The Calligrapher's Daughter by Eugenia Kim Page A

wide to the fading black of predawn, and I heard my father’s muted voice, “Yuhbo—”
    Mother rushed by my door, calling for the menservants.
    “Wait—” I yanked off my covers.
    “Watch the baby!”
    The gate creaked open and Mother cried out. Father said things I couldn’t discern. I heard Byungjo’s and Joong’s voices, then receding shuffles. In my mother’s room, I tucked myself in beside my sleeping baby brother, telling him not to worry, Father was home now. God did watch over him after all. All was well, at least for now. “You’re safe with me, Little Brother,” I said. “I’ll never leave you. I’ll take care of you always.” I said a silent prayer of thanks, whispering that I wouldn’t forget the promises I’d made.
    In the morning they remained cloistered in Father’s rooms. Cook delivered the baby to Mother for feeding, but I wasn’t allowed to go in. I broke several rules of protocol by eating breakfast in the kitchen with Kira and Cook, who told me they’d heard that nearly all the town’s men who weren’t already in jail had since been arrested. Several were missing entirely. Cook said, “It’s a lucky thing your family knows how to make influence.” She turned her body, but I saw her make a counting-money gesture to Kira.
    I was kept from my father for two weeks, until his most pronounced bruises healed. When allowed to see him at last, I was warned not to show in my face anything that might indicate his changed appearance, including his head, shaved of its topknot. My mother’s instructions on this point were so firm that I barely dared to look at him at all, and it took several days of surreptitious peeks to understand that he’d been severely beaten—far more than the last time. His face wasn’t as monstrously swollen as then; his cheeks were gaunt and lax. It was worse. With stooped shoulders and eyes that looked vacantly at me, his presence was wraithlike. His stitched head wound seemed like a careless, forgotten brushstroke. Visible through bandages wrapped like a leper’s, his thumbs were enormous and black. The first few times I saw him, his empty stare reminded me of what I had seen outside our gate soon after that joyous and then terrifying day. The two soldiers had dragged from the alley a dead body—bloated, stiff, the color of dirt. Only when I saw the clothes did I know it was a woman. Her gruesome remains, the foul stink, the flies, the utter absence of life in her body, I would never forget.
    Although he breathed, ate and slept, even smoked, my father seemed like that the first few times I was allowed to see him. Only when my baby brother was laid in his lap did I see a glimmer of my father, and only then was I not afraid of him.
    I finally did go back to the classroom several weeks after the command to return to school. I discovered that none of Korea’s children had complied with the command, nor had the businesses reopened for some time, and I realized it was defiance that had closed the shops and kept me home.
    Over time, we learned that the national demonstration had prompted unprecedented brutality from the military and police. Months later Iheard whispered reports at church about massacre and carnage: all the men in one village burned alive in a chapel, women and girls humiliated, slashed and shot, countless beheadings, people beaten unconscious and revived to be beaten again. Half of the men from our neighborhood who had gone to Seoul were dead. The remainder were imprisoned, flogged and tortured to reveal the names of the movement’s leaders.
    Our neighbor, Hansu’s father, had also been arrested, beaten and eventually released. When he recovered, he and Hansu’s mother traveled to Seoul at great risk and found their son still alive, although wounded, and sentenced to West Gate Prison for eighteen months. They returned to raise money for bribes that could reduce his term or at least improve his conditions. I took all the jeon I’d received for