Marilyn and Me. Ji-min Lee
“Ladies, you know Miss Kim, one of my boarders? She’s a typist at the base. Don’t you embarrass yourselves by saying anything in English.”
The women begin exchanging smutty jokes and laughing. With the women otherwise occupied, Mrs. Chang ushers me into the small room at the back of the shop. She turns on the light, revealing the English labels on dizzying stacks of cans, cigarettes, and makeup smuggled out of the base.
“Here you go.” I take out the dirty magazine I wrapped in pages torn out of a calendar. I asked an accommodating houseboy to get me a copy.
Mrs. Chang glances outside and gestures at me to lower my voice. She flips through the magazine rapidly and frowns upon seeing a white girl’s breasts, as large as big bowls. “Even these rags are better when they’re American-made,” she says, smiling awkwardly. “A good customer has been looking for this. I’ve been searching and searching, but the ones I come across are already fairly used, you know?”
I turn away from Mrs. Chang’s feeble excuse.
Mrs. Chang shows these magazines to her impotent husband. She lost all three of her children during the war. That is sad enough, but it’s unbearable that she’s trying for another child with her husband, who stinks of the herbal medicine he takes for his ailments. It’s obscene to picture this middle-aged woman, whose lower belly is now shrunken, opening Playboy for her husband who can barely sit up as she pines for her dead children. It’s too much to handle for even me.
“I’m sorry I had to ask an innocent girl like you to do an errand like this for me,” she says.
“That’s all right. Who says I’m innocent?”
Mrs. Chang studies me disapprovingly. “Don’t stay out too late. I’ll leave your dinner by your door.” Although her words are brusque, Mrs. Chang is the one person who worries about whether I’m eating enough.
Having fled the North during the war, Mrs. Chang is famously determined, as is evident in her success. She is known throughout the market for her miserly cold-heartedness. That’s how pathetic I am—even someone like her is worried about me.
We met at the Koje Island refugee camp. In her eyes, I’m still hungry and traumatized. I was untrustworthy and strange back then, shunned even by the refugees. I babbled incoherently, in clear, sophisticated Seoul diction, sometimes even using English. I fainted any time I had to stand in line and shredded my blanket as I wept in the middle of the night. I was known as the crazy rich girl who had studied abroad. I cemented my reputation with a shocking incident and after that Mrs. Chang took it upon herself to monitor me. When she looks at me I feel the urge to show her what people expect from me, though I doubt she wants me to. People seem to think I have lost my will to stand on my own two feet and that I will fall apart dramatically. I’m not being paranoid. I haven’t even exited the boutique and the women are already sizing up my bony rump and unleashing negative observations about how hard it would be for me to bear a child. They wouldn’t believe it even if I were to lie down in front of them right now and give birth. Somehow I have become a punchline.
Alice J. Kim. People do not like her.
Women approach me with suspicion and men walk away, having misunderstood me. Occasionally someone is intrigued, but they are a precious few; foreigners or those whose kindness is detrimental to their own well-being. People don’t approve of me, beginning with my name. “Alice? Are you being snooty because you happen to know a little English?”
Very few know my real name, or why I discarded Kim Ae-sun to become Alice. I’m the one person in the world who knows what my middle initial stands for. Only whores or spies take on an easy-to-pronounce foreign name—I am either disappointing my parents or betraying my country. People think I am a prostitute who services high-level American military officers; at one point I was known as the UN whore, which is certainly more explicit than UN madam. But I was just grateful to be linked to an entity that is working for world peace. Or else they say I’m insane. Now, to be a whore and insane at the same time—if I were a natural phenomenon, I would be that rare unlucky day that brings both lightning and hail. People will occasionally summon their courage to ask me point-blank. Once, an American officer took out his wallet, saying, “I’d like to see for myself. Do an Oriental girl’s privates go horizontal or vertical?” I told him, “Every woman’s privates look the same as your mother’s.” The officer cleared his throat in embarrassment before fleeing. Anyway, in my experience, a life shrouded in suspicion isn’t always bad. No matter how awful, keeping secrets is more protective than revealing the truth. Secrets tend to draw out the other person’s fear. Without secrets, I would be completely destitute.
Once, I heard Mrs. Chang attempt to defend me. “Listen. It wasn’t just one or two women who went insane during the war. We all saw mothers trying to breastfeed their dead babies and maimed little girls crawling around looking for their younger siblings. I remember an old woman in Hungnam who embraced her disabled son while they leaped off the wharf to their deaths.” She implied that I was just one of countless women who had gone crazy during the war, and that I should be accepted as such. But even Mrs. Chang, who considers herself my guardian, most certainly doesn’t like me. I’ve been brought into her care because the intended recipients of her maternal instinct have died. Maternal instinct—I’ve never had it, but I wonder if it’s similar to opium. You can try to stay away from it your entire life, but it would be incredibly hard to quit if you’ve tasted it. That is what maternal instinct is—grand and powerful and far-reaching. During the war the most heartbreaking scenes were of mothers standing next to their dead children. Maybe not. The most heartbreaking scenes during the war can’t be described in words.
In any case, perhaps confusing me for her daughter, Mrs. Chang meddles constantly in my affairs. It goes without saying that she has a litany of complaints. She looks at me with contempt. After all, I rinse my hair with beer, a tip I learned from an actual prostitute. That is certainly something to look down on, but I do have my reasons. My hair is completely gray. One autumn long ago, I grew old in the span of a single day. Afterward my hair never returned to its true color. My unsightly hair has the texture of rusted rope, but I’m satisfied with it for the time being. Mrs. Chang also despises my vulgar clothes, unbefitting, she says, of my status as an educated woman. But none of the things I’d learned academically helped me in the decisive moment of my life; my intelligence and talents, though not that deep or superior, were actually what entrapped me. Nor does Mrs. Chang think highly of my personality. She says I am haughty, which she thinks is why I don’t like people, but she’s not entirely correct. The truth is that I’m too broken. In any case, she cares for me in her heartless way and keeps me near. Even stranger is that I can’t seem to leave her, though I too look down on her. Our unusual connection yokes us together despite everything. She probably feels the sharp wind of Hungnam when she sees my bloodless cheeks. My pale forehead would remind her of the Koje Island refugee camp, where we were doused with anti-lice DDT powder as we sat on the dirt floor. Though we never meant to, we have somehow lived our lives together. We have a special bond, like all those who experienced war. We shared times of life and death. And she clearly remembers my triumphs and my defeats.
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 into 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