November 28th, 2015 was one of the coldest and rainiest days of the year. I wondered why it didn't snow but rained – it was freezing cold yet what I saw were raindrops instead of snowflakes. My knuckles whitened and my palm turned pink. It was several days before – perhaps after – my grandmother's sister's birthday. I was supposed to visit her with my father, but my father had an urgent appointment with his lawyer. Stupid lawyer. It was remarkable how some people in the service sector could be so high-handed, demanding time from the weekends. He said that perhaps I should go next year, or on another occasion because I was merely recovering a terrible cold that brought me down the day before, but I insisted that I go alone. I took a cab from home since Guri, where her house was was slightly too far away from the subway station, and I had to make many transfers on the subway. After a drive of 30-40 minutes, void of conversation with the taxi driver who made random remarks alone on the weather, how lousy the driver front of him was driving, and the radio, I paid the taxi driver and got off. The ground was icy and the house that I had visited several times and faintly in my memory loomed into my sight. I walked up the steep concrete stairs, taking care not to touch the rusty rail and hesitated before pressing the doorbell. I pressed the doorbell after a short hesitation but the bell didn't ring. Stupid doorbell. I knocked instead. After several knocks, an old man opened the door.
"Deul-uh-oh-se-yo (Come on in)" I wondered why he used honorific form of language to me though I was a young relative but followed him inside. The house was lit with a dingy light bulb that I identified from the conventional bathroom in the countryside. He held the door open for me and led me into the house. Perhaps it was foolish to call it a house because it was rather a room with a bathroom. There were no rooms but one. I recognized my great-aunt lying on the comforter. She barely had any hair, I could see her veins right through the pale skin of her face, and one of her eye was hazy and the other was blue from lack of pigmentation due to her age. She wasn't old – she was ANCIENT. The room was cold. The room was so cold that I thought that the outside would be much warmer.
"Why are you not turning on the boiler?" I asked. The great-aunt gazed at me as if she had been gazing at me forever and answered, "because old people barely feels things, not the taste, the pain, and the cold."
I presented her with the cookie set that my father had sent. She rushed it to open it to let me have some of it but I refused. I didn't want to have the cookies, I wanted to have more of the cookies. The old man whom I realized as the great-uncle sat next to my aunt.
"Bring those tangerines, won't you?" my great-aunt insisted and he brought the net of tangerines that seemed to have lost its elasticity, maybe because it froze and thawed. She took a tangerine, tried to peel the tangerine, fumbling with her bony fingers but failed. She just handed the tangerine to me, and thanking her quietly, I took the slightly dented tangerine, peeled the fruit and popped the whole thing into my mouth. My great-aunt beamed. Old people loved to see young people eating things, always. More voracious, the better.
"How troublesome for you to get here, alone at that!" she remarked. "Um, I took a cab. No worries. I earn much so it's okay to take cabs now."
She smiled faintly and said, "I knew you'd always do so well, your father's done remarkable too. With diplomas from Seoul National University, such great jobs, your grandmother's joy."
Oh, no. Not again. Every time I met an old relative, they always remarked on my father. It became more intimidating as they regarded me as his younger self and I was achieving none of what he had achieved.
"Your grandmother was so proud of your father. When he was your age, guess what he bought for her? A plot of land before her house! She always wanted her own land to farm rice!"
I had heard the story a thousand times, but it had a different feel to it after my grandmother had succumbed from the accident in 2013. My grandmother quit farming rice after my grandfather's death in 2011 and went to strawberry farms. One day, she took a bicycle to the strawberry vinyl greenhouses, and a yellow school bus driver late on his schedule took an illegal U-turn and hit her. I blamed myself secretly forever for leaving my old bicycle at her house and my father started abhorring strawberries. The jars of strawberry jams that my grandmother had made the winter before remained unopened in the refrigerator.
She went on babbling. "And he got a gold ring for her, for his mother! To put on her finger! Because she never had a decent ring! And guess what else he got for her? A TV! A brand new TV from Keumseong(the old name of LG)!" I remembered the old TV set from my grandmother's house. The antennas had to be adjusted continuously or the TV would never show anything appropriately, but my grandmother cherished it more than anything.
Her compliments of my father turned into mourning after just a few minutes. "Poor thing, why she had to go like that. Twelve times younger than me and going to the afterlife like that, why so! I ought to die too." Old ladies were always storytellers, telling the same story over and over again, and it always ended in mourning. I had heard the remark several times from several old people, but never my own grandmother.
"No, why should you die? I want you to live a long time." I added to her fading words. "come on, no one wants you to die."
"My wretched daughter-in-law would want me to die! Stupid bitch! Doing nothing and thinking of making others work to earn her money! She used my money for her convenience store and stuffing me into a cellar!"
