Honolulu Page 4

  "My father says that book reading is the province of men, and great harm will be done if women enter that province."

  She laughed a short, less musical laugh.

  "Your father is both misinformed and unoriginal. He was quoting the great scholar Yi Ik, who had many enlightened ideas about the underprivileged, but none, alas, for the female of the species. Would it surprise you to know that one of our nation's greatest poets was a mere woman?"

  She rose as gracefully as a doe, went to her bookshelf, and almost without looking took down a volume from an upper shelf. She sat down again and opened the book. "Several remarkable sijo poems are handed down to us from a kisaeng who went by the name of Bright Moon." She read aloud:

  You, blue stream, flowing around mountains,

  Do not be proud of moving so swiftly.

  Once you get to the open sea,

  You will never be able to return.

  Why not stop for a moment while the bright moon

  Gleams down on the world?

  Evening Rose turned the book around so that its pages faced me, but they might as well have been upside down or sideways for all that I could make sense of them. "Someday, perhaps, you will read these for yourself. I am not a teacher by trade or by temperament, but I will do my best."

  Now she produced a long black pen and a paper scroll. With the pen gripped between exquisitely manicured fingers, she drew a single character that looked like this: L

  "This is the letter we call nieun," she told me. "Say it aloud."

  "Nieun. "

  "Now start to say it again, but not quite. Vocalize only the very first part of the word."

  I thought this odd, but did as she instructed: a guttural "Nnnhh" was all the sound that came from my throat.

  "Again. And note the position of your tongue as you make the sound."

  "Nnnhh," I repeated.

  "What position was your tongue in? Was it straight?"

  "No, it was bent upwards. Touching the roof of my mouth."

  "Like this, you mean?" And she wrote down L once again.

  "Yes!" I said excitedly, the connection now obvious to me.

  "Good. You see, hangul is what's called a phonetic language-the characters were designed to mirror the shape of the mouth, tongue, teeth, lips, and throat when speaking them. So when you see this letter, you will think of that bent tongue and know that its name is ... ?"

  "Nieun, "I said confidently.

  "Exactly right!"

  She went on to draw for me the twenty-four basic characters of the Korean alphabet. I was delighted to find how quickly I was able to associate the letter giyeok with the "g" / "k" sound made at the back of my throat, or bieup with the "b"/"p" sound made with my lips pursed together. In less than an hour these mysterious symbols, whose meaning had once been so utterly opaque to me, were beginning to take on a form I could recognize.

  When I marveled at how this could be, my teacher explained, "Hangul is an invented language, created to be easily grasped. Chinese characters are ideograms-they represent concepts, not sounds-and there are thousands of them. These letters are fewer, simpler, and more logical in design."

  By the time the hour had closed on my first lesson I found that I had learned to recognize a good two-thirds of the Korean alphabet.

  Evening Rose said approvingly, "We've made good progress today, but we've only just started. Your aunt should be downstairs waiting. Come back tomorrow at this same time-no sooner, no later-and we shall continue."

  She went to her vanity table and I hurried out of the room and down the stairs to where Aunt Obedience was waiting in the foyer. Moments after we left the pretty little house she asked, "Well? Can you read?"

  "Not yet," I told her, "but-"

  I saw a notice posted in the window of a grocer's shop, and though I could not read the words, I was thrilled to realize that I recognized over half the individual letters. I went up to the store window and pointed to a character I had once thought resembled an upside-down wishbone. "This is the letter siot, " I declared proudly. I pointed to another character, a nearly perfect circle with a small bump atop it: "This is called Leung. And this one is bieup ..."

  Auntie, suitably impressed, smiled with genuine pride.

