The Starlet and the Spy Read online

  I triumphed by surviving but ended up surrendering; I tried to hang myself in the refugee camp, an act so shocking it cemented my reputation as a crazy woman. Mrs. Chang happened to walk by and pulled me down with her strong arms and brought me back to my senses with her vulgar cursing. Why did I want to plunge to my death after I’d survived bombings and massacres? I still don’t understand my reasons, but Mrs. Chang is certain in her own conjectures and stays by my side to watch over me. Hers is not the gaze of an older woman looking compassionately at a younger one. It’s the sad ache of a woman who is well versed in misfortune, feeling sympathy for a woman who is still uncomfortable with tragedy. If there’s a truth I’ve learned over the last few years, it’s that a woman’s strength comes not from age but from misfortune. I want to be exempted from this truth. I have earned the right to be strong, but now I do not want this strength. A woman becomes lonely the moment she realizes her strength. As loneliness is altogether too banal, for the moment I would like to politely decline.

  I LEAVE CHAYU MARKET AND HEAD TOWARD MYONG-DONG.

  Wind enters through my parted lips, cold enough to form a layer of thin ice on my tongue. I swirl my tongue around and swallow it. Having passed through the desolate city, the wind has an odd candy sweetness to it. Not many people are out on the street, and for that I am grateful.

  A streetcar crammed with people pulls up as I stand at the traffic circle in front of the Bank of Korea. Teeming with black heads, the car resembles a lunch box filled with black beans cooked in soy sauce. Everyone is expressionless, making me wonder why we even have eyes, noses, or mouths. I stare at those stone-faced people and gradually their features begin to disappear, leaving behind only their black hair. I can’t breathe. I feel dizzy. I close my eyes and turn away. The streetcar continues down the street and I let out a sigh, as though freed from a corset. I look around to see if anyone has seen my reaction. There is no cure for this. Even after all this time, I have a physical reaction in a mass of people. It harms my dignity; shuddering like a pissing dog every time I find myself in the middle of a crowd doesn’t fit the independent life I seek. People who have witnessed my reaction spread the rumor that I had gone insane. They might expect that I would make profuse apologies, but I refuse to do so.

  I walk past the Central Post Office and spot a hunchbacked child sitting out front. Wrapped in a ragged blanket and wearing a newspaper-thin skirt, she is begging. She scratches a spoon on an empty brass bowl and emits a sound more desperate than the Lord’s Prayer. Could that child become a woman without being violated? That’s what I worry about. I turn away, unable to meet her gaze. I hear a baby’s cry. My head snaps around. The girl’s rounded spine straightens and a head pops up. She had her infant sibling on her back all along. The baby wails, arching its neck, and the girl looks up at the sky and mumbles, too weak to soothe it. Her dark eyes reflect nothing. She may never have even heard of such unrealistic concepts as hopes and dreams. I rummage through my bag and find a broken Hershey’s bar. I toss it at the girl and rush off. The chocolate won’t solve the child’s hunger; it’ll just introduce her to the easy temptation of sweetness. Unable to forget that chocolaty taste, she will continue on the streets. That is the purpose of a Hershey’s bar, which befriends both soldiers and children during war.

  DID YOU READ MRS. FREEDOM YESTERDAY?” YU-JA ASKS, heating steel chopsticks in the flame of the stove. “What do you think will happen next? Don’t you think Professor Chang’s wife will sleep with her next-door neighbor? I’m positive she will. Isn’t the very term ‘next-door neighbor’ so seductive? I’d say it straddles the line between melodrama and erotica.”

  Yu-ja works as a receptionist at Myong-dong Clinic, which is set back from the bustling main thoroughfare. That may be why it’s never too busy when I stop by to see her. It’s a dull place for a vivacious girl like Yu-ja, who seems always to be moving to the music of a dance hall band.

  “That’s all anyone talks about these days,” I say. “As if they don’t know how contradictory the two words are together—‘Mrs.’ and ‘Freedom.’”

  Seoul Sinmun, which is publishing Mrs. Freedom as a serial, is open on Yu-ja’s desk. It’s the talk of the town. Yu-ja reads each installment passionately. In fact, she rereads it several times a day.

