All That Desperate Living

In the end, if she had always been going to come back like this, what had all that desperate striving been for?

Won-young let out a short sigh, opened the narrow door of the container house, and stepped outside. In the middle of the wide yard stood the table, same as ever, where the three of them had eaten in easy company.

Hwa-seon set an earthen pot lightly upon it—doenjang-jjigae, a soybean-paste stew still hot from the stove. Nine years since Won-young had been home, and soon she would taste the stew her mother had made her. The thought alone left her chest too full.

"Mom."

She closed the last of the distance at a run and threw her arms around Hwa-seon from behind. Since she was little, Won-young had loved, out of pure habit, to work her hands into the soft of her mother's belly. Warmth, a comforting smell, and the tenderness Hwa-seon kept for anything she loved seemed to draw themselves in over the shoulder pressed to hers. When she kneaded that familiar weight exactly as she had as a child, Hwa-seon broke into bright, tumbling laughter.

"I'll wash up and be right back."

"Mm," Hwa-seon signed.

Won-young pushed the small door open. Inside were an old washing machine, a toilet, and, squeezed in beside them, a narrow corner with a faucet that ran. She had grown used to washing her face standing up; crouching, after so long, to fill a basin and splash herself clean was anything but comfortable. The bathroom, she saw now, was absurdly small. Once she had bathed her whole body in here. Sometimes Jeong-geun would even set up a cheap plastic tub so she could splash and play. She could hardly believe any of it had fit.

She was just deciding she would shower later at the public bath in the next village over when something heavy struck the floor with a dull crack. Startled, Won-young hurried toward the sound.

Neither of them knew she had even come out of the bathroom. Side by side they went on laying out the meal, and, oblivious to the daughter who had just gone tearing through the house, Jeong-geun and Hwa-seon kept on beaming.

"Unbelievable."

The thing that had made the noise lay sprawled across the floor of her parents' room. It was the fan Jeong-geun had mounted on the wall with his own hands more than ten years ago—and it had never been new even then. He had hauled home what someone else had thrown out, repaired it, and hung it up. A relic, more than an appliance.

In high school she had begged them to please just buy an air conditioner, and they had managed a secondhand one. She didn't need to look to know how many hours the two of them had run nothing but this fan while she was away. It had given all it had. Until its neck snapped and the blades were sheared in half, it must have gone on without rest, doing the only job it knew.

Won-young was carrying the broken fan outside to clear it away when her eyes met Jeong-geun's. He had been scooping soybean paste from the row of earthen jars. Startled, he came at a run.

"Did that fall?" he signed.

Won-young answered his signs the way she always did, shaping each word slowly with her mouth.

"Yeah. Must've come off the wall. I'll clean it up and be right back."

"Are you hurt? Let me see, Won-young. Come here," he signed.

"Whoa, whoa. Dad, I'm fine. I didn't get a scratch—I found it after it had already fallen. You ran this thing all summer, didn't you? So the air conditioner's just decoration now? I told you to take the one in my room and please just use it."

Her parents had lived poor their whole lives. Not a single luxury; the two of them were used to getting by on what was never quite enough. Whenever Won-young had a little to spare, she sent money home. The electric bill wouldn't come to much, she had told them—this summer, please, run the air conditioner full blast. Seeing it still sitting, perfectly intact, in her own room stung her in a way she couldn't quite justify.

She pouted, and Jeong-geun wrinkled his nose right back. His only daughter's scolding embarrassed him, but he also looked plainly alight at having Won-young home in Aokuri.

"Uh—uhh—uhhh."

"What? Absolutely not. This time you buy a new fan. I don't care if our house is a junkyard—summer's almost here! How much can a fan even cost? Please, just buy a new one."

"Uh... uh..."

Both of Won-young's parents were deaf. Hwa-seon had been born unable to hear a thing; Jeong-geun had lost his hearing in an accident when he was about nine. Because of that, he was the one who could still force words out, clumsy as they were, and the one closer than Hwa-seon to anything like spoken conversation.

