This Burns My Heart Page 0,30

sorry and says yes? I bet you don’t even know what it’s like. To not get what you want. You have been spoiled all your life, Soo-Ja. I could tell when I first met you.” Min let out another big cloud of smoke. Soo-Ja knew the unfairness of his words. “You also have a habit of not wanting to admit defeat. I’m not sure yet if it’s a good or a bad quality.”

“I didn’t realize I was defeated,” said Soo-Ja, feeling bruised. Her mind wandered to the night they had first made love. Lights flashed in her head, blinding her.

“Have you ever not come out on top?” asked Min.

“You didn’t get much in the bargain, Min,” said Soo-Ja, trying to recover some of her footing. “I’m not exactly a princess.”

“No, but you’re not a factory girl or a farmer’s daughter, and those were the kinds of girls I was courting before I met you.”

Soo-Ja closed her eyes. She could not bear to look at her husband. “I think we should try to go to sleep. We have a long trip ahead of us tomorrow. I would say good night and turn off the lamp, but it’s dead already.”

“All right, I’m sorry,” said Min, sounding disingenuous. “What I said, just strike it from the record.”

In the dark, Soo-Ja changed from her street clothes into her pajamas. She slipped under the blankets and lay next to Min. Tears began to fall. She could not fall asleep, and she sensed that neither could he. Then she heard a small voice say something. It barely registered, like a sound squeezed out of an animal’s throat. She turned to Min and heard him repeat it, louder this time.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” Soo-Ja whispered back.

Min turned his back to her. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

PART TWO

Orchid

Three Years Later

Daegu, South Korea

1963

chapter six

Soo-Ja thought of herself as a mother first, but for the rest of the world, she was a daughter-in-law. And as such, she was expected to take care of all the Lee children, especially her teenage sister-in-law Na-yeong. Her parents lavished upon Na-yeong all kinds of expensive sweets and treats, though Soo-Ja wasn’t sure why they had chosen her as the single object of their attention and love. Perhaps they favored Na-yeong because she was one of the youngest, thought Soo-Ja, and thus least damaged, or the one with the shortest list of grudges. Maybe the chosen one had originally been Min, until her in-laws finally realized they couldn’t rely on him—Min was too erratic and rebellious, quitting activism one day, then taking up boxing the next, only to quit it, too, and return to his father’s factory, though not as a manager but as a packer. Soo-Ja wondered if maybe her in-laws, in private discussions, had gone down the list of names of their children one by one and ran out of options—Min’s sister Seon-ae, the second oldest, had left home and never come back; Chung-Ho, the third eldest, resented being forced to leave school and work; Du-Ho was not very smart and therefore written off; and In-Ho, the youngest boy, was too prone to sickness.

So when Na-yeong turned eighteen, it was a momentous occasion, and her in-laws set up a meeting with a matchmaker to find her a husband. When Soo-Ja heard about this, she began to look at Na-yeong with a suitor’s eyes. Tall, long-limbed Na-yeong wasn’t beautiful, but she also wasn’t homely. Na-yeong had fine, almost patrician features, her face not round like her parents’, but a long oval. Her eyes were also bigger, and sometimes luminous. Na-yeong did not look like Mother-in-law, who was tanned and robust, but when Soo-Ja looked through an old photo album of the family, she saw she looked just like her grandmother. Na-yeong’s features had skipped one generation, and she had been plucked straight from the past, maybe from a long line of women who looked just like she did.

But Na-yeong was clearly her parents’ daughter, in that she had almost all the same facial expressions and, like her father, hardly ever smiled. You could tell right away they were father and daughter. Soo-Ja imagined that what was inside Father-in-law had managed to manifest itself on the surface of Na-yeong’s body, as if what’s inside a parent could show up on the child’s appearance. Father-in-law had a general’s build and moved like a tree trunk, but in Na-yeong’s thin frame, Soo-Ja could see the emptiness inside Father-in-law; in Na-yeong’s bony arms and legs, his exquisite