Her mood swing was overwhelming, she had been complimenting my father joyously just minutes before. Perhaps it was an invitation for me to console her, to tell her good things about her family whom I knew nothing about. My father often remarked that my great-aunt's son was garbage, but I couldn't comment anything like that to her -
"Oh come on, you have the great-uncle here beside you like this…," my words were cut off my his words, "geureumyo(of course)". He used the honorific tone again. It was utterly uncomfortable to have such an old man to use honorific language to me. I had thought that he was teasing me when he used his honorific tone, but he spoke in nothing but honorific words.
"Why do you keep speaking to me in honorific tone? It's uncomfortable…" I couldn't help but ask this time. What he said really took me aback.
"Because I am lowly," he said.
"Why would you say that?" I asked back, and he replied, "because I married an agashi(young lady in honorific sense again) while I am so lowly."
"why….why? I don't get it." I asked again, but he sealed his mouth shut. Instead, as his mouth closed, my great-aunt started telling her story.
" You know the story of how my mama and papa died. I was fifteen and your grandmother was ten," she paused. "We were rich, we were. All the lands that you could see from atop the mountain was our father's. All of Shinwonmyeon. People told lies that the land was from bribing the Japanese people in the colonial era, but they know nothing. All from diligent hard work. You remember how your grandmother worked forever and ever. "
I swallowed. I had heard the story at my grandmother's funeral, but from a relative that I did not know, in such dry words.
"We went to a sleepover to a village next to ours, and when we returned, the village was in ruins."
I knew the story, but not from the words of relatives but from textbooks. The Korean army suspected the villagers of being North Korean partisan. Not being able to differentiate the villagers and the North Korean partisans, all were slaughtered with machine guns and burned. 300 children, and 700 adults. The story felt too faraway to be feel sad. Hundreds of people that I never knew, dying so pointlessly.
"Packing boiled eggs and candy for us, that was the last we saw of our mama. We never saw her again. Not even her body."
She continued, "but my relatives were alive. But they didn't care for your grandmother, or her brother, or me. Instead, they deprived us of everything. The land, the house, the farms. I was forced to marry this man just when I was fourteen," and she added to my great-uncle, "but I don't think you are lowly, dear."
Her story, rhythmic and elongating like a song went on, "but your grandmother was too young to send off anywhere. So they harassed her for a dozen years before she could marry. They beat her with sticks and made her do all the hard work, washing clothes at the stream in the winter, giving her no water in the summer. You remember how handsome your grandfather was? Your grandfather was an orphan from a village a bit far away. He was rumored to be the child of a foreign soldier, and that his mother ditched him because she feared people would point fingers at her for having the child of a foreigner. She was forced to marry him too! No wedding garments but a dinner with a chicken and nothing else. But never complained."
She tried to wipe her tears with her sleeve but failed because her sleeves were too short. She dabbed her eyes instead with the back of her hand. "Had three children. The three children never fought or even argued. She had issues about your uncle smoking from so young because she thought maybe he'd die of lung cancer like your grandfather, but nothing else. Nothing! Her sons bringing beautiful wives from Seoul, her daughter marrying a giant from Ulsan. Her grandchildren growing up beautifully. You are going to get married soon, right?"
I didn't have plans for marriage for a long time, but I couldn't deny her at that moment, I wouldn't have been able to deny her of anything. "Sure, I might get married next year or a year after that. You should come to my wedding."
She finally seemed satisfied. "Of course, if I don't die until then… Your grandmother should be happy, she died at the happiest moment of her life."
Her story ended in a long wail and I could say nothing. It wasn't an interview, it was a story that she started and ended all on her own. Her shoulders rose and ceased endlessly and my great-uncle sat by her, offering Kleenex tissues. I noticed that he was sitting on his knees when I had been sitting so comfortably though I shifted numerously in my seat. I knelt too.
After her cries ceased, she offered more things to eat. Old Korean cookies, bread, more half-frozen tangerines. I didn't refuse any of those. I remembered how just days before my grandmother's death, I had mixed up the leftover vegetables and rice and gochujang in a large stainless bowl and pigged on the food, and how happy my grandmother looked. It must have been 3-4 servings and it was the last memory of eating anything in front of her.
After endless stone-like Korean cookies, it was time to go. My great-aunt's eyebrows drooped. "Do you have to go?" she asked. "Let's watch another TV show, no?" I refused, waving my hands in the air, and she gave up. I must have been there for hours, in the dingily lit room smelling faintly of smoke and fungus.
"No need to come out," I told my great-uncle coming out of the house after me. He bowed at me and closed the door. I had thought that it might snow, but it didn't.
