The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [34]
I was kept from my father for two weeks, until his most pronounced bruises healed. When allowed to see him at last, I was warned not to show in my face anything that might indicate his changed appearance, including his head, shaved of its topknot. My mother’s instructions on this point were so firm that I barely dared to look at him at all, and it took several days of surreptitious peeks to understand that he’d been severely beaten—far more than the last time. His face wasn’t as monstrously swollen as then; his cheeks were gaunt and lax. It was worse. With stooped shoulders and eyes that looked vacantly at me, his presence was wraithlike. His stitched head wound seemed like a careless, forgotten brushstroke. Visible through bandages wrapped like a leper’s, his thumbs were enormous and black. The first few times I saw him, his empty stare reminded me of what I had seen outside our gate soon after that joyous and then terrifying day. The two soldiers had dragged from the alley a dead body—bloated, stiff, the color of dirt. Only when I saw the clothes did I know it was a woman. Her gruesome remains, the foul stink, the flies, the utter absence of life in her body, I would never forget.
Although he breathed, ate and slept, even smoked, my father seemed like that the first few times I was allowed to see him. Only when my baby brother was laid in his lap did I see a glimmer of my father, and only then was I not afraid of him.
I finally did go back to the classroom several weeks after the command to return to school. I discovered that none of Korea’s children had complied with the command, nor had the businesses reopened for some time, and I realized it was defiance that had closed the shops and kept me home.
Over time, we learned that the national demonstration had prompted unprecedented brutality from the military and police. Months later I heard whispered reports at church about massacre and carnage: all the men in one village burned alive in a chapel, women and girls humiliated, slashed and shot, countless beheadings, people beaten unconscious and revived to be beaten again. Half of the men from our neighborhood who had gone to Seoul were dead. The remainder were imprisoned, flogged and tortured to reveal the names of the movement’s leaders.
Our neighbor, Hansu’s father, had also been arrested, beaten and eventually released. When he recovered, he and Hansu’s mother traveled to Seoul at great risk and found their son still alive, although wounded, and sentenced to West Gate Prison for eighteen months. They returned to raise money for bribes that could reduce his term or at least improve his conditions. I took all the jeon I’d received for good schoolwork, and a chipped jade comb my mother had given me long ago, and slipped them through the neighbor’s front gate wrapped in a piece of paper marked only with his name.
One Hundred Days
MAY 31, 1919
UNCEASING GRIM NEWS OF THE FAILED MOVEMENT BLANKETED THE city. A solemn household and intermittent rains during three days of preparations for the baby’s One Hundredth Day naming ceremony chastened my anticipation of the occasion. Earlier, I’d heard my parents discussing the propriety of hosting such a party at all, but Father said, “It’s in such times as these that we must rely on our traditions and continue to observe them.”
“I worry that we appear to feast when others have suffered much more than we,” said Mother.
“We aren’t feasting, Yuhbo,” he said after a characteristic long pause. “We’re flaunting our way. They cannot suppress forty-five centuries of a people in one season of violence.”
I had felt renewed purpose then in my search for the tokens that were needed to forecast the baby’s future. When Mother had enlisted me to gather the items, she said our paths were carved by God, not fate or folklore, but this was tradition and harmless. After the naming, the gathered objects would be spread on a table in front of the baby, concealed by a cloth. The cloth would be lifted, and the item the baby chose would foretell his professional