She looked down at her mug of tea. “We’ve talked about it before, the way you call when I’m just about to call you. There’s a kind of knowing about things that we can’t explain.”
I waited.
“I felt that with Minjae today,” she continued. “He’s so easy to talk to. Like we didn’t just meet, like I’ve known him forever.”
I was relieved. “Youdidmeet before. Paul said Minjae’s family came to East End when they were kids; you met him in real life, Channing. He remembered you. You’re not easy to forget—even as a kid, his words: ‘She was fun.’”
She nodded. “I know, he told me, but it’s more than that. It’s way more than that, Dahee. I need to figure out what it is.”
There was silence for another few seconds. What could I say? Again, I told her to start the show. Channing complied by clicking a key on her laptop. I set my tea on the table and lay back down on the couch. “I’ll watch one episode and half of the next one with you, because if we get to the end, we’ll have to watch another one. They get you with a cliffhanger at the end of each episode,” I said. My eyelids closed and wanted to stay that way as fatigue washed over me.
“You always say that. How can you stop in the middle? It’s so good,” she replied.
Cheerful orchestral music filled the room. The story always began on an upbeat note. I opened my eyes to an image of a traditional Korean house with a thatched roof and wide porch. A young woman in a red-and-white hanbok and a young man looked shyly at each other across a low table with an assortment of food on it. “Already?” I asked.
Channing paused the show and clicked on another one. “Yeah, no, that’s where I was. Let me start it at the beginning.”
A lush green series of summits flashed on the screen. It was a panoramic of Jirisan, the mountain range near Namwon. I remembered how Harabeoji described it with its hidden healing herbs. Then the camera focused on a house in Namwon. The first episode showed Chunhyang’s mother talking to a man about her hopes for having her own child.
We watched for a while before I yawned again. “I can’t even right now, this one starts before Chunhyang was born.”
Channing’s voice wafted toward me. “Did you know Minjae’s dad died when he was nine? How strange is that? That’s when my mom died, and he’s been going from job to job like me and his mom relies on him like my dad does me. How do you explain that? He understands me, even without my explaining anything. It’s just he’s different, the way I’m different.”
“You’re both only going to be in East End for a few more weeks, too, remember that detail? How’s this going to work out?” I mumbled, and that was the last of the show and the conversation before I woke the next morning.
I didn’t tell her that I had researched the story of Chunhyang when I was in college. Among the books I’d read was the one I remembered seeing in Channing’s mother’s room. It was calledVirtuous Women. I was upset to learn that the story might have been based on real people well before the pansori version Harabeoji had told us long ago. The actual Mongryong arrived too late to save the real Chunhyang. I never told Channing about the people upon whom the tale was based.
Chapter 9
Once upon a time, I was lonely. My parents made us move to a different town every few years for new jobs and business opportunities. With few Asians in these neighborhoods, I felt isolated. My name made it even more difficult. In Korean,Daheemeant “much brightness.”Dafor “much” andheefor “brightness.” Children laughed at me.Duh, they said, elongating theuto sound dense and clueless. Teachers asked if my name wasDolly, as in Dolly Parton. My parents said I could change it toDollyif I wanted. Maybe I should have agreed. Maybe my life would have been easier if I’d had an American name. Some part of me resisted though. I couldn’t imagine being called anything else.
As a teacher now, I knew I couldn’t blame everything on being Korean or having a name likeDahee. Personality was a major factor. I was a shy kid with shy parents.
In Vale, Ohio, the town where we lived one year, the house was gray and creaked and cracked. Our friends from Vancouver came to visit and commented on just how far it seemed to slope. They laughed about how they would manage if the house collapsed, and I remember thinking if the walls fell in, they would be strong enough to hold them up, unlike my parents and me.
In this same town, I stood in my yard beside a white girl who held my collector Barbie doll. She said friends had rules: Friends had to playtogether after school every day. Friends had to bring snacks to the picnic in her yard. Friends had to give their friends their Barbies. I owned two Barbies that Channing’s mother had given me for my birthday, and thisfriendrefused to give one of them back.
