This Burns My Heart Page 0,73

labor and sacrifice. Everyone around her appeared to be working sixty-hour weeks, from the factory assemblymen to the shoe shiners. Students like Hana, from first to twelfth grade, had to rise in the early morning and make their own breakfast before spending the entire day doing their rote memorizations and math exercises. No one spoke about happiness, or enjoying the day. Their entire lives they’d been taught to sacrifice, either for their parents or for their children, and now they were asked to extend those feelings to their bosses and their jobs. So they worked, and watched, as the buildings began to reach the sky, and money started to flow.

President Park ruled like a dictator, everyone knew. With the adoption of a new constitution—one that he drafted himself—he had made it impossible for anyone to remove him from office (or be dethroned, as some snickered). But he’d been effective in raising everyone’s standards of living, and his occasional show of populism—prosecuting corrupt businessmen, or replacing the straw roofs of rural homes with cement—gladdened the hearts of the poor. Park had become his countrymen’s father and mother, and established capitalism as their new religion.

Soo-Ja worked twelve-hour days at the hotel, but she found nothing extraordinary in this, since everyone else worked similar hours. To be productive was to be honorable, and to raise capital was one’s duty. Confucianism had taught them to be dutiful, and capitalism had given them something to be dutiful to—the laws of economic prosperity. It didn’t matter what happened behind closed doors, in bedrooms, and in private—what tears were shed or desires suppressed. Feelings, emotions, aspirations—all that had to be set aside, as there were no individuals, only a collective will to succeed.

And Soo-Ja planned to be a part of that success. She rejected the notion of meoggo-salja; for her, it wasn’t enough just to “live and eat.” She wanted her family to reside in one of the impressive new gated houses being built in Seoul for the nouveaux riches sons and daughters of electronic export manufacturers. She wanted to buy her daughter clothes in the elegant ateliers and boutiques sprouting around the city, selling Paris-inspired fashions. And above all, Soo-Ja wanted the money to pay back her father. In her fantasies, Soo-Ja found some way of getting her father-in-law to return the money. But in reality, she knew that wasn’t likely, and that if she was to pay her father back, she’d have to earn the money herself. The land in Gangnam was the key.

Ever since they had moved to Seoul, Soo-Ja and Min had been supporting themselves by managing a hotel. As in most small businesses in Seoul, Soo-Ja lived with her family there as well, in two small rooms near the entrance. This work, which included demanding patrons and required long hours, did not pay very well, and Soo-Ja knew there was no future in it. What Soo-Ja liked even less was that the idea to do this had come from a friend of her father-in-law, and she hated being indebted to him for the introduction.

Soo-Ja also disliked the male customers who showed up late at night, without a reservation, in need of a room to sleep off the alcohol, or with a girl by their side, or both. Often, they’d ask her to send a girl to their rooms. At first, Soo-Ja ignored the requests. But then women started to come on their own, asking if there were lonely men in the hotel. They did not wear fox furs or miniskirts. They did not curse or leer. They looked like ordinary women, some with children in tow. They were hungry, with tired eyes. Soo-Ja began to tell them what doors to knock on, and sometimes, she’d warn them about a particularly nasty guest.

When Soo-Ja listened on the radio to the President talking about his five-year plan to modernize the economy, and his lofty goal of turning what he called a “backward” country into a great superpower, Soo-Ja thought about these women. She wondered what their roles would be—the women abandoned by their husbands or disowned by their families. They reminded her of the rose of Sharon, the national flower of Korea. White with purple throats and hardy petals, it had been chosen for its ability to survive droughts, heat, and poor soil. They were lovely in bloom, though that required patience, as they tended to arrive late in the spring. Once they bloomed, however, they lasted all through summer, long after other flowers