Everything Belongs to Us Read online

  By the time Jisun could form memories of her own, they had moved to the house on the hill overlooking the city. Each year the lights below grew brighter and the house seemed to expand with the accumulating weight of precious objects. Furniture. Paintings. Rugs. Crystal. Things her father collected but barely looked at before he acquired something else even more priceless and rare.

  But the intangible things proved heaviest in the Ahn household. The eroding glare of her father’s ceaseless scrutiny. His disapproving silences, punctuated by ferocious outbursts that reverberated long after the noise died down. These confrontations usually coincided with important business or social events where Jisun’s mother was also required to attend. Inevitably, her dress would appear too cheap or it would be a repeat of an outfit she had worn too often. She would have been too quiet, like a sullen shadow, or laughed too loudly, like an ignorant peasant woman. She would have slighted someone Jisun’s father was trying to impress or been too friendly with an inferior associate who did not merit such attention. Day by day he whittled her down, mocking the way she ate her food, spoke to the servants—even the way she stroked the children’s faces. “Like an alley cat,” he said. “Like a bitch licking her young.” Each morning, he dressed Jisun’s mother as if she were a doll. Shoving her limbs into clothes too constricting, too fine, which she wore with an expression of mute outrage.

  Jisun’s father had adjusted to wealth—there would never be so much that he could not adjust to it—but his wife had been happiest on the farm, where her family grew snow white turnips and radishes and made a summer kimchi famous many towns over. As for adjusting, she proved ultimately unable. By the time Jisun was in elementary school, her mother had already attempted to abandon the family twice. Once with her older brother and the second time alone. Never with Jisun, who was younger and arguably needed her mother more. She was the girl her mother should have favored—but her mother believed in the value of sons. Or perhaps she knew, even then, that Jisun was her father’s daughter, unwilling to run when she could stay and fight.

  Jisun’s father did not wait for her third attempt before cutting his losses. For years, he had claimed poor health to excuse his wife’s absence at social functions. It was a simple matter to remove her altogether, explaining that she was better off in the countryside, where the air was cleaner and the pollution would not bother her lungs.

  The week their mother was banished, Jisun and Min were taken to Switzerland to learn how to ski. They did not ask why their mother was not coming, assuming she had refused to make the trip. By this time she rarely left her bedroom, tucked away at the back of the house separated by a narrow staircase from the main wings, where the architect might have imagined the maid to live. Though she remained secluded, ajumma never failed to leave her meals by the door, no matter how many of them went uneaten. The dishes grew smaller and smaller—ajumma hated to see her cooking go to waste—but she never skipped the offering. Jisun knew because she always checked.

  Her mother died in her hometown under her parents’ roof, apparently having starved herself to death. Jisun’s father had her body brought up and buried in a fancy grave far from her ancestors. He arranged a funeral grand enough for a first lady. With four hundred wreaths of white chrysanthemums and a catered dinner that fed more than twelve hundred people, mostly business associates who got drunk and squeezed out alligator tears to impress the boss. A top-to-bottom production that would have made his wife howl with rage.

  Jisun never forgot that her mother’s first choice, when she was strong enough to flee on her own two feet, had been to leave with Min. At the funeral, she did not cry. That night she drank her first bottle of soju, filched from the kitchen. She had stolen two. The first she drank. The second she poured out for her mother, who was finally free.

  —

  BY THE TIME Jisun arrived at the lauded gates of Seoul National University, she wanted to burn the whole place down. Not just for democracy or the repeal of the repressive constitution or anything else that the student activists shouted about every day. These were heady concepts that were still only symbolic to her, as they were for many of the young activists. They joined the cause not quite understanding what to expect, not knowing what could be done or even what they hoped to achieve. It was the same for Jisun. She was fueled by personal vengeance, a blurry sense of vendetta on behalf of her mother, who had been lifted out of rural contentment and made to parody a false, totalitarian notion of prosperity. Later, she might come to label and disown these feelings as childish outposts of delayed adolescence, but in those early days, Jisun was poised for any blunt rebellion. She wanted blood. She wanted fire.

