When My Name Was Keoko Page 2

  It's all right, I told myself firmly. He's all better now.

  4. Tae-yul

  Kaneyama Nobuo ... Kaneyama Nobuo. No matter how many times I say it, I can't get used to it. It feels all wrong, like shoes that don't fit.

  On the way to bed after we get our new names, Sun-hee whispers to me. "Sohn Kee Chung," she says, her eyes big.

  I nod—I've been thinking of him, too. The Olympic champion. A world record holder in the marathon. The newspapers call him Kitei Son. But Uncle always calls him by his Korean name.

  The day after the Olympics marathon, Uncle doesn't come home for dinner. After we eat, Abuji goes out. He doesn't say where he's going, and he's gone a long time.

  We're in the sitting room. It's late, past bedtime, but Omoni doesn't seem to notice the time. We hear someone coming, and I run to the door.

  Abuji comes in with his arm around Uncle. Holding him up, sort of dragging him. Because Uncle can hardly walk.

  He's been beaten up. Really bad.

  Omoni bathes Uncle's wounds and bandages them, with him groaning the whole time. Sun-hee gets in the way, so Omoni sends her to bed. I help Omoni, fetching water and rags.

  Abuji talks to me afterward.

  "My brother was at his shop late today because he was waiting for the newspaper delivery." I know that newspapers from Taegu, the nearest city, get delivered to Uncle's printing shop late in the day. "There was a photograph of the marathon champion on the front page."

  A pause. He looks away from me. "Uncle and some of his friends changed all the newspapers. They crossed out the Japanese name and wrote his Korean name in its place. They altered the Japanese flag on his uniform, too—they drew a wavy line in the middle of the circle, so it looked like the Korean flag instead."

  I gasp. So brave of Uncle! He must have known he could get into trouble. But he did it anyway. "What happened?" I ask. My voice comes out all croaky. I take a breath, steady it, speak louder. "How did he get hurt?"

  "They were caught in the act by a group of soldiers and dragged off to jail. All of them were beaten. Besides his face, he has several broken ribs. They kept most of them in jail, but a few were released."

  "Why? Why did they let them go?"

  "I am not sure. Perhaps as a warning. They want the townspeople to see them, to see how badly they have been hurt. To discourage further acts of this sort." A pause. "Or perhaps out of respect for my position at the school."

  We're quiet for a little while. Then Abuji tells me to go to bed. "Sleep by your sister tonight," he says.

  Sun-hee's eyes are closed, but she isn't asleep. When someone is really asleep they look ... I don't know, heavier. Anyway, I can tell she's still awake.

  And probably scared. She's only little. I get out some bedding and lie down right next to her. I whisper, "I know you're still awake, Sun-hee. Don't worry. Uncle is hurt, but he's going to be all right." I don't know that for sure, but I'm hoping hard. If he was worse, Abuji would have gone for the doctor.

  Sun-hee turns toward me and touches my arm. I let her take my hand and hold it until she falls asleep.

  A few days later Uncle calls Sun-hee and me into his room. It's the first time we've been allowed to see him. I've been sleeping in my parents' room to let him rest quietly.

  He's still hurting a lot. It's hard for him to move or even take a deep breath. The swelling on his face has gone down, but the bruises look awful. Dark blue, purple, red, and the biggest one, on his cheekbone, is greenish yellow around the edges.

  Uncle sees the way I look at him. He grins and makes a terrible face. That makes me feel a little better. Then he tells Sun-hee to bring him the mirror. She holds it in front of him.

  "Oh! Such colors!" he says. "Really, they're rather pretty, don't you think? I wonder if I could manage to stay this way."

  We laugh and I feel even better. He always makes us laugh.

  Then Uncle nods at me. "Paper and pencil," he says.

  What for? I get them from the shelf and give them to him. He raises himself up on one elbow, wincing. Then he takes the pencil and draws a rectangle on the paper.

  "I am going to draw the Korean flag for you," he whispers.

