# One Thousand Chestnut Trees

Mira Stout

An epic tale of an enigmatic land – Korea – and one woman’s search for her past.Uncle Hong-do arrives in Vermont from Korea to see the sister he has never met, a concert violinist long settled in America. His colourful visit turns his teenage niece Anna’s world upside down, disrupting her cosy existence with his eccentric customs, forcing into it a fresh and intriguing tang of Korea. Then, too soon, he returns to Seoul.When Anna leaves for the orient many years later to uncover her family’s elusive history, her departure stirs up vivid, shocking memories for her mother, of her gilded childhood in Korea and the story of her noble clan’s fall from power.Long ago, her grandfather, Lord Min, commanded his own private armies and his vast estates straddled North and South. In defiance of centuries of barbarous invasions – by the Japanese, Manchus, and finally the Communists – he built a temple high in the mountains, and planted one thousand chestnut trees to shield it from view. Now, generations later, his trees call back his great-granddaughter, and Anna sets out with Uncle Hong-do to find the hidden temple.A powerful mixture of memoir and fiction – the Wild Swans of Korea.

MIRA STOUT

### One Thousand Chestnut Trees


## DEDICATION

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER, AND THE KOH FAMILY.

## CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

PART ONE | Daughter

1 A Memory

2 Cardboard Boxes

3 Five Martinis

4 History

PART TWO | Mother

5 Et in Arcadia Ego

6 Father Goes Away

 | Grandfather

7 Mansei

 | Mother

8 School Days

9 A Radio Broadcast

10 Namsan Park

11 Fire on the Cliff

12 Ninety Thousand Troops

13 In Hiding

14 Airbase

15 Farewell

PART THREE | Daughter

16 Kimpo Revisited

17 Going South

18 Going North

19 Filial Piety

20 Yangyang

21 One Thousand Chestnut Trees

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE Daughter

## CHAPTER ONE A Memory

It was winter in Vermont. Beyond my window, the pines would have bristled sparsely against the hushed white snow. The grey, swelling sky would have been as vast and lonely as a Northern sea. But I can’t recall Hong-do’s arrival. His presence was ghostly then, so tentative that he scarcely left an imprint. Yet now, years later, when I remember that emptiness, Hong-do’s face follows.

My uncle from Seoul came to stay with us when I was just fourteen, my first year of boarding school. His jet eyes, wide-boned pallor, and shock-hair gave him an outward boldness, but he was actually quite shy. Although I’d met my mother’s Korean friends, Hong-do was different, more foreign somehow; pungent and unfiltered.

Even gestures required translating; Hong-do’s sneeze was a violent ‘YA-shee’ rather than a tame, ‘Ker-CHOO’. And when he was in a hurry, he walked in Korean too, lightly trotting, arms stationary and body canted forward. He rather stuck out in our redneck town.

My mother must have looked equally oriental, but I noticed less – she was a mother, already a separate species. Besides, they didn’t look alike. My uncle’s face was paler, and round like a moon. There was something remote and masked about him, as if he were stranded in his skin.

Despite our kinship, I felt little for my new relation then. Though he was young enough to be a brother (I hadn’t any siblings), no reassuring sympathy for him welled up, and to my alarm, no rescuing tug of filial loyalty helped me to pretend otherwise. Hong-do was a spaceling to me. The rapid, guttural language of clucking, hacking noises that he and my mother spoke sounded ugly and comical to my teenage ears, separating us like barbed wire.

As a child, I had refused to learn Korean. I’d even blocked out most of my mother’s worn stories of Seoul, which were as unreal as fairy tales, but with tragic endings. The gilded family sagas ended in divided lands, ruined gold mines, betrayals and torture at the hands of Japanese invaders, even before the beginning of the catastrophic Korean War.

Hong-do had been born after my mother’s departure for America, so she was meeting him for the first time too. My mother had returned home just once in thirty years, so the narrative store could not be replenished. By default, the whole of Korea had shrunk to meaning little to me but my mother’s iron discipline, and eating dried squid after school instead of luscious Marshmallow Fluff.

Until now, I had only known my uncle from photographs in our album. In an old sepia-tinted family portrait, Hong-do was a small, doll-like boy in a sailor suit, shyly holding my grandmother’s hand. (She died before we could meet.) The family looked grave and distinguished; tall men in wire-rimmed spectacles, stiff collars and boutonnières, and women, fragile, but assured, wrapped in stiff silk han-boks, seated in a shadowy, peony-filled garden. My mother’s chubby-faced younger sister, Myung-hi, hair severely bobbed, stood protectively next to Hong-do.

I daydreamed secretly about them, especially about my great-uncle, Yong-lae, the wastrel poet, so vain that he would only be seen in public astride a white horse – which sometimes returned empty-saddled, its master having passed out in a ditch. In a later black-and-white image, dog-eared from handling, Hong-do was grown up, dressed in military uniform, leaning against a wooden footbridge before a pagoda, smiling confidently at the camera – roguishly handsome. I had looked forward to meeting him.

But this full-colour, three dimensional stranger seemed jarringly unrelated to those glamorous photographs. For a start, he was here in our kitchen rather than safely there. He reminded me a bit of a prisoner then, hiding out in our isolated house in his geeky ironed denims, gazing out of the window as if contemplating an escape. But he had nowhere to go.

During his visit, my mother became more enlivened and fluent than I had ever seen before. They would stay up late together drinking ginseng tea and talking excitedly. Sometimes they spoke with a raw, almost animal pain that frightened me. Gradually, the sound became less exclusive, and flowed generously, like water released from a dam. This awesome current bypassed me and my Boston-Irish father (who also spoke no Korean), but neither of us remarked upon it. I was content to pretend that they were discussing dull matters like jobs in Boston, where Hong-do was to attend university in the autumn. Korea was so much static to be tuned out of my consciousness.

During those winter evenings, my father and I tactfully watched ice hockey on television, but neither of us could really concentrate. Although we were silent, I was acutely aware of Hong-do’s presence. I would sneak glances at him from the sofa as if he were a surprise package that had been delivered which I hoped someone else would open. While I had decided he was to be a marginal figure in my life, I kept a self-interested eye on him anyway during those first cold nights. I sensed, with some dread, that he contained secrets I might someday need to know.

One morning after Hong-do had just arrived, we drove out through the snowbanked woods for an educational breakfast at the Timberline Restaurant on Route 9, renowned for its sixteen varieties of pancakes, and its tourist-pulling ‘Famous 100-Mile View’ over Massachusetts.

Lavender-haired waitresses in white uniforms and orthopaedic shoes delivered the orgiastic fare with medical briskness; steaming cranberry and banana-dot pancakes, french toast piled with blueberries, waffles shining with melted butter and hot maple syrup, spice-scented sausage-patties, link-sausages, mouthwatering bacon, Canadian bacon, steak-and-eggs, eggs-any-style, oatmeal, homefries, toast and English muffins. MaryLou – as her name-tag announced – refilled your coffee cup instantly, and offered free second and third helpings like someone arriving to plough your driveway.

That sunny morning, the dining room was crowded with skiers, bunched around the colonial wagon-wheel tables in pneumatic technicolour overalls. They roared with pre-sport gusto, clanking their cutlery uninhibitedly, as if their appetites might extend to the creamy blue mountains which beckoned beyond the plate glass windows like a majestic frozen dessert.

At first my uncle looked overwhelmed, but soon glanced about delightedly, taking tiny, experimental sips from the coffee cup he held ceremoniously in both palms. People stared baldly at us, jaws momentarily disengaged. Orientals were rarely seen then in the Vermont hills. We ignored their dismay – led by my mother’s well-practised example – but I felt scalding embarrassment. Although we’d begun by speaking in English, my mother and Hong-do soon broke into voluble Korean as if my father and I were not there.

At last our breakfast arrived. Still feeling unwell after his long journey, my uncle faced a modest fried egg and toast. He hesitated a moment, but with a final scowl of concentration seized the sides of the egg white with his fingers, and crammed the whole object in his mouth in one piece. Head bowed and cheeks bulging, he chewed the egg penitently, as if ridding his plate of an obstacle. My father and I froze in surprise. Never having seen an egg dispatched in this way, I began to laugh, but my mother’s eyes stopped me like a pair of bullets.

The next week my mother urged Hong-do to look for a job in Starksboro – the nearest big town – in order to improve his English and relieve cabin fever. As his classes were not to begin for several months, he aquiesced, but found nothing. I suspect he was secretly relieved.

In the mornings after a bit of coaching, my mother and I would drop him off in the icy parking lot off Main Street, the Starkboro Reformer help-wanted ads folded neatly inside his glove. Yet by noon Hong-do would be waiting for us dejectedly at the counter of Dunkin’ Donuts, attracting hostile stares from beery lumberjacks grimly chewing their jelly doughnuts, puddles forming on the pink linoleum beneath their snowmobile boots. After a week, his only offer had been a part-time window-washing shift in the sub-zero February winds. Dad said they must have thought he was an Eskimo.

Struggle was foreign to my uncle. He was the pampered youngest son of an old, noble family, accustomed to a big house in town with servants, and estates in the country. My mother even claimed that Hong-do was renowned in Seoul as a ‘happy-go-lucky playboy’ inconceivable though it was to me, as I examined him critically through a gap in the car’s head-rest. Here, he was assumed to be a refugee.

I saw Hong-do again at Easter. At home, snow still scabbed the fields, but the ground had thawed, and squelched underfoot. Wild gusts of fresh, sweet wind roared through the bare tree-tops. Unpacking my duffel bag, I resolved to be a bit kinder to my uncle – providing it was not too painful.

But I had forgotten little things about him – like the way he chewed spearmint gum with smacking gusto, and sang corny songs in the car. And his sense of humour! I rarely saw him laughing, but when he did, it was a razor-edged alto giggle. Then, at moments of unanimous family mirth he would be isolated in a deaf silence. He thought most American food was disgusting, and I never saw him reading a newspaper or book in English.

My uncle was like unconvertible currency; he refused to be tendered or melted down. There was no Western equivalent of his value. Sometimes I suspected he was simply saving himself so that he would not have to change again when he returned home.

Yet in my absence there were surprising developments. One afternoon as I studied for exams, I looked out at the faithful view of sloping, scrubby fields, towering pines, and immense sky, and noticed something peculiar about the row of younger trees opposite. Their lower branches had been brutally pruned to resemble topiary, but their trunks looked disastrously bald, like shorn poodle shanks. When I protested to my mother she smiled, and insisted that they now looked more like Korean bonsai; an observation gratingly inaccurate, to my affronted sensibilities.

Hong-do soon appeared back from Starksboro with a red and white striped parcel from Sam’s Army-Navy Store, and went off to his room. As I was reading, something caught my eye out of the window; there was my uncle, zipped into a new track suit, vigorously touching his toes in the fresh air. I smiled patronisingly at his strict precision, exercising in the waist-high weeds as if in an indoor gym.

Then he stopped, approached a pine-bonsai, and playfully shook its slender trunk. After an interval of staring, bull-like, at the tree, he suddenly charged at it, yelling murderously and began raining deft side-kicks and karate chops upon the little tree.

I rose from my chair. Had he gone mad? I heard my father’s chair scraping in his studio, and ran off to confer with him. He had left his easel, and stood at the window watching Hong-do. Without speaking, we observed him warily circling the tree like a shadow-boxer, delivering the odd kick-chop. Dad finally rapped on the window-pane, and my uncle twisted round, confused and red-faced with exertion and waved at us enthusiastically. We laughed and waved back, marvelling. From then on, my uncle performed his t’aekwondo exercises on the lawn without further interruptions.

After this, the atmosphere was lighter between us. T’aekwondo tree-attacks seemed to relax Hong-do, he smiled more readily, and began to look quite as handsome as his photographs. This unexpected glimpse of him lent a wider circumference to my mean perception of his character.

Still, an unnavigable distance separated us. I regarded him more as an exotic zoo tiger than as my only living uncle. It was safe to observe him through bars, to admire him wryly from the window, but I couldn’t begin to relinquish those barriers. The schoolyard bullies who had kicked me behind the apple trees with their pointy-toed cowboy boots might come running back through the years to punish me again for having oriental blood.

Hong-do’s foreignness might be contagious; I could be ostracised not only for harbouring an alien, but for becoming more of one myself. With my layers of sportswear and Celtic freckles I could pass for Caucasian, but my uncle’s incriminating features might give me away. It would be wiser to stay clear of him until my immunity was established. My secret Korean half was exiled to a remote inner gulag that even I was unable to find.

In the evenings, reading after supper, I sometimes caught Hong-do staring unhappily out of the window into the dark woods beyond his own cantilevered reflection. Only then did I regret not being a confidante. With the dumb instinct of a golden retriever, I itched to go out into the darkness and bring him back inside again, but just on the point of speaking to him, decided I was too small and unqualified for such a rescue. It was beyond me.

It was easier to pretend that he was not quite human. I don’t remember asking him much about our relations in Seoul, or why he had come to the West when life seemed to be so pleasing there. What was he thinking of when he was so quiet at the dinner table? What did he miss about Korea? Would he have liked to learn to ski? I allowed his elementary English to deter me from asking.

But my uncle, for his part, was maddeningly opaque. His eyes were so black that I couldn’t see his pupils. It was me that I saw squinting back irritably from those distant planets. His silences alone were new desert continents, exposing me as a mere water-dependent speck.

Yet Hong-do could be alarmingly vocal. Sometimes he would pluck away at Beatles chords on my old, badly-tuned guitar, yodelling ‘Yesterday’ plaintively from his room. To my distress, he and my mother also sang rapturous Korean songs together in the study, in a twangy, throbbing oriental vibrato which sounded surreal, and faintly sinister in the puritan Vermont woods. I was glad we had no neighbours.

Why did they wail like that?

‘Because we express han,’ said Hong-do good-naturedly.

And what on earth was han?

There was a long pause.

‘Han is sorrow and yearning and resentment; it lasts centuries, and never goes away. It is at the core of us,’ said my mother.

But what were the words?

Another pause.

‘Han is so deep, that it comes before language.’

I rolled my eyes at my father, hoping to enlist his support, but he looked away. Then I went to my room, and drowned out the han with the more familiar ululations of Neil Young.

I remember one final episode that Easter holiday. As I was studying one afternoon at my usual place by the window, Hong-do slipped into the kitchen to toast some seaweed. After offering me a warm, sulphurous black square – which I ate, grudgingly – he went outdoors to join my mother in the garden.

Then, I heard a yell, and saw Hong-do push my mother aside, his eyes locked to the ground. Running out to see what was wrong, I found Hong-do down on all fours, stabbing spasmodically at the earth with a trowel. Now quite inured to his unpredictable ways, I asked casually what he was doing.

‘A grass snake,’ said my mother.

‘But they’re harmless,’ I said, popping my eyes.

‘Maybe, but to him, serpents are a symbol of evil, and should be destroyed.’

My uncle had lost sight of the snake, and was shouting at my mother in Korean.

‘What’s he saying now?’ I piped.

‘He can’t believe that we allow snakes to pollute our land,’ she said neutrally, as if unsure of where she herself stood on the matter. Still muttering, Hong-do was crouched in a combat stance in the dead asparagus patch, gingerly parting weeds with his trowel. I wished him luck insincerely, and went back indoors. Minutes later, my parents left on an errand.