  Of the underground network called “undercircles,” it took one semester to develop a usable mental map of hierarchies, rivalries, alliances. Groups sketched out like neighborhoods connected by subterranean threads, like the new subway system that had recently been installed in Seoul.

  Each group, like a family, had its own particular identity. A face it showed to friends and a secret face it tried to hide.

  Apple was an agro-sociopolitical study group, known for its obsessive newshounds who prided themselves on originality, humor, and radical criticism. The members of Apple fanatically published original content not just about agricultural issues and the impact of government manufacturing regulations on small farms—their pet topics—but also on broader social issues. Every Tuesday morning, huge broadsheets appeared in campus lavatories and filtered out to public places as supporters pasted them to windows and tacked them to trees. For these publications, the members of Apple favored provocative topics such as government surveillance, media censorship, and Park’s maneuverings for international—particularly U.S.—aid. Since she didn’t know any of the individual members, Jisun developed a crush on Apple as a group, stalking the bulletins the way other girls sought out news of singers or film stars. Finding them was just a matter of determination and endurance. It was—she was her father’s daughter—a matter of forming a plan.

  Jisun chose the first-floor women’s lavatory in the political science building on a Monday night. She had watched this bathroom for weeks and knew there would be a bulletin posted by morning. All she had to do was wait. She packed a hot thermos and wrapped herself in an enormous hooded overcoat, prepared to huddle on the cold tile until morning. When the door creaked open at half-past twelve, she was relieved to be saved from enduring a long, cold night, but also disappointed—had it been too easy?

  “What are you doing here?” said the startled boy.

  “Waiting for you, actually.” Jisun scrambled to her feet, knocking over the thermos in the process. The metal canister clattered horribly on the tile. “You’re from Apple, right? I want to join your group.”

  “You can’t. We’re full.”

  She noticed he didn’t even deny whom he was working for, which he must have been trained to do. He was probably the lowliest peon, someone she could easily manipulate. “How can you be full? Couldn’t you always use more members to get the word out?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve read every one of your bulletins since I’ve gotten here. I even saved some of them—”

  “It’s not getting the word out if you take them for yourself. Now get out of my way.”

  After dumping his things on the ground, he took out a roll of tape and unfurled the bulletin. The thin newsprint flapped and folded against itself. Reaching for the tape, he struggled to keep the sheet centered on the wall.

  “Let me help,” Jisun said quickly. “I’ll give you a hand with these tonight. Think how much quicker it will go with two people.”

  “Not interested.”

  Jisun could see that with the number of bulletins in his stash, it would take him hours. No wonder he started barely after curfew. It would take him until morning to get them up all over campus.

  “If you let me help, I’ll take your place for as long as you want. A month, six months, whatever. You don’t have to tell anyone. I swear I’ll say
you did it all.”

  He still had his back to her, but she saw his shoulders registering the offer. “A year, even,” she said. “You can take all the credit. I won’t say a word.”

  He turned to face her. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Look. I’m desperate enough to camp out in a smelly bathroom all night. Isn’t that some kind of proof?” She met his eyes and delivered her best shot. “Of course, if you can’t get me in, I understand.”

  “Hand me the tape,” he said curtly. Jisun smiled. She cut off six pieces and lined them up on her arm, handing them over at the precise moment he needed them. When she gathered up her things and followed him to the next location, he ignored her but also didn’t tell her to get lost. Without any small talk to slow them down, they were a brisk team and finished before three A.M. Before they parted ways, he gave her a brief nod. “Tomorrow night, ten fifteen. Gray Basket,” he said, naming a drinking hole she’d heard of but never been to. Jisun waited until he had turned the corner before celebrating. She felt a glow of triumph, dampened only by the fact that it had not been more of a challenge.

