What We Kept to Ourselves: A Novel

1999

The night he found the body behind the loquat tree in his yard, John had driven home from work like on any other evening, weighed down by the usual worries. These troubles had become so familiar that he never questioned them anymore, and because he never shared them with anyone, they would forever go unchallenged. It was his misery after all.

These days his concerns hinged on the apocalyptic flavor of the moment—Y2K, or the Millennium Bug—like a futuristic disease or a line dance at a wedding. How could John protect his two children from something he didn’t understand? Asteroids and floods, all that biblical stuff, made more sense than technology, this internet, which was spooky, invisible, and everywhere at once.

But they weren’t even children anymore. His daughter Ana was already an adult, a college graduate living in Berkeley—leafy streets crunching underfoot like granola in the fall and dimly lit coffee shops with dogs snoozing at people’s feet—less than four hundred miles away, but much too far in his mind. And his son Ronald had already finished half his senior year in high school.

The house was quiet with them no longer on the phone, vaporized by this thing called email and AOL. After John had spent over a year saving up for the Packard Bell PC tower, all he could hear now from his son’s bedroom were the robotic chirps and static fuzz of the dial-up, an occasional burst of laughter, his fingers chicken-pecking the keys. Their thoughts and feelings now traveled in wires, through air, like ghosts.

Once, months ago, John had asked his son to show him how to use the computer. Instead of the cardboard signs around the plant nursery that he had handwritten with a giant Marks-A-Lot, he decided he would have them printed and laminated at Kinko’s. More professional, like a big-box store. But as he cupped the mouse awkwardly, Ronald hovering by his side, John couldn’t figure out where anything was saved and why he couldn’t just print everything out. His son argued that it was better in the box because you could go back and fix things without having to waste paper.

But that isn’t life, John wanted to say. That isn’t the way life works.

The machines were lying to us. And because of them, we were all going to die. So why burden his sixty-one-year-old brain with these advancements? Around every corner, something seemed to be falling apart or ready to implode on itself. Trash littered roads on which people drove too fast, blasting music. Graffiti covered street signs with phalluses, the hieroglyphics of spoiled children. Homeless encampments, piles of tents, shopping carts and garbage, like the flotsam of a shipwreck, gathered under freeway overpasses, harkening back to the refugee camps of his youth.

Until the end of the world, John still had his plant nursery, his teenage son at home, a daughter coming to visit for the holidays, his Sunday-morning hikes, and his wife to honor on the one-year anniversary of her disappearance. At first, he had told his children that she had probably embarked on a vacation, that she would be back. But as he sat nearly six months later with his son at the dining room table, he had lied, not the first of its kind: Mommy died.

Death was so much easier to explain. Death was the period at the end of a sentence. A disappearance was a question mark. You’d always be left waiting for a response. Much like how the war had kept him separated from his mother and sister and brother, who still might be alive somewhere in Korea across the border between the North and the South. He never knew what happened to them either. A part of him hoped they had lived and that they would reunite one day, but the rest of his being wished they had died. Because what would be the point of a life separated, cracked in two?

In preparation for Ana’s visit, he had gotten her a bag of fancy Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf ground coffee. Her favorite was Peet’s, but at least this was better than his Folgers. He bought a glass pitcher called a French press that the nice young lady with a nose piercing recommended to him. He entered a thrift store for the first time in his life in West Hollywood and purchased Ana some hippie tapestry to hang on the wall of her bedroom. People in Berkeley liked that kind of stuff, he thought. On her whiteboard, which she hadn’t used since high school, he drew a peace sign and wrote WELCOME HOME ANA above it, as a parent on television would. Maybe he’d never get rid of his accent, which was like a thick scar on his tongue, but he could act like that TV dad. He could try. He would. If only she gave him another chance.

