The Spirit of the Dragon Read online

  There’s a knock. Jackson opens the door and someone hands him a teapot and a teacup. He sets them on the table and folds his arms across his chest again. I reach over and pour the barley tea into Ms. Yi’s cup, then fill the other one for myself. The sharp, earthy aroma fills the room, making me feel like I’m in Korea again. “In the Korean culture, Detective, you must show respect to your elders and pour their tea for them,” I say. Jackson doesn’t reply.

  Ms. Yi takes her cup in both hands and gives me a knowing smile as if we are actors in some grand drama. It feels like it has many times before with the comb with the two-headed dragon—secrets, inside stories, mysteries. I set my pad and pen down. I take off my visitor’s badge and lay it on the table in front of me. I take my teacup into my hands. “I’m ready, Ms. Yi,” I say.

  She nods almost imperceptibly. She takes a sip of tea and curls her hands around the teacup. She lifts her chin and closes her eyes. It is perfectly quiet in the room. With her eyes closed, her face softens and she looks years younger, almost like a girl from long before.

  Then she begins in a faraway voice. “The Japanese administrator came to my father’s house in a Ford Model T motorcar . . .”

  THREE

  Northern Korea, 1936

  The Japanese administrator came to my father’s house in a Ford Model T motorcar. It was the type that had only two seats in the front and, instead of back seats, a low trunk. A late spring rain had fallen the previous day, and I was in the root garden along the side of our house helping my mother pull the daikons we had planted the previous fall. We already had a half basket of the long, white radishes when we heard the car sputtering up the road. Mother stood and wiped her hands on her skirt. My mother, like me, was small in height and build. In her face, you could see that years earlier, she had been pretty. Her hair, worn in a loose braid, was speckled with gray. She watched as the Ford’s spoke wheels churned up clods of mud fighting the ruts in the road. Yellow splatters covered the sides of the car halfway to the windows.

  We didn’t often see cars on our road. Of course, I had seen many cars in Sinuiju, the city closest to our village. I sometimes went there with Mother to buy supplies when we had money. In Sinuiju, the Japanese sat high in their cars looking down their noses at the Koreans. Mother told me not to stare at the men in their cars, but I snuck a look when she wasn’t looking. Once, I saw a big black car with a driver and a man in back. I assumed it was a high official or a wealthy landlord. As the driver honked at pedestrians to get out of the way, the man sat looking straight forward with the windows rolled up as if to keep the stench of Korea out.

  When the Model T pulled to a stop in front of our house, Mother said, “Suk-bo, hide the daikons and get your father at once. Then go inside and clean up the house.”

  The administrator shut off his machine, and the engine went quiet. He got out of the car with a piece of paper in his hand and approached our house. He wore a wrinkled Western-style black suit that was too big for him, and thick, gold-framed glasses. I hid the basket of daikons and ran to where my father was working in his shack. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Father hunched over his bench, working on a bentwood yoke. His old saws and carving tools hung on hooks on the wall above him. Wood was scarce where we lived—the Japanese took nearly all the timber the woodsmen harvested—so my father’s carpentry skills repairing plow handles and stools and carts were always in demand. He worked long hours, sometimes well into the night.

  “Appa,” I said, “the administrator has come!”

  Father set down his hammer and looked out the shack door. My father was not tall but strong and lean with hard black eyes. He wore a white bandana, tied tight around his head. He slowly took it off. “Suk-bo,” he said, still looking outside, “go to the house. Go now.”

  As Father went around the front of the house, I hurried inside. I quickly put things in their place—the tea bowls in the open cupboard, the shoes lined up neatly at the front door, blankets folded at the foot of the sleeping mat. I hurriedly swept the floor. The Japanese insisted that we keep our houses neat and clean, and they often conducted surprise inspections. I heard once that the thatched roof of a farmer’s house nearby was rotting and had maggots. To teach him a lesson, the official forced the farmer to eat the maggots.