  I lean closer. There have been rumors in the street, people talking about Sohn Kee Chung and the newspapers. But I hadn't seen the paper. The Japanese had burned them all. I'd never seen a Korean flag either.

  Uncle draws a circle in the middle of the rectangle.

  Sun-hee pouts. "That looks just like the Japanese flag," she says. I'm thinking the same thing. It's the flag on top of every public building in town: a red circle on a white ground. So familiar.

  "Shh. Wait." Uncle draws a curved line in the middle of the circle. "The top half of the circle is red"—pointing with the pencil—"and the bottom is blue."

  Then he draws four symbols, one in each corner. "These are black," he says. "Each has three parts, and each part represents a different cycle. The seasons: summer, autumn, winter, spring"—he points at the corners in turn. "The directions: south, west, north, east. And the universe: sky, moon, earth, sun."

  "That's good, Uncle," Sun-hee says, bobbing her head and smiling. "It's a lot fancier than the Japanese flag."

  Uncle smiles back at her. Then he looks serious. He glances around cautiously, so I do, too. Only the three of us there, but I still get a funny feeling, like someone might be watching us. "Bow," he whispers. "Bow to the Korean flag."

  We stay as we are, squatting on our haunches, but we bow our heads.

  "Never forget," he says. "Keep it in your minds always—what the flag looks like and what it means."

  His voice is quiet, but strong at the same time. I stare hard at the paper, trying to memorize the flag.

  As usual, Sun-hee has a question. "Why, Uncle? Why do we have to remember it? Why can't we just put the picture up on the wall? That way we'll see it every day and we'll always know what it looks like."

  Uncle reaches out and pulls gently on one of her braids. "We can't, little cricket. It is against the law to fly this flag—even to put up a picture of it. Korea is part of the Japanese Empire now. But someday this will be our own country once more. Your own country."

  He looks at us again. "You have it now? In a safe place in your minds?"

  Sun-hee nods so hard her head is like a bouncing ball. I just look at Uncle and nod once.

  Uncle lies back down. "Burn it," he says.

  Sun-hee looks scared. She follows me to the kitchen. Omoni is out doing the marketing. I wonder what she'd think if she were here.

  We watch the drawing blacken and then disappear in flames. Sun-hee looks a little less scared then.

  When we get back to his room, Uncle raises his head and stares at both of us. "Never forget," he says again. "I swear there will come a time when you, little Sun-hee, will sew that flag. And Tae-yul, you will help put it up over every building in the land."

  His words put a picture in my head. Me, on the roof of a building, raising a big Korean flag. Uncle down below, signaling to me that the flag was straight. It'd be fun, climbing on all the roofs.

  There will come a time... he'd said.

  But when?

  5. Sun-hee

  When we chose our new names, I pointed to the letter K. I went around whispering over and over, "Keoko. Kaneyama Keoko. Keoko."

  Kaneyama: Japanese family names were usually long.

  Kim: Korean ones were short.

  Keoko: Japanese first names could be long or short.

  Sun-hee: Korean first names were almost always two syllables.

  I'd always liked the sound of Japanese first names. "Tomo" meant "friend." I remembered learning that when I was little. It had pleased me so much that my best friend's name was "friend"! His sisters were Sachiko and Hiroko. Girls' names often ended in "ko," which means "girl" in Japanese.

  I liked how Abuji had hidden our real last name in the new one he'd chosen for us. And he'd done the same for my first name as well. "Ko" meant girl, but it could als
o mean "the sun's rays." Rays of brightness, the same meaning as my real name.

  I could think about "Kaneyama Keoko" as a name but not as my name.

  For the next few days, there was terrible confusion at school. We had to learn our classmates' Japanese names and call them by those names. Suddenly, the girl across the aisle from me was Megumi, not Myung-gin. And the boy who sat behind me was Masado instead of Young-won. In school, when I spoke of my brother, I had to call him Nobuo!

  Our teacher tried to be patient with us. If we forgot and used our classmates' real names, she prompted us—gently at first, but more sternly as time went on.