Hong-do came indoors, and began rummaging angrily through drawers and cupboards. Next, he changed into his new Wrangler jeans, my father’s too-big rubber boots and wood-chopping gloves. He’d even produced a fireman-style slicker from somewhere, cuffs rolled neatly. Then, he left without a word, carrying a long, fat stick he’d found beneath the porch.

‘Unbelievable,’ I muttered, looking around reflexively to see if anyone could confirm what I was seeing. Being alone, I shook my head and returned to the reassuring mental hygiene of my algebra book. But now and then I looked up at the field expectantly.

My mother and father returned from town with the groceries, and asked after Hong-do, smiling when they heard about his hunting preparations. We watched a muted sunset, and took tea and Chinese steam buns in the sitting room, half-listening to the news on the radio. I felt too ruffled by my uncle’s eccentric behaviour to concentrate.

Just then the front door opened, and Hong-do stamped in, displaying a small green snake by its tail as if it were a ten-foot swordfish. Dutifully, my parents admired his catch while I trained a skeptical eye on the pitiful reptile. Then, however, I caught a glimpse of my uncle’s expression, which shamed me. The pride brimming in his eyes was remarkable and disconcerting. His pride was so intense that I almost found myself wishing I could see the snake as he saw it. I stared at it hard, hoping for something magic to happen; but nothing did. My doubt remained and divided us.

Hong-do soon went back outdoors to dispose of his quarry. I watched from the window as he scaled the stone wall and stood there, surveying the darkening woods below. He whipped the snake around his head like a lasso, and cast it high into the air with a defiant shout.

For many years I carried that image with me; Hong-do, snake-slayer of Vermont, arm raised against the sky like a warrior throwing his sword into the spokes of the universe, hoping to arrest its wheels upon his victory. At least, that was what I wanted to see.

Now I recall it differently. The sun had set, and my uncle was mostly in shadow. After he’d flung away the snake he looked so small, and vulnerable, and alone out on the ledge that I could hardly bear to look at him.

Hong-do spent the following few years at university in Boston, one of ten thousand anonymous freshmen. News of Hong-do often came to me months after events had passed, subtly filtered by my mother’s own approval or disappointment, and slightly distorted by translation into English. Trying to follow uncle’s progress in Boston was like monitoring conditions on Jupiter through an unreliable satellite link. He was an abstract fuzz, composed of long shadows and receding footprints. Only his most dramatic actions survived the relay.

To my uncle’s surprise, he was not quite the star he had been in Seoul, though he had plenty of friends. My mother, able to make oracular judgements from several hundred miles away, pronounced him bright, but lackadaisical. He was lackadaisical, perhaps, but hardly lazy. Hong-do took a night job as a taxi driver, though he barely knew the streets beyond Copley Square. He was almost immediately robbed and beaten at gunpoint by two thugs on a midnight fare to Roxbury.

Next, he took on odd shifts as a waiter in Chinatown. He felt safer there. Although he studied business administration by day, on his free nights he gambled away his earnings and made extravagant bar-room loans to acquaintances much larger than himself.

My uncle then had a pretty Irish girlfriend called Mary. He was crazy for her.

‘The Irish and the Koreans are so alike; so sentimental,’ he told my mother over the phone. One day, Mary told him he was a worthless male chauvinist pig, and left him forever. Then he met a rich Korean girl, and drove all the way to California in his cab to escape her. Six months later they were married.

Hong-do set up a small shipping business in New York, and moved to a model home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with his wife and two babies. Reportedly he now wore a gold Rolex watch, and drank impressive amounts of whisky with his golf cronies – all Korean. During my uncle’s Fort Lee tenure, we saw very little of him. He didn’t much care for the Vermont wilds, but preferred neon night-life and the siren call of near-fatal business schemes. Yet unexpectedly, when I moved to New York myself after university, I began to see Hong-do quite regularly.

We would always meet in a Korean restaurant off Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. Young Bin Kwan was his favourite. He was often outrageously late, but I didn’t mind. The mean-faced maître d’ would bring me a dish of exquisite grilled dumplings and boricha (barley tea), and, like a character from a spy thriller, I would bask there in the suspect glamour of floor-to-ceiling fish-tanks and Las Vegas chandeliers. Anticipation of the ritual feast ahead, and the fascinating denouements of my uncle’s family tales put me in a buoyant mood.

When Hong-do finally arrived, he transformed into the playboy, clapping imperiously for more Korean beer and kimchi and barking commands at the twirling, traditionally-robed waitresses with breathtaking, but good-natured arrogance. They served him adoringly, fleetly replacing empty celadon dishes with fresh bulgoki, and bearing smoking iron cauldrons of demonically spicy mae-un-tang. My uncle grinned, slurped and chewed with the confident abandon of the oriental business magnate.

Once, as I watched him stuff a rolled lettuce parcel into his mouth in one bite, distending his cheeks like a chipmunk’s, I suddenly recalled the fried egg incident at the Timberline all those years ago, and understood it.

‘It’s the custom,’ he explained, motioning for me to do the same, ‘it is better manners; it doesn’t fall apart.’ When I’d packed the bulgoki into my straining jaws we both laughed achingly, my eyes swam with tears, and the juices exploded in my mouth and ran down my chin.

Hong-do showed me how to hold my teacup deferentially in both hands, like a proper Korean lady, and taught me heatedly about Korean history and Confucian philosophy. Railing about the ignorance of the West, he would glare at me unforgivingly as if I were no longer his niece, or even anyone he knew, but a symbol of the entire ‘West’ and its calumny.

Back out on the street I felt chastened, subtly changed by our dinner. The chili of the kimchi and the fire of my uncle’s beliefs began to penetrate the cool skin of my habitual indifference. But I was daunted by what I began to discover. Identity, nationality comprised manifold layers, and I was only just exploring the crude outer surfaces, straining to detect the character of the invisible blood beneath.

One night, after several beers, Hong-do became pleasantly sentimental, and drew the yin-yang circle of the Taegukki – the Korean flag – for me on the tablecloth with his chopstick, explaining its symbolism of integrated opposites. Then, smiling cruelly, he drew a diagram of himself and me, comparing our closeness to two independent circles, overlapping only slightly at the farthest parameters.

I was stung. I wanted to protest that he was being harsh, and that there was more between us; but I could not. Perhaps it was true that only this segment of tablecloth had joined us; perhaps we had never before succeeded in meeting. But if we were not as intimate as some relations, we had come a long, painful way to our present distance. I clung to this small achievement.

Over melon and toothpicks Hong-do listened rapt, but uncomprehending, to my hopes and woes, then smacked my shoulder encouragingly when I’d finished. Perhaps he couldn’t follow the language or my way of seeing things, but somehow it didn’t matter. The smack made me laugh, deflating my worries.

Then my uncle paid the stiff bill grandly, and drove me home to unfashionable West One Hundredth Street in his plush blue Chevrolet Royale, with the amazing shock absorbers. During that nocturnal ride I felt a rare, childish joy; as if no danger or sadness could reach me within that safety of new-found blood kinship, padded vinyl, and electronic locks.

It was not to last.

A couple of months later Hong-do’s trusted business partner vanished in the middle of the night with all the firm’s assets. The investigators could not trace him. Ruined, Hong-do sold his house, and moved his family back to Seoul for good.

On our final evening together before my uncle’s departure I glanced over at him in the driver’s seat on the way home. Neon lights from the Broadway marquees washed over his tired face. He ignored the crowds and the limousines, and focused blankly on the red traffic light ahead. A ghostly feeling emanated from him. I recognized it from years ago when he first came; as if his body had landed but his spirit had remained behind in Korea. There was now a similar emptiness about him, as if his soul were in transit, and had already begun the long journey home.

I wondered if Hong-do had really dreamed of success in America, and if it grieved him to see it eluding him now. Perhaps he was glad to leave; I still had not learned how to read his face. There were many things I did not know about him, and it seemed now that I might never know them. It was too late to ask those questions.

The chance had arrived that winter, ten years ago, when he had come to stay, and I had not taken it. I had neither been kind nor unkind to my uncle, but had saved up knowing him for a future time, when it would be easier. I thought he would always be there to discover, like a locked family treasure chest, too substantial to be moved. I would surely inherit it one day, and be given the key. A sick, black feeling welled up in me, and I realised then that the key had been inside me all along, and I hadn’t known it was there.

The streets flowed quickly past the window, bringing our farewell closer. Through my uncle, Korea had grown nearly real to me. But I suspected that when he left, the floating embryo of coded dynasties, diagrams, religious precepts and war-dates might perish. Korea would exist only in the unfinished, idealized monument my mother’s memory had carved, in the rare, transient taste of kimchi and in random visits to greengrocer immigrants, whose faces, behind the bountiful rows of fruit, were closed with forgetting.

I didn’t see it then, but my uncle was a drawbridge to the destroyed homeland my mother had left. Through him I visited the mansion with the green gates where my mother was born, the Northern estates, and my great-grandfather’s temple on Mount Sorak surrounded by one thousand chestnut trees he had planted for longevity.

Although the Japanese had burned down these Northern estates, and the lands were now divided on the thirty-eighth parallel, I felt I had walked through these places, and breathed them. All of this still lived inside of him, intact, and beyond reach. The drawbridge was now closing.

I forget what we said when we parted. The glare of oncoming headlights numbed me. The car door slammed, a reflection of the street façade obscured his face, and he was gone.

Later, I stood in my apartment and looked down on the myriad changing signals and dim tail-lights below that formed an endless, sweeping canon of arrivals and departures. With pain, I imagined Hong-do at the window of his aeroplane back to Seoul, contemplating the same city.

What would he be thinking of as the brute streets of New York contracted into cool, glittering grids? What would he recall of his years with us? Eating fried egg with his fingers, an afternoon’s serpent-hunting? He’d probably want to forget all that. Perhaps a dinner at Young Bin Kwan.

These incidents were meagre, but I hoped he would remember them. I wanted to be there in the background, and to appear across the table from him, years later. But I couldn’t break into his memories. Too much flesh, and glass, and time sealed them. I had to be content just to picture him thinking, suspended somewhere over the Pacific.

I remember being seven years old and the smell of apples. A boy was twisting my arm behind my back just for fun.

‘Say “Uncle”!’ the boy taunted. A crowd gathered. For some reason, ‘Uncle’ was the word American bullies used then to torture you. I wouldn’t say. it He twisted my arm harder and harder until my shoulder was shooting with pain, and my face was red and sweating.

‘Uncle! Uncle!’ I cried in furious shame.

## CHAPTER TWO Cardboard Boxes

After my uncle’s return to Seoul, life in Manhattan resumed its former shape as if he had not been there at all. Buses and taxis ploughed up and down Broadway, the phone rang, mail arrived. Pedestrians poured over crosswalks like columns of ants. The physical vacuum my uncle left was refilled instantly. The hard pavements sealed over my few, precious memories of him with the finality of quicksand.

When I tried to picture Hong-do’s life in Seoul, I could not. Its city smells, noises, and moods were inconceivable to me. Besides, it was too draining to imagine a world beyond New York. It was like living on the floor of an enclosed glass tank with unscalable walls. Only occasional, chastising glimpses of clear blue sky, in the gaps between buildings, reminded me of a remote natural order greater than Manhattan, quite beyond reach.

When I sat down to think of things to tell my uncle – in the letter that I never wrote him – I began to notice how marginal my life was. Days were measured out in so many tea-bags, bus-transfers, tuna sandwiches, cash-withdrawals, and hangovers.

I attempted to keep alive a connection to Hong-do through the occasional trip to Thirty-fourth Street for a Korean meal with friends, but this rather indirect approach failed, and without him the experience felt somewhat hollow. As predicted, my flimsy template of Korean awareness dissolved quickly, and attentions were soon fully reabsorbed in the lowly struggle for financial survival which had occupied my life before Hong-do’s departure. In my efforts to become a painter – and live in Manhattan – my life had become an undignified scramble for dry ground. I spent much of my time collecting cardboard boxes to move house with. Reasons for moving were various and unexciting: rent-hikes, lease-violations, buildings going co-op, and roommates like Ted, at West One Hundredth Street.

Ted was perhaps no better nor worse than you’d expect from a New York roommate. Ted had a honking Connecticut voice, and was a former Fly Club treasurer at Harvard, possessing the strange ability to bounce cheques selectively: rent and utilities cheques failing to clear, while extravagant entertainment and wardrobe bills found deep, instant funds. Ted stole your spaghetti sauce and lowered the tone of the bathroom with his depressing litres of bargain shampoo and generic deodorant. Pip, Alice and I were obliged to take numerous phone messages for Ted from The Hair Club for Men (where, at only twenty-four, he elected to go for weekly hair implants) and then struggle to pretend that we didn’t notice anything strange about the sudden presence of oddly-tinted brown hairs which appeared on his pate on alternate Thursdays. Unfortunately for us, this did not prevent him from attracting a girlfriend called Pierce; a law student with an aggressive laugh, who left items of clothing draped on the living-room furniture to signal her presence like a cat spraying its turf. But Ted’s most challenging habit was his nude sleepwalking. Fully clothed, Ted was irritating enough, but Ted entering my room late at night, buck naked, and climbing into my bed was pretty much the last straw. He would also make regular late-night sojourns into the kitchen when we were talking, and urinate into the refrigerator.

It was unfortunate that Ted’s name was on the lease. Although the unsolved murders of three young women on the rooftop of the building next-door cast an eerie menace over the block, and the peeling mustard-coloured paint, and tumbleweed dustballs in the corridor were slightly dispiriting, the apartment’s high ceilings, parquet floors, and wrought-iron balconies lent my existence a spurious graciousness that I appreciated very much at the time.

Sight unseen, I moved in to my next place on a searing August afternoon during a sanitation-workers’ strike, my belongings fitting into just two checker-cab trips. It was a sixth-floor walk-up on MacDougal Street, illegally sublet from a vacationing friend’s boyfriend. The strike was a bad omen: an almighty stench of food, cooked and rotting, hit me like a damp wall upon quitting the taxi; great banks of black plastic garbage bags were shored up generously on both sides of the street, shimmering in the heat. Up and down the block, an espresso bar, shish-kebab house, hot-dog-calzone-and-pizza stand, veggie-burger cart, sushi vendor and felafel emporium made MacDougal Street a sort of United Nations of fast food, whose dependence on the city’s sanitation workers was total.

I shared this apartment with Mona, a timid garment-district secretary from Belchertown, Massachusetts, her two neurotic long-haired cats, Mick and Mike, and a medical student, Ethan, who proudly told me on our first meeting that his father was the actor in the famous double-edged razor television commercials during the seventies.

The apartment’s subtly crippled appearance was owed to Delia’s vacationing boyfriend being something of an amateur carpenter. Interior walls were makeshift partitions he had enterprisingly nailed together late at night, apparently under the influence of hard drugs. The sturdiness of his carpentry was such that the cats could – and did – enter my bedroom by hurling themselves against the closed door at a gallop, whereupon they would lie down and moult on my pillow.