  “That old-maid intellectual sarcasm of yours! You know men hate that, right?” Yu-ja twirls her bangs around a heated chopstick and counts slowly to twenty. When she takes the chopstick out, her hair emerges not as Jean Harlow’s Hollywood wave but as a sad, limp curl, like a strand of partially rehydrated seaweed. To make up for her failed attempt at a wave, Yu-ja pats another layer of Coty powder on her face. She tugs on her new skirt, which is too tight. She has to lie down on the examination table to finally pull it up. She’s quite alluring. When I look at her round, peach-like face, I can’t believe she signed up to be a cadet nurse in the war.

  In order to secure a place on an evacuation train during the Third Battle of Seoul, Yu-ja had run to the recruiting district headquarters inside the Tonhwamun Gate at Changdokkgung Palace, having seen a recruitment ad for nurse officers in the paper. She was ordered to assemble at Yongdungpo Station that same day, and she dashed across the frozen Han River just as the last train evacuating the war wounded was about to leave. As soon as she boarded, Yu-ja was tasked with helping soldiers to go to the bathroom and spent the next few days working incessantly on that train, which traveled only at night. One early morning, as the train pulled into some countryside station, Yu-ja was using the dawn light coming through the window to search for and eat the bits of rice the patients had dropped, and in that moment she truly knew despair. Once in Pusan, Yu-ja put on a US Army work uniform and even went through basic training, but, worried about her family, she gave up her dream of becoming a cadet nurse. Yu-ja experienced her own hardships during those years; not until fairly recently has she been able to powder her face so liberally. I understand why she’s rushing around with her womanhood in full bloom. A flower’s lifespan is ten days, but a woman’s spring is even shorter. Many a spring died during the war. The mere fact that she survived has given Yu-ja the right to bloom fully.

  “Are you going back to the officers’ club tonight? Your dance steps have no verve,” I tease.

  Yu-ja smiles confidently. “You’re going to want to buy me a beer when you hear what I have to tell you. Ready for this? Remember I told you that one of our patients is married to the chairman of the Taegu School Foundation? Her family operates several orphanages and day care centers. I mentioned Chong-nim and she said she would ask around. I think she has some news for us!”

  Chong-nim. My mouth falls open and my breathing grows shallow.

  “Go ahead and close your mouth,” Yu-ja says teasingly. “How do you earn a living when you act like this?”

  Yu-ja is hard on me and at the same time worries about me. I wouldn’t let anyone else do that, but I humbly allow her. Mrs. Chang saved me from death, while Yu-ja took me in when I went crazy. All of that happened in Pusan—goddamn Pusan, that hellish temporary wartime capital of South Korea. Each time Yongdo Bridge drew open, stabbing at the sky like the gates to hell, I believed that an enraged earth had finally churned itself upside down to proclaim complete disaster. The streets were lined with shacks built out of ration boxes, and the smell of burning fuel mixed with the stench of shit. I spent days lying like a corpse in a tiny room as rain dripped through a roof reinforced with military-issue raincoats. “I want to eat Japanese buckwheat noodles,” I told anyone who would listen. Yu-ja would empty my chamber pot when she got home from work and snap, “Please get a grip on yourself. Why are you acting like this? Why?” I could understand Yu-ja’s frustration. To her, it was unimaginable that I could have a tragic future. I knew Yu-ja, who was a few years younger, from the church I attended for a bit after liberation. We were never close, but she always showed an interest in me. When I was transported to a hospital in Pusan, Yu-ja was working there as a nursing assistant. I didn’t recognize
her; I was at my worst, unable to utter my own name, but Yu-ja remembered even my most trivial habits. I had been the object of envy to young Yu-ja, having studied art in Ueno, Tokyo, and worked for the American military government. She remembered me as quite the mysterious and alluring role model. It might have been because I was harboring the most daring yet ordinary secret a young woman could have—being in love with a married man. That was a long time ago, when I was still called Kim Ae-sun.

