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By Root 1239 0

morning at ten, when the day’s shipment of makkali (unrefined rice wine, also known as “farmer liquor”) arrived. By lunchtime the tiled walls would ricochet with his hateful haranguing. Whenever Kay’s mother-in-law left on an errand, her father-in-law jotted down the time, and if she returned a minute later than promised, he would haul himself over to the doorway and sit there with his stunted legs folded beneath him muttering, “I’ll kill that woman someday” while beating his palm with a ball-peen hammer. Kay’s job was to cook, clean and mind the store. She cried herself to sleep each night, accompanied by the sound of hissing, the old man’s favorite meal being snake soup, which he forced Kay to prepare using live snakes caged outside her room.

“You think you have it bad living with my parents and working at a deli?” Gab says to me one windy afternoon during a rare walk we’re taking, alone, along Staten Island’s industrial shoreline. “At least no one makes you cook snake soup.”

Eventually Kay managed to get herself kicked out of her father-in-law’s house for disobedience. On the street, she was aided by customers from the store, who took up a collection, enabling her to move into a flat. Soon afterward Edward quit the military, having recently completed an elite training program for engineers sponsored by the U.S. Navy, and from maintaining engines aboard destroyers he now attempted to shift to factory work. Kay went back to singing at weddings and baptisms, then got pregnant, and the two of them tried domestic life. However, within a year Edward went right back to sea, this time circling the planet for various commercial shipping companies. For the next decade he would be essentially absent, usually as far from South Korea as physically possible.

Kay decided she needed a more lucrative career than wedding singer. Although Edward sent home checks from Gdansk, Valparaiso and Seattle, she had little idea when they would come or how much they would be for. Luckily, her older sister Sook Ja had just opened a bakery in downtown Seoul and was finding herself unable to handle the job alone. Kay volunteered to help and soon was running the place.

Managing a bakery meant waking up at three in the morning every day, not the sort of work that fits well with raising young children. Fortunately, Kay had help—Edward’s stepfather had recently passed away, and Edward’s mother had moved into their apartment. With her babysitting, Kay was able to turn the bakery into one of the more popular eateries in Seoul.

The bustling bakery was in a trendy part of the city favored by South Korean celebrities. It had small coffee-shop tables and a large young staff, some of whom lived in what was becoming a sort of dormitory in Kay’s apartment. Within a few years it had become so successful that Kay decided to expand, so she bought a restaurant that specialized in tripe soup, which Koreans typically eat for lunch. And she bought a bigger apartment to accommodate all the workers she was taking care of, and a Hyundai Pony, which, according to Gab, made her very proud.

“She used to get in the Pony and open the window so people could see her at the wheel, then drive it one block to change parking spaces,” Gab once told me. At night she went out with friends wearing flashy jewelry and European shoes. Korea as a country was now fully immersed in hyperchange, the negative effects of which included abominable pollution and great political instability (coups, strikes, assassinations), but so far Kay was enjoying it all just fine, thank you very much. Twenty years earlier, she and Edward might have gone back to Dogae and settled into a thatch-roofed farmhouse, and Kay might have spent the rest of her life washing clothes in the river and growing her own food. Instead, she had a career and security for her family that she herself provided, plus the resources to indulge herself. What’s more, she had the satisfaction of making it up as she went along, of standing out. Her own mother had been a strong woman and a partner to her father’s businesses, but she was