As it was summer, one didn’t mind that the frightening-looking gas stove was broken, but the bathroom arrangements were more testing. There was nothing as definite as a door to this bathroom; merely a friendly, cat-hairy, Indian bedspread thumbtacked to the doorframe, adding a certain anxiety to one’s activities therein. The superintendent had pledged to fix the plumbing, but in the meantime, toilet-flushing involved two trips to the kitchen tap with a bucket. Turning on the shower required the assistance of a pair of pliers. Once activated successfully, the exuberant shower-spray kept Mick and Mike’s kitty-litter tray in a continuous state of deliquescence.

When I think of MacDougal Street, I remember the inescapable melancholy of three ill-suited people sharing a small space, and the overwhelming smell of felafel. The airduct of the Middle Eastern restaurant downstairs expelled its kitchen fumes directly outside my bedroom window, which in August had to be permanently thrown open. I awoke in the mornings lightly coated in a dew of congealed felafel exhalation and cat-hair, provoking frequent bad-tempered battles with the shower-pliers.

That August it was too hot to paint in the studio, so sweltering free weekends were spent at friends’ summer places on Fisher’s Island and in Bridgehampton, or eating cherry Italian ices near the spray of the fountain in Washington Square Park, avoiding my flatmates. I spent many evenings at Laura’s, seated directly in the path of her electric fan, drinking cold beer and listening to the sound of other people’s stereos drifting in the stale night air.

I was grateful to my friend Delia for helping me out with a quick sublet, but having exhausted the charms of MacDougal Street, it was now time to move on. Laura, possessing a compassionate nature, agreed to split the rent with me, temporarily, on her studio apartment on Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue.

Our narrow, sooty tenement was positioned sensitively between a transvestite brothel and a funeral parlour. Laura had a bed in the living room, while I slept on a glorified shelf above a wardrobe, accessible by ladder. Being New York, it wasn’t even cheap. I also had to pay rent on a shared painting studio in the meat-packing district above the Hellfire Club, which I used on weekends and odd evenings. To keep up these two shelters, I held a full-time job uptown, with an antiquarian bookseller.

In the mornings at nine-fifteen I took the crowded subway uptown to Fifty-ninth and Lexington, stopped in at Frankie’s for my styrofoamed coffee and salt-bagel with cream cheese, and entered a modest doormanned building with my grease-spotted paper bag.

Through the bronze elevator doors awaited Oliver’s morocco-lined apartment, alias Cadogan Books, steaming with the force of three leather-preserving humidifiers. I let myself in with a key, and generally found Oliver, ruddy-faced, in a dark suit, tie, and half-lenses, sitting at the kitchen table sourly consuming a bowl of Frosted Flakes. He would be depressed about the uselessness of his life, occasioned by having spent another evening escorting a Mayflower matron to a dull gala at the Met.

Being a handsome, albeit impecunious Englishman of leisure, Oliver Flood was popular with various Pamelas, Aprils and Brookes. Although he felt himself well above being a walker, he was quite unable to refuse invitations, however repulsive he found them. Newly divorced, he was flattered by any reasonable attention, and admitted to being rather lonely.

After our usual morning banter, I would sit down at an elegant mahogany desk and attend first to the opening of Oliver’s mail, which he could not countenance without a human shock absorber. Sometimes plastic charge cards arrived snipped in two. Oliver confronted the arrival of credit card statements with the ritual of cowering in the kitchen doorway, half-lenses glinting, grunting softly, like an anxious primate. When the bill was very high, he hopped painfully from foot to foot, as if standing on hot coals.

Then began the grinding, circumlocutory task of updating the Cadogan Books mailing list and card catalogue. With a sense of hopelessness, I typed and retyped on index cards the names of cautious collectors, second-hand bookshop-owners, and changing department-heads of a number of universities and their often peevish and grand librarians (to whom I had already written) to try to sell off some rare volume, but Oliver’s books were usually too rare or too common to tempt the holders of these immensely fat-budgeted university funds. Meanwhile, Cadogan Books limped along, each day a little closer to bankruptcy.

Occasionally someone – Mrs Doris L. Vinehopper, for example, of 21 Mashpee Drive, Winnetka, Illinois 90987 – would mail-order two 1930’s editions of Omar Kháyyam’s Rubáiyát, and the fulfilment of Mrs Vinehopper’s desire would occupy the rest of the morning, dragged out with the aid of two further cups of coffee.

The ritual of preparing the books for their journey to 21 Mashpee Drive lent a sense of purpose to my otherwise aimless days at Cadogan Books, and kept the mind from wandering to the unpleasant reality that one was not doing any painting at all. The sheer beauty of the books made me lethargic; their gilded embossing, the satin feel of the calf book covers, and their pages’ mysterious, mushroomy smell.

But there was no slacking at Cadogan Books. Despite his considerable personal scattiness, Oliver was a stickler for book-wrapping formalities, hawkishly observing my erasure of extraneous pencil marks and smudges, the strategic insertion of a Cadogan Books compliments slip and invoice, cutting and snug taping of an underwear layer of sheet newsprint, followed by a vest of corrugated cardboard – Exact-O-knifed to precise cover dimensions – folded and taped to the tightest possible fit, and topped with a final overcoat of brown parcel paper, string reinforcement and sticky label: the book-wrapping equivalent of Jermyn Street winter tailoring.

Oliver himself went to the Post Office to mail the books; this being one of the more glamorous of the day’s activities, and a rare chance for people to know that he was wearing a suit. But oddly, if there was an auction to attend at Swann’s or Sotheby’s – dizzyingly social events for us – Oliver would insist that I do the bidding. At first it seemed that he was being generous, varying tasks to minimize staff boredom, but it became apparent, from arch comments he made about rival dealers Ephraim Pastov and John Speed, that he found the openly mercantile aspect of his profession a bit grubby.

While Oliver cut an enviable dash in the Post Office queue, selling books was one of his weaker points. His afternoons were generally spent attending art exhibitions, visiting the dry-cleaners’, lunching with potential clients, and sometimes listening to Puccini and Verdi, jotting down notes in an important hand for pedantic musical studies that he had been fine-tuning for years. Where such a desultory approach might be expected to yield limited results, Oliver was so annoyingly well-connected and clever that the books, however ordinary, and however long they might take to write, would be published by a decent house in England for quite a high fee, with no apparent negotiations undertaken.

One January morning after the arrival of a particularly emasculating credit card demand, Oliver took in the bad news with uncharacteristic silence. He eyed a priceless book of 18th century botanical illustrations with stupendous colour plates.

‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller,’ he said, melodramatically announcing his intended sales target.

‘Do you have to?’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘I suppose so,’ I said, glancing up from a new VISA statement. Perversely, Oliver appeared to hire his assistants for their flightiness and insubordination rather than their competence. My predecessor had been an London brewery heiress who dripped mayonnaise and nail polish onto the book covers, and conducted her intimidating social life on the phone in a particularly loud voice when introverted clients came to call.

Oliver went into the kitchen, and after the usual noise of cascading dirty crockery that accompanied most kitchen visits, emerged with a half-empty bottle of vodka, settled into a cracked brown leather armchair near the telephone, and crossed his legs.

‘What are you doing? It’s only ten-thirty.’ Ignoring this obvious remark, he struggled to remove the cap. ‘She’s terribly pretty, you know, half his age,’ he said, taking a tense swig from the bottle.

‘Who?’

‘Susan Yankowitz-Miller. Airline hostess emeritus; richest wife of the year. Said she might be interested in the book.’

‘Since when are you and Susan Miller having chats?’

‘Yankowitz-Miller. She insists. Saw her at Nonie Warburton’s ghastly bridge evening … If she does bite, that would be a ready eight thousand in the coffers. You’ve got to ring her up for me now.’

I protested.

‘You can. I pay you …’ Oliver handed me the bottle with a bland expression. I took an experimental pull. He passed me the number.

‘Meelair residence,’ said a distant Hispanic voice.

‘Hello, this is Mr Flood’s secretary calling for Mrs Miller.’

‘Mrs Meelair ees not home.’

‘May I please speak with her secretary?’

‘Chust a moment.’

Oliver mouthed something. I waved him away.

‘Avedon Buckley speaking, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s personal assistant, may I help you?’ said a lockjawed, blaring female, as if guarding access to one of the more important Pentagon generals. A protracted and farcical exchange of rude evasions (secretary) and slimy begging (me) ensued, and at last the mighty Mrs Yankowitz-Miller consented to come to the phone, despite having no recollection of having been interested in buying a ‘book’ – a word she pronounced with genuine surprise. Oliver, primed by the Smirnoff, sat on the edge of his chair, knees pressed together in a supplicatory pose, and injected into his voice an oily bonhomie for which he later loathed himself, and which instantly secured him an afternoon’s audience.

After a bloody three-week telephone campaign fought between Cadogan Books and Mrs Yankowitz-Miller’s manicurist, masseuse, hairdresser, chiropodist, colonic irrigator, fitness-trainer, voice-coach, personal shopper, florist, caterers, flamenco teacher, and the Save Tibet Foundation, Mrs Yankowitz-Miller duly bought the priceless book, and instructed Rodrigo, her decorator, to cut out the plates to hang in the baby’s bathroom. She also bought twenty-five yards of tooled leather books of no interest whatever to plump out her husband’s library. Cadogan Books was temporarily reprieved.

We celebrated by going to the movies at noon the following day to see Aliens II, and Oliver took me out for a late lunch at the Plaza afterwards. His jutting chin, diplomat-grey hair and dapper suit found an approving audience among the waiters and divorcees, who craned their necks with interest as he entered the room. The attention agreed with him, and he even bothered to pull in his stomach self-consciously as he got up to make a telephone call. As he turned, the vents of his suit seemed to flap deliberately, revealing a scarlet silk lining that flashed like mating plumage.

Oliver ordered an expensive bottle of Mercurey to impress the impudent sommelier, who had sized us up as illicit lovers, and although he was fairly merry at first, by the time coffee had arrived he was in quite a fragile state.

‘I’m thinking of packing it in, you know … Do you think I should pack it in? I’ve already had to sell some furniture.’

I was a bit shocked. ‘I don’t know … Maybe we should both pack it in,’ I said half-joking, emboldened by the wine and false security of multiple waiters.

‘Of course I’m grateful you gave me the job, Oliver, but it’s a bit tricky getting my own stuff done working for you full-time.’

Oliver eyed me critically, annoyed at my candour; he disliked being reminded that I had aspirations beyond Cadogan Books.

‘Come on, Ol. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. What about going back to England?’

‘Clapped-out place. Truth is, I can’t. Too many enemies. Customs & Excise, solicitors, creditors, cheated colleagues, ex-wife nonsense …’

‘Where would you go? Would you stay here? You can’t. You’d turn into an old soak who dines off old ladies,’ I slurred. He looked up sharply.

‘Well, it’s settled then. I’m going. To Brazil … Why not Brazil?’

‘A bit melodramatic isn’t it? That’s where war criminals go. Besides, it’s so far away.’

Oliver looked far away already, quite alone with his misfortunes. Betrayed by his wife, business crashing, on the run from some past stain that made him jumpy and sour. But it wasn’t any good telling me these things, I was on the brink of telling him, I was just as derailed as he was.

‘The climate’s good in Brazil,’ he said, pathetically.

Sitting there overlooking Central Park amidst thick napery and gilt, it was hard to feel too sorry for Oliver. He looked so sturdy; a mature oak of a man, enjoying the deepest possible roots, but these he had severed long ago. Like most New Yorkers, he was a socio-geographic amputee, a handsome trunk, cut off at the knees.

I was saddened and mildly alarmed by this display of middle-aged vulnerability. But before I could offer any modest comfort, a wave of jadedness drowned the tender sprout of compassion. This is New York, pal, said the pre-emptive voice, Get a grip. Unnerved by his lost expression, I faltered, then remembered helpfully that people here came and went with every toilet flush. Oliver was a bubble on the effluvient foam of the East River; a wad of chewing gum on the city’s stiletto. You had to get used to people leaving New York. You reeled in the severed ties of friendship quickly. You learned to let go in advance.

Numbness set in as I realized that I was jobless. We parted in the freezing rain on the wide, optimistic steps of the Plaza. Oliver and his troubles were dwarfed standing there beneath the bright waving flags of Canada, America, France, and Guam. He forced a smile, and hunched his shoulders in farewell.

I would miss Oliver very much, despite his manifold obnoxiousnesses. In my heart’s psychiatric wing, he was almost like family. As with my uncle’s demise, there would be no Mayoral committee, no special envoy at the airport thanking him for his brave effort, nothing to soften his humiliation. Just a thirty-five dollar cab-ride.

It was odd thinking of my uncle and Oliver together. They met only once; not surprising given that Hong-do and I met only occasionally, but the two men were so different that they refused to share the same memory.

The one time Hong-do came to Cadogan Books was a tense occasion. Opening the door to Oliver’s apartment, I kissed my uncle’s cheek awkwardly, truly happy to see him. But a chilling moment followed, when I saw him through Oliver Flood’s eyes. After a perfunctory stab of courtesy, Oliver seemed only to notice my uncle’s awkward business-English, slightly inferior suit and rather dodgy shoes. These preliminary findings appeared to relieve him of further interest. It was also apparent from Hong-do’s sharp-eyed silence that he thought Oliver an arrogant, trivial man.

Seeing these two worlds standing side by side in the same room, yet failing to meet in any way, was painful. I was torn; insulted by Oliver’s flippant welcome to Hong-do, yet ashamed to be able to understand Oliver and his limitations better than I could follow my own uncle’s thoughts.

During those years in New York, Hong-do had remained in his own Korean enclave, and I stayed in my Western one. It was as if we had been moored in the same harbour on separate submarines. Although I invited him aboard my vessel, he never stayed long; he seemed to know about the leaks. I should have done better; made the necessary repairs to accommodate him.

I reflected on these failures walking down Fifth Avenue, past the unappetizing, superfluous luxuries behind shatterproof glass. I searched the faces streaming towards me with detached curiosity, with painter’s eye, but was soon numbed by the insistent drumming of impressions on the retinae. Infinitesimal variations on one eyes-nose-mouth theme, so many individual, snowflake faces in the blizzard of urban rush hour humanity. A face missing one quality was superseded by a face possessing that quality, and missing another. One race complemented another race. Perhaps the incomplete, jigsaw faces all added up to one consummate face, reflecting God’s obscured likeness.

It was getting dark. I ate a warm pretzel more for recreation than hunger, looked at my watch, and decided to go into St Thomas’ for evensong. Its choir was justly famous. Despite being Catholic, I preferred the intimacy of this church to the cavernous nave of St Patrick’s Cathedral across the street, with its dwarfing gothic stalagmites. I entered the dim church, and slid into a pew at the back, like a stray. A row of fur coats and blonde heads swivelled round in impious curiosity. Through the tracery of the altar screen and the rose window, the night glowed a rich cobalt blue.

