The calligrapher's daughter_ a novel - Eugenia Kim [90]
“Yes, Umma-nim.” We said goodnight and I returned the trays to the kitchen. Cook was gone, the stoves banked and tidied for the night. I washed the dishes with a crock of water thoughtfully left by Cook, still warm. Heaviness tugged at my thoughts as I dried and put the bowls away. On the shelf I found my childhood brass rice bowl, kept polished and shiny. I laid its coolness against my cheek, and as tears wet the brass surface, I rolled the cold metal on my skin, trying to replace the tightness in my chest at my impending loss of freedom with the joy of being home.
Sleepless in bed, I recalled what Mother said: that perhaps Father finally realized the days of bloodlines and class distinctions had ended. Had he really given up fighting? I realized how important it was that he be as much of a stickler for the old ways as he used to be. I’d previously regarded his stubborn adherence to tradition as a limitation, but the thought that he might have given up made me see otherwise—it wasn’t stubbornness but strength of conviction. When I read in Mother’s letter that he’d stopped painting because he believed a proper audience for his art no longer existed, it seemed a prideful conceit. I now began to see the magnitude of what he had lost as he put aside each part of all he had known. Whether by force of law or by social pressure, all the insidious change maneuvered by the occupation in each passing day was irrevocable. Could this laxity in my father’s defense of tradition be indicative of the state of our country? I hoped not. With these thoughts, and because it was right to obey my father, I would acquiesce with all the grace I could muster to his choice of a husband for me, though this decision made me cry.
I searched the beams for words that might inspire a peaceful resolution to my warring sense of duty and hard-earned freedoms. Where once the simple memory of a pattern of stars would trace words for me, now nothing came. I thought I should pray, but when I tried, I remembered instead the vision shared with my mother after Dongsaeng’s birth. Like water, flowing around, beneath and through rooted trees, we would always flow. I said a small prayer then, with thanks for my mother, for Dongsaeng’s safety, for my father’s continued stubbornness, for a husband with kindness.
BY MIDMORNING THE clouds had dropped and a wet fog hid treetops and gardens. I ran fingertips fondly over the hammered hinges of the folding screen outside Father’s sitting room, where he and I would wait for Hansu. Straightening, I went in. My father sat at his desk, his hands idly turning pages of a well-worn book. “Thank you for asking me to join you, Father. I’m relieved to see you’re looking well.” He looked drawn and hollow, his skin chalky.
His eyes caught mine, and I was surprised and touched to feel their warmth. He quoted slowly in Chinese, “The way home is a thousand li …”
My mind was far from classic poetry. I looked at him blankly, trying to remember the stanza and discern his meaning.
He frowned, a teacher prompting a young student, and continued, “… an autumn night is even longer.”
I remembered the poem, and my eyes flooded with love and gratitude for his paternalistic formal welcome and his scholar’s insight, as I finished it, “Ten times already I have been home, but the cock has not yet crowed.”
He looked pleased, turned his eyes aside and mentioned the nineteenth-century poet Yi Yangyeon, in a tone that said well done.
Overcome by the intimacy of the moment, I sat quietly, feeling pride and a different kind of closeness than I had ever felt before with my father. He had never instructed me on classic poetry, yet rightly assumed that with the training from my mother and from Imo, I would know this poem. It was the closest he had ever come to acknowledging me as an intelligent and educated person, separate from our