Then the men take turns dissecting her height (too tall), her education (too threatening), her personality (too strong), her clothes (too dark), and start offering advice about how to attract a man (incorporate cute mannerisms in speech).
Throughout it all, she titters and jokes along with them about her shortcomings. “I know, I really need to tone down my first impression,” she says with a pained, toothy smile. All night, she tries desperately to seem like a good sport.
The ones who pay for the ravages of the firing squad are of course us, her underlings. The next day, she will invariably scream at us for “unacceptable work,” and make us stay at the office well into the night with her. She’s happy at the office—there’s no one to go home to. But even if she wasn’t such a sour bitch, her complete ineptitude would keep me from feeling sorry for her. The only reason she continues to get promoted is because she stays past 11 P.M. most nights and broadcasts it loudly the next day, with us as witnesses. Management pegs her as “loyal.”
I have no desire to stay past midnight every night for a company that treats me like an ant to be crushed by the heel of a shoe. But those who do, the ones with no families, those are the ones that get ahead. The career woman I imagine my mother to be—she is probably one of them too.
I know it’s too early for the baby to be kicking—or for me to feel it kicking, anyway—but I could swear that I feel a gentle movement just under my belly button. I place my hand there and listen and wait. For what, I have not a shred of an idea.
“Please stay,” I whisper. “Please, please stay.”
Miho
I often wonder where I would be today, if my aunt and uncle had not decided they couldn’t keep me anymore.
They might have continued to raise me, if my cousin Kyunghee had not been so smart. She was five years older than I was, and from the fifth grade, she had exhibited flaring signs of intelligence that her teachers—even in our forlorn, sleepy school in the middle of the reed fields—were quick to single out and praise. Kyunghee can do long division in her head, Kyunghee can sketch a startling still life from memory, Kyunghee can memorize every king in Korean history. I was proud of her too, my gifted cousin, and my favorite thing to do was take my sketchbook and sit under the big tree outside my aunt and uncle’s restaurant and draw while she did her homework beside me, her lip curled in concentration as she worked slowly through her textbook. “Don’t get your fingers all dirty,” she’d say sometimes when she looked up from her homework, because even back then, I preferred to smudge out all of the edges in my drawings with my fingers. I don’t work with pencils much anymore, but when I do, they remind me of her.
Kyunghee did not notice me much. Her brain was always puzzling out things that interested her and she did not care for friends of her own. My aunt and uncle generally left me alone as well. They ran a “taxi food hall” for taxi drivers that served three varieties of hangover stews and simple side dishes. It was probably the cheapest restaurant in our town, on the edge of a patchy field of wildflowers, and we lived in two rooms at the back of the restaurant.
I don’t know where it came from—that drive of Kyunghee’s. She lived for praise and she was relentless in her studies. While I loafed around and watched the TV that was on for the customers, she would sit in the corner and finish her homework as soon as she got home, and when she did not understand a problem, she would walk to school early and find any teacher or staff person and ask until they showed her the answer. Needless to say, the grown-ups all loved her for this. My aunt and uncle did not know how to help her, but they were grateful to her for being so self-sufficient.
“I don’t know who she gets it from,” they said, shaking their heads proudly when customers