With their daughter, though, both of them mostly signed, and Won-young answered not with her hands but by speaking slowly, opening her mouth wide so they could read her. The notebooks stacked thick in the room were what remained of an earlier language—before she learned to sign, the written conversations she and Jeong-geun had passed back and forth. He must have cherished the memory of trading words with his daughter. He hadn't been able to throw a single one away, and he still kept them bound together in a long, careful row.

It had not always been a sorrow that her parents could not hear. When something hurt her, or when grief pulled her under, there were plenty of nights she was simply glad they never knew she had sobbed until dawn. The first time she and Lee-kyung broke up, she had come home and stayed for days, and she hadn't needed to do what other people did—pull a heavy quilt over her head so her parents wouldn't catch her crying.

It was for the same reason that Won-young had never fallen into the local dialect. She had first learned to speak from television, from the internet, from the educational videos her parents put on for her. Between Jeong-geun, who spent his days out gathering worn-out furniture, and Hwa-seon, who sorted scrap, she had grown up more dearly loved than anyone.

Sometimes friends mocked her parents for their disability and left her raw with it. The more they did, the more solidly Won-young grew. Even when a spark from Jeong-geun's welding leapt, by his own mistake, into a heap of scrap and set the house on fire—even when her own life was suddenly in danger—she never got angry. She knew the love of the two people who had run into those flames without flinching, thinking of nothing but saving their daughter.

To Won-young, they were the two most precious people in the world. If a millionaire came someday and offered her the chance to trade her family for another, she could not have done it. Not for anything. They were the only family there was.

After that noisy morning, Won-young, on her way back from the bathhouse, stopped with Jeong-geun at the cafe in the middle of Aokuri. Calling it a cafe was generous. Everything there was self-serve.

It had once been the village hall. When Gangcheon-si built a new one, the old building had nearly been left to rot, useless. That it became Moon Cafe, and the neighbors' favorite haunt, was entirely Jeong-geun's doing. Clever with his hands, he had started taking abandoned tables and chairs, making them look new, and setting them out one by one. A secondhand refrigerator, a coffee machine someone else had used and thrown away, a kettle that could boil water—little by little, the place began to look like something. Proud of her father's quiet work, Won-young had done her part as well, leaving a few of her more striking paintings, and the shabby room turned, quite suddenly, charming.

The out-of-fashion cups and glasses, the homely little trinkets, had all been carried over from the neighbors' houses, each according to taste. No one treated the place carelessly. Perhaps that was why, after all these years, the cafe seemed only to have grown finer. Won-young smiled, small and pleased.

"Dad, instant coffee?"

Jeong-geun nodded. Won-young took a packet of coffee mix from the cupboard and tipped it into the prettiest cup she could find. From the refrigerator she pulled a carton of banana milk and stabbed a straw through the top.

"This one's mine."

She totaled it roughly in her head and slipped three thousand-won bills—hardly more than a couple of dollars—into the red box.

"Dad, the weather's nice. Let's have these outside."

At the entrance, too, stood a wooden table Jeong-geun had made.

"I wish Mom had come with us."

Hwa-seon's knees had been bad lately, and getting around wore on her. She had said she wanted to rest at home.

"Your mom's probably busy right now," Jeong-geun signed.

"Busy? Why? She said she was resting."

"Resting, sure," he signed. "She was all excited—your favorite aged-kimchi gimbap, those seaweed rice rolls packed with kimchi fermented until it's good and sour, and seasoned scallions, and a whole pile of other things besides."

"Oh..."

No wonder. When Won-young had asked her, for the first time in ages, to go to the bathhouse together, Hwa-seon had refused that too, saying she had errands at the market. If Jeong-geun's love lived in fixing whatever was broken, Hwa-seon's lived in food—in making by hand, whatever it was, the things the people she loved wanted to eat.

"I can't stand it. And her knees are bad. Dad, you're not hurting anywhere these days, are you?"

"My knees have been a little sore lately, too..." he signed.

"Does it hurt a lot? Go see a doctor. No—forget that. Later, you're coming to the hospital with me."

"Later," he signed.

"Later when?"