And when the world ended, he’d go out sitting on the living room couch with his two children beside him, the twinkling lights of the artificial Christmas tree they’d assemble that weekend reflected on his tear-streaked face, and a photograph of his wife, Sunny, from their wedding day clutched to his chest. How beautiful she was—her brown eyes, tender and soft, behind a veil attached to a circular hat polka-dotted with tiny pearls, which resembled a little cake on her head and matched her long white dress. She was glamorous, yet covered her charming, crooked teeth whenever she laughed. And he had always wanted to grab her hand and say, You are perfect the way you are.

But she was gone. He’d have to live with this broken heart. If he hurt enough, she might return. If he hurt enough, she might be able to sense how much he needed her.

John pulled into the driveway and cut the engine of his Eldorado, inhaling the musty smell from the vents and exhaust. He collected his leather briefcase from the passenger seat. His neck and back muscles ached from lifting plants, bags of compost and mulch, all day. He massaged his shoulder with his free hand and pushed open the car door to go inside the house, where his son waited for him to make dinner.

As he approached the front door, he caught sight of a ragged cat, which shat in his yard and slinked away toward his neighbor Rodriguez’s lawn. Despite its plainness and low chain-link fence, he loved this bandage-beige house with its grass mowed biweekly, its single row of roses that bloomed in reds and hot pinks and perfumed the air in the long, dry summer heat, and the hodgepodge of ceramic pots with a collection of cacti and succulents on the brick steps leading to the front. The least he could do was keep his wife’s plants alive.

But the backyard—a future project of hers—was now a total mess, had become overgrown in parts and completely barren in others, with garden tools and a shovel caked with dirt, abandoned. No one went to the rear, where the garage stood in silence, filled with their kids’ old schoolwork and mementos, the books and notebooks he kept from his days long ago in graduate school, and Sunny’s art supplies. He’d rather not think of it at all, the structure itself like a large delete button.

With his girlfriend’s T-shirt draped over his face, Ronald bathed in her favorite scent, Juniper Breeze. The perfection of that evergreen was unlike the seasonal high-school fragrance variations on American desserts—peppermint sticks and gingerbread and sugar cookies.

His parents never baked; ovens were for storing pots and pans. Many of the immigrant kids, or the children of immigrants like himself, who came from predominantly Latino and Asian families, didn’t have homes filled with pies or cupcakes. Yet everyone at school wanted to smell the same way, longed for the comfort of some common nostalgia, whether it belonged to them and their histories or not. But comfort to him smelled of his mother in the kitchen, her hands in plastic gloves, massaging red pepper flakes, salt, a dash of white sugar, garlic, and saeujeot into the chopped leaves of a napa cabbage. He would stand beside her at the counter, and every time she taste-tested the kimchi, she’d place a child’s bite-sized portion in his mouth, careful not to deposit the scarlet paste on his face, her plastic gloves crinkled on his lips. She’d ask, What do you think?

But nobody in America celebrated the smell of kimchi. The only non-Korean he knew who actually loved kimchi was his girlfriend Peggy, who was Filipina and stopped at the Korean market every time she was in town, where she’d load up on her favorite banchan—kkakdugi, seasoned spinach, and jangjorim.

A week ago last Friday, Ronald had strummed his fingers against the warmth of Peggy’s stomach, along the bottom edge of her pale pink bra with the tiniest bow between her breasts, as his mouth touched the cup of her perfect navel. At first she flinched at the coldness of his fingers, then smirked, her eyes closed in pleasure. He kissed her lips, which were smooth and small and ripe, the color of berries.

They had met back in middle school in Hancock Park, where her family had lived about two to three miles away from him yet worlds apart, with its distinctive multimillion-dollar residences, formal hedges, country club, and healthy white people. But her family had fled four years ago to La Cañada for the obvious—the lack of crime and homelessness, the better schools, the serene isolation of the foothills by the Angeles National Forest, and the full amenities of neighboring Pasadena and Glendale. Her father was a doctor, and her mother, some kind of manager or administrator at the VA.

