The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [100]
“Excuse me, have some more,” I said, laughing, head sideways, mouth covered.
“Miss Han, what a wonderful lunch!”
The tea released its flowery steam, the scent in harmony with the willowy setting. He sighed, finished eating and thanked me again. I was thinking that I hadn’t laughed like that since being with Imo, and before the end, with the princess. Taking tiny bites of dumpling and rice, and feeling oddly protective of what remained in my lunch box, I wondered if it was his nature to always devour food so robustly. With this thought came a strong sense of his masculinity, and my body flushed from neck to knee.
“Please excuse me and let me explain myself a little,” he said. “When I was young, there were years when there was no food. My mother taught me how to eat the mudworm. Do you know what it is?”
I shook my head.
“This is a small worm, just one or two centimeters long. It lives in the silt of riverbeds and streams. In such places there are no fish, not even scorpions, but the mudworm is a strong survivor.”
He sounded like he was sermonizing, but I also acknowledged that he told a good story. I poured him the remainder of the tea and put my last rice roll in his box.
“At the stream my mother and I—at the time I was just a little boy, perhaps four—she showed me how to scoop bowlfuls of the mud and silt. We put five shallow scoops into one large bucket filled with clear water from the stream. It was quite hot out and I remember enjoying wading in the mud. After a while, when I looked in the bucket, there were hundreds of tiny brown mudworms in the clean top of the water, spitting mud out with each wiggle when they swam.”
“ Aiu!” I said, horrified.
“I presume you don’t much like snakes and worms.” He swallowed his tea as quickly as he’d eaten his—and my—lunch.
“Hundreds together? No.” My back thrilled with a small terror. “Excuse me for being rude. I’m sorry, go on.”
“Not rude at all. An honest reaction.” He smiled and my back thrilled in a different way. I listened to his story and focused on skinning the persimmon, its orange flesh firm within my palm, the thin peels delicately curling around and tickling my fingertips, the rare bitter-flower smell scandalously tempting me to lick my juice-anointed fingers, which of course I resisted doing. I listened to Mr. Cho.
“My mother and I scooped the top mudworms and put them in another bucket of clean water, and they would again spit out their mud as they swam around. We changed the water six times until the worms were almost white, and then we strained them and spread them on a mat to dry in the sun. My mother fried them and we ate them with barley. They tasted of the stream and gave us protein. Such an insignificant creature that lives in the beds of streams, yet God gives vital purpose to each thing, no matter if it’s as lowly as the mudworms who suffered for the mother and her family who survived starvation because of them.”
“Amen,” I said, struck by his story and the degree of poverty he’d known. Remembering the earlier cue about his religiosity, I added, “You have made it a gift from God.”
“That’s why I enjoy eating so much!”
I thought of the mudworms’ suffering, as he put it, and it brought to mind Teacher Yee, March First, my father’s torture and West Gate Prison. It seemed that people were scooped from their lives as indiscriminately as those worms. I wondered aloud, “But is all suffering to be a gift from God?”
I heard appreciation of my question in his tone. “Think of how many stories in the Bible tell how the grace of God comes as a result of suffering. Think of Christ’s example.”
I found this answer to be too glib and stole another glance at his expression. He seemed relaxed, and his eyes searched the far edge of the pond as if open to any answer the day might offer. I struggled a moment with the guard of proper behavior at my lips, but struck it down, weak as it was, and asked, “But why must the cost of grace be human suffering?”
I felt his appraising look and refused to