When My Name Was Keoko

“It’s only a rumor,” Abuji said as I cleared the table. “They’ll never carry it out.”
My father wasn’t talking to me, of course. He was talking to Uncle and my brother, Tae-yul, as they sat around the low table after dinner, drinking tea.
I wasn’t supposed to listen to men’s business, but I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t really my fault. Ears don’t close the way eyes do.
I worked slowly. First I scraped the scraps of food and dregs of soup into an empty serving dish. Then I stacked the brass bowls – quietly, so they wouldn’t clang against one another. Finally, I moved around the table and began putting the bowls through the little low window between the sitting room and the kitchen. The kitchen was built three steps down from the central courtyard, and the sitting room three steps up. From the window I could reach a shelf in the kitchen. I put the bowls on the shelf one at a time, arranging them in a very straight line.
The longer I stayed in the room, the more I’d hear.
Uncle shook his head. “I don’t know, Hyungnim,” he said, disagreeing respectfully. “They’re masters of organization – if they want this done, you can be sure they will find a way to do it. And I fear what will happen if they do. Our people will not stand for it. I am afraid there will be terrible trouble-“
Abuji cleared his throat to cut off Uncle’s words. He’d noticed me kneeling by the table with the last of the bowls in my hands; I was listening so hard that I’d stopped moving. Hastily, I shoved the bowl through the window and left the room, sliding the paper door closed behind me.
What rumor? What was going to happen? What kind of trouble? When I asked Tae-yul later, he said it was none of my business. That was his answer a lot of the time. It always made me want to clench my fists and stamp my foot and hit something.
Nobody ever told me anything. I always had to find out for myself. But at least I was good at it.
You had to do two opposite things: be quiet and ask questions. And you had to know when to be quiet and who to ask.
When was easy. I was supposed to be quiet most of the time. The youngest in the family was never supposed to talk when older people were talking. And girls weren’t supposed to talk much anyway, not when men or boys were around. So listening was easy for me; I’d done it all my life.
But lots of times I didn’t learn what I wanted to know by listening. That was when I had to ask questions.
I could have asked my mother, Omoni, when we were doing housework together. But I’d learned that it was useless to ask her most questions. Either she didn’t know the answer or she wouldn’t tell me. Men’s business, she’d say.
Abuji knew almost all the answers. I was sure of that. But I hardly ever asked him. He always said exactly what he wanted to say, and no more. That left Uncle and Tae-yul. Usually, I tried Uncle first. He was quite cheerful about answering me most of the time. And when he wasn’t around, I’d ask my brother. Firstborn son, only son – the men usually included him in their talks.
Tae-yul was thirteen, three years older than me. He was often impatient when I asked questions, and acted as if I were stupid for asking in the first place. But that was better than not knowing things.
Listening and asking weren’t enough, of course. After that came the hard part – the figuring out.
They’ll never carry it out… They’re masters of organization… I knew who “they” were. The Japanese. Whenever there was talk that I wasn’t supposed to hear, it was almost always about the Japanese.
A long time ago, when Abuji was a little boy and Uncle just a baby, the Japanese took over Korea. That was in 1910. Korea wasn’t its own country anymore.
The Japanese made a lot of new laws. One of the laws was that no Korean could be the boss of anything. Even though Abuji was a great scholar, he was only the vice-principal of my school, not the principal. The person at the top had to be Japanese. The principal was the father of my friend Tomo.
All our lessons were in Japanese. We studied Japanese language, culture and history. Schools weren’t allowed to teach Korean history or language. Hardly any books or newspapers were published in Korean. People weren’t even supposed to tell old Korean folktales. But Uncle did sometimes – funny stories about foolish donkeys or brave tigers, or exciting ones about heroes like Tan-gun, the founder of Korea. Tae-yul and I loved it when Uncle told us stories.
We still spoke Korean at home, but on the streets we always had to speak Japanese. You never knew who might be listening, and the military guards could punish anyone they heard speaking Korean. They usually didn’t bother older people. But my friends and I had to be careful when we were in public.
Every once in a while another new law was announced, like the one when I was little that required us to attend temple on the Emperor’s birthday. I decided that this must be the rumor – Abuji and Uncle had heard about a new law.
I was right.