Waiting for Appa

Sometimes she can smell him just beyond her fingertips. It is never strong or overpowering. It’s like a whisper of memories that transcends time and place. A mere hint of his presence and desperation seizes her heart once again. It lures her into frantically scanning the streets, room, wherever she is to find him. A whiff of him and memories, sweet and bitter, rush at her senses and heighten the scent of him. Soon, the spiral downward begins and she doesn’t know how to stop until she finally crashes into the realization that it can never be him. No matter how she wishes it to be, it can never be him. One day, she hopes to have the strength to keep on walking, to ignore the call and finally vanquish the love that shocks her into a brief searching frenzy. Her heart pounds in happy recognition only to be disappointed. The heartache it causes so often and with such regularity is too much to bear. Chapter 1 – Spring, 1978 The feeble sun lingers on the horizon, struggling against the onset of darkness. Eunhae holds up her hand to block out the sun and squints against the pink horizon. She tries to shrug off a sense of foreboding that has been pressing down on her since yesterday. From the mahru, she closes the outer doors leading to the housing complex, picks up her doll, Candy, and turns to watch her appa, her daddy, rise from the radiant ondol floor of their bedroom. He slides open the doors to their spare room. In the time it takes him to walk from their bedroom, where their yellow and red sleeping mats are neatly folded and stacked up against a wall beside the armoire, to the next room, where the two large immigrant bags stand empty, she learns about despair. Despair that momentarily forgets about breathing in a futile attempt to capture time, that lingers on clothes and blankets even after her appa promises, once again, to send for her and her mother. Why should he keep promising if it is true? This first taste of despair comes to her as a languid realization. Like harvested clams along the seashores of Chinhae, forced open and thrown into a boiling pot of water, his leaving opens her to an unknown fear. She chews on her fingernails. Her appa, a Navy captain, hates this habit, says at nine, she’s too old to be chewing her nails. Clutching Candy closer to her body and tugging at the doll’s silken green sleeves, she mulls over his promise. Three years. We’ll be together in three years. All around her are memories of him. If she lifts her head and focuses, she can see him: playing with her, laughing with her mother, and sharing meals together. She wants to reach out and capture every memory, hide them so that no one can take them away from her, not even time. He drags the two bags, one on each side of him, from the spare room to their bedroom. At the raised threshold that separates the two rooms, he turns to look at her. “You’re quiet, Eunhae,” he says, eyeing her. Though frequently away on his Navy ship, he can be astute, almost intuitive, and it is always difficult to hide her thoughts from him. Eunhae has been thinking about his departure, imagining a vague figure of a girl and her daddy under a bright, sunny sky running along the seashore. Then she awakens to the reality of his departure and swallows the tears, as if he has already left. Her tongue is still unable to form a sentence and she shakes her head quickly. He stops, lets the bags stand by the doorpost. Like a pair of faithful Jindo dogs, they wait obediently for him as he comes and sits down on the mahru next to her. She refuses to look at him. Instead, she focuses on a small pebble wedged in the tracks of the sliding glass doors. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, caressing Candy’s corn yellow hair. “No, Appa,” Eunhae says, wishing the conversation over. “I think we need to—” “We’ve talked about it,” she snaps, "but it doesn’t change anything! You’re still leaving.” Dropping Candy, she runs into the bedroom and slams the doors with a loud clack. “Your behaving this way isn’t going to make things better for either of us,” her daddy says through the rice paper doors. “Instead of being mad, why don’t you help me pack for my trip to America?” Eunhae falls to the ondol floor and buries her head under a blanket, crying. She wants him to miss his train, his airplane, his chance to go to America. She wants to lash out, but she doesn’t want his last memory to be of her throwing a rare tantrum. Instead she comes out from underneath the blanket, straightens her hair and gulps, ready for good-byes. But as she turns toward her appa, she hears the crows, the birds of bad omen, cawing and lets out a gasp. ********** After dinner, she shuffles through the house, memories hidden in every nook and cranny of their small two-bedroom rental, which is a part of a triplex. On one unusually warm spring afternoon last year, her daddy’s desk had been transformed into a small boat floating down the river Nile. A tall bookshelf had been converted into a building in Seoul where she and her friends played spy games. These memories, these treasures, threaten the tenuous control she has on her emotions and she stops before entering their bedroom where her mother and daddy sit side by side, talking quietly while folding his clothes. Eunhae sits down in the spare bedroom, clutching Candy. The doll was a present from her father when he returned from Seattle. She hugs the doll closer to her body, and watches her parents through the open door. Her mother is fingering a white dress shirt, tucking and folding it as if to minimize the creases. Reluctantly, she places it in the smaller of the two bags and looks into the distance. Her father holds his socks in one hand and in the other a bundle of new underwear her mother purchased a few days ago. He wears a Navy sweat suit, which he wears when he’s at home. Tomorrow, when he leaves for America, he will put on his only suit, wiggle his arms into the snug sleeves, and walk out of the front gates of their house for good. Her mother and father pack his bags. Two pairs of thick long johns for winter. Sweaters. Two thin summer blankets. Two thick winter blankets. Pillows. Sleeping mats. Cooking pots. Spices and dried fishes. Dried seaweed and sesame seeds. Rice bowls, plates, and chopsticks litter the floor. Her mother places each item in the bag with reverence and mouths a short prayer, offering Buddha’s protection. As if her prayers will create a protective shield over her husband. Her mother was from an ardent Buddhist family. She met Appa in Chinhae at a Christian church her uncle attended when she was twenty, but she and Appa didn’t marry until she was twenty-five. Although she was considered beautiful, it was said that her love for Appa, whom her parents considered unsuitable for her, rendered her unfit for the marriage market in Seoul where she and her parents lived. Unable to convince her parents to allow her to marry the man she loved, she went to many matchmaking suhns with her mother, but she rejected every candidate. They were either too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, too reserved, too talkative, and so on. Always too something, her grandmother had complained to Eunhae, recounting the tales. Encouraged by Umma’s determination, Eunhae’s father pursued her with ardor. After five long years, they finally received permission to wed. As a testament to their initial struggles to marry, they were known in the neighborhood as the inkobubu, the lovebirds. Soon, the inkobubu will be torn apart, and Eunhae wonders if they will survive the separation or if they’ll die of longing as some lovebirds do.