Free Drifting House by Krys Lee Page B

turned.
    “Adeul–ah….”
    I said nothing.
    My father took off his shoes and laid them neatly on the cement as if he had just come home. He sat, legs folded over each other, then got up again, as if he wasn’t sure where he wanted to be. He walked over. His hands held my face, and he stared deep into my eyes. He kissed my cheeks.
    “Adeul–ah, pray for me.” His voice dropped. “No matter what, tell them I drowned.”
    And just as I moved toward him, my father turned his back on me and on God, and stepped casually off the riverside path and into the river.
    I have not looked at photos of my father for years. His bloated river face and ­emptied-out eyes have faded for me, though I still hear his cadences, those broken incantations that rang through my childhood. Soon after my father’s passing, I stopped attending church. No matter how often New Mother reminded me that I was a pastor’s son, I could never go back.
    During my college years I dutifully visited New Mother; sometimes I just made phone calls. Every year I poured the rice wine that my father liked so much over his grave and pulled the weeds around the tombstone; I ordered flowers for my mother’s grave,stranded in America. Just after I graduated, I fell in love with and married a woman who nurtured the faith that I no longer could. Through her, even after we returned to America, a part of me stayed connected to Korea and to the church. I believed myself to be happy, or at least reconciled, as we settled in New Jersey, acquired our first mortgage, and took ­weeklong holidays in the ­summers and winters.
    Time passed for me, time stayed still. Seoul is a city that, no matter its changes as it modernized, I will always remember as my father’s. On my last day there, I walked through Woo Meat Market, where merchants unload pigs’ heads leaking blood from the mouths and necks, and passed men staggering into the dark, men seeking brawls and seeking love. I saw the violence that my father had grown up with and passed down to us. I felt what my father must have always carried with him: the terrible war, its ­long-ago shadow that cast far beyond and drew you in like a thirsty curse. Only then I understood what the war had done to us.
    When the monsoon rains descended that July, I thought of how he had wanted to walk with God but had been incapable of it. I see now that his slightly bowlegged walk is my walk; that my black, watchful eyes are his. When I see a stranger hunched over, devouring a cut of filet mignon as if it were a bowl of ramen, I see my father and the hunger he had grown up with. There he is for me, an orphan, hungry all his life.

THE GOOSE FATHER
    E VEN AFTER SOONAH and their two children had left Seoul for Boston, Gilho Pak denied that he was what the news­papers dubbed a “goose father,” one of those men who faithfully sent money to his family living overseas. The original goose fathers, the term signifying their journey from one country to another, were Korean men who had been drafted or volunteered as mercenary soldiers for the U.S. army in Vietnam, and sent their salaries back to their family. But back then, there had been few jobs and a national landscape of poverty. Gilho was not a goose; he was entirely stationary. He was a successful accountant who did not associate himself with the Vietnam mercenaries, much less the so–called goose fathers reduced to eating ramen for dinner; those men so dishonest they had other women in their wives’ absence, men who collapsed from strokes, unearthed in their homes weeks later by neighbors, men less than men in their solitude. Unlike those fathers, his family’s absence made Gilho even more upright and correct in his behavior. Sex? He had neverunderstood the fuss. And what about Junho, his ­ten-year-old son, and his daughter, Jinhee, in American private schools, his wife’s ­language-school tuition that qualified her for a student visa, their living expenses? He’d had the foresight of