They were no longer girls by any standard. Most peasant women had one or two children by their age, and the most coveted courtesans were closer to fifteen rather than twenty. But they were only just beginning to see themselves as women. Each felt as though she’d gained some secret password that would change all the previously known rules of life.
Although she never spoke of him, everyone in the household knew that Lotus’s lover was President Ma. She had been starring in The Story of ShimChung for only a month when he sent a note to her dressing room during intermission, offering to take her to dinner. When she came out at the end of the night, there was a black car waiting outside the back entrance of the Grand Oriental. He was in the driver’s seat, wearing an elegant fedora and a black suit with a pristine white pocket square.
“Let’s go drink to your success, wherever you’d like,” he’d said as Lotus slid onto the passenger seat. Her nose flooded with his scent—the freshness of cologne mixed with the warmth of tobacco.
“It’s fun going out for a drive, isn’t it? In the summertime, I’ll take the top off and you’ll feel the wind in your hair. There’s nothing in the world that’s more refreshing,” he said, and she drank in every word. He was implying that they would continue to spend time together in the future, and thinking of what she might like while also sharing what he likes. This is what it means to be loved, Lotus thought. There had been no one else who showed so much interest in her, so she fell for him before he even asked her to be his mistress.
Since then, the black car, which he had purchased from a French gold mine owner, was always waiting for her at the end of the night. Most of the time, they made love hastily in the car before he drove back home to his wife and three children. When this first happened, Lotus was mortified; they were parked on a side street, there was the balmy light of a spring dusk, and anyone could have looked inside. But she eventually realized that this impropriety gave him a special thrill, much like how he loved driving fast with the top down. It was the kind of thing he would neither ask nor want from his wife—she knew this instinctively and was proud of being the one woman who could give him what he needed. But whenever Lotus managed to convince him to spend the night in her room, and he slept soundly with his arm reassuringly around her, she forgot any bitterness or resentment she’d ever felt and was sorry for others who could not experience such happiness.
IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT and JungHo was standing outside his mentor’s door, half listening to the voices inside and half drifting away to sleep.
“。 . . Send support to the tenant farmers who are rising up against the Oriental Colonization Company . . .”
“。 . . But are we giving up on Primorski? We should never have trusted the Red Army . . .”
When he’d first moved to MyungBo’s guesthouse, these phrases were meaningless to him as though they were in a foreign tongue. He wasn’t even interested in knowing these windy words and cloudy ideas; he liked to reserve his thinking for Jade, his friends, food and shelter, and other tangible things that made his heart warm, stomach full, and feet firm and heavy on the ground. Then MyungBo started explaining things to him one by one, using the words that he could understand. Primorski was just the Russian word for Yeonhaejoo, a frosty northern land that horse-riding Koreans conquered two thousand years ago. They were hunters, mountain people, warriors—and their capital was PyongYang, which was close to JungHo’s own village. When JungHo listened to these tales, he felt a strange yearning and pain. It was a pain that originated outside of him and seeped through his skin, like the pale blue moonlight, the howling of wolves, and the sound of snow crunching under his feet.
The door opened; several men dressed in suits came out, along with a few women in hanbok. They barely nodded at JungHo while passing by and whispering among themselves. JungHo flushed a little, remembering how deeply MyungBo bowed to him at their first meeting. These revolutionaries all talked about abolishing class, but MyungBo was the only one who treated everyone—including JungHo—with equal respect.
“Comrade JungHo, I’m sorry the meeting ran late,” MyungBo called, and JungHo walked inside.
His mentor did not get up; that was the one gesture of informality that he allowed himself as the months passed. Instead, he busied himself with spreading out a book, sheets of paper, and a pencil over a low table. JungHo sat down across from him and peered down at the book. Instantly, he lost all memory of the shapes of characters he’d learned. Instead, his mind let the black marks turn into cranes flying across the page, then strips of charcoal scattered in the snow, and he shook his head firmly to get rid of these unhelpful associations.