tears welling and I hurried to the bathroom I’d seen down the hallway. Locking the door, I started crying for real until I saw myself in the mirror and stopped, horrified. My face was distorted and ferocious, patterned with red welts. I looked down and closed my eyes.
Remorse, that was all I allowed myself to feel. “How Loring,” they would have said if they could see me now, all the girls from the Center. “Stop being so Loring,” I could hear them jeer. Because secretly, to each other and to ourselves, even we used that word that way.
Ara
I do not like going back to Cheongju. I feel bad because it is no fault of my parents that their only daughter has not been to see them in three years. I know the other servants of the Big House pity them twice over, for having a mute daughter in the first place, and an ungrateful one at that. She would rather spend holidays alone than travel home like the rest of the country.
Perhaps this is why I feel so at home with Sujin or Miho. Neither is the type that longs for family. Anyone else would fault me for being a bad daughter, or wonder how it is that I do not withdraw to where I came from, bruised by an impatient city.
My parents are old. They should have had a daughter who is filial and generous, one who sends them a percentage of her paycheck and comes home every month with news of promotions and romantic conquests. TV dramas depict such daughters in droves—with their doe-eyed faces that furrow in sorrow when they choose their beloved, destitute parents over their fabulously wealthy suitors because you cannot have both. I have never met such a daughter in real life, but perhaps that’s because they’re all at home, busy being virtuous. Kyuri, I suppose, comes close, but she has her own share of problems that would kill her mother and sister if they ever found out.
But for Sujin, and for Sujin alone, I am thinking of going home for Lunar New Year and taking her with me. Watching her fall apart yet again this week in front of our bathroom mirror, agitated and despairing, I have been asking myself how I can get her mind off the state of her face. It has actually come a long way but she is unable to get over how it stays stubbornly swollen.
“All the girls in the blogs had their swelling go down so much faster. It’s been more than two months! This really isn’t normal, is it? I should call Dr. Shim, right? Don’t you think so, Ara? And I keep hearing a clicking sound in my jaw when I walk. That cannot be normal or they would have told me at the hospital, right?”
It is true that she does seem to have more swelling in her jawline than the girls from the blogs, but the lower part of her face does not protrude like that of a fish anymore—instead her mouth has moved so far inward that she now, in my secret opinion, looks toothless. Although I assure her that she will look better than any of the bloggers in the end—her transformation will be all the more dramatic for being so prolonged—she pushes my notepad away whenever I write this.
It was of course Taein who gave me the idea and the courage to think it over. In his latest SwitchBox message, he said that he was going home to Gwangju before leaving for Crown’s world tour. It would be his first homecoming since his debut. He said our roots are what make us who we are and he wouldn’t change the hardships in his past for anything, because they are what inform his lyrics and music and even his dancing today. And if he can find it in his heart to go visit his estranged mother and four older brothers, who used to ignore him and then sued him for a share of his Crown earnings, I can go home too. I have to admit that it makes me feel warm all over, to embark on this parallel journey with Taein.
Sujin will protest at first. What about our tradition, she’ll say. Every major holiday, we patronize a