The service had begun, and my eardrums were bathed in silky, sweet, golden music. The boys’ voices were arrows of piercing sound, bright as stars; still, chill, and distant. Aimed at the heavens, the notes were like austere fireworks, going so high and no further, bursting and falling gracefully, no less beautiful for their vain striving. I felt both pain and relief at the sound, as my selfish, jagged yearnings bled into insignificance. The voices sliced through my pretence at being happy, exposed my false footing. The discomfort was oddly strengthening. Often I sat there, coated with a light scum of petty dishonesties and rank thoughts, and by the end of the service would feel quite clean; spirits rinsed by the acid purity of the music, anxieties temporarily assuaged by the healing words of the prayers:

‘O God … give unto thy servant that peace which the world cannot give … Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ, Amen.’

Then I would slink out again into the lucre-grimed circus of Fifth Avenue, where the invisible particles of acquisition and struggle accumulated again within like a layer of plaque.

Now I sat still after the fur coats and cashmeres had filed out solemnly, and stayed behind to think. I had not taken communion, partly for tribal reasons. I would feel a fraud not being Anglican. Who were my ‘people’? Did one need a people? An artist was meant to be a pioneer, a pilgrim, yet a submerged need to belong surfaced at odd moments. The Catholic church was a spiritual family, but somehow the bond was obscure, impersonal, like St Patrick’s itself. One longed for a more acute, flesh-and-blood connection, smaller than God, and more enduring, more forgiving than a lover. A chill of doubt and wonder enveloped me in the church. Rueful thoughts came of my own small family, scattered by discord and continental drift. I had no siblings nor living relatives at all on my father’s side. I thought of my uncle Hong-do, and a tiny spark of warmth lightened the void. Clashes with my mother had prevented me from exploring the Korean side of my family. I wondered if it might be possible to try now, or if it was already too late. Had I the maturity to attempt such a radical reversal of the entrenched ostrich position that I’d assumed toward her culture?

Wriggling, I tried to calculate what it would cost to embrace the Orient. It could be restrictive. One might even lose one’s former identity. Besides, would one be acceptable to them, as a half-Westerner? A quasi-Oriental face would only go so far to reassure them. Inner qualities would be needed to bridge the gap. Did these qualities already exist in me, or could they be developed as one went along?

Strangely, Korea was the last destination I thought of travelling to. It was a world I accepted as being permanently and impossibly remote. In my warped thinking, I vaguely imagined it to be full of Korean mothers who would give me a hard time. Perhaps I wasn’t strong enough to face the sad endings of the fairy-tale past related to me as a child. Yet the prospect held out an undeniable sense of promise. Maybe it was the key to some locked door which needed opening. Although one shrank from becoming a race-bore, for the first time it seemed that there might be a middle way between exaggerating its importance, and denying it altogether. Perhaps it would be possible to go to Korea.

Full of nascent intentions, I took the express train downtown, somewhat sedated by evensong and the good wine from lunch. But after a few minutes under the cauterizing lights of the jolting carriage and the barbed stare of a drunk vagrant, my nerves were soon fraying again. Korea was pulled from my thoughts like an expensive scarf caught in the subway turnstile.

I slightly dreaded arriving at the Twenty-third Street exit. Wesley, the one-legged black Vietnam veteran on crutches might be there at the top of the stairs, bellowing ‘Marry me!’ to all the young women walking past. Much as I had a soft spot for Wesley, I couldn’t face him tonight, and to my relief, he was not there. Back out on the street, the air had grown colder and the wind had picked up. I checked the train entrance reflexively to make sure that I was not being followed by the drunk from the subway car, nodded a greeting to Jésus at the Ti Amo Cigar Stand on the corner, and let myself into the dark apartment building, the sleet cutting into my cheek, like a spray of crushed glass.

The apartment was empty. Laura was out at an uptown gallery opening with her married lover. Not hungry, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. As I switched on the light the waterbugs startled me – and I them. Fat as dates, the bugs scrambled sluggishly out of the bathtub and filed into the large gaps in the tile-caulking that the landlord had promised to see to months ago.

I went to bed early, ascending the ladder to my carpeted shelf to read by the clip-on lamp. One could just about sit up without scraping one’s head. Without pleasure I drank the large glass of whisky I’d poured myself, feeling a sense of disgusted relief as the alcohol burned and seeped its way toxically around my bloodstream. In the semi-dark I drifted off – the marquee lights of the Coronet stayed on all night, bathing the curtainless apartment in ice-blue illumination. Since my small epiphany about Korea, I felt quite restless, unable to block out the usual nocturnal serenade. Traffic noise roared down Twenty-third Street. I was roused by the shout of a wino, the sound of a taxi honking. Around four am, someone’s newly discovered favourite song boomeranged around the building’s airshaft. The loud noise had a pointless, sad defiance to it, like a prisoner shaking the bars of his cell. It repeated three times more and abruptly stopped. Just before dawn, I slept.

## CHAPTER THREE Five Martinis

At six o’clock the next morning I was awakened, as usual, by the hydraulic twangs of the industrial elevators delivering shipments to the storage basement below the funeral parlour. Feeling jetlagged from sleep-interruption, I dozed on until nearly nine. Standing in the narrow, gloomy kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil I remembered that Oliver had given me a month’s notice. Familiar financial fear started to spread through my lungs like camphor.

Obviously, rents and utilities had to be paid; food, drink, and art supplies had to be bankrolled, and a surreally large college loan needed repaying. I had difficulty swallowing my toast. I took a scorching swig of coffee and glanced around the apartment; Laura had not come home last night. The apartment looked dusty and neglected in daylight. It was dusty and neglected.

That afternoon Laura rang me at Cadogan Books and asked me to meet her for a drink at the Algonquin. Harry also called, back from his business trip to Philadelphia. He would join us there later. Laura and I met at six-thirty, and sat on a sofa trying to look nonchalant. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of days. She looked tired.

‘It’s my birthday,’ she said brushing a lock of wavy blond hair out of her martini glass. I had forgotten her birthday. So had Philip, the married lover.

‘About Philip,’ she said, ‘I think I’m in trouble.’

‘Not pregnant.’

‘No. In love,’ she said.

‘It’s not an affliction, you know.’

‘But it wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to just like his company. Appreciate the square meals. Now I really mind; I mind that he’s married; I mind that I mind. And of course …’ she trailed off, ‘It’s tacky, I know …’

‘Maybe you could bail out now, before you get hurt any more.’

‘Easier said than done, old thing.’

‘Yeah, I know. But you’ve got to think about the big picture. Meals come and go.’

Laura looked upset.

‘Well, I’ve lost my job; Oliver’s going out of business.’

Laura raised an eyebrow. A balding waiter politely brought us our second round of martinis and another dish of greasy mixed nuts.

I had known Laura since university. Since before she had become an unknown actress. She hadn’t met anyone nice since her junior year, when she’d gone out with Charlie Downs. It was widely assumed that they would get married. Charlie surprised everyone by getting engaged to the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Senator for whom he’d worked in Washington.

Across the room I noticed a couple of preppy-looking boys, probably around our age. One of them was long and droopy, and the other had curly hair and wore a cream-coloured Irish fisherman’s sweater draped around his neck. Unexpectedly, the droopy one made his way over to our sofa.

‘Would you ladies condescend to have a drink with us?’

‘Suave,’ Laura said, smirking, ‘I guess I wouldn’t mind another.’

I shot her a questioning look. One worried almost equally about Laura’s man-judgement as about her drinking-judgement. She tended neither to eat enough to avoid instant drunkenness, nor to get enough decent male attention to repulse dodgy advances. However a diversion from the adultery question was welcome. Noting his friend’s success, the boy in the fisherman’s sweater rose from his corner, and sauntered over to our table.

‘Hi there. Wen Stanley. Tommy introduced himself? Tom Morgan. Morgan-Stanley, I know, I know … Mind if we sit down?’ he asked.

‘What kind of a name is “Wen”?’ said Laura.

‘Short for Wendell,’ said Wen, visibly warming to his subject. He and Tommy smiled conspiratorially. ‘Waiter! Another round please. Put these on my tab, will you?’ said Wen, untying his sweater sleeves.

I don’t remember a great deal of the ensuing conversation, nor was any of it surprising. Condensed version: them; Groton, Middlebury, Manufacturer’s Hanover training program, Fisher’s Island. Laura knew Tommy Morgan’s sister from St Pauls. Wen knew a few people from Brown, including my old boyfriend, Fred, and a slew of friends of my friends’ cousins. Wen lived on the upper East Side in his maiden aunt’s apartment. Would we like to go up there for a nightcap?

Laura said she’d like to, and excused herself to go to the Ladies’ Room. I sat there between the boys, smashed. We had eaten some nuts and pretzels. I counted having drunk five martinis. (A first.)

Just then Harry entered the hotel and looked around inquisitively. He spotted me sandwiched between two strange men, and his face hardened a fraction. I had forgotten that Harry was coming.

‘How was Philadelphia?’

‘Fine,’ he said, scrutinizing me. ‘Harry Palmer. Pleased to meet you,’ he said, shaking hands insincerely with Morgan-Stanley. He fired me another look and settled heavily into Laura’s seat. The boys exchanged men-of-the-world glances.

‘Not Palmer, of Palmer’s Peanut Butter, I trust?’ said Tommy, in an inspired gambit.

‘’Fraid so,’ said Harry, looking about distractedly.

‘Weh-hey! Palmer’s Peanut Butter! The King of Peanut Butters. That makes you … what, King Peanut?’ said Wen.

Harry flinched. ‘My father’s the boss.’

‘So what do you do, crack the shells?’ Tommy drained his martini glass languidly.

Harry ignored him.

‘So you must be an incredibly rich guy. Plus all the peanut butter you could ever desire.’

‘I’m flattered at your interest in the family business. Why, what does your father do?’

‘Here are the drinks. Cheers, Mr Peanut!’ Wen raised his glass. Harry’s jaw tightened again, and he looked at me with distaste.

‘I’d better go see what’s happened to Laura,’ I excused myself. As I walked to the Ladies’ Room the force of the martinis asserted itself in a blaze of dizziness and acidic hunger. Legs, which felt like they belonged to someone else, carried me to the little wood-panelled bar with the grouchy bartender. Ignoring his eyeballing intimidation tactics, I crammed a handful of mini-pretzels from the napkinned bowl into my mouth and walked away, crunching, pleased to be able to negotiate the crowded reception area without mishap. I found Laura behind a locked cubicle in the Ladies’ Room.

‘Are you all right, Laur?’ I got down on all fours onto the spotless black-and-white checkerboard floor and looked under the door.

‘Absolutely not,’ came a weak voice above her familiar feet, ‘I’ve been sick.’

Worried that I might get sick as well, I started to do some light jumping-jacks and toe-touching calisthenics, hoping that violent blood circulation might speed the alcohol-processing and chatted with some difficulty to Laura as I performed them.

The sound of Laura retching ripped through the echoey sanctum. It was so hushed in the Algonquin that one could imagine being ejected for making audible bodily function noises. A middle-aged woman in a fur coat entered and looked horrified, catching me mid-jumping-jack, and experiencing Laura’s vomiting noises as they peaked acoustically. She left in an outraged huff, trailing the scent of ancient Blue Grass.

‘I don’t want to rush you, but are you OK yet?’ I asked under the door.

‘Getting there.’

‘You can’t really want to go uptown with these clowns. I mean, it’s not as if we know them or anything. And Harry certainly won’t want to go.’

‘What is there to know, for Christ’s sake. Where’s your spirit of adventure? It’s my birthday after all … Won’t you at least go along with me on my birthday?’ she wheedled from under the door.

‘Excuse me for pointing this out, but look where “spirit of adventure” has gotten you so far, Laur – the tiles.’

‘Oh come on. Forget Harry. You don’t like him anyway.’

‘Thanks Laur. I’ll see you back out there. And hurry up will you? Do you need anything?’

‘Nah. Be out in a minute.’

Twenty minutes later, the five of us were in a taxi headed uptown. Tommy tried to charge the bill to his father’s reciprocal Harvard Club account, but the waiter refused. Harry, looking blacker and blacker, ended up paying the tab. The air was somewhat tense.

Although Morgan-Stanley were a bit of a joke, Harry’s martyred patience and plodding reliability were not especially endearing that evening. There in the taxi I was chilled by the thought that I didn’t actually care much what he thought or felt. Though we had only been seeing each other for a month, he was becoming quite proprietorial. Our watery liaison boiled down to a flirty evening shouting over the Palladium’s sound system, a couple of unrelaxed beers at Fanelli’s, a harrowing weekend at his parents’, and an intensely interrogatory dinner at Mortimer’s.

There had been a curious lack of urgency about our attraction. Harry’s advances, like his opinions, were politic, and had remained delayed on the ground for a disarmingly long time, like the take-off of a well-maintenanced jumbo aircraft. Although he was kind and well-meaning, I had been attracted to a friend’s racy description of what he had been like during college. As time went on, I wondered if perhaps the friend had been thinking of someone else.

Squashed up against Harry as the taxi gunned up Park Avenue, mildly sickened, I wondered about romantic Love. The rare, invisible currency running through people’s lives, whose presence tripled your blood count in the night. People pretended it didn’t matter if you had it or not, but it did. Maverick and precious, it was a wild thread stitching together unlikely people, strengthening them, suturing their wounds, weaving surprising designs in the chaos. Whatever it was, Harry and I had not been selected for its grace.

I recalled that weekend, being brought home speculatively, and prematurely, to his family’s grey-shingled mansion in Sands Point, to see how I went with the decor, and the weft and weave of other family members. Harry’s other blond brothers Mark, Randy, and Junior were all lined up at the enormous mirror-polished dining-table with their blonde-highlighted, nautilized wives. It was like being cast in an East Coast setting of a Tennessee Williams play. Mr Walter Palmer, rheumy-eyed, ruddy-faced manufacturing magnate and patriarch, sat at the head of the table sallying and interrogating his slightly cowed sons with brittle humour. Mrs Betty Palmer, with spun-sugar hairdo and kind, suffering expression, made conversation with Junior’s new wife Donna about the upcoming Cancer Benefit at The Pierre.

Harry smiled a little too encouragingly at me over his cut-crystal wine goblet. That I was an apprentice artist had been bad enough, but when Mr Palmer asked what my father did for a living, he took the news that my father was an artist too as if it were a personal insult. He couldn’t quite place me socially, which irritated him; artist-father – could be some Communism there – the slightly Oriental eyes, the prep-school and ivy-league background, it didn’t tally squarely on the balance sheet. Mrs Palmer was just asking where my mother was from, when Mr Palmer launched into a well-rehearsed anecdote about how Mr Palmer senior had worked his way up and across from air-conditioning units to the dizzying heights of the peanut butter world. We laughed tactfully, and filed into the equestrian-print-lined, chintzy study for coffee and Mrs Palmer’s special-recipe peanut brownies à la mode, as prepared by Dolores, the Filipina cook. I smiled inanely, and sat down on a needlepoint cushion that read, Nouveau Riche is Better Than No Riche At All.

Why had I gone? What was I now doing in a taxi with him and these other strangers? I didn’t really know. Muddling along, trying anything once. Lost. That most people I knew appeared to be equally lost blurred this fact, and removed the stigma.

