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My memory is a swirl of quixotic hopes.
For a long time I missed having the definite personal history that others had and I never would. I wanted the blind swollen pride of family, because everyone else had that and I must be missing out. But with the red rust of womanhood came the realisation that I would soon have to grow up and make my own name, and I took to creating my own tree, fantasizing about my past in hopes that I could discover some hidden virtues, some vestiges of a memoir I was never a part of.
I like to think they met in Hahoe, maybe at the mask festival; that he looks at her across the sweating masses and she blushes to virginal pink; that they smalltalk about the weather and the year's tourists over cheap kimbap and melting ice cream. They part ways, still waking up breathless weeks later and feeling in the dark for the warmth that unmercifully is never there. But nothing remains secret in a village and eventually he finds out where she lives, and like an oriental Pyramus and Thisbe they whisper their chrysanthemum secrets through the walls.
She is young and optimistic and odd. Her eyes are slightly crooked, her mouth slightly too small to be considered beautiful. She works in the sun and her skin will never have that treasured ethereal milky whiteness; she moves too much to catch that death pallor. Her hair is cut sharp - one, two, three lines - matching the razor of her jaw and the steel of her back.
Her sister is the beautiful one actually, if beauty means never being able to keep her legs shut because of all the neighbors with their adoration and false promises. But she left Andong months before in pursuit of Seoul's glittering urbanity, leaving the little village house and the mother and father who want to arrange a marriage to the boy with the big head and thick lips.
Mother and Father are old and can no longer hear the telltale rustling in the next room, the sharp intakes of air when the moon and the planets align and the stars burst into bloody supernovae. They think the roses in her cheeks are from the new Chinese tea and don't question when she comes in late from the fields, hanging around outside with the pigs until Mother and Father go to bed so that she can lock the door behind him.
She cries on the day she finds out, cursing the life within her yet forgetting momentarily her own slippery part in the affair; it is always easier to be a victim of fate than to face one's own responsibility. The old woman three gates down tells her about thin metal hooks and phials of mercury which are sure to eliminate the problem, but after a restless night and a bottle of soju she gains her acumen and decides she can not butcher her seed like a pig.
Three months later she tells him and is horrified at the caul covering his expression. "You'll help me?" she asks meekly. She is never meek. His jaw tightens and a gruff agreement unsticks from his throat.
The next day he leaves and she never sees him again.
In my daydreams the face of she is easier for me to visualise, yet I can never imagine him. I stare in the mirror and try to untangle my own features, trying to decipher from whom exactly I come.
Maybe he is Japanese, and remembers as he lies next to her in the afterglow of their late-night fumblings the clear demarcation between their two histories. He fears being seen as a disloyalist by his own and a second-time intruder by hers, yet he can't resist her cinnamon candy murmurs running down his neck and his cheek and his temples.
Maybe he is Chinese and eventually succumbs to the asian hierarchy learnt by rote through his boyhood, the moons in her eyes fading out one night, against his will, to shroud her in the mud of her taught position.
No one country can bear claim to me. I look like no one.
I can never refer to them as my parents. I watch them like a film.
I try to see her as the forgotten, the weak side of an idealistic romantic tragedy. I see him as a pawn, trying to respect thousands of years. It's easier to forgive them that way.
But I know it's a lie.
Note: The word "gook" most likely comes from the Korean noun "miguk," meaning "foreigner" (especially American; "guk" essentially means "country"). During the Korean War, American soldiers assumed that the childrens' cries of "miguk" (referring to the soldiers) were "me, gook" - a sort of pidgin attempt to identify themselves. The term was eventually and erroneously transferred to mean a larger group of asian people, especially the Vietnamese, and is presently regarded as a slur.
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This was a hard one to score
Posted Jul 1, 2008
There was some good description and word choices. For the most part it flowed nicely while also maintaining that daydream kind of state we all can get into.
Some word choices I didn't like, but I can understand why they were chosen from the overall read of the story.
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