Ghost Factory

A week after my eighteenth birthday, I sat with my legs draped over the side of an embankment wishing my toes could touch the water of the Han River. My legs were warm from the sun, sickly white against the green water. Cars honked and whirred across a nearby bridge.

I traced the edges of an envelope—a card from my mother. I still hadn’t been able to open it. I had been preparing for college entrance exams, busy with my nose in the books. I could’ve opened it. It asked me to from inside my backpack, my desk drawer. I stared at it as I lay in bed.

Imagining it might carry her scent, I put the envelope to my nose and closed my eyes. And, for a second, she was there lulling me to sleep. The lotion on her hands filling my head as she combed her fingers through my hair. Then there was just the smell like days-old dishwater rising from the river.

I hadn’t seen her in years. Hadn’t heard her voice. Though I thought of her daily.

* * *

I was about ten-years-old the night I saw my mother’s dreams wriggle loose from her eyes. I sat there at the edge of her bed, running my hand across her arm. She was crying, so much so that she floated above her sheets. Her neck was bruised like an apple and salty tears stung at her rug-burned back.

She had been praying again—my father said he would beat God out of her. He threw her against the wall and dragged her to their bedroom. He shut the door and laid his fist wherever he thought God might be. In her belly, in her chest, in her head. And suddenly, he stopped, opened the door, and lay on the living room floor to watch TV.

I sat there watching my mother cry and had nothing to say when she began to laugh. Laughing and crying, her eyes flung wide open against the shadows on the ceiling. Every smiling thing she’d ever hoped for came rushing out of her eyes, like steam overhead, evaporating from a rice cooker. She stopped laughing. She stopped crying. She lay there, her eyes locked, breathing slow and steady.

“Uh-mah? Uh-mah? What happened? Uh-mah!” I shook her arm, then her shoulders.

“I am great. Go to sleep now. I be okay. You be okay. Everything okay tomorrow. I promise.” She sat up, kissed me on the forehead and pushed me out the bedroom door. I looked back as I pulled the door shut behind me and she said, “Everything okay tomorrow.”

That night, as they lay in bed, my father told my mother to light a cigarette for him on the stove. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and went to the kitchen. I remember hearing her bare feet stick and pull off the linoleum. I remember hearing a drawer pulled open. She returned to their bedroom with a lit cigarette and a hammer. Eyes closed he took the cigarette from her left hand. With her right hand, she cracked his head open.

A single memory came streaming out like ribbon. During the Occupation, my grandfather used the one knife in their dirt floor, two-room house to kill his family. The soldiers had just entered the small village, coming over the green, misted hills. He killed my grandmother first, so she wouldn’t have to watch her children die. The girls came next, falling like forgotten dolls. All of their hands folded in prayer. My grandfather fell to his knees in front of my father with trembling hands and held my father’s teary and blubbery face.

“You, then me.” The words barely escaped his mouth. He gripped the knife and steadied himself as the door flew open. The bullet entered the back of my grandfather’s head, making blood spatter on my father’s face as it exited through the forehead. They fell like dominoes, my father well-hidden under my grandfather’s body.

Crushed and quiet beneath his father’s body, he lay there for a day, coming in and out, each time his eyes focused on a crucifix held loose between his sister’s graying fingers. He prayed and prayed and prayed, but the blood never drew back, the closed eyes never opened and the opened ones never moved. Under my grandfather’s dead body, is exactly where my father’s dreams died.

* * *

I didn’t hear my father’s skull crack, or hear the great, last gasp before he died.

I was watching the shadows on the ceiling, how they changed as cars passed by or when the wind shook the trees. They moved in and out of each other seamlessly like dark water.

I thought about swimming in Lake Michigan. My parents sat on rocks beside each other, smiling as I splashed the water around me. The sky bright with Fourth of July fireworks, the water reflecting the blooming sparks of red, white and blue in the sky. I loved it, the way my parents smiled when they were looking at me. They looked happy together. I had no idea how much had been carved out of them.