During the cab ride Wen accidentally dropped his fisherman’s sweater out of the open window. The taxi driver refused to stop for it. Back out on the pavement Laura, now sober, paid for the cab as the rest of us were having considerable trouble finding correct change. Harry’s pale blue eyes looked more puzzled and washed out than usual, and he said that he was going to walk home. I told him I would be keeping an eye on Laura. As I said this, it occurred to me that I might not be seeing Harry again. I felt a needling regret as I remembered that Harry was quite nice really. I wished him well, and selfishly, disliked losing an admirer. Harry walked away, head down and hands jammed in his coat pockets, and disappeared into a gap of dark pavement between the streetlights.

Wen, Tommy, Laura and I crushed into the carved wooden elevator under the disapproving stare of the doorman, and entered Wen’s aunt’s apartment with a respectful silence as we took in the regulation upper East Side brocades, severe Chippendale and grandiose blackamoor figures flanking the doorway to the dining room.

Tommy, the polite one, decanted generous glasses of Aunt Stanley’s vintage Armagnac. A lock of Laura’s hair caught fire as he lit her cigarette. It wasn’t serious, but she was a bit shaken. We ate some Baskin Robbins Rocky Road ice-cream and leftover microwaved macaroni, in that order. After a couple of Armagnacs and some frugal lines of cocaine from a little waxed envelope in his wallet, Wen emerged from a bedroom without any trousers on, and sat down wittily on the ottoman at Laura’s feet in his socks and protruding boxer shorts.

This seemed like a good moment to leave. Wen, still trouserless, and Tommy escorted us downstairs in the elevator, and Laura – nursing her singed lock of hair – and I got into a cab and went home. We never saw them again.

As I lay on my mattress trying to get to sleep that night, my head throbbed. I was terribly thirsty, but refused to get a glass of water, having just drunk an unbelievable amount of water only moments before. I was too lazy to get up again, and could not guarantee a successful reprise of going up and down the ladder. It seemed unfair to have contracted a hangover while still technically drunk.

The garbled mess of the day circulated through my head like hard lumps of batter through an eggbeater, gradually growing smaller. Each diminishing thought was accompanied by increasing feelings of disgust, and surprising sadness. Oliver’s impending departure and Harry’s retreat formed one lump of ambivalent, unmelting loss. Laura’s troubled, sleeping presence nearby did not lessen the loneliness which seemed to have welled up from beneath the darkened furniture and flooded the room.

Was anybody else’s life so disjointed? If so, didn’t they worry about it? Perhaps this was just the normal texture of postgraduate life in New York at the end of a fractured, narcissistic decade. Even couched in the sedative language of Newsweek, the condition hurt. The disjointed bits had spikes, and the missing piece, whatever it was, had left behind a canyon of emptiness around which I had organized my life quite well.

At first I thought the missing thing might be Love, but wasn’t sure. Was Love so big?

Perhaps the force itself was still mighty, but its public image had been diminished by the same hype as less important things; it had been used to sell economy cars, diet soft drinks, untrue songs, banal movies, and anti-wrinkle creams. Although cheapened, private Love still exacted the same high price.

Dull thoughts followed, so boring that they slipped from beneath me, half-formed. I found myself thinking again of Korea.

The roar of traffic held me in web of continuous noise. The light of the cinema marquee across the street flooded beneath my closed lids and strained my eyes, despite their being closed. Thoughts racing, I longed for rest, for peace.

Often, when my mind tired of its ineffectual wonderings, I would think of cool, green leaves and imagine fresh, verdant smells. Fanned, rustling leaves enfolded me. The woods were so deep I couldn’t tell if it was night or day. I lay my head on some moss, and to the sound of rushing leaves, eventually I fell asleep.

## CHAPTER FOUR History

Cardboard boxes and canvases slid across the back of the rented station wagon as the car’s wide hips swung around the corners of Route 9. Driving up the Interstate earlier, my spirits felt progressively lighter the farther from New York I sped; Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, Holyoke, Northampton, Greenfield, and finally Exit 3 to Starksboro. The names of the towns on these green-and-white signs were tattooed in my memory; their familiar sing-song syllables, like nursery rhymes, prompting the mixed emotions of childhood, with its maddening dreads and comforts. The landscape growing steeper and wilder, I floored the accelerator up the final hill, impatient to arrive.

The next morning, sitting at the dining-room window, I gazed out at the high clouds and pine branches tossing in the March wind, drinking coffee from my preferred blue-willow cup and saucer. I smiled at the sight of my mother, weeding as usual, at the edge of the window frame. She would never run out of weeds in Vermont. For years, she had tried to grow tiger lilies, her favourites, by the front steps, but they always died. Resigned to the cantankerousness of the Vermont soil, my mother discovered an unusual answer. She made a garden out of the weeds themselves: cultivating the prettiest, and uprooting the nastier-looking ones. Growing up, I had found this practice – as well as making monster bonsai out of scots pines – rather embarrassing, but now thought it quite inventive. Looking at the scots pine-bonsai next to her, now much taller, I thought of Hong-do.

After quite a lot of thinking and worrying, I had moved out of New York and bought a one-way ticket to Seoul. It sounds a bit melodramatic, but the open-ended ticket had more to do with ignorance of how long the trip would take than with a desire to stay forever. It almost felt as if I were going to Korea against my will. Although no one was forcing me to go, thoughts of going to Seoul kept returning insistently during quiet moments, creating a pressure impossible to ignore.

Despite being unhappy about giving up my studio, it felt likely that if I didn’t go now, I might easily resist it later. The paintings I’d been working on were terrible anyway – a series of self-conscious fauve fire-escapes. They were leading nowhere at all, and a break could only help. The exact purpose of this trip was fuzzy, but its vagueness seemed appropriate. While it had seemed so small at the time, my uncle’s visit had opened up something unaccountably big. Clearly, going to Korea would be the most direct way of finding out what the nature of this something might be. Hong-do sent a brief note welcoming my visit.

My mother had been very surprised when told of my plan over the phone, but also seemed pleased. Being reserved, it was sometimes quite difficult to tell when she approved of things. I’d decided to try and learn some Korean, but unfortunately, my mother would be away on a recital tour for most of that short interval, so I was unable to learn from, and practise on, her. Instead, I brought with me a Linguaphone Korean language course purchased in the city: one of those instruct-yourself kits, complete with cassettes and a couple of bewildering booklets designed to simplify and decode the cryptic Hangul characters.

Nearly blue with frustration, I sat in my old bedroom with the headphones on, and tried again and again to halt the tape in the spot where the frail thread of comprehensible sound became a locomotive of complete gibberish. I studied the Korean alphabet chart and tried to think in ideograms rather than in individual letters. The concentration required was strenuous in the extreme; like trying to cut something by first melting down a knife, recasting it into a pair of scissors and waiting for the metal to cool each time you needed to cut with it; the scissors turning back into a knife as soon as the immediate task was complete.

‘Annyong haseyo. Annyong-i kyeseyo …’ I repeated over and over. Hangul required six syllables simply to say ‘goodbye’. King Sejong, inventor of the Korean language, promised that it would take only a day or two for his subjects to learn it, but he must have been flattering his countrymen. The difficulty of following Hangul on the earphones was hallucinatory. As the grammatical and conceptual differences between English and Hangul widened further, my metaphorical scissors shrank. It was like trying to penetrate a concrete wall with a safety pin. It filled me with indignation and disbelief. For the first time, I began to get a measure of the formidable barrier my mother had overcome.

Those few weeks were spent painting during the day, cooking for my father, and leafing through Western books about Korea in the evenings. Besides needing to know some facts, I craved a tangible definition of Koreanness. The books’ indexes yielded such dry characteristics as a) the sanctity of hierarchical Confucian family and social relationships; b) ancestor-worship; c) advanced scholarship and artistic achievement; d) self-reliance; e) self-sacrifice; f) pacifism; g) harmony with nature. Although not unhelpful, the words failed to construct a convincing picture. It was like trying to understand the soul of a missing person from police forensic reports and identikit features.

Reading the encyclopaedia, I grew embarrassed by my ignorance. Even the most pedestrian of facts had passed me by.

I learned that Korea – ‘The Hermit Kingdom’ – was one of the oldest, most insular nations on earth, autonomous, racially, linguistically and culturally distinct for 5,000 years. Legend held that Koreans were descended from a semi-divine bear king, Tan-gun, in 2333BC. Science dated Korea’s origins to the Palaeolithic Age, identifying Koreans, rather unpoetically, I thought, as Tungusic Mongoloids, a Mongolian sub-species taller and fairer than other Asiatic races, though not through Caucasian influence, and unrelated to the Ainu-descended Japanese.

I studied these bald, creaky facts as if for an exam, stopping frequently to make cups of tea. It was not that the exercise was exactly boring, but it was painful, like doing years of ignored accounts. I grilled my father for any intelligence he might be hiding, but his knowledge was fairly sketchy too. He had left art school to serve as a draughtsman in the navy in World War II, but hadn’t left Maryland. They heard little on the boats; minimalist wire reports, crude newsreel propaganda, leaflets – that was all. My mother had told him odd family stories over the years, but they were mostly the same ones I had heard. Teeth gritted, I persevered with the history books.

Korea had been the last Far Eastern country to open her gates to the West in the 19th century, and only then under severe foreign trading pressure. Its xenophobia developed over the centuries by devastating foreign invasions; multiple regicides; organized mass rape; mass torturings; massacres and cultural repression. These and other deeds of shocking opportunism had been performed enthusiastically by the Japanese, with occasional cameos by Mongols and Manchus. During periods of peace, Korea had been a vital cultural channel between Japan and China, bringing Buddhism, art forms, and technologies to developing Japan, some two thousand years younger than Korea.

When Christianity was brought to Korea in the 18th century by the French, it was a catastrophe. Unprecedented division and slaughter ensued, creating the chaos that neighbouring Russia, China, and above all Imperial Japan, were to exploit to their advantage in the 19th century.

Japan ordered the assassination of the Korean Queen Min in 1895, and had annexed the country by 1910, turning it, like Manchuria, into a puppet state, brutally suppressing its language and culture for nearly four decades. When the deposed and humiliated King Kojong refused to grant further concessions, Japan allegedly ordered his fatal poisoning in 1919, provoking the pacifist March 1st Independence Uprising in which the Japanese massacred thousands of unarmed Koreans.

During World War II, Japan forced two hundred thousand Korean women into sexual slavery for the Japanese Army along with thousands of Dutch, Malaysians, and Chinese women; they reduced millions of educated Koreans into menial labourers, confiscated wealth and property, and imprisoned or executed all dissidents. Only Japan’s defeat in World War II briefly restored Korea’s freedom.

Then came more familiar tragedies: 1945: Korea partitioned without its people’s consent on the 38th parallel – an arbitrary North-South division designated by Russia and the Allies at Yalta to facilitate the withdrawal of Japanese troops; North under Communist aegis; South Capitalist. Five years later came the Korean War: one of the most savage in recorded history. Seventy-four thousand UN fatalities, thirty-five thousand American fatalities, and a staggering three million Korean dead. It accorded no glorious victory, only a bitter forty-four-year ceasefire. UN Forces under American command managed to protect the South from Communist takeover, but had virtually decimated the country through bombing.

As a direct result of the three-year war, Korea was left geographically and ideologically divided against the wishes of its own people, impoverished, and razed to the ground.

Freakish result of the war: thirty-five years later South Korea had become one of the richest capitalist economies in the world, while the communist North stood isolated, starving, and virtually brainwashed under the bizarre leadership of Kim Il-sung; the planet’s last Stalinist dictator.

After reading this catalogue of woe, I was almost winded by the scale of it.

I remembered a conversation my mother and I had once had about the war.

‘It was our fault,’ she said ruefully, ‘for not developing an effective army when we could see the Japanese arming themselves to the teeth. We were arrogant, not wanting to adopt Western industrialism and militarism. We believed that we could stick our heads in the sand while other countries joined the race. We were romantic, unrealistic … All we wanted to do was to read our books, farm the land, and watch the sunset,’ she said.

‘We were not interested enough in worldly power. And we were punished for it. So now we are interested in money and troops. Probably too interested.’

I was more upset about her tolerant attitude towards the Japanese invasions than I was about watching sunsets.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said.

‘Well, tell me!’

‘Don’t raise your voice. You still twine. You’re too old to twine.’

‘WHINE, not twine.’

‘Don’t talk back like that …’

‘Oh, please go on.’

‘Well, you must know this … For centuries Korea always regarded Japan as an … unruly younger brother, to be tolerated, in the Confucian way, rather than to be treated as an enemy. Aggression against a neighbour was considered shameful to Koreans … modesty and pacifism are important national ideals. We would do anything to avoid a conflict with our brothers; Japan knew this very well, and simply chose to take advantage of it,’ she said.

I kept silent, well out of my depth.

‘Don’t think that the West was ignorant of what Japan was up to,’ my mother went on. ‘On the contrary! Until Pearl Harbor, the United States and Great Britain actually encouraged Japan’s expansionist policy as a check against Communist Russia! When Syngman Rhee – the Korean President – appealed to the League of Nations in the thirties to put a stop to the Japanese, did the West help us? Absolutely not. They appeased the Japanese,’ she said with a sudden burst of animation. ‘We always felt that the West was more of an enemy than the Japanese, who were at least fellow orientals.’

‘But it wasn’t the West who kept invading Korea; it was Japan. Don’t you resent what the Japanese did at all?’ I asked, incredulous.

She looked at me in surprise, and spoke slowly again, weighing her words.

‘Calm down … Well, as a nation Japan was always … competitive and a bit immature; big-headed. Blinded by visions of power and empire. Their sense of humanity got lost … Japan was not alone in this way of thinking, you know. Think of revolutionary Russia, of Nazi Germany, of China and Tibet, there are too many to single out.’

‘But Ma, they were uniquely cruel to Koreans! Inhuman. Surely you don’t defend them,’

‘They are still our brothers. Human. All human beings are capable of evil, especially in times of war. Human nature is weak,’ she said.

I was faintly scandalized by her forgiveness of a people who had systematically raped her country, stamped out her language – even forced her to change her name to Japanese. To top it off, they claimed creepy racial superiority, and denied the Nanking Massacre and the existence of the ‘Comfort Women’ until confronted with the disgust of other nations. Yet my mother had never spoken maliciously of the Japanese, not in my presence, at least, and she refused to speak ill of them now. Although her patently worthy, Christian stance was admirable, I was irked that my mother had never shown anger about it, and refused to acknowledge the damage to her country, even when the Japanese would express no remorse, nor make formal reparations for their war crimes. If she had ever felt strong emotions, she never admitted them.

‘War is war,’ she said simply. ‘Bad things happen.’

But I began to wonder. I wondered at my mother’s silence all these years. It was full of unanswered questions. Apart from this single conversation, she had barely mentioned the events I was now reading about. Had they seemed irrelevant to her new life, been a source of discomfort? Perhaps she had been sparing herself the hurt of my habitual indifference. It was true, I had shut out her stories as a child.

My mother and father had talked of going to Korea one day, but my mother quietly resisted it. Dad and I didn’t question her decision to stay away from Korea. Perhaps she dreaded the immense changes she might discover, both in herself and in the war-battered country she had fled. She had returned only once since then, after her parents’ deaths. She had not seen them again, nor been able to say goodbye before they died. This was so sad to me that I’d never dared ask her about it.