And he loved her. Peggy Lee Santos. They loved each other still. Even though he could not follow her to the fancy places she would go, the private universities that she researched with her seemingly infinite hours on AOL, he would drive to the end of the world for her in his father’s beat-up, ugly Eldorado.

Pots and pans clattered like sad cymbals less than ten feet from his door in the kitchen where his father prepared dinner. Frustrated, Ronald pulled Peggy’s T-shirt off his face and switched on his desk lamp, washing in glare the import-car posters—images of shiny modified Hondas flanked by models—around his bed. He didn’t even know why he had these posters anymore. For a little while, before he could actually drive, he had been interested in cars—the speed, the acceleration, the women—but now these images, curling at the corners, functioned only as distractions to cover the emptiness of the dirty white walls.

In a photo that his older sister Ana had framed for him on his desk, Ronald and his mother posed after his middle school graduation. Her face glowed as she clutched him with manicured fingers around his shoulders. She never had the time to do her nails, but she’d painted them that morning in front of her vanity. He remembered how much pride she exuded that day, but he could also sense—because he and his mother always had this way between them—her sadness over his growing up so fast.

How embarrassed he had felt that day beside her, as if he was too grown to be babied by his mother. But what he would give to hold her hand now. How much they could say to each other without words, how much they knew about each other in a squeeze of the shoulder, a quiet observation of one another through an open door, a mirror, a glance. His father, on the other hand, had always been unknowable, opaque, a dull stone worn smooth by time.

He didn’t believe his father’s claim that she was dead. There was no body. There was no proof.

Ronald had the itch to log on to see if he could find Peggy or any of his friends. Although they had already made plans to meet up in Pasadena tonight, he needed an escape now. But his father always got angry when he clogged up the phone line before nine p.m. Who knew who could call the house? They should all be available—just in case. But his father never acknowledged for whom or what they had been waiting.

Instead, their lives were a constant away message.

His father had set the breakfast nook for dinner—paper napkins, metal chopsticks, spoons. They hadn’t used the dining room table since his mother disappeared. Ronald slid onto the bench in front of the oxtail soup, the meat and bone and mu which had simmered for hours last night in a garlicky salt-and-pepper broth. Steam delicately painted the air with the rich and oily smell of gelatin and beef. Even if his father underseasoned and never bothered to brown anything, time and low heat performed most of the work.

Did you sell all the Christmas stuff at the shop? Ronald asked.

What, the garlands? John set his bowl of rice in front of Ronald, then winced as he bent to sit.

The poinsettias. The ones you were making such a big deal about.

Yeah, yeah. Almost gone. More come in the morning, his father said.

The soup was too hot, so instead Ronald sampled the baechu kimchi that his father bought. Without his mother, no one bothered to make kimchi at home. His mother would prepare jars and jars that they’d eat from almost every night, which his sister Ana found to be repetitive and dull. Sure, Ronald craved cheeseburgers and fast food too, but Ana claimed to dislike all the spice, and she hated the chopsticks, always using a fork instead. She had to make everything some kind of protest. No wonder why she liked Berkeley.

Can I take the car out tonight? Ronald asked.

How long?

Couple hours. He spooned the tender meat off the knobby bones, which he discarded onto his napkin.

Your homework? his father asked.

It’s Friday. Ronald hated his father’s voice—the graininess from all his years of smoking, the heaviness of the tone, the accent, which wasn’t quite Korean but distinctly foreign. His sister had once explained that since their father had immigrated in the early sixties, he’d picked up his accent from speaking English with Chinese Americans, Black customers, and Jewish shopkeepers who were then prevalent in the areas of South LA where he’d worked. But whatever the reason, his father’s accent always embarrassed Ronald. He was embarrassed for his father. His mother could hardly speak English, but he preferred her voice to his whenever she tried. She could play off anything through her tact and charm, her sense of humor. Her laugh, a ho, ho, ho, which she covered with her hand.

And? his father asked.

