about my mother makes not being able to have a baby all the more difficult. Getting pregnant is not the issue, it’s that these babies keep on dying. I read somewhere that miscarriages are babies self-terminating when they know there will be a problem. It hollows me out, the way that they would rather kill themselves than be born to me.
* * *
—
WHEN I THINK of my mother, I imagine that she is a rich woman—self-made and invincible. I also like to imagine that she is alone and tortured by regret over how she left her baby. Sometimes, if I am in a public space, I look around casually to see if there is a well-dressed woman in expensive sunglasses lurking behind a corner with a hungry expression on her face.
After leaving you, I have never known what it is like to be happy, she says, when she musters up the courage to come talk to me.
When I think of my grandmother, though, I understand my mother for leaving. If I’d had any backbone as a child, I would have run away too.
She is out there somewhere—my mother. Whenever she sees a baby, she is thinking about me.
* * *
—
I HAD NOT even known that all the venomous things my grandmother spewed about my mother abandoning me had been true. I had thought that my mother was with my father overseas as he worked. I did not understand until he came back that my mother had left both of us.
It had been a few weeks after my cousin’s accident that my father came for me at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother had not spoken to me in those weeks—she had also stopped feeding me—she had stopped being at home altogether during the day because she said she could not bear to be in the same house with me. I made my own rice and ate the dried food that tasted bad uncooked.
But when my father came for me—that was one thing to his credit, that he had packed up and left his life in South America with a local woman when he heard about the accident—my grandmother kicked up a fuss you couldn’t believe! She shrieked, she gagged, she threw things and clutched me to her so hard that her nails dug into my neck and I wriggled away and ran to my father, whom I did not even know, calling out, “Father, Father.”
When he took me to his new apartment in Seoul, he said that we were both starting over. That we could be happy now.
* * *
—
IT’S PAST 1 A.M. and I’m stooped over the toilet bowl again.
My morning sickness only comes at night, rearing its head after my husband has already gone to sleep. It’s mostly in my throat—it feels like I’m going to throw up every few minutes but I never do, then I feel ravenous, but when I go through the list of things to eat in the house, I want to throw up again.
Something not agreeing with you, baby? I want to ask as I gingerly touch my lower stomach. Was it the ice cream? The noodles? They’re the only things I can bring myself to eat these days and the reason why my stomach looks like I’m five months pregnant instead of two. I’ve taken to wearing drapey, shapeless dresses to try to mask my protruding belly—but I’m sure the razor eyes at work will notice before long. My fists clench when I think about what they’ll say—and it’ll be even worse if I lose this one too. Not that they knew about the other miscarriages—they just gave me hell last time for calling in sick for three days in a row.
Currently, in my New Product Development role, my immediate boss is a thirty-seven-year-old unmarried woman whom I almost feel sorry for every time we have team night. The minute dinner starts, the talk always turns to why no one has married her.
“Why don’t we go around the table and offer some theories for Miss Chun?” Department Head Lee says once the meat order has been placed by Chief Cho. “Chief Cho, what do you think?”