I had often wondered why she was so self-contained in her feelings. Reading about the country’s traumas now, I began to understand her a little more. It was only in her playing that my mother expressed deep emotion. Through the violin she could enjoy a safe, dignified release, externalized, separate from herself. Music seemed to liberate and to structure her feelings. Perhaps she feared that if she ever started grieving her losses, she might be unable to stop. Maybe time and distance had frozen them, as a kindness, deep inside her.

I looked out of the dining-room window quite exhausted from reading. The horizon returned my stare with peaceful blankness. There was no doubting that New England, with its stone walls, woods, and red barns, was an utterly different world. The Yankee landscape had its own past to digest. Murdered colonial settlers lay beneath the foundations of the ruined mill behind our house. The summer camp nearby, Camp Winnepesaukee, had a quaint Native American name, but no Native Americans remained in the county. Ghosts of unknown soldiers, Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain boys, were said to haunt the overgrown woods nearby. A Mississippi-born Vietnam veteran turned motel-owner had shot himself in the head on our road in 1974. I felt little connection to any of it.

America had been fortunate to avoid wars at home this century; its recent history seemed to contain mostly the weird, scattershot tragedies of unlucky motorists and airline passengers, assassins, terrorists, and lone maniacs. Apart from conveniently invisible Vietnam veterans, America’s sufferings were unusually noisy and individualistic; celebrated in internationally-televised courtroom battles and sumptuous spreads of marital woe in Life magazine and Paris Match.

Korea’s annexation, wars, and partitioning had been blows to the roots of its nationhood, withstood in a global silence. Its obscurity, aristocratic disdain for trade and militarism, and deliberate aloofness from the West ensured that no one cared about its traumas. Korea was too old and complicated to be understood by a world that worshipped Youth and Caucasian notions of glamour. What did it matter if Korea had been the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual centre of the Orient in the eleventh century, advancing painting, ceramics, medicine, Buddhism, and cartography, producing books in movable type in 1234 – two centuries before the Gutenberg Bible – or that pilgrims, monks, poets, scholars, courtiers, painters, goldsmiths and ceramicists had come to learn at her feet. Again, in eighteenth century Choson, Korea’s level of civilisation was unsurpassed in the Far East. But twentieth-century Korea was war-scarred and rebuilt; its back still turned somewhat defensively against the encroaching West, whose condescension Korea felt keenly.

When my mother returned from her concert tour a few days later, violin-case in one hand, suitcase in the other, I welcomed her differently. Maybe I imagined it, but her face looked more complete to me, and slightly harder, too.

As she walked up the flagstone path and handed her suitcase to my father, it occurred to me for the first time that she must have been carrying cases when she first arrived in America. There had been a moment just as specific as this one. Had she walked down a gangplank? What would she have brought with her? Had anything survived from those days? I tried to imagine her as she was then, but could only picture her in a snapshot from the late 1950s, when she was a music student in New York. How different she looked then, her face round and babyish, hair bobbed and permed; barely recognizable. She had long ago lost the open vulnerability of that sheltered girl from Seoul. I remembered a photograph of her even further back, in the forties, before leaving Korea. She was standing on the wide bank of the River Han in a brown overcoat, a tiny figure against a vast blue sky. It was taken at such a distance that you could barely make out her face. Over time the colours have bleached out, the image gradually disappearing in its frame.

Looking at my parents’ backs as they climbed the front steps, I realized how incomplete my knowledge was of them both. Perhaps I would always see them through the keyhole of childhood, reduced and truncated by my own self-interest, their limbs moving predictably in and out of the light; Mother’s hand stirring a soup-pot, tuning her violin, Dad’s shoulders hunched over a canvas, shovelling snow, studying the sports results in the newspaper. The keyhole was dark during years of absence; boarding-school, summers, and university. Periodically I sought clues in the enigmatic black-and-white tableau of their wedding photograph – the disapproved-of wedding that neither set of parents had attended on racial objections – but their young, exultant faces revealed nothing but youth and exultation, their mobile eyes frozen in the recording of the moment.

There was a land-locked familiarity about my parents; I had been content to stick to the limited territory I knew, to ignore their pasts, and avoid the entire ocean of their inner lives. Perhaps this was how it was meant to be between parents and children, our lives unequal parallel lines, never meeting. But it no longer felt quite right.

That night my mother regained control of the kitchen with an assured clatter, and as usual, prepared us a fine quasi-Eastern, quasi-Western supper; homemade mandu-guk (dumpling soup) with Chinese leaf, and Irish beef stew – kimchi optional – accompanied by rice and potatoes. Despite decades of inculcation, Dad still preferred potatoes to rice, and my mother rice to potatoes. I ate both.

I told my mother about the books I’d read. She listened carefully, and said little. She carried on eating quietly. She gave me a penetrating, measured look, neither warm nor hostile, which said, ‘We’ll see how long this interest lasts.’

After supper when my father went upstairs to watch the news, my mother made some ginseng tea and we sat down together a bit edgily, as always. Like many daughters and mothers, we had had fearsome disagreements over the years, but ours were magnified by a cultural gulf.

My mother had been a distant and rather puzzling figure, as unpredictable and all-powerful as the weather. Often abroad on concert tours, her absences and bad moods affected me like rain. Early on, I had been raised mostly by nannies. Feeling excluded by my father and me, my mother was often perfectionistic when she returned home, and I shrank from the force of her criticisms. Yet when she was happy, it was as if the sun had broken through at last, transforming everything, bestowing a warmth – that only she could bring – to cold corners of my being. Her kindness was never cloying or phoney, but vital.

We disagreed over petty things – her convent strictness over manners, clothes, curfews, and boy-girl etiquette – but more fundamentally, we did not speak the same language. I could not understand her mother tongue. Even when she spoke in English, the meaning of her words was pure Korean. I did not understand what she meant by ‘respect’: to me, it meant politeness; to her, it meant filial piety – children revering their parents. How did one revere? I thought it unfair to be expected to behave in ways I had never seen practised. America did not tend to produce reverent teenagers; why should I be the first?

Yet inadvertently – and sometimes knowingly – my behaviour hurt her deeply. She had worshipped her own mother, yielding at times I would not even consider, while I was fresh and moody, continuously breaking the code of obedience upon which her very childhood, and generations of Confucian childhoods, had been unquestioningly founded.

But compared to my boarding-school friends, I was fairly virtuous. Like a good Korean child, I was flirtatious but chaste, worked hard at school; competent at sports and the arts, sceptical but conscientious. Got into trouble only once: suspended for smoking a cigarette in the girls’ lavatory. My mother’s rage was frightening: when I got home, she locked me out of the house until dark. To her, I was a barbarian, needing urgent curbing.

Although we got along in a crippled sort of way, with the advent of teenage hormones, communication became untenable. Trivially, I scorned the square clothes she bought me and told her so, while she would upset me by dismissing F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath as a colossal waste of time. She disapproved of my acting in school plays,

‘Vulgar,’ she pronounced.

More distressing, when I tried to confide tremulous worries to my mother, she would respond with an authoritarian maxim or reproval which I would angrily reject, thinking that she didn’t care. Tears were ignored, along with achievements.

‘Mothers are not friends, they are mothers,’ she would say in defence of her sternness. We would make up, and row again. The turmoil was painful for us both. It was like having a diseased tooth; a dormant infection that flared up regularly, only worse. Beneath the irritable surface symptoms lay profound guilt and despair; a sense that I should have prevented it somehow, should have been stronger. It provided the first disturbing and confounding proof that two people could be biologically close, and yet be as strangers. My father and I got on easily, which may have aggravated things. But for all that, I loved my mother fiercely. Although I could not express it to her, I found her strength and principles quite awesome. I longed to please her above anyone else.

Sitting at the dining-room table, acute frustrations between us had relaxed with time.

‘Get a pen,’ my mother instructed gently. Then she got out a battered old address book, and opened it. The writing was mostly in Korean. Thanks to the Linguaphone booklet, I recognised the odd vowel. The pages were yellowed and flaking at the edges. She squinted at the page, and smiled with rare spontaneity. It reminded me of the way she had looked ten years ago, when I spied on her speaking Korean with Hong-do.

‘You must go and see my cousin and his family; he was once my tutor. This is his name and address. And of course, your aunt, Myung-hi, and our eldest brother, your uncle Jin-ho, if he is still alive.’

This last comment chilled me. Didn’t she know if her brother was still alive? Why didn’t she know?

‘It’s complicated. I can’t really say,’ she said. ‘My older brother has not been well, and since my parents’ death, I lost touch with other relatives.’

I was shocked by her refusal to talk about it, or even to think about it. This mention of my other uncle brought a heavy sadness to my mother’s face that I did not understand then, but later would.

She moved on to discussing another relation. I listened, bemused, and grew cautiously excited about these names and places. It was like mapping the first inches of the unknown iceberg of my mother’s past.

Although she was silent, one could sense the importance she attached to bequeathing these family details. After twenty-seven years I was still not wholly ready to receive these names, delivered in her difficult handwriting, in Korean. But somehow, a lazy willingness to try had come, and just outweighed the reluctance.

Between sips of tea my mother mentioned that So-and-so was now president of a hospital in Seoul, and that Such-and-such was a prominent banker, that X was a drunk and a womanizer. Because I had not yet met them, characters became jumbled, and I forgot which of them to avoid and which to pursue. But my appetite to find them began to sharpen.

‘I wish I were going with you,’ said my mother, to my surprise. ‘But I can’t go now. There is too much to do. Another day maybe we can go,’ she said, as if not entirely convinced that she could.

I kissed her good-night. She moved her face away slightly, as usual. Sometimes I had been a bit hurt by this aversion, but my uncle had told me that in Korea, grown-up relations did not express their affection in the casually physical Western manner.

‘Good-night,’ she said, and turned to mount the stairs.

One day towards the end of March, my mother and father drove me to the airport. My journey was to be especially long; I was flying first to London to see an old art professor, on a cheap fare, naturally, and the trip would take a further eighteen hours from London; a punishing London-Paris-Anchorage-Seoul route.

Inwardly, I said goodbye to the pines, and to the long pebbly curve of our drive that was carved by repetition into my bones. The northern sky boiled purple over the roof of the car. The maple trees on the dirt road were in bud, their red-tipped branches forming an untidy ceremonial arch under which we drove until we reached Route 9. I turned and looked back through the mud-splattered rear window. The receding tunnel of maple trees was telescoping smaller and tighter, like a closing lens.

This departure felt different from the rest. How many times had I left home, for many purposes, usually doing so with an ungrateful sense of relief. Like most adolescents, I’d wanted to teethe on a bigger world.

These woods, these fields, were kindly guardians I had outgrown; I had become blind to their possibilities. I had never felt a sense of belonging to this landscape; not like our tractor-driving, dyed-in-the-wool Yankee neighbour, Addison White, and the generations of Whites before him, nor like Judith, the ex-New York sophisticate in the hilltop farmhouse who proudly wore her handwoven shawl, whatever the occasion, the way a grateful immigrant might fly a flag over the front door.

Somehow, this didn’t feel like home. Throughout my life I longed to recognise a picture of home. My heart was an empty frame, waiting. There was nothing wrong with the view out of the dining-room window, but it didn’t fit the frame. It was both too vast and too small. Yet I was grateful to these trees and ditches; for their mute acceptance of their limited role, for being there, unchanged, whenever I came back. I was grateful to the backs of my parents’ heads in the car for the same reason, although I never said so.

A clear purpose began to form as I sat in the car. With the family names as foundation-stones, I might begin to build a sort of makeshift bridge from West to East, between my mother and myself. It was over-optimistic, even a grandiose idea. The bridge would have to be much stronger than both of us to succeed. The help of something far greater was needed; perhaps God, upon whom I depended with shallow irregularity. Despite the unlikelihood of achieving this ambition, a constructive impulse in this direction was a welcome surprise. I felt tentative hope. Then a heavier thought nearly eclipsed it. This journey would take me far away from where I had been before, and deliver me somewhere I might not want to go. It was likely to take a long time. Worst of all, I might have to change.

At Logan Airport my parents and I entered the transatlantic departures terminal. Dad heaved my heavy suitcase onto the luggage belt at the ticket counter, and my mother fussed, telling me as she always did, that I was carrying too much.

‘Don’t take so much next time. You always carry too much. Next time …’

‘Ma …’

‘It’s true, you always …’

‘I know, I should travel more lightly.’

I rolled my eyes at Dad, who smiled. I embraced him goodbye, and he clasped me awkwardly, his cheek rough, big shoulders hunching down to reach me, his usual silence containing patient affection. His clothes smelled of turpentine. My mother looked very serious and her eyes, level with mine, were liquid with tears.

‘What can I tell you? … Be good. Don’t impose on anyone … Make sure to say hello to everyone. I … Too bad I can’t go with you … Write.’

I threw my arms around her small, slightly rigid frame, and squeezed her tightly until she softened. I felt a single sob escape her body. My past petty hatreds melted into intense regret and crooked love for her.

‘I’ll be back, don’t worry. I’ll tell you everything … I want to find the temple on Mount Sorak. And the chestnut trees. I’m going to find them.’

I don’t know what made me mention the temple or the trees. It just came out. I swung a satchel over my shoulder and headed for passport control. I looked back, and my mother and father waved, their gestures small and uncertain. My mother looked forlorn. Suddenly she waved again, this time bigger. She waved again and again.

PART TWO Mother

## CHAPTER FIVE Et in Arcadia Ego

Korea Kangwon Province 1936

I looked up at the sky. It was all of heaven to me, and the world. Korea was the world; wide and clear and blue. And it jiggled. I was sitting in the basket of my father’s bicycle, with my head tipped back, laughing. The rays of the sun pierced through my eyes, blinding me pleasantly.

The pebbles on the dirt track made the handlebars judder. My father was not looking at the sky, nor was he laughing. He looked very serious, concentrating on the road ahead. I tilted my head from side to side in the basket, to make him smile.

We were on our way to the marketplace in Yangyang, a few miles away from home. I loved this ritual. For a few hours, it was just my father and me. No interference from my naughty brother or crying baby sister, and he bought me rice toffee. Usually it was the eldest boy who had the honour of escorting a father to market, but Jin-ho made my father so cross, that I, being next eldest, and nearly six years old, inherited the fun.

I wish I could tell my daughter the way it was then. But where would I begin? Seeing her to the airport, all that I left behind comes flooding back as we drive back through this Northern landscape, a landscape that I now accept as having little to do with me. I am a small leaf, blown here by history.

Riding in the big basket of my father’s bicycle, everything was golden. It was spring. Sun glistened upon the pine needles, it danced in the poet’s stream in the village, and it warmed the barley grasses of the fields on our family estate. The breeze washed the scent of jasmine and acacia past my eager nostrils. Exploded cherry blossom hung like pink popcorn in the boughs of trees along the road winding down to Yangyang. There was a slight mist in the valley, and the light was soft, a softness that would be gone by June.

In the noisy marketplace we parked the bicycle outside the sweet shop, and father bought the toffee for us children. I got to carry the little paper packet, and was also entitled to pick out a sweet or two as we promenaded round the market.