Can I borrow the car? Ronald said as clearly as possible.

His father sucked the meat from between his teeth. Bring the car back before midnight. His purplish lips frowned. No drink. No smoke. No pregnant, uh, okay?

After dinner, the neighborhood cats scratched the roof, which John had patched himself last year, strapped to the chimney with rope around his waist. His wife Sunny had fed and talked to the cats like children. She would stand at the back doorstep making kissing sounds. John once found her outside with a pair of tweezers and a struggling yellow cat between her legs, its limbs everywhere, like an asterisk. She pulled a splinter from its right front paw and winced when the cat mewed in pain. She spoke to the cat in Korean as if it could understand her: Be calm. I’m trying to help you. Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?

Remembering these words, his brain hurt. He wanted television.

On the tan-colored pillow-top couch in his pajamas, his hair smoothed to the left in a perfect part, his dentures removed, he flipped on the television to Los Angeles’s local multi-Asian channel (Vietnamese and Cantonese and Tagalog during the weekdays, Japanese and Korean at night). He disappeared into the news and commercials. A public service announcement on the conservation of water reminded him of the bills in the mailbox. He was so forgetful these days.

After slipping on a pair of old loafers, John shivered as he stalked down the driveway, knees aching. Their mostly quiet street ran east to west following the sun’s blazing arc across the sky, which melted into a citrus-colored acid every night. Sirens and cars zoomed blocks away down Pico Boulevard, a swift-flowing thoroughfare connecting the city’s dense, bustling interior to the Pacific Ocean. Despite the smog, the air smelled sweet and clear in this neighborhood of lawns and palm trees that swayed like slender hat-wearing ladies.

In this gentle darkness, his next-door neighbor Rodriguez, who always donned a white tank top despite the December chill, draped Christmas and icicle string lights on the towering prickly pear and succulents at the edge of his lawn. He waved as a form of silent solidarity between homeowners. John had rarely spoken to him, but he knew from Sunny that his family was from Mexico and he’d grown up in LA. She had contended that she could read a person by looking at the things for which he got his hands dirty. She once deemed Rodriguez, with his thick graying hair and faded neck tattoos, a hardy minimalist who was soft inside, much like his beloved cacti, in contrast to the junglelike foliage, the twining vines, jasmine and passionflower that hopped the fence between their backyards.

That Rodriguez is an artist, she’d said. Look at the arrangement of his plants. She added the next part in a vain attempt to make John feel inadequate: The other day I caught him smelling one of the blooms off his prickly pear. And then—you know what he did? He reached down and pet one of my kitties. Right on the head.

One of her cats, a splotchy tortoiseshell, the same one John had seen earlier slinking down the driveway, now lay beneath the streetlight in front of the house. Separated from him by at least fifteen feet and one waist-high chain-link fence, the cat gazed contentedly at him and then strutted out of sight. John reached inside the mailbox for the envelopes, the junk mail, and the weekly advertisements (pizza coupons, an ad for window blinds, personal check orders, a takeout Thai food menu). His heart sunk. Another trial CD for AOL, a plastic disc with delicate rainbows on its mirrored belly. He didn’t care if it was free; nothing was free, and it would keep the phone line busy. Who knew if Sunny would call one day and need help? But again there was nothing, no letter from her tonight.

Airplanes at a great distance blinked and painted trails lit by the sliver of a moon in the sky. Ana would be here, finally, tomorrow. He always loved the warmth and clean smell of her every time he hugged her, which was now only twice a year, when he met her at the gate of the airport and when she left. He adored the way her hair felt under his chin, the thick texture like her mother’s. Even if only for a few seconds, those seconds mattered very much to him.

He had to convince her to move back. She didn’t need to live at the house. There was so many places in LA with young people and coffee shops and bookstores, all those things she liked about the Bay Area. He could even plant her some trees if she liked them so much. On Sundays, they could go hiking together. She had already quit her job.

