“I do.”
“So why don’t you eat it?”
“It stinks.”
“What?”
“I don’t want their stinking formula. No way.”
Jiyoung couldn’t understand what she meant by that, but she understood how she felt. Their grandmother wasn’t scolding them just because they were too old for formula or because she was worried there wouldn’t be enough formula for the baby. The combination of her tone, expression, angle of head tilt, position of shoulders, and her breathing sent them a message that was hard to summarize in one sentence, but, if Jiyoung tried anyway, it went something like this: How dare you try to take something that belongs to my precious grandson! Her grandson and his things were valuable and to be cherished; she wasn’t going to let just anybody touch them, and Jiyoung ranked below this “anybody.” Eunyoung probably had the same impression.
It was a given that fresh rice hot out of the cooker was served in the order of father, brother, and grandmother, and that perfect pieces of tofu, dumplings, and patties were the brother’s while the girls ate the ones that fell apart. The brother had chopsticks, socks, long underwear, and school and lunch bags that matched, while the girls made do with whatever was available. If there were two umbrellas, the girls shared. If there were two blankets, the girls shared. If there were two treats, the girls shared. It didn’t occur to the child Jiyoung that her brother was receiving special treatment, and so she wasn’t even jealous. That’s how it had always been. There were times when she had an inkling of a situation not being fair, but she was accustomed to rationalizing things by telling herself that she was being a generous older sibling and that she shared with her sister because they were both girls. Jiyoung’s mother would praise the girls for taking good care of their brother and not competing for her love. Jiyoung thought it must be the big age gap. The more their mother praised, the more impossible it became for Jiyoung to complain.
Kim Jiyoung’s father was the third of four brothers. The eldest died in a car accident before he married, and the second brother emigrated to the United States early on and settled down. The youngest brother and Jiyoung’s father had a big fight over inheritance and looking after their mother that led to a falling-out.
The four brothers were born and raised at a time when mere survival was a struggle. As people died, young and old, of war, disease, and starvation, Koh Boonsoon worked someone else’s field, peddled someone else’s wares, took care of domestic labor at someone else’s home, and still managed to run her own home, fighting tooth and nail to raise the four boys. Her husband, a man with a fair complexion and soft hands, never worked a day in his life. Koh Boonsoon did not resent her husband for having neither the ability nor the will to provide for his family. She truly believed he was a decent husband to her for not sleeping around and not hitting her. Of the four sons she raised thus, Jiyoung’s father was the only one to carry out his duties as a son in her old age. Unwanted by her ungrateful children, Koh Boonsoon rationalized this sad outcome with an incoherent logic: “Still, I get to eat warm food my son made for me, and sleep under warm covers my son arranged for me because I had four sons. You have to have at least four sons.”
Oh Misook, her son’s wife, was the one who cooked the warm food and laid out the warm covers for her, not her son, but Koh Boonsoon had a habit of saying so anyway. Easy-going considering the life she’d had, and relatively caring toward her daughter-in-law compared to other mothers-in-law of her generation, she would say from the bottom of her heart, for her daughter-in-law’s sake, “You should have a son. You must have a son. You must have at least two sons …”
When Kim Eunyoung was born, Oh Misook held the infant in her arms and wept. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she’d said, hanging her head.
Koh Boonsoon said warmly to her daughter-in-law, “It’s okay. The second will be a boy.”
When Kim Jiyoung was born, Oh Misook held the infant in her arms and wept. “I’m sorry, little girl,” she’d said, hanging her head.
Koh Boonsoon repeated warmly to her daughter-in-law, “It’s okay. The third will be a boy.”
Oh Misook became pregnant with her third child less than a year after Jiyoung was born. One night, she dreamt that a tiger the size of a house came knocking down the front door and jumping into her lap. She was sure it was a boy. But the old lady obstetrician who delivered Eunyoung and Jiyoung scanned her lower abdomen several times with a grim look on her face and said cautiously, “The baby is so, so … pretty. Like her sisters …”
Back at home, Oh Misook wept and wept and threw up everything she’d eaten that day, while Koh Boonsoon heard her daughter-in-law retching in the bathroom and sent her congratulations through the door.
“Your morning sickness is awful this time! You never got sick once when you were pregnant with Eunyoung and Jiyoung. This one must be different.”
Reluctant to leave the bathroom, Oh Misook locked herself in, to cry and throw up some more. Late that night, after the girls had gone to sleep, Oh Misook asked her husband, who was tossing and turning, “What if … What if the baby is another girl? What would you do, Daddy?”
She was hoping for, What do you mean, what would I do? Boy or girl, we’ll raise it with love. But there was no answer.
“Hmm?” she prodded. “What would you do, Daddy?”
He rolled over to face the wall and said, “Hush and go to sleep. Don’t give the devil ideas.”
Oh Misook cried all night into her pillow, biting her lower lip so as not to make a sound. Morning came to find her pillow soaked and her lip so badly swollen that she couldn’t stop herself from drooling.
This was a time when the government had implemented birth control policies called “family planning” to keep population growth under control. Abortion due to medical problems had been legal for ten years at that point, and checking the sex of the fetus and aborting females was common practice, as if “daughter” was a medical problem.1 This went on throughout the 1980s, and in the early 1990s, the very height of the male-to-female ratio imbalance, when the ratio for the third child and beyond was over two-to-one.2 Oh Misook went to the clinic by herself and “erased” Jiyoung’s younger sister. None of it was her fault, but all the responsibility fell on her, and no family was around to comfort her through her harrowing physical and emotional pain. The doctor held Oh Misook’s hand as she howled like an animal that had lost its young to a beast and said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Thanks to the old lady doctor’s words, Oh Misook was able to avoid losing her mind.
It was years before Oh Misook fell pregnant again, and the boy made it safely into this world. That boy is the brother five years younger than Jiyoung.
Being a civil servant, Jiyoung’s father had a stable job and a steady income. But it was certainly a challenge for a family of six to live on the wages of a low-level government employee. As the three children grew, the two-bedroom house started to feel crowded, and Jiyoung’s mother wanted to move to a bigger place where she could give the girls, who were sharing with their grandmother at the time, their own room.
Mother did not commute to a job like Father did, but was always doing odd jobs on the side that allowed her to make money while doing chores all on her own and looking after three children and an elderly mother-in-law. This was common among mothers in the neighborhood who were more or less in the same situation. There was a boom in made-for-housewife jobs, all with the label ajumma, or middle-aged married woman: insurance ajumma, milk and Yakult ajumma, cosmetics ajumma and so on. Most companies outsourced their hiring, leaving the employees to their own devices if there were disputes or injuries on the job.3 With three children to look after, Mother chose sideline work she could do from home. Taking out stitches, assembling cardboard boxes, folding envelopes, peeling garlic, and rolling weather strips were just a few of the endless list of jobs available. Jiyoung helped her mother, usually with the clean-up afterward or counting units.