  "Perhaps when your lessons are over," she said, "you can teach me to read!"

  or the next twenty-four hours I could barely contain my anticipation. I longed to share my excitement with my mother, with whom I had shared so much, but Auntie insisted on keeping my lessons secret. The following day I again left her house, this time on my own, under the pretense of visiting with Mrs. Li's nonexistent daughter. I was so thrilled that I forgot the route we had taken the day before and had to ask directions from a woman heading to market. But when I described the little white house under the paulownia tree, she gave me a reproachful frown: "What's a girl like you doing going to a pleasure house? You hardly look like you belong there," she said with disdain. I was a bit taken aback, but told her I was meeting a friend there. With a little grunt of disapproval she pointed and told me the house was two blocks north.

  I arrived five minutes late and my teacher was not happy about it. "If you cannot be on time," she told me sharply, "you might as well not come at all. I have a schedule to keep."

  "I am sorry, teacher. I lost my way. Please forgive me."

  My sincere contrition seemed to mollify her. "Very well," she said, motioning me to sit again at the table, "we'll continue where we left off yesterday."

  That day we studied the remainder of the Korean alphabet until I was able to recognize all ten vowels and fourteen consonants. Then my teacher handed me a pen and had me copy the letters onto the paper until I could make a passing imitation of her elegantly flowing calligraphy.

  "You have a graceful enough hand," she allowed, "but let's try again."

  "Yes, teacher."

  I copied the letters over and over until my fingers cramped, but I had never been happier in my life.

  The next day I made certain not to be late; in fact I was ten minutes early. But this time when I walked into my teacher's room I suddenly found myself face-to-face with a middle-aged man pulling on a pair of baggy white trousers.

  "Oh!" I gasped. "I'm so sorry!" Blushing and stammering, I backed out of the room and hid, unsuccessfully, behind a brass Maitreya statue in the hallway. After the man left, throwing me a chagrined smile as he passed, Evening Rose told me to come in, and we proceeded without a word spoken about the incident.

  I had never seen a man's private parts before and was barely acquainted with what my own could do, but I was becoming as fascinated with what went on in this "pleasure house" as I was by my teacher's lessons. After a few more glimpses of men slipping in and out of women's rooms, I began to realize that being an "entertainer" apparently meant more than merely serving tea or playing the lute. I admit, I was a bit chagrined by this: The importance of chastity was drummed into every Korean girl from an early age, and such flagrant lack of virtue was at first shocking and dismaying to me. I was confused: Evening Rose was so elegant and refined-how could she be capable of such disgraceful behavior? What would my mother say if she knew this woman was teaching me? Did Aunt Obedience know what went on in this place?

  That set me to wondering something else, and one morning when I was alone with Obedience I asked her, "Auntie? How did you and Evening Rose happen to become acquainted?"

  An innocent enough question, but it brought out the fire in Obedience's eyes. She said tartly, "It is enough for you to know that we are acquainted," and I wisely never broached the subject with her again.

  Which is not to say I didn't broach it to Evening Rose, but when I asked her the same question she merely replied, "I am not free to discuss that with you," and I decided that further pursuit of this question was futile.

  My teacher went on to demonstrate to me how letters were stacked and combined in syllable blocks, and the syllables then joined to create words. When I correctly deciphered the first word she pres
ented to me, I was so happy and proud that I actually burst into tears, which seemed to both startle and move her.

  She then gave me a grade-school primer, not unlike the ones I had seen my brothers reading from, and tasked me with reading the simple wordscat, dog, house, sky, mother, father-therein. Over the next several sessions, as my reading skills gradually increased, so did my writing ability. Soon I was stacking vowel upon consonant, consonant upon vowel ... and as the syllables combined into words flowing out of my pen, I exulted in a joy and a confidence I had never felt before.

  "Well," Evening Rose said, pleased, "you seem to have a gift for language."

  "The gift is yours, teacher."

  "My teaching skills are minimal. I have a talented student."

  I beamed with pleasure at this rare compliment. My initial shock and dismay at my teacher's profession had receded to a faint reproof in my mind. It seemed, after all, a small thing compared to what I was receiving from her.

