This Burns My Heart Page 0,62

rod out on one boy, but spares the other. Why do you think he doesn’t beat you?” asked Yul.

“I don’t know, sir.”

At this point Soo-Ja felt as if Yul had given her enough of an opening so she could ask the boy some questions. “Why did your father take Hana? What did he tell you?”

Bae contorted his neck, weighing his loyalties, and took a while before he finally began to speak. “My father is not a bad man. But sometimes he does strange things. Things that we don’t understand, but in his head it all makes sense.”

“Why did he take Hana to your house?” asked Soo-Ja.

Hana lay in her mother’s arms, afraid to let go. She grew heavier with every block they passed, but Soo-Ja swallowed the pain. In spite of Yul’s offers to carry her, she knew it was best for her daughter to stay with her.

“You see, ma’am, we’re all boys in the house. Me and my brother. And my father always wanted a girl. So he said this was God’s way of giving us our wish. But I think he did it because of the way she was dressed. He kept saying, ‘Look how nice her clothes are, she must come from a good family!’ He was excited to have a girl from a good family.”

Soo-Ja looked over at Hana, wondering how much of this entire ordeal she understood. Bae stopped talking and watched her as she watched Hana. Soo-Ja turned to him again. “Go on, Bae.”

“He told us to be very careful with her. That a girl isn’t like a boy, you can’t be rough with her. He also told us if anybody asked, to say she was our sister, but that her mother wasn’t our mother, which I didn’t understand. If my mother isn’t her mother, then how can she be my sister? But I suppose it makes sense, since you’re Hana’s mother and you’re not my mother.”

“Would you like her to be your mother?” teased Yul.

So this is how you talk to boys, thought Soo-Ja. You tease them about girls, even if that girl is your mother.

“Yul! Please,” Soo-Ja admonished him, though she did not really mean it. It was the first smile she’d seen on Yul’s face this entire time, and it made her glad.

The boy immediately nodded. “Yes! Yes, I would. You’re very pretty, agassi.”

“It’s ajumma. I’m not too vain to say it. I may be young enough to still be agassi, but I’m a mother now, and ajumma and eomma sound the same to me,” said Soo-Ja. “But Bae, go on. What else happened?”

“We all gathered around Hana. I know boys are not supposed to like girls, but she was very entertaining, we couldn’t stop watching her! It was like having a rabbit in the house. And she cried. Oh, she cried so much in the beginning. And then my father said, if you keep crying, your mother is going to get really mad, and she won’t take you back. That’s when I knew something was wrong. But I couldn’t say anything.”

“And where was your mother through all this?” Soo-Ja asked as they kept walking, the streets completely deserted in front of them.

“She was serving customers. I think she was mad at my father, and was avoiding him. She looked horrified when Father brought Hyo-Joo, I mean Hana, home. She said, ‘Why would you bring me one more mouth to feed?’ And my father said, ‘She’ll earn her keep. She can work at the counter and serve customers when she’s older.’”

Soo-Ja tightened her grip on Hana when she heard this. Did her little girl know the life she had been spared? Of course she did, thought Soo-Ja, the way children always know everything.

“She’s a very clever girl, your daughter,” said Bae, smiling and showing his teeth for the first time. It seemed that he was enjoying being the center of attention. “This morning, she finally stopped crying. She said she liked it with us, and that the house was good. But could she please get some air? She said that it was stuffy in the room. So my father said all right and let her go outside.

“But then as soon as she got outside, she tried to run away. She reached to undo the latch on the gate, but it was too high for her. My father ran back out to get her, this look of panic on his face. He couldn’t believe that a three-year-old could be so clever. That’s