  The boy lasted only a few more weeks in Apple, evidently disillusioned by the mundane work of lower-rank activism. Jisun, too, quit a few weeks later. But not because she was frustrated with posting flyers and running meaningless errands. It turned out that the members of Apple, as brilliant and incisive as she had hoped, were also chauvinistic, power hungry, and vain. They loved the trappings of activism as much as—or more than—the ideas they supported. They pretentiously wore Lenin hats and gomushin, the rubber shoes worn by farmers, as if they had just stepped off a Bolshevik rice paddy. They wasted whole afternoons interrogating new recruits on their reading histories—not to discern their interests, but to prove their own superiority. Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? was a prerequisite, along with Gorky, Marx, and Sinclair.

  The second group she tried, Mayday, cultivated a belligerent and hawkish reputation, pulling fire alarms and conducting what they called “kamikaze operations”—actions that could be completed within five minutes before the authorities intervened. They sometimes created more theater than social action, but after the verbal pretensions of Apple, it was a relief to do something. To create a noise that anyone could understand. And Mayday held close contacts with undercircles at Yonsei and other universities, where protests had begun to spill off campus into the streets, disrupting traffic and resulting in the deployment of riot police.

  At her first Mayday meetings, Jisun came prepared with a mental list of questions. Foremost in her mind was learning the ropes for street protests. She wanted to know how to prepare for tear gas, what to do if she was arrested, how to handle interrogations. The main leader, Yosan, was a senior majoring in German lit. He had a streak of white hair at the nape of his neck and planned to work as a journalist after graduation. He was passionate about censorship issues, with an encyclopedic knowledge of authors whose names Jisun did not even know how to pronounce. But he was contemptuous of females, especially ones who might be considered attractive. Despite Jisun’s numerous questions, Yosan ignored her completely. She had to doggedly repeat herself before he’d even look at her. When he did, it was only to articulate what his attitude had been projecting all along. “You’re just a first-year. Paint some signs. Prove yourself. We’ll move you up to leaflets.”

  She persisted. What weapons could they use? Rocks? Pipes? At what point could they justify using violence? And what would the police come with? She asked if anyone had any experience making Molotov cocktails.

  The boy slowly raked his eyes over her, as if she had arrived at the meeting naked. “They get one photo of you anywhere near a Molotov, you’ll be in prison swinging from your toes. Be happy you don’t have a dick to hang by.” His disciples twittered dutifully, but Jisun was undeterred. She had been raised by a man who had slowly killed his wife with nothing but the grinding edge of sarcasm. This undergraduate version barely registered on her scale.

  She returned his stare and asked again.

  “Look. If you’re worried about the gas,” he said, “stay home. We don’t need another scared-shitless girl to drag back, anyway.”

  When the gas deployed at her first street protest, Jisun was close enough to see it coming. It enveloped her and everything around her like a tunnel, flooding her eyes and nose with searing liquid. She could feel her own tears burning as if her face were on fire. All around her was noise, and no one knew which way to run. It felt impossible to keep moving with the suffocating smoke filling her chest. Only the terror of being trampled kept her from collapsing on the street, because everyone was running and no one could stop to help her even if they wanted to try.

  Afterward, she was more livid about her lack of preparation than the brutality of the police response. The more experienced student activists, she’d noticed, had come with wet towels, bandannas, even goggles, the obvious solution of which particularly galled her. The seniors had chosen to keep her in the dark, using the police tear gas as some kind of substitute for hazing.

  She cornered Yosan. “I asked you about the gas.”

  “And I told you to stay back.” He had a sheaf of leaflets in his hand rolled up tight like a baton. As he talked, he flicked up the edges so the pages snapped back on the roll. She wanted to snatch it from his hand and slam it across his nose. He lifted his lips in a humorless smile. “But now you know what it’s like. Congratulations. You’ve been to your first big-girl protest.”