  That wonderful, thrilling week in Taegu passed all too quickly. At the end of it I had grasped the rudiments of something I had only dreamed of. the power to take meaning from words. It was a gift I knew I could never truly repay, but I wished to give my teacher something, so I filched one of the bottles of rice wine we had brought for Aunt Obedience and presented it to Evening Rose on our last day of lessons. She accepted it graciously and bowed. "Know that you are welcome to return again anytime," she said, then turned away.

  I started to leave the room, when behind me I heard my teacher say, "Your parents were wrong, you know."

  I looked back at her. "What?"

  "When they named you. They were wrong." She gave me a soft smile. "To these eyes, you are a rare and beautiful gem."

  I smiled and left, my heart soaring like a kite.

  Later, when I went into Aunt Obedience's room to deliver her some ginseng tea Mother had made, I demonstrated to her how I could now write simple words. "You are a smart girl," she said, looking pleased and proud. "You will make something of your life."

  "I can't thank you enough, Auntie, for all you've done for me," and I kissed her on the cheek. Flustered, she changed the subject.

  Back in Pojogae, I found a moment alone and surreptitiously took out the browned old page I had kept all these years. Evening Rose had identified it, sight unseen, as from a travel book by a woman writing as Lady Uiyudang; and now I let my eyes drift across the columns of printed symbols. To my delight the word moon jumped off the page at me. Then sea, and night, and sun, the words blazing like stars in a paper sky. I did not, of course, recognize all the words-but I identified enough to transform the page from a mysterious and unfathomable riddle into something nearly comprehensible, and thrillingly attainable.

  lossom wanted to know everything about our trip, but I worried that a child as young as she might let slip something to my parents, so I withheld the full truth from her. I fell back into my old routine-cooking, sewing, housekeeping, washing. But having walked the streets of Taegu unescorted-and glimpsed an even broader world beyond that, through words-I found myself chafing even more within the limited confines of the Inner Room.

  Doing laundry at the stream, I found that Sunny had a new enthusiasm, and as usual she shared it with me as we pounded our clothes with our bats: "Have you ever heard"-thop thop thop-"of a place called"-thop thop-"Hawai'i?"

  "No," I answered truthfully.

  "They say it's a paradise"-thop!-"where no one needs money to live, and where the streets themselves are paved in gold."

  I regarded her skeptically. "Who are `they'?"

  "Pink Lily told me in church. She said the American missionaries told her about it. And they said that there are"-her voice lowered to a whisper-"Korean men there, who need wives!"

  I looked at her with unalloyed pity.

  "That is without a doubt the silliest tale you have yet told," I declared, and punctuated the statement with a thop that ended the conversation.

  Looking back, I'm not sure why Sunny continued talking to me. But really, roads paved in gold?

  By autumn Aunt Obedience's health was again in decline ... or perhaps she was just lonely for her sister. This time Mother could only go to Taegu for a day or two, but once again I was able to accompany her, carrying several cribs full of eggs. Our trips to the city now became shorter but more frequent-once every month or so-and on that first visit, while Mother and Obedience gossiped, I slipped out to see Evening Rose.

  I was worried that she might be, shall we say, otherwise engaged ... but when I arrived at her house she came to the door promptly and smiled upon seeing me. "Come in, my little gem," she said, and from that day forward she would never again use my birth name; to her I was always Gem, Jin in Korean.

  She offered to continue our lessons, and over the course of the next year she helped me further hone my reading skills and exposed me to a breadth of literature I would never have encountered without her: poetry like that of the kisaeng Bright Moon, p ansori like "The Song of a Faithful Wife," and romances such as "A Dream of Nine Clouds."

  In addition to reading and discussing literature, she taught me a few songs that had found favor at the royal palace and showed me some steps of a kisaeng dance, though I felt clumsy and clubfooted. In odd moments I would find myself gazing at her, still musing about her connection to my aunt. Could it be a blood relation, I wondered? Might they be cousins, or half-sisters? I enjoyed the possibility that Evening Rose and I could be distantly related, enjoyed it enough that I did not want it dispelled by whatever the mundane reality might be.