  After I’d cleaned up, I went to the latticed windows of the main room and pressed my ear against the hanji paper between the latticework. I strained to hear what the administrator was saying, but I could only catch a few words.

  “Read this,” I heard the administrator say in Japanese. And “. . . a new rule . . .” and “. . . your daughter is the right age . . .”

  They were talking about me. I didn’t know what the administrator was saying they wanted me to do, but I knew I would not want to do it. And who was I to have the administrator drive all the way to my village in his car? I was no one—a sixteen-year-old girl that nobody paid attention to. I held my breath and continued to listen.

  “You will be notified,” the administrator said. “It is your duty . . .”

  “Yes, sir,” I heard Mother say. I did not hear Father say anything.

  The car engine coughed and rumbled to life. I cracked open the window and looked out. The car’s gears engaged with a grind, and the wheels turned and spun in the mud. The automobile lurched along the road, trailing black exhaust as it went back from where it came.

  My parents turned to come to the house, so I quickly closed the window and sat on a floor mat, pretending that I had been there all along. When the door swung open, they both glanced at me. Mother went to the basin and washed her hands. Father held a flimsy pink paper as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Neither one said a word, and though I wanted to ask what the administrator had said, I knew I should stay quiet.

  When Mother finished washing her hands, she sat on the mat across from me, and Father sat next to her. He set the pink paper on the floor. Mother looked straight at me. She was petite but strong and had a well-defined chin. “Suk-bo,” she said, “you are sixteen years old now. You are a woman.” Normally my father, a man and the head of the household, would be the one to speak first. Instead, he stared at the paper and let my mother talk.

  “I married your father when I was your age. It is time for you to marry, too.”

  “I do not want to marry anyone,” I said. “Kwan-so is two years older and he has not married.”

  “Your brother is a man,” Mother said, “and men can wait to get married until they are older. And he is away at school and must finish his studies. Since you are no longer in school, you should think about getting married.”

  “I will not,” I said under my breath.

  “Suk-bo!” Father said. “It is important that you understand what your mother is saying.”

  Father was right, I was not always as respectful as I should be. Most times when I was disrespectful, my father would turn away or pretend he didn’t hear what I had said. Mother, however, always scolded me. Sometimes she would swat me, although never very hard. Now it was Father scolding me. “I am sorry, Appa,” I said, although I was not sorry at all.

  Mother continued. “The Japanese have a new rule. They want Korean women to marry Japanese men. The rule applies to all unmarried women sixteen years and older. The administrator is informing all families with daughters that age. That is what it says on the paper.”

  “But we are Koreans!” I protested to my father, hoping he would agree with me. I knew Father didn’t like the Japanese. He often said he thought they should leave Korea, though he said it only when Mother wasn’t near.

  My father didn’t say anything. Mother went on. “Yes, we are Koreans. However, they want us to be Japanese.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why must we always do as they say?”

  “Because that is how it is with them,” Mother replied.

  “Well, I do not know any Japanese boys,” I said.

  I looked at my father. I hoped he would take pity on me as he often d
id and tell Mother we didn’t have to follow their rules. But his shoulders were hunched and his eyes were unfocused. He looked like many of the men in my village, broken and resentful. Without looking up he said, “We could move to the north, Jo-soo. I know a man in Manchuria who can help me get work there.”

  Mother shook her head. “You want to go to Manchuria to join the rebels, Seong-ki,” she said. “Anyway, our family is here.”

  “The police come to our village more often now,” Father replied, his voice strained. “They came twice last week with their inspections and questions and new rules. Always their rules.” He shook his head. “They arrested Mr. Pak last week. Mrs. Pak told me they bound his hands behind his back and kicked him before they pushed him into the car. Someday they will arrest me, too.”

  “They threaten you because you do not hide your disgust,” Mother said. “If you were more careful and cooperated with them . . .”

  “When does it stop?” Father bellowed, his jaw tightening. “Every month there are new rules, and you say we should cooperate. Now they want our daughter to marry a Japanese. They are destroying us.”