Her brother invited us to look at a discovery in the yard. Why did I go? I sensed it was something terrible. Instead, I followed the girl, and we reached her brother, who was crouched over something on the ground. Suddenly he jumped up and threw something small and wet at my face. A mound of reddish-brown twisting worms. I swatted at it and shrieked. He laughed. “Isn’t it the food you like to eat?” he said. Thefriendlaughed loudly. Somehow, I managed to get to my feet and run to my house.
East End became the relief from those places where we lived: a town near the ocean far away from overcast valleys, where it was always bright and never muddy. On school breaks and many holidays, we drove there to visit my father’s brother’s family. They were the opposite of us. My uncle had a wife and a daughter. They threw big parties with lots of Koreans and lived in a sturdy stone castle by the sea.
Though I’d visited for as long as I could remember, all those people in my cousin’s house felt like strangers to me. Each time, I tried to hide by the grand piano in the large hall, and my mother had to coax me to follow my aunt up to her daughter Channing’s room. I would hold on to the hem of my mother’s sweater to keep from falling back down the stairs, which seemed to be impossibly steep. What I really wanted to do was reach out for my mother’s long ponytail, which she’d let me hold when I was a baby, but I was too old for that now, and I knew she had trouble keeping the strands tucked in.
I remember my aunt wore a brown turtleneck sweater, no matter the weather. She had short, fluffy thin hair through which I could see her gray scalp and gold-rimmed large round glasses that magnified her eyes. Herdeep voice and bark of a cough reminded me of videos I’d seen of seals, though hers made her wince and pause when she walked.
Channing’s mother was my kun-eomma. I was told by my parents to call her that, which translated to “big mother.” Kun-eomma was an excellent pianist and played five other instruments as well as worked as a lawyer in town. Although this Korean term had everything to do with age and not size, she was the tallest Korean woman I’d ever seen at five seven. Channing would grow two inches taller than her by the time she was eighteen.
During these big parties, Channing would be in her room with a group of children. She sat in front of a desktop computer playingStarCraftorWorld of Warcraftand other games unfamiliar to me, her left hand clicking on a keyboard while her right hand moved the mouse.
The children in Channing’s room at these parties—usually there were six or seven in that room—would look at me when I walked in and make space for me to join. And then they’d turn back to shout in awe at Channing’s progress in the game. In those moments, I’d be close enough to see Channing’s gold hair pins that held back her short hair. She’d lift her chin and turn, and I could see tiny sparkly gold rosette earrings in her earlobes.
When I was nine years old, we arrived at Channing’s house on Christmas as usual. I ran from the car into the house, my parents on each side of me, holding my hands. A moment before we reached the door, I thought we were going to be blown out to sea. My feet left the ground, but we made it. My uncle opened the door and waved us in.
My mother took me upstairs to Channing’s room, but Kun-eomma didn’t go with us. Someone said she was resting. In Channing’s room, as usual, the children were cheering on my cousin. I went out and explored the hallway. At the end of it was a double door, and through it I heard someone coughing. It had to be Kun-eomma, so I turned the knob with the intention of saying hello and retreating. I missed her hug, the way she greeted me each time we arrived at her house.
I remember the overhead light was intensely bright, bouncing off the white walls and the white shelves lining the room. The shelves were packed with books; some were jammed horizontally on top of those with spines standing up. Everywhere were books: on the bed, on a long red couch, on a round table. Thick white curtains covered the windows with some sort of light where the rod was, as if to mimic sunlight coming through and around the drapery. I thought I was in a library except for the king-size bed in the middle of the room on a yellow-and-orange patterned rug. Unlike the decor of the rest of the house, which was full of somber dark wood and maroon colors, everything in this room spoke of a warm summer day.
In bed facing me, sitting up with newspapers, brown thick folders, and books laid out on the blanket, was Kun-eomma in her usual brown turtleneck. She was wearing flannel pajama pants with red-and-white-striped candy canes on them. She squinted at me, leaning forward. “Channing?” she said. She had a book in her lap, which she overturned just then, laying it cover side up beside her, and she scooted closer.