The square in Yangyang was like a circus to me. Awnings, tents, carts overflowing with goods, and well-groomed livestock crowded the centre. Villagers jostled each other, and picked their way between tables and groundcloths loaded with bountiful baskets of grain, displays of glistening fish and shellfish, dried cuttlefish and octopus, seaweed, heaped kimchi, pine nuts and chestnuts, fruit, vegetables, rice cakes and dainties. Stalls offered bolts of rainbow-coloured silks, fine handwoven linen and cheap cotton muslin, native canoe-shaped rubber slippers, metal chopsticks, brass, porcelain and celadon bowls, books, lacquer trays and chests, mother-of-pearl inlaid boxes, ink and inkstones, rice paper, linen, calligraphy brushes, ivory and tortoiseshell combs. Familiar vendors crowed and yelled their bargain prices, competing with lowing cows and squawking fowl.

I stared boldly at the other children strapped to their mothers’ backs or holding their grandmothers’ hands. They looked much more babyish than me; I was allowed to roam freely by my father’s side, making what I believed to be adult conversation.

We bumped into Baby Uncle near the well in the square. His name was Gong-lae, but I called him Baby Uncle, as he was the youngest of the Min brothers. Bending down, Uncle pinched my cheek and stole a piece of toffee in one motion. Then my father told me to wait for him by the willow tree while he and Baby Uncle went into a small office to deliver some papers to a colleague. Uncle bought me a rice cake. I sat down near an old grandmother, and inspected the cake, which I dismantled and ate kernel by kernel to make it last as long as possible, and surveyed the crowd, quite giddy with happiness.

My father eventually came out of the little building, and furtively tucked an envelope into his breast pocket. He looked a little happier than before, and swung my hand in his as we walked back down the street to the bicycle. With father’s help, I squashed back into the basket, legs dangling out, and we pushed off heavily onto the dusty track, wobbling off for a few yards as we headed back home.

I did not realise then how terrible those spring days were for my father. That day, as every day since June 1910, we were living under a military dictatorship. Japan, fresh from their victory over Russia, had begun colonizing Korea. Our Emperor Kojong was reduced to the status of King. The same blue sky that entranced me was oppressive to father. For him, nothing would be right and good until Korea was free.

Here, at market, father, aboji, perceived a very different scene to the one I did. Yangyang had once been fairly rich. Now it was poorer and shabbier. On this Eastern coast, there was bounteous fishing and farming, but the best catch and produce were now skimmed off and profits channelled to the occupying Japanese government in Seoul.

Our clan, the Min, were the chief landowners of Kangwon Province, our estates straddling what is now both North and South Korea. We had been rulers here for centuries. Over the course of my father’s childhood he had seen our ancestors’ ancient hereditary and honorary titles stripped from us, and for a pittance, we had been forced to sell major land holdings to the Japanese. We were one of the last yangban families to remain in the province. Father felt that we could not leave, so deep were our roots here. Less fortunate landowners and the middle classes suffered the seizure of their land without payment, and those who opposed this were shot by the Japanese. Many had fled to Manchuria and Siberia to avoid impoverishment and Japanese persecution. Only bankrupt commoners and former serfs stayed on.

The market square was nearly deserted compared to its former self, the grass near the well was overgrown and ragged, even the poets’ stream was now a muddy trickle, drying up in its bed. Japanese officials disguised as Korean peasants roamed the streets of Yangyang for signs of local underground activism, but fooled no one with their blatantly Japanese features, squatter physiques, and pidgin Hangul. But the authorities were correct to be worried about the underground resistance movement. My father and Baby Uncle had that morning been attending an Independence meeting in the ironmonger’s storeroom. Both of them had already been sent to prison once for their efforts.

Yet naturally, I knew nothing then of my father’s political secrets. The grown-up world was a remote kingdom in the eyes of Korean children. One trusted, accepted, and obeyed the word of parents and elders. This was Confucian law.

As the rise of a steep hill loomed up before us on the bicycle, I saw that familiar stretch of the road which led to the green gates of our estate; a view that was the most beautiful I have known. The wing-tipped lilt of the tiled roof-gates made my heart swoop upwards, for within the walls of the estate lay what I can only call happiness. Years later, the silhouette of those gates is still scarred in my memory with the burning iron of loss.

At this point in the road I descended from the bicycle, and walked with my father the rest of the way, shaded by an avenue of gingko trees. Soon the gravel drive forked, and we took the right turning to our farmhouse on the crest of a hill, while the road continued to the left, leading eventually to the grand main house, a mansion, where my eldest uncle, Yong-lae, lived with his family, along with Baby Uncle, who was still a bachelor.

My grandfather, Lord Min, was now dead. I remember him only slightly, but those impressions cast a giant shadow. He was a splendid, rather mythical figure in his red silk court robes, carried aloft by serfs in his sedan chair. At home, he had been no less awe-inspiring in his high black horsehair hat, with his long white beard and gray silk robes. He moved slowly, and walked with a silver-topped cane, a gift from the King.

Grandfather had been the last of the jinsas in the family; jinsa was a yangban imperial scholar’s title, now obsolete, bestowed on him by the late King Kojong. Grandfather had been a courtier to the King in Seoul, and was also a distant cousin of the Queen. But Lord Min – Gong-ju was his first name – was too ambitious for the King’s liking. My grandfather’s private armies exceeded the royal quota, and with some relish, the King exiled him to his Northern estate until his death.

At the time of his marriage, my grandfather had a vivid dream of three birds flying. His wife later gave birth to three sons: Yong-lae (Dragon arriving), Bong-lae – my father (Phoenix arriving), and Gong-lae (Peacock arriving). That he should have had so poetic a premonition was said to be typical of him. He also fathered two daughters, but being female, my aunts had merited no such privileged iconography in my grandfather’s dreams.

People spoke of Grandfather as if he were a god, and we all were happy enough to go along with the indulgent descriptions. Min Gong-ju was princely, witty, a brilliant scholar of Chinese classics from the age of seven, a formidable poet and horseman, never seen merely riding on his white horse across the fields, always galloping. He was considered a good and merciful feudal lord. As a youth, he had been strikingly handsome: fair and rosy, with liquid hazel eyes and shiny amber-black hair. Noble Manchurian blood accounted for the European features of some of the Min clan. I remember his uproarious laugh, quite terrifying, coming from beneath his towering, solemn black horsehair scholar’s hat.

But at the end of his life, Grandfather was rarely even seen in public, much less laughing. When he went to the village he wore a Western Homburg low over his eyes so that no one would recognize him, so humiliated was he by the effects of the Japanese occupation, and our family’s disgrace.

It was Grandfather’s generation that had witnessed the fall of Korea: he had been alive when the rebel army was defeated by the Japanese, and had witnessed the dissolution of the entire Korean Armed Forces by the occupying militia. He had been at Court in Seoul when a group of government ministers had committed mass suicide in protest at Annexation; he had even seen the expression upon the King’s face when the Japanese Declaration was presented to him.

My grandfather stood by politely as Japanese police ransacked his personal library, confiscating heirloom history books and irreplaceable hand-calligraphed works of Korean poetry and ancient literature which had been declared subversive. Grandfather was made to watch as armed police burned his dearest books in a public bonfire, their wisdom vanishing in a column of destructive black smoke.

The takeover was a nightmarish echo of the Hideyoshi invasions of the sixteenth century, when Japan had systematically devastated Korea. Arson had been perpetrated on such a scale that virtually no building in Korea not constructed of masonry survived that invasion: even Kyongbok Palace, the royal residence, was burned to the ground, and later had to be rebuilt. All government buildings and royal libraries holding irreplaceable Yi Dynasty records were burned. Thousands of farmers and civilians had been slaughtered and their property destroyed by Japanese troops. The noses of twenty thousand Koreans had been sliced off their faces. Artisans, doctors, and printers had been captured and kidnapped, taken prisoner to Japan for their technological and medical expertise. Although despised and maltreated by the Japanese, they were never allowed to return home to Korea.

Now the descendants of those Japanese invaders were back in Seoul repeating their public book-burnings – eradicating virtually all of the country’s new historical and political texts, schoolbooks, and works of nationalist literature – and replacing them with their own accounts of Korean history. The Japanese literally rewrote our history, redrafting political events to diminish and excuse their atrocities, and teaching this sanitised version of history to Korean and Japanese schoolchildren. Lord Min was furious to learn that those children whose parents could not afford private education were deliberately being kept illiterate by the Japanese government, who had closed down over two thirds of the schools to this end. Knowing scholarship to be the cornerstone of Korean society, Grandfather said the Japanese could not have chosen a more cynical form of cultural strangulation. Cruder totalitarianism came in the banning of Korean newspapers and of public gatherings, and the changing of street signs from Hangul to Japanese.

Our family could not understand how it had been allowed to happen. The West made no moves to intervene. The League of Nations did not respond to our pleas. Forty years earlier the West had been virtually silent when Queen Min had been murdered in her own Palace by a mob of Japanese assassins, who had hacked her body to pieces with machetes and burned her still-living remains with kerosene in the Royal Gardens. Had the Japanese even attempted such an act on a European monarch, would Japan not have provoked a war, or at the very least been ostracized with sanctions by the world powers? The West’s appeasement had rocked my grandfather.

Millennia of civilization were being systematically destroyed by a Japan drunk on the liquor of new military and industrial power. The last vestiges of the Korean aristocracy were abrogated. Our country was finished, as far as Grandfather could see.

Grandfather had often said that the yangban class had brought the 1894 reforms upon themselves through gross abuse. Corrupt aristocrats used their rank as an excuse to do nothing all day but gossip, smoke pipes, play chess and practise archery. These reprobates still insisted that commoners dismount when meeting them on the road and when passing before a yangban house. For centuries yangbans had had the right to ignore tradesmens’ bills, to exact loans from farmers and neighbours, demand free labour from peasants and unlimited use of their cattle and horses, the right to free food and lodging at the homes of magistrates, and amnesty from the law except in rare cases of treason. Such blatant injustice was wrong and deserved to be abolished along with slavery, thought Grandfather, but he also felt strongly that the class structure ensured civilisation, and with reforms, should remain intact.

Lord Min did not like to understand the success of the Japanese; Japan was amoral, and yet it flourished. Right and wrong were reversed. How could the world be blind to their perfidy? He had said that the Japanese were only accepted by the West as civilized beings because they adopted European haircuts. He was partly serious. Even in such an outwardly trivial matter as hair dressing, he saw the contrasting character of Korea and Japan. Where the Japanese had passively accepted a daft government edict for all men to cut their hair short in the European fashion, in Korea, when the Japanese consul, Inoue, decreed a similar order for Korean men to cut off their topknots, it caused a national furore, and Korean ministers resigned their posts in protest. Although the King himself, out of diplomacy, finally adopted the edict, those Koreans who cut their hair in the country were beaten up in broad daylight by topknotted dissidents.

For Grandfather, who had been raised to pity the barbarian ways of the Japanese rather than to condemn them, being forced to bow to them in his waning years became an intolerable degradation. He grew ill, ageing quickly.

Near the end of his life, Min Gong-ju, now a commoner, returned with a Buddhist monk, to the land he once owned in the stupendous Sorak Mountains, confiscated by the Japanese. Grandfather became obsessed with erecting a family temple on the highest peak, in defiance of the loss of centuries of stewardship.

He ordered the temple to be built in the grounds of a hermitage to symbolize the lonely and vain path of enlightenment, and to represent inviolate Korean sovereignty. The Min name was to be carved upon the temple pillars. Min Gong-ju ordered one thousand chestnut trees to be planted around the temple for longevity, their eventual lushness and strength were to screen it from enemy detection. The temple was constructed in secret by several of his former serfs, who risked their lives to do so. Soon after its completion, my grandfather died. He never saw the temple.

Since Lord Min’s death, the muscular gables of our ancestral house had lost their air of potency and assurance. The calm and old-fashioned grace within its rooms had also vanished with my grandmother’s spirit. She had died six months after her husband. But the heaviness in the household had set in a few years before, with the unhappy behaviour of Yong-lae, the eldest Min son, now in his thirties.

Yong-lae, it was said, had inherited his father’s good looks, intelligence, and fondness for riding a white horse, but entirely lacked his backbone. Where Lord Min had revelled in the responsibility and dignity of his station, dutifully officiating at dull civic and royal ceremonies wherever he was needed, and lending his attention to humble and humdrum estate maintenance, Yong-lae wrote the occasional poem and spent the greater part of his time visiting his tailor in Seoul.

One year, Yong-lae secretly ordered seventy splendid coats to be made for himself. This was a great mystery to us, because we never particularly noticed his new clothes. When the bill arrived my grandfather was enraged. He confined Yong-lae to the estate grounds for two months, and ordered a servant to burn all of his son’s trousers but one scruffy pair, which he was ordered to wear with his new coats.

But this ploy backfired. Yong-lae’s sartorial appetite remained undiminished. Once the dramatic value of grandfather’s action had faded, Yong-lae genuinely needed new trousers. But a weakness for fine clothing was the lesser of his peccadilloes.

‘Going to his tailor in Seoul’ soon became a euphemism for drinking binges, which began tamely enough, but worsened. Predictably, not even Yong-lae’s marriage to a lovely and sympathetic young woman of a neighbouring clan could keep him away from the bars and taverns of Seoul.

Yong-lae’s drunkenness shamed the family. It was an awful cliché, my grandfather complained to him, for an eldest son to be so irresponsible. But Yong-lae did not smile and promise to reform, as he might have done before. It was now as if his father were discussing someone else, whom he only vaguely remembered.

Grandfather, already shattered by the invasion, could not fully fathom that his right-hand son, traditionally relied upon for support and leadership in parents’ old age, was a sick human being, as useless as a broken leg. Towards the end of Grandfather’s life, the look of disbelief frozen in his eyes was terrible to see. The burden of assuaging Yong-lae’s failure fell to my father, Bong-lae, the second son.

Father was silent now as he pushed his bicycle. Although the big house would always be splendid, a symbol of better times, the farther we withdrew from the grand main house, the happier I felt. The hill rose up a gentle slope to our farm, and soon we were home.

How can I describe it? It was nothing special. And yet to me, it was a paradise. Just a traditional Korean farmhouse of wood and white clay, with a winged, grey tiled roof, set comfortably in a crab apple orchard, watched over by jagged blue mountains. Unlike the big house, we did not have a colony of live-in servants, just a housekeeper, and a tenant farmer and his small family in a nearby cottage to perform heavy chores, tend the livestock and vegetable garden, and help with the prodigious work of preparing food for winter.

Above all, home was green. The green of new rice grasses. The green of ripening fruit. The green of a bride’s gown. Out of my bedroom window, wide verdant fields, thick copses, bamboo groves and gracious trees stretched outwards, uninterrupted on all sides. The teasing mists of the East Sea added enigma to the solidity of the land.

My mother, wearing a pale-blue linen han-bok with white ribbons, descended the step to greet us. My little sister, who was two, followed her out of doors and fastened herself onto my father’s leg. He picked her up and gave her a piece of toffee.

I took off my shoes, entered the house, and thirsty from the journey, went straight into the kitchen to get a drink of water from the well. The enormous kitchen was very much the centre of the house, quite literally the hearth of our home.

