“Nobody eats for free!” she shouted in Korean.
Gi stood and lowered her head, and offered her bowl back to the woman, in the polite way, using both hands.
“We are very sorry to have caused you trouble. We have no money, but we will very gladly work for the food we have taken.”
The woman paused, then gave Gi a sideways look. “What kind of work can you do?”
“We’ll do anything.”
“Can you clean?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“My cleaner is worthless. If you come back after closing, and if you can clean my restaurant better than she does, then I’ll give you a full meal at the end of the night. But if you’re stupid and lazy, then I better never see you around here again. Deal?”
Gi and Cho cleaned the restaurant with the highest attention to detail. They dug hidden grime out of corners and scrubbed every surface. The effort was not lost on the woman, and at the end of the night she gave them a generous meal, including precious morsels of roast duck, and a bag of leftover dumplings to take with them. Gi and Cho bowed deeply in gratitude.
“Come back tomorrow,” the woman said curtly as she scooted them out the alley door.
Gi and Cho showed up faithfully every night and cleaned the restaurant. After a week the woman, Mrs. Ling, began to soften toward them, if only by being fractionally more polite. It turned out that the cook was actually her husband, and her way of displaying affection for him was to criticize his every action. She complained constantly that his generosity, or his wastefulness, or his lack of common sense was going to drive them to bankruptcy. He made a show of cowering from her, but they had found an equilibrium that would have been impossible to upset.
As the weeks went by, the Lings showed greater and greater kindness. As hard as Gi and Cho tried to keep themselves clean, the grime on the street found its way onto their clothes. Because they were working at night, they could no longer go to the shelter to shower or have their clothes laundered; so Mr. Ling took them home with him one night to let them bathe and put their clothes through the washing machine. And, since it was late, he gave them a mat and blankets and let them sleep in the garage. Gi learned later that it had been Mrs. Ling’s idea to let them stay.
When the first cold night of the autumn hit, Mrs. Ling offered to let them stay every night in the garage, in exchange for housekeeping and as long as they were gone during the day. Also, they were allowed occasional use of the shower and laundry. To the homeless girls, this was the greatest generosity imaginable. Though the garage was not heated, it was shelter from the wind and rain, and they were able to gather enough blankets to insulate themselves from the cold. For the consistency and privacy, it was an improvement over the shelters.
All the while, Gi worked actively on her English and continued her studies at the library. She absorbed books on algebra, trigonometry, and geometry. She explored calculus and chaos and the mathematical principles behind the concepts of physics. She loved how numbers could be used to describe and predict the concrete world, and in that she found a bridge that helped her explain and validate her own existence to herself. She was real, numerically consequential, a vehicle with mass and velocity and substance.
Strength slowly returned to Cho. She fidgeted less and nearly stopped mumbling to herself. Without money she could not buy cigarettes, and eventually she stopped craving them. Gi hoped to see more of the old Cho come back, with her snappy comments and fearless attitude; but she seemed now permanently subdued, as if she were happy to be invisible. Regardless, Gi was grateful for her companionship.
83
G
I
HAD
BEEN
AWAY
from the brothel for nearly a year and a half, and her quest to find Il-sun had been almost entirely replaced by the quest to improve her own life. The odds of finding Il-sun now seemed improbable, though she still kept her eyes sharp. She had done many double-takes, thinking she had seen Il-sun out of the corner of her eye, but it was never her.
One evening Gi and Cho were walking through the International District, on their way to clean the restaurant, when they passed two women speaking Korean. They were dressed like prostitutes, in short skirts and stiletto heels, but it was not always easy to tell: Sometimes women just dressed like that in America. As they went by, Gi thought she could detect the unmistakable
Chosun
accent when one of them spoke.
“Excuse me, are you
Chosun
?” Gi asked, incredulous. She had not met anyone from North Korea since arriving in Seattle, and she did not expect that she ever would.
The women stopped and gave a wary stare. Then one of them shrugged and nodded.
“So are we,” said Gi. There was another guarded pause as the women sized each other up.
“How did you get here?” asked the woman, finally.
“That’s a long story,” replied Gyong-ho.
The woman chuckled, and then nodded. How could it be anything but a long story?
“We’ve been looking for a friend of ours. She’s
Chosun
. Her name is Il-sun, but she also goes by Daisy. Do you know her?”
“We know a Daisy,” said the other woman. She spoke with a
Hanguk
accent. She was apparently glad to be part of a mystery solved; but then her face fell. Something had made her uncomfortable. The
Chosun
woman elbowed her: It would be in her nature to want to hide information—anyone could be an informer for the secret police. Gi and Cho understood her reticence all too well.
“You do?” Gi had only asked out of habit, and expected the usual negative response. She could not believe what she had heard.
The other women looked at each other, but remained silent.
“She is my friend from childhood. We lost track of her, and I have been worried sick. If you know anything about her, or where I can find her, please, please tell me.” Gi could not keep the note of pleading out of her voice.
“We know where they took her,” the
Chosun
woman said, finally.
“Who is ‘they’? Where?”
“Pill hill,” the
Hanguk
woman said in English.
“Pill hill?” repeated Cho.
“She means First Hill, where the hospitals are,” said Gi. “What’s wrong with her? Is she alright?”
“It doesn’t look good.”
“Where can we find her? Which hospital?”
The women shrugged and walked away without another word.