  And now she is talking about Chong-nim. Her name makes me alert. I’ve been looking for that girl for the last three years, that child with whom I don’t share even a drop of blood, the five-year-old who grabbed my hand trustingly as we escaped Hungnam amid ten thousand screaming refugees, where we would have died if we hadn’t managed to slip onto the ship. If I were to write about my escape, I would dedicate the story to her. To the girl who would be nine by now, her nose cute and flat and her teeth bucked, from Huichon of Chagang Province. Her hopes were small and hot, like the still-beating heart of a bird. Her will to survive roused me from Hungnam and miraculously got us on the Ocean Odyssey headed to Pusan. It was December 24, 1950. The night of Christmas Eve was longer and more miraculous than any night in Bethlehem. I wouldn’t have lost her if I hadn’t acted like a stupid idiot. She disappeared as I lay in the refugee camp infirmary, conversing with ghosts. She became one of many war orphans, their bellies distended and their hair cut short, buried in the heartless world.

  “The orphanage is somewhere in Pohang,” continues Yu-ja. “There’s a nine-year-old girl, and she came from Hungnam around the time you did. I heard she has the watch you talked about. What other orphan would own an engraved Citizen pocket watch?”

  My—no, his—watch that I gave to her, which she tucked in the innermost pocket of her clothes. It had been our only keepsake. That small watch is probably ticking away with difficulty just like me, cherishing time that can’t be turned back.

  “Where is it? Where do we need to go?” I spring to my feet.

  Yu-ja tries to calm me down. “I don’t know all the details. I’m supposed to meet her this evening at the dance hall. Why don’t you come with me? There are too many orphans, and the records are so spotty it’s hard to find them. The lady managed to get in touch with a nun who saw a girl who fits her description somewhere in Pohang.”

  But Yu-ja is unable to convince me to wait and has to run after me without putting the finishing touches to her makeup. Next to fresh, fashionable Yu-ja, I look even more grotesque. Yu-ja is a young female cat who’s just learned to twirl her tail, and I’m an old, molting feline who can barely remember the last time she was in heat. I’m not yet thirty, but I feel like an old hag who has forgotten everything.

  We go down the stairs. Yu-ja tugs my arm at the entrance to the obstetrics clinic; a young girl is squatting in the cold hallway, wearing a quilted skirt, a man’s maroon sweater, and a black woolen scarf wound around her face. Her gaze is feral, sad, and cold, a dizzy tangle of defensiveness and aggression. Yu-ja pulls me along.

  “She’s a maid for some rich family in Namsan,” she whispers. “Did you hear what happened? The master of the house raped her and now she’s pregnant. Then he and his wife accused her of seducing him, beat her, and threw her out. Apparently she has eight younger siblings back home. She was here yesterday, too, asking for help to get rid of it. So many maids are in her situation. I feel bad for them. They try to get rid of it by taking quinine pills—it’s so dangerous.”

  We step into the street and the wind delivers a hard slap. The maid’s rage and despair scatter in the wind. This city poisons girls and women, young and old. Girls with tragic fates are merely a small segment of the people who make up the city. The light they emit in order to hide their shame turns the city even more dazzling at night. The streetlights go on and the light seeps into my heart. It has taken in yet another unforgettable gaze.

  IT’S STILL EARLY BUT THE DANCE HALL IS CROWDED.

  The dancers are gyrating enthusiastically, as though it’s the last dance of the night. This is a sacred place for the wild women of these postwar times, these women who rightfully intimidate men. Of course, men dance, too, but women own this place. A rainbow of velour skirts and nylon dresses twirl like flower petals. There are café madams, owners of downtown boutiques, restaurateurs, dollar exchangers, rich war widows, wives of high-level officials, teachers, concubines, college students—I am taken aback that these are all women who have lived through the war. Maybe they hung their grief and pain on the heavy, sparkling chandelier. I’m jealous of these women whose desire to dance is so intense, who look as if they would keep dancing no matter what. Having learned the futility of life, they move lightly without any regrets. I can’t do that. My breath catches in my throat as I watch them dance, skin to skin. The sight calls to mind images of the masses, moving with a single purpose. As I stand there, dazed, Yu-ja pushes me toward a table in the middle of the room. The chairman’s wife and the wives of business and political leaders, all in fox stoles, greet us.

