The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [142]
Thereafter, I will need to earn passage home, and will keep you apprised. The New York Presbytery is receptive to my inquiries, and it is likely that I will pursue work there. I can always rely on being a houseboy, though the payment is only a few pennies along with room and board. I hope for an assistant pastorship, but being a foreigner decreases that likelihood. Since my English has greatly improved, I can also translate. While long-term plans are difficult to make, I wanted to give you some idea of my possible whereabouts. And, as our distance grows at home, I can only pray that God will provide as He has so far. I pray that His mercy and goodness keep you and your family safe and well.
Your husband in Christ
The Moon’s Portent
AUTUMN 1936 – WINTER 1938
THE SCHOLAR HAN’S BREAKFAST LAY COLD AND UNEATEN ON A TRAY beside him. A note listing several classic poems and an open Bible were centered on his writing table in preparation for the words he’d speak at his son’s wedding. Beside his elbow were the household accounts he’d soon relinquish to Ilsun as master of the family. And at his feet two Seoul newspapers, Dongah Ilbo and Kidok Shinmun, bore headlines of another student protest in Seoul, this one spurred by the imprisonment of each newspaper’s editors for superimposing an image of the Korean flag over the Rising Sun in the victory photograph of the winning Olympic marathoner, a Korean national. Rumors that the papers would soon be shut down concerned him as much as reports of the foreboding policies of the new governor-general, Minami Jiro. Among them was the required recitation of the Imperial Oath and Pledge at any public gathering and in the schools. Endless brainwashing! thought Han. It was the subtlety of the smallest-seeming acts that proved to be the most coercive. On one of his recent walks, he’d heard a gaggle of young schoolchildren speaking Japanese, and when he addressed them in Korean, they looked at him uncomprehending. He rationalized that they were peasant children or Japanized orphans, but it needled him.
“Abbuh-nim, would you like your soup reheated?” There was his daughter, two months home from her failed marriage. He waved her away, not wanting to deal with the unanswered question of her procuring a job. A bad example for the new wife, he thought as he scanned the list of poems. He was trying to remember a sijo about marriage written by a poet, a former military commander, who had famously commemorated the end of the Japanese invasions at the close of the sixteenth century. It was bad enough that he couldn’t recite the poem, and now, was it possible that he’d forgotten the poet?
His stomach growled and he called for Najin. “You can reheat.”
“Yes, Abbuh-nim.”
He sensed her lean form as she bent for the tray and regretted that her husband had gone to America before providing a real chance for a grandson. He would remember to ask for that blessing during his son’s wedding. Preparing his message, he culled from the Confucian theologian Zhu Xi, early Joseon Dynasty poets and the Bible. His wife had once accused him of being so old-fashioned as to be unable to see beyond the woods of his ancestors’ cemetery. He could now concede to this, feeling reassured that Ilsun’s classical training had prepared his son to have a foot in both yesterday and today. This made Han frown, knowing that more often than he liked to admit, Ilsun had both feet planted firmly in the present without regard for the past whatsoever.
Well, he thought, marriage will cure that. When one’s seed sprouts beneath one’s roof, what was, and what will be, take on new meaning.
Najin