It was a two-storey annexe where grain and dry goods were stored above, with an outdoor wing for the chickens and pigs, and below, the furnace and ovens generated our ondol heating – the Korean system of flue pipes which carry heat beneath the oiled, sepia-papered floors of every room so they are warm to sit and sleep upon. Here, behind a large embroidered silk screen, we also bathed, drawing our water from the indoor well which was kept covered with a huge carved wooden lid.

It is the smell of that dark timbered kitchen that I remember still; a sweet and earthy scent of hay and fermenting soya beans. More than any other, this was the smell of my childhood. It also held the transient odours of delicious soups simmering in great iron cauldrons and succulent bulgoki grilling, but the scent of spicy hay was the irreplaceable constant, lingering in the eaves, and deep in my memory.

My mother supervised the making of our own soya sauce, duenjang and kochujang sauces in the grindstones, the slicing of radish and cucumber for pickles and, of course, the hand-manufacture of several varieties of hot kimchi, which were kept in enormous stone urns on the jang terrace in the garden. It was a year-round activity to keep the food stores filled.

My brother, sister and I played boisterous games of hide-and-seek in the storage loft beneath the mighty oak beams, trying not to upset colourful baskets, jars, and sacks of provisions. Jin-ho – showing off that he could read and I couldn’t – called it Ali Baba’s treasure cave, for it held everything we could imagine.

There were baskets of garlic and ginger, brass bowls of whole green chillies, dried red chilli flakes, cold iron cauldrons of soya beans for sprouts and curd, huge sacks of rice, barley, maize, flour, potatoes, sweet potatoes, ceramic jars of dried chestnuts, ginseng root, green and preserved persimmons and crystallized ginger, dried plums, dried mushrooms, anchovies, and stacks of kite-shaped dried cuttlefish – a local specialty. Serried rows of stone flagons stood by the staircase; honey, sesame and fish oil, home-made rice wine and soju, a fiery and disgusting grown-up drink which Jin-ho had been recently sick on.

I drank the cold spring water, and went out to climb the crab apple tree. I amused myself for some time by sitting on the highest bough, pelting my little sister with apple blossoms. At first she loved it, tipping up her face to welcome the petals, but then decided it was all too much, and began to scream.

My mother opened the kitchen door and struck the brass gong. Forgetting our petal fight, Myung-hi and I raced inside for a simple lunch. Afterwards we had our usual nap. I fell asleep dreaming blissfully of rice cakes and bicycles.

By suppertime it was cool outside. My mother closed the papered screen door overlooking the flower garden and lit the dining-room lanterns. We all sat round the low mahogany table keenly looking forward to eating. Jin-ho’s hands, for once, passed inspection, so there was no delay.

My mother ladled out the mandu-guk – dumpling soup – and then we had rice, hot kimchi, steamed bracken stalks with sesame oil, dressed cucumber, radish, spinach and beansprouts, toasted seaweed, and marinated grilled chicken slices dipped in spicy bean sauce and wrapped in fresh lettuce leaves, followed by juicy scarlet strawberries. Our meals were very simple, but delicious, with everything fresh from our farm.

Toward the end of supper, there was a sound outside the door; someone clearing their throat. We all looked up in surprise, and my father got up to slide back the screen. There, accompanied by a maidservant, was Yong-lae’s wife, in tears, black hair loose and flowing. She apologized for interrupting, but said she must speak with us.

Jin-ho and I glanced at each other, electrified with excitement.

‘Of course, of course,’ said my father, standing up. My mother also rose, gently touching her sister-in-law’s forearm and stood before her, shielding her from our inquisitive eyes.

‘Children, go into the library and play, take Myung-hi, and make sure she doesn’t disturb any of your father’s things,’ instructed my mother.

Jin-ho and I bowed obediently, but pouted in our mother’s direction to express our maximum disappointment at this cruel exclusion. I dragged Myung-hi by the arm into the study, leaving the door pointedly open. Jin-ho and I immediately slithered out and regrouped by the dining-room door, which was slightly ajar. Myung-hi sat on her fat bottom in the corridor looking at us quizzically.

Jin-ho stuck his ear to the crack in the door. I shoved him aside to make room for myself, and with a sly tilt to my head, caught a narrow slice of Yong-lae’s wife’s face, twisted in distress. We only rarely saw her. She was very pretty, despite her tears and streaming hair, and wore a sumptuous midnight-blue silk gown edged in white satin. She was unbearably glamorous.

‘… and the groom found him in a ditch, he had been robbed. His pockets were reversed and empty, the horse was nowhere to be seen. Unconscious. The groom had to fetch help from the farmer, and take him on his own horse … He was in Seoul for three days … and there is no more money. Our children are always asking me where he is. What can I do? How shall I manage? … my own family will not give me any money; they know he will just squander it. They say he is making a fool of me,’ said Ok-ja, sobbing into her fine handkerchief.

My mother tried to calm her with soft words, but one could see that the situation was worse than she knew how to cope with. She looked at my father for prompting. My father was silent, his face drawn with worry.

‘Somehow we will help you. Please continue to be brave. For your children too. We will do what we can. I will speak with him, but you must be prepared for him to carry on. You know how he is. But you were right to come to me,’ said Father. My mother handed her a beaker of ginseng tea.

Jin-ho and I looked at each other with coy satisfaction at the quality of entertainment being offered. Then Jin-ho sneezed. My mother rushed to the door hissing admonitions, grabbed our elbows, swooped up Myung-hi, and propelled us into our rooms.

‘Children. You are wrong to listen at doors. Very naughty. You mustn’t repeat to anyone what you have heard, and you must learn to obey your father and me. Where do you learn such habits? This is grown-up business, and that is that. You will soon be old enough to have your own worries, so be glad not knowing.’

‘But I’m not tired, mother, and it’s so interesting,’ said Jin-ho, smiling his most charming smile. A lock of shiny hair caught in his long, blinking eyelashes. You couldn’t help adoring him. Mother told him to go to bed anyway, and not to be fresh, but her anger had disappeared.

‘I’m not tired either,’ I echoed.

‘Oh, yes you are. You went all the way to market today. And you mustn’t argue, Myung-ja! Your father is not happy with the way you imitate your brother’s bad habits. By the way, get up early tomorrow, Jin-ho. We are going to your grandparents’ for the day. No reading all night in bed. No singing and dancing on the mattress either. Up early, Jin-ho, remember.’

Jin-ho shrugged his shoulders and trudged off to bed without saying good-night to anyone. It was true that he’d been more disobedient than usual of late. Mother stroked my cheek absently, and tucked me in after putting Myung-hi to bed. Myung-hi cried again to remind everyone that she still had a point of view, even lying down. I went to sleep looking forward to tomorrow, and wondering about our aunt in the beautiful gown. What would father be able to do for them? Would uncle go to jail for being such a bad husband?

It was a beautiful, mild morning. Jin-ho and I were terribly excited about going to our grandparents’, not only because of the novelty of their seaside household, which was filled with cousins and other exotica, but because the visit would involve a ride in the estate’s glamorous black Packard, which my father would be borrowing for the day. Grandfather Min was the first in the province to have bought a motorcar.

‘Eat more!’ instructed my mother, urging me to finish the rice in my bowl.

‘But I’m not hungry!’

‘You will be – when we’re halfway there. Have more kimchi.’

I frowned, and forced myself to finish breakfast. Jin-ho was already in the car, sitting behind the steering wheel on my father’s lap. Even on my father’s lap, he could not see much over the wheel, so gigantic was the car’s chassis. Jin-ho was not at all mechanically adept, but liked the flattering image of himself as a motor-racing driver.

Once we were out on the dirt road I pretended to be a princess, making a state visit. The landscape floated by in a dream. I waved to the cherry blossoms, pretending they were loving subjects, and bowed my head modestly to the ginko tree courtiers and bracken ladies-in-waiting. Sadly, we were only going six miles.

We drove very slowly up a winding hill encircled by tall pines and zigzagged blue peaks, and there, on a breathtaking clifftop lay my mother’s family estate. Jin-ho and I cheered with excitement, and Myung-hi imitated us, her joy causing a strand of saliva to hang from her chin.

Father drove around to the stables at the back of the house, and parked next to one of the traps. We burst out of the car, and patted the warm muzzles of the horses. The air smelt delicious; sharp and briny from the sea, and fragrant with acacia-blossom. My mother gave Jin-ho a basket of honeyed rice cakes to offer to our grandmother. As we approached the stone steps, Jin-ho pinched off a corner from one of the cakes and ate it with provocative gusto. Father frowned, and meant it.

The house was far less grand than our grandfather Min’s, which had many wings for servants, tutors, guests, and visiting family, courtyards, pavilions, a temple, outbuildings and stables, and serfs’ cottages in separate enclosures. Although simple, our grandfather Kang’s home had the most unforgettable garden and position looking out to sea.

The Kangs were landowning gentry. Unlike Grandfather Min, Grandfather Kang had no burdensome title, and had never been obliged to perform the grinding administrative duties incumbent on men of the Mins’ rank. Kang’s sunny, youthful demeanor reflected the fact that he spent most of his time engaged in his greatest pleasures: gardening, fishing, and eating.

When we arrived, plump, balding Grandfather Kang was out on one of the terraces in his elegant grey linen jugori and white paji trousers fingering the leaf of an azalea bush with rapt consideration. He smiled and waved us down to show us a new addition to his exotic specimens.

Being on a hilltop, his was a many-tiered garden, bordered with stones and flowering pine bushes, che-song-wha. Bright colours vibrated against their deep green setting. Grandfather grew prodigious quantities of pink, white and red peonies, camellias, azaleas, rhododendrons, lilacs, wild beach roses, calla lilies, tiger lilies, white, gold and purple irises. The acacia and wisteria were so heady that the smell made me drunk. There were also the mysterious yellow moonflowers that only blossomed at night. During summer visits my brother, cousins and I told ghost stories at night behind the luminous moonflowers, hiding our faces behind the blossoms, and screaming in the bushes until we were dragged inside to our beds.

Like most Koreans, Grandfather had a deep love of trees. He had a mulberry grove in which which he cultivated silkworms for his tenant farmers to produce silk. He also grew orchards of plum, apple, peach, cherry, pear, and nectarine trees. He had almond and walnut trees, persimmon trees, dates, bamboo, and trellised grapevines, all of which Grandfather complained withstood more hardship from the greedy hands of us childen than from birds or insects. In the autumn it was one of my favourite things to come with my mother and gather fallen chestnuts from beneath the chestnut trees, whose last dying leaves fanned out brilliant orange against the deep blue sky. I loved the earthy smell of the rotting leaves underfoot, and the delight of finding the shining, heavy brown orbs hiding in the damp grass and papery foliage, fishing them out and plunking them into Grandmother’s old straw basket.

Being one of Grandfather Kang’s favourites, I was given the privilege of tending a small row of tiger lilies. These precious lilies I weeded and watered with ostentatious ruthlessness to prove that Grandfather’s trust was not misplaced. Thus began my lifelong love of gardening.

Soon my grandmother, two aunts, and various moppet-headed cousins came out of the house to greet us, amid shouts and laughter. Grandmother, in a cream silk han-bok, was small and deceptively frail-looking, her hair in a tight black bun. Actually, my honoured grandmother was incredibly tough, with a grip like an iron clamp. My aunts, Chosan and Chungsun – thus called by the children because they lived in the nearby towns of Chosan and Chungsun – were dressed more simply in pastel pink and blue linen with white edging.

The elder, Chosan-daek, was fat and newly a Christian, while Chungsun-daek was skinny and underconfident. The beauty of the family, Aunt Pusan, lived a long way away, in the southernmost port of the country, but we were very excited that she was here now, resting indoors from the long railway journey.

Pusan-daek was my favourite aunt, not only because of her easy manner and porcelain beauty, but because she was thrillingly clever and lively. She was also generous; whenever I saw her she let me try on her many pairs of high-heeled shoes and laughed with delight as I clumped round the room in them, turning clumsily to show off the different pumps to their best advantage. I was slightly silly about her shoes, but she never behaved as if I were a nuisance. Although she was as busy as any of my other aunts on her visits, Aunt Pusan always made time to brush my hair tenderly before I went to sleep. This small gesture warmed me to the tips of my toes, and I went to sleep feeling that my head had just been touched by the hands of a fairy princess.

Aunt Pusan had had many proposals of marriage, and ended up marrying the richest and handsomest of the lot. Yet I overheard Grandmother telling my mother that Pusan-daek’s nouveau riche husband had turned out to be too much of a peacock to notice his wife’s qualities. Although, as an uncle, he was senior to me, I thought him a very stupid man indeed.

After the luncheon feast, which my aunts had spent three days preparing, my brother, two boy cousins, Jae-sung and Jae-dal – sons of fat Aunt Chosan – and I announced our intention of going down to the sea, a fifteen minute walk away. However before going off, Jin-ho and I sneaked away to Aunt Pusan’s quarters to catch a glimpse of her, as we had been denied that opportunity during lunch, when Grandmother Kang declared her still too tired to make an appearance.

One of the best things about Grandparents’ rambling, busy household was that we could be naughty for much longer before being discovered. We stood very quietly in the cedar-scented corridor outside Pusan-daek’s room. A muffled but distinct whimpering sound could be heard. Fortunately for us, the door was open a crack, irresistibly inviting us to look through it.

I gasped and covered my mouth. Jin-ho was shocked too. There, sitting in the corner leaning her head against the wall, was Aunt Pusan, wearing a frightening white canvas coat with her arms wrapped round her body so that she couldn’t move.

Jin-ho and I looked at each other in horror. Neither of us had ever seen a strait-jacket. What had happened? Why was she strapped into this diabolical contraption? Her face was downcast, but even so, you could tell that she was utterly altered; her spirit strangled. She was pale, like a crushed moth.

Tearfully, I ran to my mother, leaving Jin-ho dumbstruck at this extraordinary sight. Mother was in the sunny mulberry grove with Aunt Chosan. They were talking animatedly about the plight of Uncle Yong-lae. I told mother what we’d seen. First she was angry that I had been spying again, but seeing how upset I was, she softened.

‘You are too young to understand, but your aunt is not well. She is so sick that she tries to harm herself.’ I looked at my mother blankly. She sighed.

‘Sometimes, my daughter, after a woman has a baby, she becomes very sad like this. So she must rest in this ugly coat, away from other people who would tire her.’

Aunt Chosan nodded her double chins.

‘But she can’t move, mother!’

‘I know … Now that’s enough, Myung-ja. You are too young to understand such things. Go and play. Do as you are told,’ she said, looking unhappy.

‘But it must make her worse to be alone in that scary thing!’

‘Myung-ja! Do you criticize your grandmother’s wisdom?’

I could not reply.

‘Now, you are not to mention this again. Not to your cousins, not to father or Jin-ho. This is ladies’ business. You must promise to be silent now that I have explained this private matter. This is not for small children’s big-mouthed gossiping.’

I promised, and dragged my feet back to the house. Jin-ho was sitting quietly outside Pusan-daek’s door like a faithful dog. Our aunt was now sleeping sideways on the silk mat, her face still pale, but tranquil. Naturally, I told Jin-ho immediately what mother had said. We drew away sadly from Pusan-daek