The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [25]
“They’re clean, see?”
“Don’t talk back! Have you no respect?” His rebuke and the deepening furrow between his eyes confused me.
“Abbuh-nim—”
“Where are your manners? Where is graciousness? What kind of things will my son learn from an inept peasant of a sister!”
I knew that I should bow, offer an apology and go away, but somehow my body wouldn’t bend.
“Look at your hands. It won’t help to wash—dark as a peasant’s! What will he learn?”
I had the terrible sacrilegious thought that it was I who had seen the baby born—I who was the firstborn—and that made me special, more special … I couldn’t finish the thought and forced my feet to retreat, remembering at the last minute not to run in my father’s presence. I turned at the edge of the courtyard to see him tighten the baby’s bunting and go inside.
Dried stalks of tiger lilies whipped my arms as I ran toward the pond in the far corner of the estate. I stopped, panting from running and holding in my angry tears. I had only wanted to see him! The toes of my gray rubber shoes touched the edge of the pond, its surface spotted with lacy green mire. I remembered the tiny white elbow I’d seen in the bundle Father held. I wiped my eyes and face with my fingers and looked at my hands and wrists—ruddy brown, carelessly tanned. Remembering what he’d said, I rubbed my forehead as if to erase my skin color, and tried to retract my hands into too-short sleeves.
I walked by the pond late into the morning and listened to the rhythmic whir of dragonflies’ wings, catching glimpses of their fleet black bodies reflected in clear circles left by melting ice on the algae-coated surface of the pond. Sometimes I saw my face mirrored as well, but I drew back to avoid the reminder of my features. Even if I swore to always carry an umbrella to shade me from the sun’s baking rays, my skin would never be as fair as that pure pale newborn’s. With a long stick, I stirred circles in the water, and the algae shapes swirled as inchoately as my feelings. I was thrilled to have a sibling, especially the boy both my parents had long prayed for, but I also feared that things would be different, like how my father had turned toward the house. I trailed through the willows, their bare wispy arms softly brushing my shoulders, and I remembered how my mother said she was counting on me to be a good nuna to my brother. It calmed me to think that fulfilling my responsibilities as older sister might favorably shape the changes the baby brought to our lives. I headed back toward the house, hoping he’d grow out of infancy soon, so I could prove how good a nuna I could be.
LATER THAT WEEK, after school, I sat on my knees next to Mother’s bed, admiring the contented baby’s appetite.
“Let me show you something,” she said. “You should know this so you can understand your father better, and now your dongsaeng, and be properly respectful to them.” Mother lifted the blanket and her nightskirt, and with clinical description explained the origins of the blood staining the cloth between her legs, the soft, loose flesh of her still-expanded belly, the seepage of milk from dark, flowering nipples. Having washed together with my mother countless times and having witnessed the birth, I merely raised my own skirt to examine my child’s body with comparative interest as she described the biological process of life so recent that her body still trembled in remembrance of its violence and mystery.
“This is the great gift that God has given to women,” she said, “and women alone.” She smoothed