  I was a good student; I'd never once given the teacher cause to beat me. I was very careful to use everyone's Japanese name and to respond when anyone said "Keoko," even though it felt as if they were talking to someone else. But on the second day of the name change my brain grew tired of being careful every single minute, and I called a classmate by her Korean name.

  I chose the worst possible moment to make this mistake. Onishi-san was in the room. He was the man who served as the military attaché for our school. Our teachers were Korean, but their bosses were Japanese. Onishi-san's job was to make sure all the students were learning to be good citizens of the Empire.

  He came into our classroom several times a week, often in the middle of a lesson. We always stopped what we were doing and bowed to him. Then he'd stand at the back of the room and observe us for a while. I could tell he made the teacher nervous. I tried especially hard to give the right answers when he was around.

  That day, I knew he was in the room. I knew I had to be extra careful not to make a mistake. And somehow I did the very thing I was trying so hard not to do—I said "Myung-gin" instead of "Megumi."

  Onishi-san heard me. He made a funny sound in his throat, like "Ah!" Then he looked at the teacher and made an abrupt motion with his stick.

  The teacher glanced at him quickly and then at me. "Keoko! To the front," she said.

  The class was suddenly silent. I could see the surprise in the faces of the other students. The daughter of the vice-principal—who had never before been beaten...

  In the brief moments it took me to walk to the front of the class, I saw the teacher's face. She looked so unhappy that I felt sorrier for her than for myself. She didn't want to beat me, but she had to—because Onishi-san was there.

  It was so unfair. First our names were taken away, and then we weren't given even a few days to learn everyone's new name.

  So when the bamboo cane swished through the air I was angry, not frightened. With each stinging whack, the word rang in my mind ... unfair—unfair—unfair—unfair—unfair.... Best of all, I was too angry to cry.

  At home that night Omoni pressed her lips together when she saw the fierce red welts on my legs. She soothed them with a paste made of herbs, but the marks stayed there for several days. I was glad they didn't fade right away. Seeing and feeling the sore redness of those welts always made me a little angry all over again.

  I wanted to stay angry about losing my name.

  ***

  The changing of my name made even Tomo cross. When we played together after school during those early days of the name change, he kept catching himself. "Sun-hee—I mean, Keoko," he kept saying.

  Once, after correcting himself for what seemed like the hundredth time, he stamped his foot in frustration. "Keoko-Keoko-Keoko," he said, as if trying to pound the name into his brain. "Keoko-Keoko-Keekeeko-Kekoko—" He was getting his tongue all twisted.

  I giggled. "Kee-kee-ko? Ke-ko-ko?"

  "Ke-ya-koo! Ko-ko-ka!"

  Now we were both laughing.

  "Ka-koo-ko!"

  "Ke-ay-ka!"

  Tomo was laughing at the silly sounds. I was laughing for the same reason, but I was also secretly pleased to be treating my Japanese name with such disrespect.

  At last our laughter faded and we caught our breath. Tomo glanced at me quickly, then looked away again. "Maybe, when it's just the two of us alone, I could still call you Sun-hee. What do you think?"

  It wasn't often that Tomo asked for my opinion. I wanted to answer carefully, so I thought for a moment. "Wouldn't that just make it harder?" I said. "You'd have to switch to my Japanese name when we're with other people. You might get mixed up and—and forget."

  I didn't say all that I was thinking—that as the son of the principal, Tomo always had to set an example. A mistake from him would be worse than a mistake from other students; he would lose a lot more face. I didn't have to say it, because it was something Tomo lived with every day.

  "You're right," he said. He flicked another glance at me. "It's such a nuisance, isn't it?"

  And I knew this was his way of saying he was sorry I had to change my name.

  It was our last year of school together. Elementary students all went to the same school, but in junior high, boys and girls went to separate schools.

  Not that Tomo and I saw each other much in school anyway. The Japanese students had their own classrooms. Tomo had told me that in bigger cities the Japanese had their own schools. But our town was too small for that.

