The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [4]
“Yes, Umma-nim.” I started on the opposite seam, feeling without consciously understanding how her words made it as easy to be as joined with her as the two skirt panels I sewed. The room shrank and cooled as the shadows outside the lamp’s glowing circle darkened with the late hour. I considered what my mother had said about the hard times and her explanation of a bleak future under the Japanese emperor. “Umma-nim, is that why Abbuh-nim hasn’t named me?”
“What? Nonsense! Where did you get such an idea?”
I related what the painted-eyebrow woman had said that day.
“Why do they think children can’t hear?” She stabbed her needle into the taut embroidery. “Yah—” She put her sewing down and smiled. “If they only knew how well you hear, even through walls!” She sewed until her needle grew restful, as if calmed by the serene beauty of the blue iris that blossomed from its tail of thread. “Ignore them. Some women gossip because— Never mind. You were born so soon after— Well, what’s most important is that you are your father’s daughter. You are yangban and privileged, a blessed child to have such a noble and talented father. You should respect him always. He thinks of his country and family first, always of others first, and his is the highest example to follow. We’re fortunate that he survi—that he’s modern enough to afford us many freedoms, and you should only be grateful.”
I bowed my head obediently. I’d heard similar versions of this speech many times, usually at bedtime when my ears were sleepy and compliant.
“You take it for granted, but it’s your father who allows us to come and go as we please. It wasn’t so long ago that such a thing was considered scandalous for women of our class.”
Having always had this freedom, I wasn’t sure why I should be grateful, but I also knew not to ask more questions.
“Besides,” she said. “Who knows? One day he might consider sending you to school. At last there are rumors of public schools! We’ll see, very soon I hope. With education, what name you carry won’t matter at all.”
I didn’t understand about “public school” but was pleased to know it would counteract the negativity attributed to my namelessness by the beak-tongued woman. I also heard something new in my mother’s voice, and had I known more, I might have recognized it as hunger. My mother had been educated by her mother in both Korean and Chinese writing and reading, and like most yangban women, had studied the classic Instructions for Women and the sixteenth-century Four Books for Women. She was also teaching me to read and write, but the education she spoke of reached far beyond the morality literature, guidelines for female behavior and the classics she had studied.
“You’ve seen Missionary Gordon at church,” said Mother. “She’s old enough to have been married years ago, but she has the respect of the congregation and is free to go about unescorted, thinking her own thoughts, because of her education.” My mother also told me about a school in Seoul for grown-up women, Ewha College, which the Japanese had allowed to be reopened the previous year. “Things are changing so much that these schools can teach all women, not just yangban daughters, about the higher way of living and our duty not only to our family but to our country.”
Not fully comprehending what she said about the scary American missionary lady or the special place for women, I clearly heard my mother’s admiration and yearning, and as I sewed my tidy stitches and knotted the end of the seam, those feelings grew to be mine.
At bedtime Mother sat beside me, the dim lamp making visible only the soft curve of her cheek, one ear and the shoulder of her white blouse. She told me again that I must honor the long legacy of my father’s lineage and respect the ancestors buried on the mountain behind our estate. After prayers, she related