This Burns My Heart Page 0,18

air, and Soo-Ja tried to keep her head covered with her arms. Next to her, Chu-Sook’s mother wailed in horror, letting out all the sorrow that had been trapped in her lungs before.

Soo-Ja then saw that the men who had been holding Chu-Sook’s body began to fall, too, like the legs of a table being knocked off one by one. For a moment, Chu-Sook’s frame seemed to hang in the air, on its own, and Soo-Ja imagined that it would fly to heaven. The moment suddenly felt very quiet and still—the body rising a few inches, as the last of its pallbearers pushed it upward toward the sky—but then its weight broke through the air again, and Soo-Ja watched as the boy’s body fell to the ground, making a thunderous noise. Chu-Sook would not make his way to his savior that night; he chose to stay with the others, becoming one more in a sea of bodies.

chapter three

“Now, more than ever, I long for my life to have more heft,” wrote Soo-Ja to Min. It was the first letter she’d ever sent him. “And yes, that’s the word I mean—heft. I have tasted what it means to have days packed with urgency and meaning, and I cannot go back to living an unimportant life. I find my routines so dull and tranquil. I know I have everything a young woman of my class could ask for—attentive servants, hand-stitched clothes, a temple-like home—but it all feels like a gilded cage. I can see what will happen if I stay in Daegu. I’ll never have to answer the call of my own highest potential. I must become a diplomat.”

Lying restless on the ground, Soo-Ja thought about Min, and how much she’d misjudged him. Why had she been so quick to dismiss him? He had risked his life at the protests, just like she had. They had experienced the same—only miles apart. Had he thought of her as he evaded bullets, or as he knocked about against the body armor of the police? All he’d asked for was a date. If she’d simply said yes, he could have been out of harm’s way.

Come back, Soo-Ja found herself whispering. If he did, they could go on that date he had so desperately wanted. They could take a walk along the river at night and name different constellations. If it got cold, he’d lend her his argyle sweater. Or maybe he’d ask Soo-Ja for hers. But what she realized was that she wouldn’t mind that, if she had to be the strong one. She’d like to swoop in and care for Min, who sometimes had the air of an orphan. How had he managed to survive all his life without her to protect him? He was the opposite of Yul, who seemed to need nothing and no one. Not even a wife, thought Soo-Ja poignantly.

Min had been lucky. He’d marched in the large protest outside the National Assembly, the one where, according to the radio, more than a hundred people had been killed, and a thousand injured. But he had not been wounded. He’d told her so when he wrote her back. He also mentioned he’d be coming home to Daegu very soon. “My work here is done,” he wrote in a grandiose way. “Syngman Rhee has been deposed. Our country’s struggle for freedom, which began when we freed ourselves from the Japanese colonizers, then continued with the war against the communists, has finally come to an end with the end of the dictatorship. I was talking about this to the people in the crowd, as we watched the slow procession of the President’s motorcade through the streets of Seoul. And you know what the amazing thing was? Some people were crying. I don’t know if it’s because they were thinking of the terrible things he’d done, or because they felt sorry for him and his wife. But what matters is that he’s gone now, and this is a beautiful day for democracy.”

Min had left as an idler, but he would return as a hero.

Soo-Ja sat on the front steps of her house, watching the servants do the week’s laundry in the courtyard. One of them worked the lever of the water pump, her heavy arms pushing up and down, until a clean stream spurted out. Another sat on top of a stone, scrubbing wet, soapy clothes on top of a washboard. Finally, a third one rinsed the clothes in the pump and shook them