  There was a long pause, and the tension inside the house was thick like fog. Finally, Mother said, “Suk-bo, go pull the rest of the daikons.”

  I wrung my hands in front of my chest. “Please, Ummah,” I pleaded, “don’t make me marry a Japanese. We should do as Father says and go to Manchuria.”

  “Daughter!” Mother scolded. “Go now!”

  I went outside and retrieved the basket, then went to the garden and kneeled at the daikons. Their leaves were bright green from the previous day’s rain. As I pulled the radishes from the ground and brushed the mud off, I heard Father and Mother talking inside the house, quietly at first, then louder. They were arguing again. It wasn’t proper for a woman to argue with her husband, but these days it happened every time the officials came to our village. I hated when they fought. I never really paid much attention to what they were fighting about. I would let them carry on and would go for a walk in the forest behind our village or visit a friend. Now, however, they were arguing about me.

  I couldn’t bear listening to them. I tried to shut my ears and turn my attention to the daikons. I grabbed one of the leafy tops and pulled. The top snapped off, so I dug around the root to free it. I pulled on the root’s top, but it broke too, leaving half in the ground and half in my hand. I looked at the half daikon in my hand. I didn’t even like daikons. We grew them because the official in charge of our village didn’t take them from us. He said our poor soil made them bitter and sharp. As my father and mother fought inside the house, I threw the half daikon into the grass at the edge of the garden.

  I thought of a boy I liked named Jung-soo who lived up the road. The son of Farmer Dho, he was lanky and shy and about my age. I couldn’t say he was handsome, although he wasn’t unpleasant to look at. Whenever the villages got together for a celebration, I’d catch him staring at me. We hadn’t talked to each other yet, but now that I might be forced to marry a Japanese man, I planned to talk to Jung-soo at the next opportunity.

  The back door flew open and Father stomped out. He marched into his shack and slammed the door. Soon I could hear him hammering on something.

  Mother came to the garden and pulled daikons alongside me. After a while, she said, “Suk-bo, the Japanese are our rulers and we must obey them. Your father thinks we should fight them. But I fear that if we fight . . . well, you cannot lose a fight you do not take.” She tried to smile, but it was as if she had forgotten how to. Over the past several years, her face had lost its once gentle beauty. Now it was thin, with lines around her eyes and mouth. Her chin had grown hard, and there was no life in her face.

  After a few seconds, she said, “If they find someone for you to marry, that is what you will do.”

  “Why can’t we go to Manchuria like Appa said?” I asked.

  Mother stopped pulling the daikons. “Listen to me, Suk-bo. It would be very hard in Manchuria. We would have nothing and always be in danger. We would be hungry. This . . . this is a chance for you to have a better life.”

  “I do not care,” I said. “I will not marry a Japanese.”

  “Yes, you will, Daughter,” Mother said. She started pulling daikons again. “We will not talk about it any longer.”

  From Mother’s tone I knew it would do no good to argue with her. So as Father pounded away in his shed, I pulled daikons next to my mother and worried about a Japanese man that someday I might have to marry.

  FOUR

  The next morning, I woke to the sound of Father working in his shed. He was hammering again, and his hammering was loud. I looked out to the main room of our house. It was earlier than I usually woke up, and the morning light bathed the room in muted colors. Mother was at the stove stirring something in the iron pot.

  I rolled over on my mat to go back to sleep, but Father’s pounding kept me awake. I remembered the new rule that Korean girls like me must be available to marry a Japanese man and knew I would not be able to sleep anymore.

  I crawled off my mat and went into the main room. It was cool, but because my mother was cooking, the floor was warm from the ondol heating underneath the house. Mother glanced over her shoulder at me. “You are awake early, Suk-bo,” she said.

  “Why is Appa making so much noise?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  “Yes,” Mother said, “he is loud this morning, isn’t he?”

  “Why is he so loud?”