  “I understand you’re fluent in English and you studied in Tokyo,” the chairman’s wife says. “My son is preparing to study in America. I would ask you to tutor him if you weren’t a woman.”

  She laughs. The other wives look askance at my whorish hair and my tattered black lace gloves. By the time their eyes settle on my worn stockings, they are concluding I am not who I purport to be.

  I cut to the chase. “When can I see Chong-nim?”

  The chairman’s wife gestures at me to be patient and pours me a beer. “The nun I met at the single mothers’ home told me about a girl who fits that description. Something about a pocket watch? I put in a special request to find her. You can go to this address and ask for Sister Chong Sophia.” She smiles as she hands me a card.

  I bow in gratitude. She takes my hand. She’s drunk. Her eyes betray a hollow elegance unique to a woman of leisure.

  Meanwhile, Yu-ja is craning to find someone. “Look who’s here!” she says, clapping and springing to her feet.

  The band is now playing a waltz. Perfume ripples and crests against the walls. Beyond the couples moving off the dance floor is Park Ku-yong, who scans the room until he spots Yu-ja. He waves and comes toward us. Alarmed, I try to duck under the table as Yu-ja grabs me and pulls me up. Ku-yong is wearing a faded black university uniform and an embarrassed expression, as if he is fully aware that he doesn’t quite belong. His footsteps, however, are as assured as ever, obliterating the rhythm of the waltz as he walks toward us. I glare at Yu-ja and pinch her hand.

  At our table, Ku-yong bows and the women welcome the opportunity to tease me. “Oh, you must be Miss Alice’s boyfriend!”

  Ku-yong smiles in embarrassment. I can’t in good conscience make him stand there like this, so I quickly say my goodbyes and take my leave. Yu-ja laughs and wishes me luck. She’s certain that this man has feelings for me. She may be right, but I haven’t confirmed it. I want to avoid the common mistake of a lonely woman confusing a man’s kindness for love. Any special feelings he might have for me are more likely sympathy.

  “You came all this way but you’re not even going to dance?” This is Ku-yong’s attempt at a joke, but I look away.

  I can’t dance with him. You don’t dance with a man who regards you with sympathy. You can drink with him and even sleep with him, but you can’t dance with him. That would be insulting to the beautiful music and the sparkling chandelier.

  KU-YONG AND I WALK APART FROM EACH OTHER LIKE AN old-fashioned couple who keep a decorous distance in public.

  Worried that his gaze might land on my body somewhere, I shiver for no reason at all. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was at Yu-ja’s clinic last week with an unwell coworker. She told me I would see you today if I came by. I’m glad I did.”

  I look down at his shadow stretched out next to mine. He’s probably not eating well, either, but his shadow is sturdy. His interior is likely hollow, though. What once filled his soul ha
s probably leaked away. I know because that’s what happened to me. We were artists once, but now we barely remember how to hold a pencil. I make a living with my clumsy English skills, while he is stuck doing manual labor at the US military ammunition depot in Taepyongno.

  The silence makes me uneasy. “Marilyn Monroe is coming to Korea,” I blurt out. It’s never advantageous to talk about a prettier woman than oneself, but I am curious about his reaction.

  Ku-yong widens his already big eyes and raises his arms in a silent cheer. That’s the power of Marilyn. “Can you believe she’s married? You’ll have to find someone yourself, don’t you think?” He glances at me.

  I’m charmed by his effort to link Marilyn’s life to mine. I let out a laugh. “Gentlemen prefer blondes, which you know I’m not.” No gentleman likes prematurely gray hair washed with beer. But I also can’t stand gentlemen. The two men I loved were gentlemen, and they both disguised their true selves with well-tailored suits and nice manners. The man who ruins a young lady’s reputation is often a gentleman who walks her home at night.

  “Alice, have you been drawing?” Ku-yong asks suddenly.

  I glance up at him. Mediocre people like us don’t dare talk about war and art, the great subjects of humanity. If there is anything we learned, it’s that you avoid war and art to the best of your ability if you want to live your life to its natural end. “No. And you?”