This Burns My Heart Page 0,93
who was so much older than they were, old enough to be a parent. You simply did not address an older person that way.
Soo-Ja tried to stay calm. “Call your parents. Or your boyfriends, if your parents don’t know that you’re here. Have them send you money.”
When she thought later about her days working as a hotel manager, she’d remember days like this the most, being yelled at by a group of guests. But it wasn’t like this all the time, nor were all the guests this bad: some left little gifts on her desk, some had children who smiled and curtsied at her, some bowed almost as low as the floor and thanked her profusely for something as small as a bar of soap.
“Are you deaf? You stupid old hag! We don’t have to pay! Now give us our things back. Or we’re going to call the police,” Nami yelled.
From somewhere down the hallway came another voice, a man’s, yelling, “What kind of a hotel is this? All this shouting all the time, keep your noise down!”
Soo-Ja looked straight into Nami’s eyes and held her gaze. “You want the police? All right, let me call them. I’ll have you all arrested for trying to skip on your bills.” Soo-Ja picked up the rotary phone and started dialing random numbers. She could feel the girls’ tough facade cracking. Soo-Ja knew how to bluff.
One time, a drunk man took a room to sleep off the alcohol, and the next morning, he told her she should let him go peacefully or else he’d beat her. At the time, another guest—a big, hulking man with almost no eyebrows—had been sitting in the front desk area waiting for his wife to come out. No Eyebrows saw her arguing with the drunk man and gave him a dirty look. Without missing a beat, Soo-Ja told the drunk man in a stage whisper that No Eyebrows was a member of the secret police and was here to protect her. He would take him to a dark room and drown him in bathwater if he didn’t settle the bill. She wasn’t sure if the drunk man believed her story, but he clearly did not want to take the chance, as he pulled his wallet out and handed her the money he owed her.
“Or would you rather just pay and go?” Soo-Ja paused for effect and put the receiver down. “I think you’d rather just pay and go.”
The girls looked defeated and seemed to debate what to do. Meanwhile Soo-Ja wondered, Was it so offensive to them, to have to pay for things? And it wasn’t just them, it was people all over the city haggling, hustling, cutting in line, and giving one another a hard time—yes, the men and women of Seoul were “on the move,” making more money, but they were so unhappy, too. It was like a virus, spreading over the crowds, every face that of someone trying to take what’s yours. They made up for it, sure, by being overly effusive to their own friends and loving to their family members, but life there did take its toll on their souls.
But the girls hadn’t used their trump card yet. Nami finally turned to Min, as if she had just noticed him. He had been quiet this entire time. “Mr. Lee, when we told you yesterday that we didn’t have money, and we were poor girls from Inchon, and we asked you, ‘Couldn’t you be nice to us,’ didn’t you smile and say, ‘Don’t worry about it, go play, and be children’? Isn’t that exactly what you said?”
Min remained silent for a while. Soo-Ja was expecting him to explain to the girls that he had misspoken, but instead Min turned to Soo-Ja and said, “Why don’t you let them have the rooms?”
That was it, thought Soo-Ja, that was their marriage right there, in those words. Min leaned closer to her, so the others couldn’t hear, though obviously they could. “The thing is, I gave them my word. I already told them something else yesterday—I can’t go back on it.”
“These girls have the money. They’re trying to pull one on us. I know the scam—teenagers with money in their hands make a bet they can get everything for free.” Soo-Ja said this for them as much as for Min. And she could tell, by their nervous shifting and glancing at one another, that it was true.
“I’ll cover for them. I’ll make up the difference,” said Min.
Why