  Mother pointed for me to sit at the low table. She brought a teakettle and two small tea bowls to the table. She poured the tea into the bowls. I took a sip, and the hot, bitter bori cha tea began to wake me up.

  “Your father is angry,” Mother said. “More so today than usual.”

  “Is he angry at the Japanese again?”

  “Yes,” Mother said, nodding.

  “Is he angry about the new rule?” I asked.

  Mother set her tea bowl on the table. “Suk-bo, there is something you should know about your father. We did not feel you needed to know this before, but now that you are older . . .” Mother gave me a smile, not like the forced smile she’d had lately, but like the gentle one I remembered from years earlier. My heart softened. I so wanted to go back to those days when Mother was tender and Father wasn’t angry all the time.

  As we sat at the table and sipped our tea, Mother told me about the time before I was born. She said the Japanese were strict then. The police beat and killed Koreans who did not obey them. Sometimes they killed for no reason at all. “It was a horrible time,” Mother said. “We were always afraid.”

  Then Mother told me that in March of 1919, our people began to fight back. Students in Seoul issued a declaration of independence that sparked protests and riots all over the country. The provincial government called in the military to put down the riots, and the soldiers killed thousands of demonstrators. They arrested tens of thousands more, some of whom they shot in the streets.

  “Your father wanted to join the resistance,” Mother said. “But we had a young child—your brother—and I had just become pregnant with you, so I begged him to stay home, and he did. However, his younger brother, your uncle Chul-han, did not have children and joined the resistance. He went to Seoul and . . .” Mother looked into her tea bowl. “I am sorry to tell you, Suk-bo, your uncle was one who the police shot in the street.”

  I took a moment to think about this. I knew my father had had a younger brother, and I knew that he had died before I was born. I’d never thought to ask how he had died, and my parents had never told me. And now that I knew about my uncle, I saw Father in a different way. Of course he hated the Japanese. Of course he was angry all the time. I would be angry, too, if the Japanese had executed my brother. In fact, though I didn’t know my uncle, anger swelled inside me for what they had done to him.

  “Why don’t we fight them?” I asked. “I am not afraid.”

  “Huh,” Mother said with a nod. “You have always been
more spirited like your father. But after the demonstrations, we did not need to fight. Though we did not gain our independence, they were not so cruel as they were before. They encouraged us to help them build a new Korea. They gave us more independence. They were not as strict.”

  “Then why is Father so angry now?” I asked.

  Mother sighed. “Times are changing,” she said. “The Japanese are going back to the way they were before.”

  “Then we should fight them!” I declared. “Like Uncle did, like Father wants to.”

  “He and I have talked,” Mother said. “We will stay here and do as the Japanese say.”

  Mother smiled at me again, but this time it was her forced smile. After a few seconds, she gathered our tea bowls and the teakettle and took them to the basin. She went to the stove and started stirring the pot. “I’m cooking rice. When it cools, you and I will make dduk for the festival tomorrow.”

  I wanted to ask again why we couldn’t fight the Japanese, but I knew Mother would not answer me. So I went to the sleeping room and pulled on my day clothes. When I went back, Mother had prepared a small bowl of millet for my breakfast. When I finished eating, I had to do my chores. I went to the garden and pulled weeds from around the napa cabbage. I gathered sticks and dried grass, took them to the house, and put them in the wood box next to the stove. I swept the floor. Finally, I had finished my chores and it was time for me to study. I was studying Japanese writing, math, literature, and philosophy. Since I was no longer in school—country girls like me rarely went to school after age twelve—Mother thought I should learn how to sew and cook. But Father insisted I continue to learn what they taught in the schools, and Mother did not mind that I did. I was glad she let me. I enjoyed my studies, and I was a good student.

  But I didn’t study that day. Instead, I decided to go to the forest behind our house to pick strawberries. That’s what I said I wanted to do, but honestly, I just wanted to get away for a while. I was worried about having to marry a Japanese man someday, especially after the story Mother told me about my uncle. I needed time to think about what I should do.