to hear news of your daughter from your own husband! thought Soo-Ja. “She’ll do fine. She’ll spend the summer studying.”
“In America, you don’t have to be good at school. You just have to know how to smile brightly and shake hands firmly. Hana could learn how to do that.”
“Listen, if she wanted to go to America to go to school, I’d give it a second thought. But you know Hana. She wants to sit by a swimming pool in a nice hotel, and marry some Kennedy.”
“Fine. We just might go without you then,” said Min, with his mouth full, pushing his empty plate away from him, the leftover chili pepper staining it red.
“I’d kill you if you did that,” said Soo-Ja, heading back to the front desk.
Soo-Ja had no time to listen to either of them. She couldn’t wait to tell her father that she could finally pay him back. She would go visit him and give him a check for the money.
For the last eight years Soo-Ja had lived full of guilt, thinking of all the money he had lost because of her. In his sixties, her father was supposed to reap the rewards of an industrious life, and finally rest while Soo-Ja and her brothers took care of him. But Soo-Ja had not been able to help him in this stage of his life; and not only that, she had moved to another city.
Her brothers still lived in Daegu, but the eldest, Tae, had turned against their father (he felt that his father played favorites toward Soo-Ja), and it had been left to Kwang-Ho, the youngest of the three, kindly but a bit reluctantly, to take care of their parents (which was the job of the eldest, not the youngest).
After Soo-Ja moved to Seoul, she tried not to think too much about the family she was leaving behind. She felt terrible when they lost their ancestral home and had to move into a small apartment. Now, finally, Soo-Ja could make it up to her father.
“Eomma, can you please put Father on the phone?” asked Soo-Ja excitedly.
It was late in the evening, and Soo-Ja sat in the alcove that served as her office. The day’s check-ins and checkouts were done, and she knew she could talk to her father in peace.
“Soo-Ja, is this you? I don’t remember what my daughter’s voice sounds like,” said Soo-Ja’s mother.
“Eomma, please,” said Soo-Ja, trying not to let her mother kill her good mood. “Just give the phone to Father.”
“I’m just saying, it’s been so long since you called. And you didn’t come home for Seollal.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“If you won’t even come home for the holiday, when will you ever come home?”
“Eomma, please put him on the phone. I have good news for him,” said Soo-Ja.
Soo-Ja heard the faint sound of her father’s voice in the background. Her heart leapt with joy, until she realized he was singing. She heard the hesitation in her mother’s breathing, and then finally the sound of the phone being handed to her father.
“Soo-Ja? Is this you?” He sounded like a man who had swallowed a microphone. His words seemed to stretch for miles.
“Hello, appa.”
“Your mother doesn’t want to sing for me! Nobody wants to sing for me. But you will sing, right?”
“Appa, no, I—” Soo-Ja squinted her eyebrows, worried. The phone cord tangled in her hands, an unruly bracelet.
“Sing for me. Sing for me!”
“Appa, you’re going to wake up Kwang-Ho. He has to get up early for work,” said Soo-Ja. She heard some talking in the background, and she thought she could hear her brother’s voice. She had not spoken to him in months.
“Kwang-Ho is not my son!” her father proclaimed loudly. “I have disowned him!”
“Appa, you live in his house. He takes care of you.”
“He drags me out of the sul-jib, and embarrasses me in front of my friends. What kind of a son is that?”
Soo-Ja closed her eyes, mortified by her father’s drunkenness. For a moment, Soo-Ja heard the sound of the phone changing hands, and then she heard her mother’s voice.
“Soo-Ja, your father is tired. Why don’t you call again tomorrow?”
“What’s wrong with him? Why do you let him drink?” asked Soo-Ja, pulling the phone cord so tightly she almost broke it.
“Your father’s been having a hard time. He doesn’t like living off of Kwang-Ho. Your father never had to depend on others before. It used to be that other men came to him, asking for money. Now he has to ask them for