Why? he had asked her last weekend over the phone. Didn’t you just start?

It’s too stressful, Ana said.

"Stressful?" He knew the literal meaning of the word but couldn’t comprehend why in the hell an office job could be so stressful. Try working at a bread factory like he had all those years ago while in a PhD program in a foreign country called America. Had she ever stood for ten hours, baking hot, without even a break for water? His head would spin and spin and spin, and an infinity of glistening loaves that looked like long butt cheeks would streak by on rattling conveyer belts that smelled like rubber and WD-40. And his job wasn’t even as bad as the ones with the mixing machines, their industrial cruelty doled out in the name of hamburger buns.

Yeah, it’s too much work, she said.

Too much work?

Not everyone is made like you, Dad. Annoyance permeated her voice. I’ll find something else.

Find something else? His kids were spoiled. What made them think that they could find another job whenever they felt like it? Maybe it was her degree from a fancy American college, which he had never gotten because he’d dropped out of grad school. Was that it? Get a degree and when things were too stressful, you quit? His kids were soft, hadn’t gone through war like he had at thirteen, hadn’t lost their family and home, too. They didn’t know what it was like to climb over dead people, bodies bloated and rotten, or to steal from the dead because you never knew when you could get another pair of shoes. They never had to wear another man’s socks, with another man’s blood on them. They didn’t know what that was like, that smell, all those bodies, the shit and urine, those maggots and flies. These American kids would never get it.

Whatever the reason for Ana quitting her job, now was the time to show her that Los Angeles was her home. They didn’t have to settle for those twice-a-year hugs. Her father would guide her through this transition, take care of everything, provide some soft landing as he had always done.

With the mail still in his hands, he made his way up the driveway. A fog of breath expelled from his mouth. The cat sprinted a couple feet in front of him and disappeared behind the house. Son of a bitch, John said, toothless, his dentures fizzing in their cup for the night. He’d scare the cats away for good this time.

He shivered as he trudged down the gravel path that ran alongside the house toward the backyard, his eyes adjusting to the dark. Something crunched beneath his loafers. He stepped down from the concrete pad in front of the garage and made his way through weeds, feeling the hard, compacted soil beneath his feet.

On the other side of the freestanding garage, behind the adjacent loquat tree, a pair of shoes, beat-up and broken, emerged from the darkness where vines dangled over the fence from his neighbor’s yard.

Excuse me, John said. His heart pounded as his breath clouded the air. Sirens howled in the distance. The snap of a twig. Excuse me, he said again, voice rising. His anger grew as he gripped the mail in his hands in a fist. He was angry, mostly because he was terrified of those shoes, those legs. In a sense he was furious with himself.

But the man, facedown, did not move.

John approached slowly, wondering if he should first run back into the house and call the police.

With his foot, John nudged the man’s leg and shouted.

Of course, the man was dead.

And nearby lay a white envelope with the words Sunny Kim on it.

1977

Sunhee lay down beside her husband, who was perched on the edge of the bed, bathed in the amber glow of the lamp on their single nightstand, calculating his week’s earnings in his notebook. The crickets played their legs in a fever outside, as alley cats mewled through the open windows from which a gentle breeze, that nonetheless smelled of trash and smoke, caressed her face. He gripped the pen and nodded as he focused, counting as if to a rhythm, but there was no music; there were only money and bills. How dull, she thought.

The mattress squeaked and groaned as she adjusted her now cumbrous body, almost seven months pregnant. She frowned at the sour smell underneath her arms. It was too hot. How she missed slumbering on her floor mat at home in Seoul, longed for its firmness against her back. She didn’t understand why her husband insisted on this soft, noisy mattress as if to sleep on the ground, like they had always done in Korea, would be some kind of regression. Even the squeaking of the springs as they had sex embarrassed her. What a pathetic sound. But they were Americans now.

