‘Don’t cry, darling. There’s a good girl. Mum’ll soon be better.’ Her voice was very gentle. ‘When I am better,’ she went on, ‘We’ll go shopping at the Hwashin Department Stores and buy some lovely shoes for you, and some nice biscuits too...’
I let myself go and cried freely and then, feeling such comfort in the warmth of her embrace, I felt drowsy.
At that moment someone came in. It must be either my grandmother or aunt. I was ashamed of myself for holding onto my sick mother as I came out of the room but once out I was sulky at being pushed out of such a bliss. Squatting in a sunny patch on the verandah and with my back against the wall I must have nodded off into the sleep that I had failed to get in mother’s arms. When I awoke, there were my father, brother and sister all weeping. I have no memories at all of the few days that followed. On the day of her burial, I am told, I was crying like one possessed. As the hearse was leaving the house I was pounding on the floor crying ‘I want my mummy’ and ‘I want to go with my mummy’ until I passed out. I often heard father telling this story to various people.
‘I can never smack her, even when she’s really naughty. When I raise my hand that scene comes back.’ Probably it was because of this that father was specially gentle and patient with me out of all his children.
In the year after her death, there came several happy events in the family. My brother entered Kyŏng-gi High school as his parents had wished, my father was promoted at his work and I started primary school. We went to visit mother’s grave. Hyŏngsŏk was wearing his school uniform with the badge. Father bought expensive sweets and biscuits besides the food for lunch. He had planned a family picnic by the grave, but no sooner had we got there than my brother broke down at the foot of the grave calling, ‘Mum, you could have waited another year and...’ The outing started and ended in tears. Being a Christian family we did not offer sacrificial food like other families did but we often visited the grave, and on the anniversaries of her death we all sat round at midnight to say prayers and sing the hymns that mother used to like.
After mother died grandmother moved in to look after us. Under her management the household became very tidy and well organized but it lacked homely comfort. A strong disciplinarian she fussed about such things as table manners and the way we addressed our father, and how girls should behave, and boys. Sometimes her iron rules were intolerable but father unconditionally obeyed her, setting an example for us to follow. She had been widowed young, and had brought up two sons, my father and his elder brother, single-handed and successfully. She was very proud and righteous.
When I was nine she arranged a second marriage for father to a woman who had been briefly married before. She was a simple-minded, good-natured woman from the country. It was obvious from the beginning that she tried hard to make a good wife and a good mother. Grandmother retreated to her elder son’s house and the stepmother loosened the household rules. Everybody seemed to be accepting the new situation and trying to adapt to it except for me. I never relaxed and felt comfortable with my stepmother. Sometimes I purposely chose to do things that would displease her. I openly showed my contempt, dislike and dissatisfaction. It is not that I really disliked her but it was rather a kind of psychological twist. She was endlessly patient with me and put up with all my wiles. If she had severely scolded me or smacked or beaten me, I think retrospectively, my childish wilfulness might have given way to docility. Or if she had been given more time, my whims would have run their course and her efforts might have been rewarded, but it was my fault that her marriage to my father came to an abrupt ending.
One evening I cried and sulked for some reason, refused to eat supper and went into the spare back room and sat squatting there for a long time. When it was getting dark my father came in and without saying anything just raised up my face. I buried it in his lap and cried uncontrollably.
‘Why are you being like this, my child? Why do you hurt your father so much? What is it all about?’ He repeated this several times.
After a long time I stopped crying and said, ‘I don’t like our new mother.’
His arms stiffened and held me tighter but he did not speak. It was just then that real wickedness got the upper hand. I thought I could take it a step further. Something amazing, which sounded quite dramatic but was not from the bottom of my heart, leapt out of my lips. ‘Don’t you miss our dead mother? Probably you’ve forgotten her,’ and I cried again, a semi-dramatic weeping.
It was later in the night that the performance produced its effect. The commotion continued all through the night in the inner quarters where father and mother slept. Now and again sounds of father shouting, something being smashed, and mother crying with some words in between, were heard. ‘...a woman that dies leaving behind her brats should be punished thoroughly wherever she’s got to...Unless she’s possessed by that woman’s soul, can it be words out of her own mouth? A brat of barely ten?’
The row between father and mother went on for a few more days until finally she left.
As the days went by I silently suffered the consequence of the breakdown. My little heart was remorse-stricken with the thought that my wickedness had been the cause of my father’s unhappiness.
That year my father became the branch manager of the X Newspaper in the Ch’ung’chŏng North Province. Leaving Hyŏngsŏk in Seoul in a lodging house near his school, my family moved to Ch’ŏngju, the provincial town and into a house much bigger than the one we used to live in Seoul. There were the inner quarters where our family with grandmother, once again the mistress of the house, lived. They were joined at one side, through a corridor, to the offices, and at the other end of the office block, joined in right angle were the servants quarters where the delivery boys and two housemaids lived. Across the yard from the inner quarters were the visitors’ rooms. Father set up his study here and spent most of his spare time buried in books and papers. He was master and mentor to the paper-delivery boys.
‘Knowledge is power. Your future depends on how well you cultivate your minds now,’ he encouraged them to read and think deep. ‘A poor harvest through failing to sow the seeds in the right time can cause sorrow of one year, but if you miss your chance to learn at the right time, sorrow will follow you for the rest of your life’ he told them as he gave them personal instructions according to their individual aptitude and ability.
What with several young men and a couple of female helpers on top of our own family it must have been a large household with many mouths to feed. With food shortages and the constraints of the last years of the Second World War, these were indeed hard times for the grown-ups, but looking back they were the happiest times for me. These memories are as vivid as if they had happened but a year ago. I was doing well at school and at home the atmosphere was always warm and pleasant. Harmony reigned throughout the big household.
With the help of the menfolk in the house, father made a big, circular flower-bed in the centre of the courtyard. Exquisite flowers bloomed throughout the year and the shrubs flourished. Scattered here and there in the garden were trees that bore apricots, persimmons, dates, pomegranates and chestnuts. On the land behind the kitchen there was a vegetable plot and its produce was a great help in overcoming the shortage of food.
My younger brother, Myŏngsŏk who had been with my aunt and uncle in Seoul since mother’s death was now back with us. A darling boy amongst three elder cousins, all girls, he was used to calling their parents ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’, and now at his own home he kept calling his own father ‘uncle’ bringing a wry smile to father’s face. With eyes sparkling like stars, and cheeks rosy and dimpled, he was a beautiful boy. He now started at the primary school for boys, and Sŏnhi and I were transferred to girls’ school. Among the country children wearing shapeless clothes and dragging rubber shoes Sŏnhi and I made an odd pair with our navy blue sailor suits with snow-white silk ties and leather shoes. Every morning father did up my tie for me.
Father often took the three of us for a walk along the embankment of the River Mushim that skirted the western side of the