84
G
YONG
-
HO
AND
C
HO
SPENT
most of a day trying to locate Il-sun. They walked all over First Hill, going to the hospitals and speaking with unhelpful receptionists and harried nurses. Finally Gi realized that there was confusion with Il-sun’s name: Korean names are typically given with the family name first, followed by the personal name. The person who admitted Il-sun made the mistake of thinking Park was her first name and Il-sun was her family name, and noted it that way on her chart.
Once they established which hospital Il-sun was in, they had to convince an ill-tempered nurse to allow them in to see her. She insisted that only next of kin were permitted on the terminal ward. Eventually she went off duty, and her replacement proved to be less of a stickler for the rules.
Gyong-ho and Cho were not prepared for the sight of her. There was no question that she was dying. She was emaciated and her hair had thinned to the point where her scalp was visible. She had sores and bruises festering here and there on her papery, pallid skin. Her breathing was rough and shallow, and she went into coughing fits that seemed powerful enough to break her frail-looking bones. She had tubes going up her nose and poking into her arms. She was completely wasting away. Even so, when they walked into her room she lightened considerably, even managing to smile.
Il-sun did not have energy to speak, so the women sat together holding hands and looking into one another’s eyes. It was amazing how much could be said with only the eyes. There were looks that said “I’m sorry,” looks that said “I’m scared,” looks that said “I love you. I will miss you when you’re gone.” Gi stroked Il-sun’s head and held her hand, and told stories, memories of being children together—and they laughed. The offenses that at one time seemed so big in their friendship fell away. Even their history, where they had come from and where they had been, seemed insignificant compared to being there together in that moment. The only moment there will ever be is right now—Gi had heard that somewhere, and now it made sense.
Nurses and doctors came and went. They were so busy that they rarely spoke to the women—they were impatient for Il-sun to die. They needed the bed. Gyong-ho was glad that Il-sun was at least not dying alone. She was there for her. After dark the head nurse came in and told them visiting hours were over. She looked for a moment like she might enforce it, but then she turned and left the room. A few minutes later she returned with extra blankets and a box of crackers.
“Sleep in bed next to me, like in the old days,” Il-sun rasped to Gi. The effort of saying it was nearly too much for her. Gi climbed into the bed and put her arm around her. Il-sun felt hollow under her arm. Gi could not sleep. She counted Il-sun’s breaths until dawn. Cho slept restlessly in a chair.
The next day Il-sun floated in and out of consciousness. Gi and Cho sat with her, leaving reluctantly only to use the bathroom. A young intern took pity on them and brought food from the cafeteria. They had no appetite, however. Tears came in bursts at unexpected intervals. Gi again held Il-sun through the night.
The following day Il-sun awoke with bright, alert eyes. Some energy returned to her and she even sat up in bed for a short while. Her voice was soft, and she seemed possessed of a deep calm. She told them, especially Gyong-ho, how much she loved them. The rise of energy was short-lived, however, and by noon she was unconscious again. To Gi she seemed like a piece of clockwork winding down. Her breaths came in shorter gasps, and more slowly. Her heart was a faint throb. The head nurse came in and said, “It won’t be long now.”
There were no more tears. The clockwork stopped—there was a little cough and then her body deflated. In one moment there was life, and in the next it was gone. It was that simple—the sweet release of death. Gi was lying in the bed next to her. She felt her final heartbeat. The last one pulsed strong. She died with her eyelids half open. Gi closed them with her fingertips.
85
A
FTER
I
L
-
SUN
PASSED
AWAY
,
something in Gyong-ho was liberated. The quest to find Il-sun had taken the focus off her own suffering, and enabled her to persevere. Through it she built her inner strength. Now that Il-sun was dead, the story of Gi’s childhood had ended. The last remaining tether to who she had been was severed. She was ready to start over. If the child Gyong-ho was communist
Chosun,
and the adult Gyong-ho would be imperialist American, then she would have to resolve the conflict between the two within herself. The enemy, she decided, was not the communist or the imperialist, but the lack of understanding between them. If one has to be right, then one has to be wrong, in a polarized world. Yes and no. But between yes and no there is an infinite range of possibilities, a full spectrum of maybe. If you are stuck in either/or, then you are missing the infinite.
She went to the library almost every day after Il-sun died. She read books and filled notebooks with observations, thoughts, and equations. She would sit alone in quiet, blissful concentration.
“Is that the Olowati paradox you’re working on?” a voice said over her shoulder, startling her.
She turned to see a tall, dark-skinned man with a wide smile and a pot belly standing over her. He was in his middle fifties and wore large, square glasses and a sweater with broad horizontal stripes that made him look wider than he actually was. She felt guilty, as if she had been caught doing something bad. “Yes,” she said sheepishly.
“That’s ambitious. Can I see?”
Gi handed the man her notebook, only because she thought it would have been rude not to. She would have preferred to keep her work to herself.
The man sat on a chair across the table and studied her work intently. His eyes darted around the pages as he chewed on his lower lip.
“My God, have you solved this?” he said after several minutes. “Jesus God, I think you might have solved it! Is this all your work?” He looked up at her in disbelief.
Gi nodded.
“Are you . . .” The man found himself speechless. “Jesus God.” He looked back over her notes. “Are you Carlson’s student?”
She shook her head.
“Well, you’re not my student. You don’t look old enough to be doing doctoral work, anyway. I’ll be damned. What’s your name?”