  “Why bother protesting the government—so you can be the tyrant?”

  “That’s how the rest of us learned. Me, him. All of us. What makes you so special?” He reached out and tapped her forehead with the paper baton. Two taps, square between the eyes. Not enough to hurt, only to prove he was in charge. When the baton came down again, Jisun knocked it from his hand, scattering the sheets across the floor.

  “What makes me special is that I actually care,” she snapped.

  Instantly his face was so close, she could see a piece of black seaweed lodged between his teeth. She could smell the oil on his nose clogging his pores in a mosaic of grease. “Worry less about the cops and more about your attitude,” he snarled. “You want tips? Keep your mouth shut and do as you’re told. Or else get out. Bitches like you never last, anyway.”

  Jisun held her ground. “Thanks. I’m not going anywhere.”

  —

  AT THE NEXT protest, Jisun was ready with a bag of bandannas soaked in vinegar, which she’d heard helped against the gas. She hesitated over goggles, which she could have easily swiped from her family’s stash and even shared with others. She had enough equipment for a dozen people. Swim goggles in clear, dark, and prescription lenses. Even better were the ski goggles, large enough to provide full peripheral vision. But she remembered how they had caused a division of haves and have-nots within the ranks. Worried that someone else could feel similarly betrayed, she left the goggles at home.

  Knowing what people would say about her when they found out who her father was, Jisun worked harder than anyone, volunteering to do the grunt work everyone else avoided. She hauled five-gallon kettles of water to boil for tea and late-night ramen. After everyone else had left for the night, she picked up empty bottles and scraped gum and washed cigarette ash off the floor. They might criticize and reject her anyway, but at least she’d have done everything she could to argue her case.

  —

  “YOU FINALLY FOUND what you’ve always wanted,” Namin said.

  Jisun had been trying to explain the different undercircle groups, what each had meant to her, why it was so important for her to be involved. She hadn’t expected Namin to share her enthusiasm, but she didn’t expect to be treated like a freak, either. The way Namin reacted, Jisun felt like one of those cases in abnormal psychology texts. Those people who went around searching for lost messages or misplaced clues for decades following a trauma. War survivors. Or jilted lovers.

  “So are you finally happy?” Namin said.
“Can we expect an era of peace and tranquillity now?”

  “Maybe I’m properly miserable,” Jisun said. “Having your consciousness raised isn’t a picnic, you know. I can see why you Circle types avoid it. You wouldn’t want to accidentally change your mind.”

  Namin laughed. “Well, misery becomes you. You look like you’ve come out of a milk bath.”

  “Yes, that’s what we do. Protests and milk baths.”

  But she couldn’t manage a real edge. Namin was right. She might not have known what she always wanted—unlike Namin, who always knew what she always wanted. What she’d do after college, Jisun genuinely had no idea.

  But she was happy. Happier than she’d been in a long time.

  It was through S4—the most extreme of all the undercircles—that Jisun learned of UIM, the Urban Industrial Mission, from the United States. UIM had originated in the late 1950s as a faith and counseling ministry for factory workers, but by the 1970s it had shifted focus to social issues. It educated workers about labor laws and the need for trade unions. Because it was an American organization, the Urban Industrial Mission was granted greater leniency to make public statements in support of workers’ rights and hold demonstrations and sit-ins despite laws that might have prohibited local people from doing the same. The authorities, well aware of the power of the American Christian lobby and already sensitized by criticisms of human rights abuses from the Carter administration, were wary of creating additional friction between Seoul and their most important ally, the United States.

  In the second semester of her freshman year, Jisun heard murmurs of UIM staff looking for English translators who could help them communicate better with workers. Jisun was fluent and might have been perfect for the job, but she didn’t think twice about it. Translation was a desk job and she wanted to be out where the action was. She might never have considered it if the S4 leaders hadn’t pushed her into the role. By that time, it was obvious that Jisun was running out of options in the SNU underground network.