This Burns My Heart Page 0,115

Min, letting him know she was onto him.

“I don’t want to visit America, I want to live in America!” Hana almost yelled.

“Go. Go live with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Hana, the life you want is a dream, a movie-star life. If we moved to America, we’d start at the bottom. I’d probably still be a hotel clerk, just in a place where nobody can understand what I’m saying. Nicer background, same life.”

“But we have money!” Hana protested.

“Hana, I already told you before. We’re not keeping all the money. We have to pay back your grandfather in Daegu.” Soo-Ja smiled at herself, proud of being able to pay her father back for the money he had loaned to Min’s father so many years ago.

“I thought you said the money was for me! You told me, the reason you invested was so you could invest in my future!” Soo-Ja heard an unexpected desperation in her daughter’s voice.

“Yes. It is, of course it is. If we had sold the land twenty years from now, especially, all of it would be yours. But my father is still alive, and I want to pay him back.”

“It’s not fair! It’s my money.” Hana got up and ran out of the room, leaving the paper door open on her way out. Soo-Ja wondered if she spoiled her by letting her do whatever she wanted. How would she ever learn to appreciate their love?

Soo-Ja patiently rose and closed the door. She didn’t want guests to look in and see into their room.

“My parents still offer to pay back what they borrowed from your father,” said Min evenly, without looking up from his bowl of doenjang soup.

“What kind of insulting offer are they making this time? The exact same amount he borrowed, not adjusted for inflation, only enough to pay for a TV? Your father borrowed enough to pay for three houses!”

“You can’t get back what you lost.”

“What do you mean?”

“The years you spent with them. The money can’t make up for that.”

“I was their slave.”

“I know, I know. But they’re my parents you’re talking about!”

“You want to go to America, too, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he said quietly, the pinched sound hinting at some larger sorrow.

“And if it were up to you, we’d fly there tomorrow, right?”

“But you won’t let us,” said Min, letting more of his anguish emerge. “You’re trying to keep us away from them.”

“I’m not,” she said. “And I don’t have my parents with me, either.”

“They’re four hours away by train.”

“My father’s too sick to travel. I hardly ever get to see him.”

“But you see him. I haven’t seen my parents in almost ten years.”

Min was as restless as a cast-off lover. He would often talk about his plans to join his parents—plans that Father-in-law neither supported nor discouraged. In the past, whenever Soo-Ja listed the reasons why they couldn’t go—Min’s parents had betrayed them, she did not wish to live with them, she couldn’t leave her own parents—Min only repeated, But they are my father and my mother. She knew at those moments that he did not, could not think ill of them, regardless of what they’d done to him. He rationalized the past, did elaborate somersaults in his head, concocted versions of the story in which his parents finally emerged as victims, and Soo-Ja—Soo-Ja, whom he had to live with, the one who was left—turned out to be the villain.

• • •

But the idea somehow took hold. It came back in the morning, in the bitter coffee and the spicy udon noodles. It lashed at her ears, tugged at her ankles.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. I can go live with Grandpa and Grandma on my own,” said Hana.

“Don’t say that,” said Soo-Ja.

“Why?”

“Because I need you to need me.”

“It’s America!” Hana yelled, like a mantra. Soo-Ja understood her daughter’s frustration. She probably couldn’t fathom why her mother was keeping her away from sun-drenched afternoons and wide-laned streets and air so clean you could drink big happy gulps of it. In America, no one would honk in traffic, or cut in line, or speak ill of you. In America, every day was a vacation, including the workday.

When it wasn’t Hana, it was Min. Did they conspire to take turns cornering her? Soo-Ja wondered.

“She’s not just being frivolous,” Min said to her over lunch, between bites of thinly sliced beef and spiced cubed radishes. “She’s worried about her future. She’s not doing very well at school.”

How awkward it was, to have