This Burns My Heart Page 0,129

her hands into fists, her arms shaking. She struggled for breath, and fought back a wave of emotion rising in her chest.

“I have to work!” said Soo-Ja loudly, her voice piercing through the air. “I work so that you can play! I work for you. For you.”

“Mom, please stop. Somebody might come in,” said Hana.

“Am I—Am I embarrassing you right now?” asked Soo-Ja, desperate for the love of the girl in front of her.

Soo-Ja stared at her own reflection in the mirror. She had never lived for herself, and in that, she found her greatest mistake and her greatest glory. Her selflessness had not been entirely chosen, but rather forced out of her, by her family. She had not been allowed to pursue happiness; only to try to find some meaning in her sufferings, and look for a way, however small, to make sense of her disappointments. How could she explain this to her daughter? she wondered. Hana already seemed to belong to another world.

Soo-Ja stopped looking into the mirror and stared, instead, at the carpet below her feet. It was light brown, and it reached between her toes. Her voice suddenly became very quiet, like a whisper. “All right, then. It’s all decided.”

“I know what you’re thinking. But your life is your life, and my life is my life,” said Hana. “You made your mistakes, but they’re your own.”

“Yes, I know,” said Soo-Ja, forcing herself to smile. “You’re right. Forget what I said.”

“If you’re not happy about being here, you can go back and just visit us later,” said Hana. For Soo-Ja, each word felt like a lash against her bare skin.

“No, Hana. I’ll always be where you are. No matter how much you try to run away from me, I’ll always be where you are.”

Soo-Ja thought of her father’s letter. You keep running away from me, but I will always find you, he had written. She didn’t think she’d be repeating his words to her own daughter, and so soon. She was so struck by this, she did not notice that Min had been standing outside the door, in the hallway between the room and the garage, listening in, making no sounds of his own. He was like a prowler, already inside the house, just trying to figure out how to get out.

It took her a while to fall asleep. Soo-Ja was used to random noises at night—guests lumbering to the bathroom, couples tossing harsh words like tennis balls—and the silence felt otherworldly to her, the prelude to some shaman evoking mountain spirits.

When she was twenty-two, Soo-Ja dreamed of donning a diplomat’s suit jacket and flying through the atlas to dole out goodwill like peppermint candy from a bag. This was the diorama version of her life, the one you put in a magic snow globe and sell in souvenir shops. At the time, she was sad that she didn’t get to leave Korea. But now she wanted to tell her twenty-two-year-old self that she was lucky, that she got to spend a little more time with her father (if she’d left Daegu then, she would have missed the last ten years of his life), that she got to know her own country and came to cherish it like a loyal friend. There was not enough time later to say good-bye to your parents and your youth; the old familiar rooms fall away before you know it. She wanted so much to escape, and marry, and leave. She didn’t know back then that she had already found happiness, and that in going after it, she’d simply been walking farther and farther away from it.

Soo-Ja didn’t know how long she’d been asleep when she felt someone nudge her. She opened her eyes only a slit and saw it was not morning, but not night either—the light outside, shy and bleached out, announced only the promise of sun, not its presence. Min stood over her with an anguished look on his face, and when he saw she was awake, he began to nudge Hana, too. Min had an amped-up energy about him, and Soo-Ja realized he had not slept at all. Next to the bed, she saw that he had placed two bags—the one she’d arrived with, and the other, a smaller one, which she recognized as Hana’s.

“What time is it? What’s wrong?” Soo-Ja whispered.

“I called a taxicab. It’s going to be here in twenty minutes. It’ll take you and Hana to the airport.”

“What do you mean?” Soo-Ja asked, sitting