I tried to make it last. I refused to come out of the water, shaking my head and continuing to slap the water, laughing. The fireworks had ended and it was just clouds above and water around me. My parents weren’t smiling, so I splashed the water on them. Without warning, my father’s eyes grew wide and white. I stopped and came nearer to them. My mother tried to speak, but kept still. As soon as I was close enough, he ripped me out of the water and smacked me across the face.

You never listen. You are nothing. You no good.

I looked around my room for something else to remember. All the shapes and shadows were still and flat against the walls, so I fell asleep.

* * *

“You wake now. Wake up. We late.” Her hands were pressed against my cheeks, they were cold. “We late. Time to go. Okay?” She was sitting on the bed and got up. In the middle of my bedroom was a suitcase. The one we had used the year before when we visited Korea. She was putting all of my clothes in it.

“Where are we going?” I slowly sat up in bed, rubbing the tips of my fingers against the creases of my pillowcase.

She looked at me, smiled and continued to pack the suitcase. With her back to me, she said, “Teeth brush. We late.”

As I walked to the bathroom, I noticed my father’s shoes by the door. I went back into my room as my mother was zipping the suitcase shut. “Is Ah-pah not going to work today? Is he sick or something?”

“Teeth brush. Please.”

When I returned she was lying on my bed, speaking Korean. She didn’t see me come in; the only thing I could understand was my name.

“I’m ready to go.”

“Okay, change clothing. We go five minutes.”

She didn’t say anything as we walked to the neighbor’s house. I didn’t ask why she wasn’t wearing her work clothes. I didn’t ask, again, why my father’s shoes were still in the hallway. The wheels of the suitcase squealed as she dragged it behind us. She held my hand tight as if I might blow away.

The neighbor was crying as my mother said goodbye to me. They had been talking, longer than usual in hushed Korean. My mother knelt down in front of me and held my whole body tight against her chest.

“You be good. Everything okay. Everything okay. Uh-mah love you. Okay? You understand?”

I didn’t, but I nodded my head. I had no idea. She stood, kissed my forehead and left. That was the last time I saw her. She didn’t pick me up from the neighbor’s that night. I waited by the door like a dog, crying.

* * *

A week later, I was sitting at the airport staring at my feet. The neighbor hadn’t answered any of my questions since my mother walked out the door, except to say that I would be going to visit my family in Korea. She wasn’t being mean, she was just quiet.

When we got to the terminal, she spoke to the people at the airline counter. She gave them my passport and my suitcase. I had a backpack strapped to me with a few books and things to keep me busy during the flight. After they finished talking, a flight attendant came over to me and lowered her head to mine.

“Hi there. Are you excited about your big trip?” Her smile was big and red. She put something around my neck. “Don’t take this off until you get off the plane in Korea. It’s very, very important. It’s just so that people know to take extra good care of you. Okay?”

The neighbor left me at security with the flight attendant. I watched as she vanished around a corner. The flight attendant sat me down near the boarding entrance, facing a window.

“Look! That’s your plane. Don’t be scared. It’s going to be just fine. Okay?”

She went back to her station after telling another attendant to look after me. I looked around the waiting area. There were a lot of Korean women with their families. A couple of them looked like my mother. They looked at me, probably wondering why I was by myself. I kept my head down—fearing they might ask.

As I moved towards the gate, I tripped over a man’s suitcase and came face to face with my mother. The word murder stared back in neat, black newsprint beneath her photo. The man whose suitcase I’d fallen over helped me to my feet. I looked back at my mother’s face, staring up at nothing from the newspaper, as a crew member ushered me into the plane.

* * *

Dreams make disappointment.

That’s all she’d written in the card. Three words for eight years.

I watched passing boats and eddies form and break against the wall beneath my feet. The lights inside homes and the headlights of cars popped on as the sun rolled away. I read it several more times before I put the card back in its envelope and let it slip into the river