  I only saw Tomo at assembly times, which were in the morning, when the whole school met in the courtyard to recite the Emperor's education policy. We also sang the Japanese national anthem and did exercises together. And once in a while there were special assemblies.

  Even though I couldn't read Japanese when I first went to school, knowing how to speak it made all the lessons much easier for me. At the start of my second year I was made Class Leader because I was the best in my class at reading and writing.

  We had to learn three kinds of writing. Two kinds used the Japanese alphabet, and there were two different alphabets. The third system, which most of my classmates found terribly difficult, was called kanji.

  Kanji has no alphabet. Instead, each word is a separate picture-character. Altogether there are nearly fifty thousand characters! Not even scholars who spend their whole lives studying kanji can learn them all. We had to learn about two thousand basic characters—to recognize them in reading and to write them ourselves.

  We had calligraphy lessons as part of studying kanji. I loved calligraphy the very first time I tried it. It seemed that an unknown creature came to life in the brush as soon as I picked it up—a creature light as a dragonfly, smooth as a snake, quick as a rabbit.

  The combinations of kanji characters were like magic to me. For example, the character for "love." You wrote the character for "mother" and combined it with the one for "child." When stroked with the brush rather than sketched out with a pencil, the word truly did look more loving.

  Every week we learned new characters. Sometimes the connections were easy to understand. The character for "life" was formed by writing "water" plus "tongue"—for without water to drink there can be no life. The characters "rice" and "mouth" together made "happy" or "peaceful." It was true—how could you be happy or at peace if you were starving?

  Kanji was full of secrets like this. Tae-yul hated studying kanji; he thought it was boring. I couldn't understand that at all. Maybe I loved kanji because it was about knowing a little and figuring out the rest.

  Abuji noticed my interest in kanji and began to spend more time with me. Before, Omoni had always looked after us; Abuji was busy with his own work. Until he started to help me study kanji, I'd spent very little time with him.

  My lessons in school concentrated on learning and memorizing characters. This was so difficult and took so much time that the teachers didn't explain much about each individual character. Abuji took my learning a step further—or rather, a step backward.

  One night we sat together at the low table in his room, bent over a sheet of paper.

  "Mouth," he said as he wrote the character: "This is very simple. It began as a circle, like an open mouth, but the line was squared to make it easier to combine with other characters.

  "West. As the sun goes down, the birds fly back to their nests. So
you see—" and he drew for me the progression of pictures that had evolved into the character for "west."

  I loved these sessions with Abuji. I watched with my eyes and listened with my ears and learned with my heart. My kanji got better without it ever feeling like work.

  At the end of my fourth year of school I was awarded a special prize for my language skills. All students wore two badges on their collars, one with the school's name and the other with their graduation year. I was given a third badge to wear. It meant I was the best in my grade at Japanese. It was the proudest moment of my life when the principal pinned the badge to my collar in front of the entire school. I didn't look at Abuji, but I could feel how proud he was.

  As I left the platform to rejoin my class, Tomo smiled at me with his eyes. I was so surprised and pleased that I almost stopped walking. Tomo and I never talked to each other at school. Even when I did see him—in the courtyard before school or during assemblies—I pretended I didn't know him, and he did the same with me. It was just the way things were: Japanese and Korean children didn't mix during school.

  Tomo must have noticed my surprise, for he quickly looked away. But that didn't bother me. Nothing could have bothered me as I walked back to my seat. I felt as if I were floating on a bright rosy cloud.

  That afternoon on my way home from school I felt something whiz past my ear. I turned around quickly, ducking just in time as a second pebble flew past. I kept my head down but glanced around wildly. Who was throwing stones at me?

  At that moment a gang of boys from school dashed out from behind a wall. They threw a final volley of pebbles at me, then ran away, chanting: "Chin-il-pa! Chin-il-pa!"

  Chin-il-pa meant "lover of Japan." It was almost like a curse. Chin-il-pa were people who got rich because they cooperated with the Japanese government. I hadn't done anything like that! Why were they cursing me, calling me that awful name? I ran home, blinking away tears.