Sunhee inched closer to her husband. Could you get me some pickles? She craved the slices of cucumber she had salted herself without seasoning or dill like the local brands. She preferred the simplicity of her own homemade pickles, the way her mother made them, before sautéing them in a pan with garlic and sesame oil and red pepper.

Huh? He squinted at her through the dimness of where she lay.

Pickles, a bowl of them. She cleared her throat. I finally found a comfortable position and I don’t want to move.

He sighed, smiling as he rested his notebook on the nightstand. He got away with it all because of that smile, didn’t he? That smile had mischief in it. He didn’t smile enough these days.

Okay, okay, he said. As he stood from the mattress, her body tilted like a canoe. She pondered the crooked calendar on the wall, which displayed the month of October. She realized it was already July now, nearly August, and for whatever reason, neither she nor her husband had bothered to turn the calendar pages or even replace it with a new one for this year, as if time had been frozen during that month they had first met last autumn in Seoul, and in a way it had. How time flew. She could hear him rummaging in the kitchen like a visitor struggling through some foreign land—the refrigerator, the pantry, the cupboards.

Through an initial arrangement between their families, she had married Kim Jung Ho, the son of a law school professor, in November, following a month electrified by courtship—elegant boxes of tawny pears that crunched in the mouth, chocolates wrapped in sensuous golden paper like a tiny blanket by Gustav Klimt, and a lavish bouquet of red roses, tight unripe buds that bloomed after days in water and reminded her of rococo and John Waterhouse, women of opulent dresses and swanlike necks. Tall and lean, Kim Jung Ho possessed a handsome face, long but squared off at the chin; and full, wavy black hair, almost blue like a cormorant’s wing. With his tan, chestnut-colored skin from all that sun in California, he was easy to look at, even glamorous. And unlike her other suitors, he offered her the adventure of a lifetime, a chance at another country. America.

He had immigrated to Los Angeles on a student visa for a PhD program in English literature in the early 1960s, although he eventually dropped out, which made him a bit of a renegade. He had claimed that he always loved books, and as a teenager after the war, displaced and alienated by his experiences of violence, his unexpressed feelings about his separation from his mother and siblings, he had been particularly drawn to foreign stories, faraway lands in which the tragic flaws of great men, who had reminded him of his father, had been shaped into lyrical language and forceful, heartstopping drama. In other words, Shakespeare.

When she had asked him why he left school, despite his clear passion for the subject, he’d said in a somewhat cool, detached manner: In America, there are so many ways to make a living. There, we don’t have to do what our parents say. We can be anyone we want. We can be free from their expectations, free from history. I love it so much. He claimed to now work in oil, which she hadn’t understood at the time meant gas station attendant.

She had imagined them cruising in a convertible on a highway beside a stretch of sand and infinite blue waves to a faint horizon, and dancing under gem-colored lights at a smoky Hollywood nightclub, far from what had become the most dreadful, complicated place—Seoul. Despite the growing economy after the brutalities of the war, which she herself had lived through as a baby and young child, there were protests and civil unrest against the president and government almost every day, news of students killed, police violence, murders and disappearances. She was tired and yearned for some stability now that she was in her late twenties. She needed marriage, a family. A new lease. A different story.

But after she had married Kim Jung Ho and boarded an airplane for the first time in her life, stopping only once in balmy, green-and-teal Hawaii, she had been thrust into this alien world of wide streets and concrete and fast cars. She never said this out loud, but she’d regretted her decision immediately. Sure, they had gone to the beach a couple times. He had even tried a ballroom dancing class with her, but he was unable to quickly grasp the steps and claimed to be too busy to learn.

She had taken for granted the click-clack sound of her heels on the old stone paths in Seoul. Just the memory thrilled her. The open-air markets teeming with life and sound, the gruff voices of the women who worked in the stalls, the fresh octopus, clams, and mussels that smelled of the ocean, their home. The fish eyes glistened like the mother-of-pearl inlaid on an enamel box. And the bins full of banchan—every namul imaginable, from chives to mugwort to dandelion. There was always so much variety in color and texture and smell, while in America, food appeared to be simply brown and white and dry, slices of pale vegetables coated in more cream sauce. Did Americans like color at all, besides the unnatural hues of mustard and ketchup?

