are the busiest times, with all the extra cooking and cleaning and shopping and rituals.
I try to see it through Miho’s and Sujin’s eyes, and it is as painful as I predicted. The edges of the living room wallpaper have turned a shade of yellow, and in the far corner a triangular flypaper is studded with insect bodies—a few still flickering with life. I also hope Miho doesn’t notice my parents’ matching “Adidis” slippers in the foyer.
Miho smiles at me and asks where the bathroom is. I point to the right and walk to the kitchen, where Sujin has already poured herself some barley tea from a jug in the fridge and is eating a rice cake from a plate my mother left on the table.
“It’s kind of eerie how it’s stayed exactly the same,” Sujin says, gesturing around her. “I feel like I’m in middle school again. Your mother made these, right? You used to bring them to school.” Sujin pushes the plate toward me but I shake my head. Even as a child, I could see only how much work and cleanup they involved, and I did not like to eat them.
* * *
—
WE GO FIND my mother in the kitchen of the Big House. She is making dumplings with Mrs. Youngja and Mrs. Sukhyang at the round table. Waving their flour-coated hands, Mrs. Youngja and Mrs. Sukhyang yell in excitement when they see me.
“Look who it is! Ara! Pink hair! Oh my goodness! And you gained some weight!”
“No, she hasn’t, she’s lost weight!”
Mrs. Youngja and Mrs. Sukhyang immediately start squabbling while my mother waves me closer. When she soundlessly wraps me in an emotional hug, my heart gives a guilty jump as I take in how lined her face has become. Her skin looks powdery and thin, and uneven silver streaks her hair. Can she have aged this much in what seems so short a time?
I write a New Year greeting and show her. I also write out Sujin’s and Miho’s names and beckon them to come say hello.
They enter shyly, then bow. Elders make them uneasy.
“It’s been a long time,” says my mother to Sujin. I am relieved that there is no sorrow or reproach lining her voice. She sounds too exhausted to mind the girl she once disapproved of for leading her daughter astray.
“It’s so wonderful to be back here again!” says Sujin loudly.
I am waiting for my mother to comment on Sujin’s face—she looks like a completely different person after all, but my mother doesn’t say a thing.
“You’ve been here before?” asks Mrs. Youngja, as she rummages in the refrigerator to find us some snacks. “Are you a school friend of Ara’s?” Mrs. Youngja is a relatively new addition to the staff—she started working at the Big House when I was in high school. Mrs. Sukhyang is a good decade older than my mother, but she looks about the same age, probably due to the harsh blue-black shade of her hair.
“She is a middle school friend of Ara’s,” my mother answers. And then she says something that flabbergasts me. “You know, one of those children from the orphanage.”
My throat constricting, I look at Sujin and Miho sharply, and so do Mrs. Youngja and Mrs. Sukhyang. The girls haven’t heard that reference, or that tone, in a long time.
“I grew up there too,” says Miho steadily. The women cluck in sympathy—“motherless poor things” is the prevailing sentiment. But we all know that the minute we leave the kitchen, that sympathy will be undercut by something else. I’m sorry, I telegraph to Sujin, who blinks rapidly to say it’s fine and I’m not to worry about it.
“Come, come, you need to eat after such a long journey,” says Mrs. Sukhyang. She opens the lid of one of the pots on the stove and carefully drops in the dumplings.
“They live in Gangnam, you know,” Mrs. Youngja says knowingly to Mrs. Sukhyang. Without holiday traffic, it is barely two hours away by bus, but I know that neither of them has been anywhere near where we live now. All of their children live