like her not to go on a class trip. I couldn’t go on any trips because we were too poor, and as for my brother, I’d heard it was because he didn’t get along with the other students. Neither he nor I mourned our family’s poverty or our maladjustment to the group. Being poor or being lonely could be either fortunate or unfortunate, but the truth is that the distinction was meaningless. Whether we were fortunate or not, we were still different, and that’s all there was to it.

“I’ll die if I can’t go on this trip.”

After the years had passed and my little sister was grown up, would she too inherit the cynicism and apathy toward the world that enabled our family line to endure poverty and maladjustment, just as my brother and I had? Maybe, but she hadn’t yet.

“I’m getting my paycheck from the restaurant today or tomorrow,” I said, stroking her hair. “You can use that to pay for the trip.”

“That’s your lunch money.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll pack my lunch this month.”

I didn’t tell her that I would most likely be skipping lunch that month since it was hard to wake up early and there was rarely any leftover rice or other food in the fridge.

My brother sometimes came by the restaurant to walk me to the subway after I got off work late at night. One Sunday night we were in the city hall station underpass when the last train was leaving. My body felt heavy, like it was sinking deeper and deeper into the underpass.

“How are you holding up?” he asked.

My brother was a man of few words. Though we lived under the same roof, I rarely heard his voice. He’d once had a job guarding the Blue House, the president’s residence. After quitting he’d become one of the many ordinary people who failed at everything they tried to do. He hadn’t gone to college, and he wasn’t a computer genius.

“I’m a little tired, but it’s manageable,” I said to him there in the underpass. “At least the restaurant isn’t too busy on Sundays.”

“Do you have to keep working nights? You barely get any sleep before you’re up again for your day job.”

The worn-down heels of my brother’s sneakers descended the stairs. Up until last month he’d had a job as a night watchman on a construction site.

“I’m sorry I can’t do more for you,” he said.

“You don’t have to say that. I’m all right.”

“I’m going to Japan. There’s work there.”

“When?”

“Not sure yet. Maybe as soon as next month.”

“What kind of work?”

“A janitorial service in Osaka. If I work hard, I’ll be able to save up and not be cheated out of my pay this time.”

“What kind of cleaning do they do?”

“Different kinds. Sewers, roads, septic tanks.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“For as long as possible. The visa is only good for a year, but if I can’t get an extension, I’ll stay there illegally if I have to. Once I’m settled, I’ll send you money.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“You’re struggling too hard for someone who has an older brother and parents, albeit incompetent ones.”

“No. I’m healthy and I went to college, which you didn’t even get to do. I’ll get by. But what about you?”

My brother was thirty-four years old and still unmarried, though he’d once lived with a woman for about a year until they broke up over money. I sometimes felt bad for him because of that. I was in high school when he broke up with her and moved home. One Saturday afternoon, when the sunlight was turning everything golden, I’d returned home from school and was washing my clothes under the tap in the courtyard. For some reason I turned to look behind me. My brother was standing there. How long had he been watching me? He asked me to go with him to the market. I said I had to finish the laundry, but his voice took on an uncharacteristically crabby tone.