Once her husband returned to the bedroom and handed her the bowl of pickles, Sunhee said in a regal declaration, I have thought of a name. She had been meaning to have this discussion but he was too busy, didn’t like to be distracted at night, except right before they fell asleep and he nuzzled his face into her neck, rubbing her now round stomach with his hands from behind.

He picked up his notebook. As he sat down again on the bed, the legs of his boxers scooted up, revealing the muscles of his thighs, lightly covered in hair. She loved his body, long and strong, but not in a way that was overly muscular or overbearing. He had a gracefulness, a leanness about him that reminded her of men in the movies. He had been striking on their wedding day in his dark suit and crisp white shirt. She’d worn a heavy winter dress with a high neck and long A-line skirt embroidered with tiny pearls, as if she had emerged from the ocean as a virgin. But she wasn’t. She smiled. Neither was he.

Anastasia. Anastasia Kim, she said in English, like a proclamation from a queen.

John laughed, shifting his weight on the bed. What are you talking about? He lifted his head. How many syllables? Pick something simple. Something that makes more sense. I can’t call my daughter that.

"No, no, dummy. Not her. Me."

What?

Me, me.

You’re kidding. He closed his notebook. Who do you think you are? A Russian princess?

She smirked.

"If you’re going to change your name, you should pick something closer to your own. Look, let me help you. Your name is Sunhee, right? Well, pick Sunny. Close enough, right? Do you know what that means?"

Oh, you have no sense of glamour, no sense of poetry. I want to be Anastasia.

Queen of Complaints?

Shut up. She chuckled, then sneezed. Her allergies. Too much grass in this country. At least I’m original. I’m sure it required imagination for you to think of ‘John.’ Just like the Americans say it, ‘John Doe.’ You might as well have kept ‘Jung Ho.’

I like Sunhee, or even Sunny, better than Anastasia.

She smiled and rubbed her stomach. Anastasia could use a foot rub. Anastasia is tired.

Okay, okay, he said, balancing the notebook on the edge of the nightstand beside the lamp. But my turn next. As he grabbed her foot, pressed his thumb into the arch, she closed her eyes, savoring his hands, his fingers on her skin. She purred and laughed as he inadvertently tickled her now very sensitive toes. But in less than a minute, his motions became mechanical, harried, as if his mind had ventured elsewhere already, rather than remain in that moment, in those seconds beside her, inhaling the life that they had—both its mundane beauty and sadness—that was still, when considered under a certain light, miraculous. So many people had died in the war. So many people lost. So many families torn apart. Literally. And here they were—feeling something. All their senses, their limbs intact. Alive.

As he massaged her calves, her thighs tingled. She shut her eyes, struck by the memory of her college art studio in Seoul where she had spent so many hours pressing globs of paint straight from the tube onto the palette, colors with strange names like Cadmium Green, Napthol Scarlet, and Raw Umber. She remembered the prickle of excitement as she presented her paintings to her favorite professor, Cho Myunghwa, who had been in her late twenties and had studied at Beaux-Arts de Paris and could speak four languages. Her father had been a diplomat. Never pretentious or too precious, she had a gentle seriousness about her, a relaxed and open face, bright and round as a full moon, and a very solid but slim stature like a dancer’s. When considering her work, Professor Cho leaned in close and Sunhee caught the scent of cigarettes, ashy but intoxicating, although none of the students had ever seen her smoke. She didn’t know if she wanted to be Professor Cho, or if she simply wanted to be near her to absorb her confidence and untouchability, what Americans would describe as cool.

The last time she had seen Professor Cho had been two months before she had met her now husband, years after she had graduated from college. She chanced upon the professor at the gallery show