  Once I stayed till late in the day when my teacher had to prepare herself for an engagement that evening. I watched with fascination as she made up her face-powdering it with snow-white makeup, applying kohl to her eyes and brilliant red pigment to her lips. I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and the wisest, and I said as much.

  "To be beautiful and clever, that is what men expect of a kisaeng." She used a brush to smooth out the white powder that made her shine like a China doll. "Yangban men marry obedient Confucian wives, but who is it they seek out for wit and companionship?"

  "Teacher, how did you become an entertainer?"

  "I was born to it. My mother was kisaeng, so I inherited her status; I had no say in the matter. She was owned by the government, even as I am. I can never have the same status as a so-called honorable woman ... even a commoner's wife." She must have seen sorrow in my eyes at this, because she said sharply, "You needn't pity me, my little Gem. I've learned more in my life than a hundred wives are allowed to know. It's been, all said, a fair trade."

  I quickly changed the subject and asked her again of her days at the royal court. When she spoke of the people she had known there, the dances she performed, it was clear that the Japanese had ended what she thought of as the brightest, happiest days of her life. "No wonder you hate them," I said.

  Her face in the mirror was dramatically beautiful, her crimson lips accentuated by the white sheen of the powder.

  "I hate them for that," she said, "and not least for what they have forced me to become."

  She put down her makeup brush and stood, ready for what must have been a humbling step down from entertaining kings and queens. I started to leave, when I remembered another question I had meant to ask.

  "Teacher, have you ever heard of a place called Hawai'i?"

  She turned her painted face to me. "Why, yes-a former kisaeng I knew went there, to work in a place called Iwilei. Why do you ask?"

  So it did exist, after all! "Is it beautiful? A paradise?"

  "It's been called that, but I wouldn't know."

  "Are-" I hesitated to even ask it. "Are the streets paved with gold?"

  She laughed good-naturedly. "I sincerely doubt it. Now, if you'll excuse me-

  " Of course. Thank you, teacher."

  Well! Perhaps I owed Sunny an apology, after all.

  e were home for only two weeks when a message came from a doctor in Taegu that Aunt Obedienc
e had been stricken with pneumonia. Mother and I hastened to reach the city, but by the time we arrived at the sliver of house chockablock to the butcher's shop, my aunt had let go of her shaky grip on life.

  Mother was devastated. Sick with shock and grief, she made the necessary funeral arrangements and we cried together. I could only console myself with the knowledge that I had thanked my aunt for all she had done for me, and that she had been happy and proud of my accomplishments.

  This would certainly be my last trip to Taegu, so the day before Auntie's funeral I left the house on some pretext for one last visit to Evening Rose. She greeted me at the door with condolences-somehow she had heard of my aunt's passing-then sat me down at the same table where I had learned to read and said, "There is something I think you should know. About your aunt and myself."

  Finally, I was going to know the truth. Was my teacher obedience's stepsister, perhaps? Would I be able to call her auntie? I waited expectantly.

  With uncharacteristic hesitation, Evening Rose began, "Your uncle, of course, was quite a successful businessman."

  "Yes. He owned a pastry shop." I smiled at the remembered smells of honey rice cakes and chestnut bread. "He used to give me little red bean pastries to eat when I came to visit."

  This only seemed to make her more uncomfortable. "Yes. I met him at some function or other. I found him likable, and kind."

  She glanced away from me, something she had never done before.

  "Like all men, your uncle desired an heir. But your aunt seemed unable to give him one, and so ..."

  She sighed, as if she was regretting having brought the matter up.

  "He ... took me as a concubine," she said finally. "A `second wife.' It is not an uncommon practice."

  I felt as if someone had pushed me from a moving wagon, and in the middle of a mudslide to boot-the ground shifting beneath me.

  This was the last thing in the world I had expected, and I immediately thought, I've heard enough-but my teacher went on:

  "I was his concubine for the remainder of his life-almost ten yearsthough I did not produce an heir for him, either. He may have been unable to produce one with any woman-but it was your aunt, of course, who bore the stigma.