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By Root 1056 0

the beginning of a woman’s private time, and long after I went to bed, she stayed up to sew, read, or write letters. I cracked my shutter open. Two silhouettes, outlined crisply against the snow like shadow puppets, headed toward the gate. I dimly heard a rattle of iron and wood when the bar was lifted and the latch released, then the sounds in reverse when Byungjo closed the gate. He went into the cold gatehouse where he’d await Father’s return. My face chilled, I crept into my quilts, sleepless with curiosity. What seemed like hours later, I woke to sounds of my father’s snow-crunching footsteps, then his shoes shuffling off in the entryway as he quietly, and surprisingly, hummed the Doxology.

Once alerted, I heard my father over the next several weeks go out in darkness with increasing frequency. It was especially peculiar because in winter, except for church, he rarely left the estate. And since my mother hadn’t attended church lately—too noticeably pregnant to be seen in public—he hardly went out at all. I longed for answers, but I’d learned well how to suppress my inquisitiveness, particularly on matters related to him. With my father, I was like that raspy sliding door—always around but noticed only when something was awry, such as when I dropped a cup, spoke before thinking or skipped on the flagstones.

LATER THAT WINTER in February, the moon a strand of blue in a cold starlit sky, I sprawled on the bedroom floor with my favorite activity: filling thick pads of cheap paper with vocabulary in Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and an occasional English word in crooked letters. The courtyard rang with dripping thaw, loudly punctuated by sheets of ice crashing from rooftops onto the flagstones—a noisy harbinger of an early spring. My mother stopped at my door and I immediately sat in a more ladylike position, but she only said to come quietly to help with something.

In her sitting room, ghostly twin trails rose from two lamps and disappeared in the smoke-stained ceiling beams. Fabric and blankets tumbled from a linen chest, its woven grass lining lifted sideways to expose a false bottom. In this hiding place, bright scraps of cloth in familiar shapes lay in neat piles. I picked up red and blue half circles with yin and yang curves and fitted them together. “Taegeukgi, the flag.”

“So you haven’t forgotten. And you know it’s forbidden. A secret, agreed? You hem. We have fifteen more to finish in less than a week.”

“So many!” I whispered. “What for?” Sitting on the floor, I inspected her invisible stitches on the corner trigrams—heaven, earth, fire and water—and bent to her instructions to join the completed flag rectangles back-to-back.

“You’re old enough to know about certain things,” she said. “You’re not to speak of it at school or even at home, to anyone. It’s impossible to tell who’s friendly to whom.” She clipped a thread between her teeth and deftly tucked the edge of a cut form onto the background.

I thought of the Japanese merchants I saw at the market on my way to school, and the shouting men performing calisthenics every morning in the police station yard, but I’d rarely said more than a few words to a Japanese person and couldn’t imagine anyone I knew being friends with the people my father called “heathens.”

“What about my teacher?” I asked.

“Not even her, though I’m certain she’s a patriot. We prevent trouble by keeping this secret in this room.” She sighed. “Why must you always ask questions? Obedience.”

“Yes, Umma-nim.” I disliked the fussy exactness of sewing, but the warm floor and my mother’s humming made the task almost pleasant. I assumed she withheld an explanation about the flags because of my questioning and tried to be patient, but my curiosity about their number and secrecy only grew. I worked to match the precision and speed of my mother’s handiwork with little success. “So slow! How can we make that many? Abbuh-nim’s right. I’m too clumsy”—one of my father’s standard criticisms.

“Your work is beautiful when you attend to it. Don’t worry, I’ve already made forty. It’s been months.”

“I